TOMMY: Colonel? Carl’s hurt bad, sir—I don’t think he gonna make it ’less he get some help. (Beat.) Colonel?
QUANTRILL: Do I look like a doctor to you?
Tommy backs quickly away. Jed edges cautiously over to Quantrill.
JED: Sir? I wonder if I could ask you somethin’?
Beat.
QUANTRILL: What?
JED: Your family . . . you reckon they at rest now?
QUANTRILL: My family?
JED: Your brother . . . Charley.
Beat.
QUANTRILL: I ain’t never had no brother.
JED: But I thought . . .
Quantrill smiles.
QUANTRILL: What difference it make, Jed?
Jed backs away. Quantrill begins to laugh.
What difference it make!
JED (aside): The next mornin’ Tommy and me got Carl and with a couple of others slipt outta camp. We stole some horses and headed east into the mountains. Towards home.
Jed, Tommy, and the others approach a crowd gathered around an open grave and singing “Amazing Grace.” The hymn falters and then dies out as the mourners see Jed. Ezekiel and Joleen step out of the group and face Jed.
JED: Pa? (Beat.) It’s Jed, Pa.
EZEKIEL: Jed?
Joleen hugs Jed.
JOLEEN: Zeke, it’s Jed, honey.
EZEKIEL: Pappaw died this mornin’. I’d give my right arm if he were alive to see this. (He wipes the tears off his face.)
JOLEEN: Who your friends, Jed?
JED: That’s Tommy Nolan, and Carl Dawkins, and Sam Jackson, and that’s Isaac and Josh Gatlin over there, and Edward Hayes.
JOLEEN: You boys are welcome! Why don’t you come down and get yourself somethin’ to eat and somethin’ to drink? There’s a cold supper in the orchard. (To one of the mourners:) Show’em the way, Lallie.
TOMMY, CARL, etc.:
Thank you, ma’am.
God bless you, ma’am.
Yes’m.
They exit, leaving Jed, Joleen, and Ezekiel alone.
JED: Richard’s dead.
Ezekiel embraces Jed.
EZEKIEL: You rest tonight, son, then tomorrow we’ll ride over to the Talbert place.
JED: Ain’t no need for that, Pa. They ain’t got nothin’ we need.
EZEKIEL: I just this mornin’ laid my daddy in the cold ground, his back bent and his heart broke by them people, and you stand there and you tell me “they ain’t got nothin’ we need”! They breathin’ our air, ain’t they?! They walkin’ on our land, ain’t they?!
JOLEEN: Easy, Zeke. The boy’s just tired—he didn’t mean that. That’s his land too.
JED: I don’t see why there got to be any killin’, Ma! We can just run’em off. Hell, they ain’t probably nothin’ now but a bunch of women and children, handful of slaves. Ain’t a growed man on the place!
JOLEEN: Your Pappaw showed’em that kind of mercy once.
EZEKIEL: And then they come back and made him grovel in the dirt. I was there, boy, I saw it! And then they took everything he had and worked him like a nigger in his own fields! Worked ALL of us! Bible says, “An eye for an eye—”
JOLEEN: “—and a tooth for a tooth.”
JED: When’s it ever gonna STOP?! I’M SICK OF IT!
Beat.
EZEKIEL: It’s gonna stop tomorrow.
JOLEEN: Jed, honey, you want your own family, don’tcha? Babies of your own? Honey, they ain’t gonna be safe with any of them people around. You always gonna be lookin’ over your shoulder worryin’ about your babies. (She hugs him.) You a good boy, Jed Rowen, don’t you ever forget that. The Lord is askin’ a terrible thing of you, I know, but you got to be strong, honey. You just keep His promise in your heart and you think about your own children.
EZEKIEL: Jed?
Beat.
JED: One more day . . .
EZEKIEL: And then you can rest. Just like the Lord did when His work was done.
Beat.
JED: All right.
JOLEEN: Let’s get you somethin’ to eat now, honey—you must be starved to death.
Joleen exits. Jed and Ezekiel stand on opposite sides of the stage. They face the audience directly.
JED (aside): We rode out the next mornin’.
EZEKIEL: “O Lord God, to whom vengeance belongeth, show thyself! For the day of their calamity is at hand, and the things that shall come upon them make haste.”
JED (aside): They saw us comin’ a ’course, and took shelter in the big house Ezekiel and Pappaw had built for’em like slaves.
EZEKIEL: “You rich men, weep and wail over the miserable fate descending on you! You have lived on the earth in wanton luxury and the day for slaughter has come!”
JED (aside): Those walls were thick, but I hadn’t studied under Quantrill for nothin’. I had Tommy Nolan fire the house, and then all we had to do was wait.
EZEKIEL: Can you see the flame, sinner! Can you feel its heat?! God has not forgotten your crimes! No! He will pay you back in your own coin! Can you see the flame, sinner?!
JED (aside): I could hear Pa preachin’ hellfire and judgment on ’em, but all I could think of was Quantrill laughin’ about his brother Charley, and I knew what we did had nothin’ to do with God.
EZEKIEL: Come and gather for God’s great supper to eat the flesh of all men, slave and free, great and small!
JED (aside): We killed most of the men straight up, slave and free—’cept for this nigger family name of Biggs. Pa let them go. Then he took Stephen Talbert, Richard’s younger brother, hitched him up like a mule, and, crackin’ a whip over his back, plowed table salt into their fields.
EZEKIEL: “That the whole land thereof is brimstone and salt, that it is not sown nor beareth nor any grass groweth therein!”
JED (aside): We buried him that way, with the traces still on ’im and the bit in his mouth, and those fields are still barren to this day.
EZEKIEL: “The land thereof shall become burning pitch. It shall lie waste and the raven shall dwell in it.”
JED (aside): But that wasn’t the worst of it.
He pulls his gun out and enters the scene.
Randall!
A terrified Randall creeps in.
RANDALL: Jed? Please, God, don’t kill me, Jed!
Jed hugs him.
JED: Get to the barn. Work your way into the woods and don’t stop for nothin’!
Randall nods and turns to go. He runs right into Ezekiel, who grabs him.
RANDALL: Jed!
JED: Let’im go, Pa!
EZEKIEL: We can’t do that, Jed.
JED: Let’im go!
RANDALL: Jed!
EZEKIEL: You agreed, Jed!
JED: Please, Pa!
EZEKIEL: What good does it do to crush the snake if you don’t kill its young!
RANDALL: JEDDDDDDD!!!
Ezekiel breaks Randall’s neck and leaves him dead on the ground. Beat. Jed kneels down by Randall’s body. He speaks directly to the audience.
JED: After that, the men poisoned the well and burned everythin’ else that was still standin’, and what animals they didn’t kill, they took off with’em. Pa took nothin’ ’cept for an ole gold pocket watch he said belonged to Pappaw.
Ezekiel stands in a spotlight.
EZEKIEL: Lord don’t love a thief, boys.
Ezekiel exits. As he does so, the two women from Jed’s dream come downstage right and downstage left and kneel as before. A spot comes up on each woman.
JED: After my men was finished with’em, I spared both the girls, Miss Rose Anne and Miss Julia Anne. Pa was all set to kill them too, but I’da shot him first and crazy as he was I think he knew it. “War’s over, Pa,” I said. “War’s over. And ’sides, they’re just women. W
hat can women do?” (Beat.) And then I went home.
Beat.
Rose Anne and Julia Anne speak exactly as they did in Jed’s dream. As they speak, Jed will begin to bury Randall with his bare hands.
ROSE ANNE: Come here.
JULIA ANNE: Come here.
ROSE ANNE: Listen up.
JULIA ANNE: Listen up.
ROSE ANNE: These are the names.
JULIA ANNE: These are the names.
ROSE ANNE: Tommy Nolan . . .
JULIA ANNE: Carl Dawkins . . .
ROSE ANNE: Sam Jackson . . .
JULIA ANNE: Isaac Gatlin . . .
ROSE ANNE: Josh Gatlin . . .
JULIA ANNE: Edward Hayes . . .
ROSE ANNE: Ezekiel Rowen . . .
JULIA ANNE: Jed Rowen . . .
ROSE ANNE: Jed Rowen . . .
JULIA ANNE: Jed Rowen . . .
ROSE ANNE: Jed Rowen . . .
JULIA ANNE: Jed Rowen . . .
The lights close down around Jed as he finishes burying Randall. He rocks back on his haunches, exhausted, a fistful of dirt in one hand. We hear the crows again. The entire company stands just outside the light, surrounding Jed. He feels but does not see them.
JED: In my dreams, Pa still preaches Revelations and the trees in the orchard bear crows instead of apples and ragged women feed me a meal I don’t dare refuse.
Even when I’m awake, planting my fields or rocking my daughter to sleep, I can feel the shadows movin’ closer. But at night, in my dreams . . .
In my dreams, it’s always spring, and the first, dark shoots reach up through the soil towards me and mine. Whole fields of decay. Fields of appetite.
Spring.
Beat.
And then the harvest.
He pours the dirt onto Randall’s grave.
Tbe lights fade out. Blackout.
PART
TWO
Ill fares the land, to hastening ills at prey,
When wealth accumulates, and men decay.
—OLIVER GOLDSMITH
TALL TALES 1885
FIRE IN THE HOLE 1920
—INTERMISSION—
WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON? 1954
THE WAR ON POVERTY 1975
TALL
TALES
Some men rob you with a sixgun,
Some with a fountain pen.
—WOODY GUTHRIE
CHARACTERS
MARY ANNE ROWEN age fourteen
ADULT MARY ANNE ROWEN age forty-nine
JT WELLS a storyteller
TOMMY JACKSON age fifteen, a neighbor
JED ROWEN age fifty-two, Mary Anne’s father
LALLIE ROWEN age forty-seven, Mary Anne’s mother
NARRATOR: Tall Tales.
The year is 1885. The Rowen farm in the hills of eastern Kentucky, in Howsen County, near the Shilling Creek.
Tall Tales.
1885. Summer. The prologue and epilogue happen approximately thirty-five years later.
PROLOGUE
The hills of eastern Kentucky, in Howsen County, near the Shilling Creek. A young girl, MARY ANNE ROWEN, kneels by a creek and arranges her hair. Standing off to one side is the woman she will become in thirty-five years. The ADULT MARY ANNE watches her younger self and speaks to us.
ADULT MARY ANNE: Spring usta explode in these mountains like a two-pound charge of black powder hand-tamped down a rathole. After months of gray skies and that damp mountain cold what bores into your bones like termites in a truckload of wood, it’s your dogwood trees that finally announce what everythin’s been waitin’ for.
First thing some morning, you might see a single blossom hangin’ there, light pink, the color of a lover’s promise . . . if lies had a color. And then later that afternoon, damned if that bud ain’t been joined by a hunnert of his brothers and sisters all sittin’ round, chattin’ each other up, Sunday-go-to-meetin’ style. Course, dogwood’s just the beginnin’.
The spark what lights the fuse for spring, that’s the azaleas. When they get to goin’, you’d swear somebody’d scattered a whole handful of lit matches across those hills. Bible story is how old man Moses talked to a burnin’ bush. But for my money, he was just conversin’ with a scarlet azalea in full bloom. Story just got a little expanded in the retellin’ . . . the way stories do.
Fella once told me a story, said these ain’t no real mountains here at all—that if you stood high enough, you could see it was all just one big mound that had been crisscrossed and cut up into so many hills and valleys by the spring runoff, that it just looked like mountains. Leastways, that was his story.
Only, I don’t put no truck in stories no more.
SCENE ONE
The light fades out on the Adult Mary Anne and comes up on the younger Mary Anne. A man, JT WELLS, enters and stands quietly behind her. Smiling, he watches for a moment, then picks up a pebble and tosses it over her shoulder and into the water. She turns, startled.
JT: Friend. I’m a friend.
MARY ANNE: Shouldn’t sneak up on a body like that!
JT: No, you’re quite right, young lady, I shouldn’t have. And under any other circumstances, my rudeness would merit your harshest disapprobation.
MARY ANNE: Huh?
JT: You’d a right to be pissed off. But the fact of the matter is, if you hadn’t been in mortal danger just now, I probably would’ve walked right on by, ’stead of savin’ your life.
MARY ANNE: My life?
JT: Well, your immortal soul at least.
MARY ANNE: How you figure that?
JT: Why, starin’ into that stream like that. I’ve heard it said from them that knows, that the devil himself hides his bleak heart in the muddy bottom of slow-movin’ pools, just like this.
MARY ANNE (a little uncertain): You’re just foolin’.
JT: Would that I were, ma’am. But ’tis a widely known fact that the Father of Lies often assumes the shape of an Ictalurus punctatus and—
MARY ANNE: A what?
JT: Channel catfish.
MARY ANNE: You use more twenty-five-cent words when a nickel word would do than any man I ever met.
JT grimaces, mimes being shot by an arrow, pulls it out, and hands it to Mary Anne.
JT: I think this is yours.
Both laugh.
JT: Where was I? Oh yeah . . . And thus disguised, he lies in wait for an innocent virgin to come along.
MARY ANNE: Devil hafta wait a might long time for one of those in these parts.
JT: Well, he’s a mighty patient fella, the devil is.
They both laugh.
MARY ANNE: There is an old catfish in this crick.
JT: Oh yeah?
He sits close beside her and they both look into the stream.
MARY ANNE: I ain’t never seen him, but my daddy has. Almost caught him onct. So’s Tommy, but I think he was lyin’.
JT: That your brother?
MARY ANNE: Naw, he’s my boyfriend.
JT moves away slightly.
Leastways, he thinks he is.
JT moves back.
JT: Mighty pretty here.
MARY ANNE: Yeah.
Both are quiet for a moment.
I jist love them old trees. Specially that oak there. That’s my favorite.
JT: That’s a beaut all right.
MARY ANNE: Folks ’round here call that the Treaty Oak, ’cause my great-great-granddaddy Michael Rowen, that’s where he bought this land from the Injuns.
JT: That a fact?
MARY ANNE: That’s what my daddy says. I don’t think there’s a tree in these hills comes close to touchin’ it for size. Leastways, I ain’t never seen one. When I was a kid, I used to think that tree was all that kept the sky off my head. And if th
at tree ever fell down, the whole thing, moon and stars and all, would just come crashin’ down. I think sometimes how that tree was here way before I was born and how it’ll be here way after I’m gone and that always makes me feel safe. I think this is just about my favoritest spot in the whole world. Not that I seen a lot of the world, but my daddy took me to Louisville onct when I was six. You ever been there?
JT: Well, it just so happens I was in Louisville three weeks ago.
MARY ANNE: Yeah? I bet you been a whole heap of places, way you talk ’n’ all.
JT: Oh, I been here and there.
MARY ANNE: Where?
JT: Well, places like . . . Atlanta.
MARY ANNE: You been to Atlanta, Georgia!?
JT: Hell, that ain’t nothin’. I been to New York City!
MARY ANNE (almost inarticulate with wonder and envy): Nooooo.
JT: Yes ma’am, I have. And lived to tell the tale.
MARY ANNE: What’s it like?
JT: Well, I tell you, it’s . . . it’s pert near indescribable. It’s hundreds of buildings, each and every one taller’n that ole granddad oak of yours. “Skyscrapers.” That’s what they call ’em. Skyscrapers. Clawin’ up at the very fabric of heaven, threatening to push old Jesus Christ himself off his golden throne! And not more’n two months ago, I’s standin’ in the top a one of them golden towers and John D. Rockefeller himself shook me by this hand.
MARY ANNE: No.
JT: Yes ma’am, he did. And me, just a poor boy outta Breathitt County. Said to me, he said, ‘‘JT, you’ve got a future here,” and then he clapped me on the back! Imagine that—the richest man in the country—the “Standard Oil King” himself—standin’ no further from me than you are now.
Beat.
MARY ANNE (shyly): Is that your name?
JT (still lost in reverie): Huh?
MARY ANNE: JT. I was wonderin’ what your name was.
JT: Oh Lord, isn’t that just like me? Here I get to jawin’ so much I clean forgot to introduce myself. JT Wells at your service. The ‘‘JT” stands for Just Terrific. And who do I have the honor of speaking to?
MARY ANNE (mumbling, embarrassed): Mary Anne Rowen.
JT: Say what?
MARY ANNE: Mary Anne Rowen. (Quickly:) Most folks just call me Mare, though.
JT: “Mare”? Well, I don’t know. Don’t seem right somehow. I mean, isn’t that what you call a horse or something? “Mare”? That’s not a proper name for a pretty thing like you. Let me see here. Mary Anne. You know what your name is in Spanish?
The Kentucky Cycle Page 11