He argued me, but I argued him down and he took the money and rolled it up and stuck it through the curly handle of the jug. Then he swarved on up the bank to leave it. When he came down we started on ahead, and I picked and sang more of Mr. Bascom’s old song:
"There’s an old hollow tree up the road here from me,
Where I lay down a dollar or two;
I go away and then, when I come back again,
There’s some good old mountain dew ...”
“I vow and declare, you done sung a parable," said Tombs. “Come along now, we're near about to Larrowby."
“You step out like as if you're right anxious to see that pretty girl you say lives there."
“Just you wait till you see her."
We slogged along betwixt thickets and rocks, and then we got to the Larrowby settlement.
It was more or less the way Tombs had told, a few houses bunched up together at the bottom of a big wide hollow. Up the slopes on all sides, the trees had been mostly cut away and you could see fields of corn and gardens of vegetables, and here and there pastures of green grass with cows and sheep in them. The stream we'd followed ran through amongst the cabins, and there was a sort of main street of stomped-down clay that must be right miry in a rainstorm. And folks were out here and yonder, and when they saw us they hollered out Tombs's name:
“Tombs McDonald, as I live and draw breath!"
“Hey, Tombs, how you, how you come on?"
“Who's that there stranger man you done fetched with you?"
A dozen of them came and gathered with us, country-dressed men and country-dressed women and a couple-three children, all of them healthy-looking, happy-faced. Tombs hollered them back:
“This here's a friend of mine, and his name's John!"
They all came closer round to shake hands, to say they'd heard tell good things about me, to ask me to pick them a song. I did, and it was a song I'd always loved:
“Vandy, Vandy, I've come to court you,
Be you rich or be you poor,
And if you'll kindly entertain me,
I will love you forever more ..."
They hollered and clapped for that, and wanted another; but Tombs allowed we had business to tend to, and headed for the biggest house in sight. The most part of them trailed along with us.
That house Tombs headed for was broad-fronted, the only one in Larrowby with two floors to it. It was a country-style general store, the walls of wide planks straight up and down and painted white, with thick home-split shakes to cover the roof. All the way across the front ran a porch. Inside were counters and shelves and barrels and stacked-up things— canned goods, different things in jars and sacks and boxes and so on, cheap clothes and shoes, bundles of brooms and rakes and all like that. Up on one wall, a big calendar with a picture of an Indian a-paddling a canoe. In one comer, a little desk with pigeonholes back of it and a sign that said larrowby post office. Behind the main counter stood a stocky gray man in a shop apron, and a fair-haired rosy-cheeked girl that was bound to be the one Tombs swore was so pretty.
“Why, Tombs!” she said, and her voice sang his name, and her smile bunched her rosy cheeks and purely lighted up the whole place.
“Hey there, Myrrh,” he said back, with a big smile of his own. “Let me introduce you my friend John. This here is Myrrh Larrowby, John, and here’s her daddy, Mr. Jonas Larrowby.”
Mr. Jonas Larrowby shook me by the hand and looked at my guitar. He allowed, the way all those others had, that he knew who I was, had heard right good things about me. Tombs was a-talking up a storm to Myrrh while she waited on a couple of men at the counter. One of them asked her to open him a can of greengage plums, the other called for sliced peaches. She opened the cans and gave them plastic spoons and they ate the fruit right out of the cans, the same way folks used to do in country stores in years back before there was ice cream so far from town.
Jonas Larrowby acted like as if it made his day to meet me. “We're proud to have you here, John," he said. “Is there aught in this world we can do for you?"
“I’d like to get to a phone," I told him. “To make a longdistance call. I'll pay what the call costs."
“Shoo," he said, “call who air you want to, air place in this whole country, and forget about the payment. I say, it's a privilege to have you with us. There's the phone over yonder, next to the post office desk."
I put through a call to Sam Heaver, to tell him I'd got myself lost up that mountain, but I’d been found again and was all right. He was truly glad and relieved to hear me say it. Then I turned round to where Jonas Larrowby had Tombs’s crumbs of gold out to weigh on a little scale.
All the time, more and more folks were a-coming in. Naturally, in that sort of settlement, the store was where all sorts would come in to see what might could be a-going on. I shook hands with a big sight of folks, and I found time to talk to two men.
One was their old doctor, Sam Bullard. He wore jeans about like mine, he was short and stocky-built. His hair was as white as a fresh-picked flock of cotton, down yonder in the lowlands low. He wore spectacles fitted close and chubby to his lined face. About eighty years old, as I reckoned, but a-plenty of gristle in him still.
“Sure enough," he told me, “I try to look after these Larrowby folks when they're ailing. If to look after them is beyond me, I see that they get to the hospital at the county seat. It’s good to make your acquaintance, John. And here, let me make you acquainted with Preacher Davis Larrowby too. Right this minute, I'd judge that you and I and Preacher are the only intellectuals in the neighborhood.”
Preacher Davis Larrowby was as gaunted up as a rake, and near about twice as tall. He even towered a couple inches over me, a-standing straight and high for all he must have been near about as old as Dr. Bullard. He had on a long black jimswinger coat, but his shirt was a blue work shirt, with an old string necktie. He had a long nose and a long jaw, and grinned with teeth like a friendly horse.
“Intellectual,” he repeated the word. “Doc, you love that term. Well, at that, you have a big shelf of books, I have a big shelf of books. We've always borrowed one another’s books, and given them back again. John, will you be here Sunday? You'll be welcome at our church. It's only a little shed of a place, but it's easy to recognize from the cross on top. The Lord’s Service Station, some people here call it.”
“That’s a right good name for a church,” I said. “Preacher, I can't rightly say where I’ll be on Sunday, but if I'm here I’ll come hark at your sermon.”
“Our observances are simple,” he said. “Enough people come to sing a hymn or two and say a prayer and maybe profit by the Golden Text. And during the school year, I teach the children in this area. That fixes me with enough to live on.” “But hardly enough to go wild on,” said the doctor. “He gets some money, and meat and commeal and firewood, and he has a good cabin; his kinfolks pitched in and built it for him, about a quarter of a century ago. And he preaches good sermons, so I’ve been led to believe. I don’t go to church very often myself. I don’t know whether he prefers the Old Testament or the New.”
“I prefer both,” Preacher Larrowby said, with a chuckle in it. “If you would read those two Testaments, Doc, you’d find some interesting things in them.”
Just then, the other folks hollered me to pick guitar again. They were out on the wide porch, a-forming up two sets of fours to dance. So I picked for them, and Doc Bullard called the dance figures. What I picked was a string of fast-step dance tunes like “Cripple Creek” and “Old Joe Clark” and “Laurel Lonesome” and so on. I saw Tombs out there, a-stepping it off with Myrrh Larrowby, and her cheeks were rosy with how she enjoyed herself.
After while, the dancing stopped and I went back into the store to buy me some clothes. Another blue shirt, some underwear, a couple pairs of socks, a razor. Time passed and Tombs allowed we could buy us some lunch there, but Doc Bullard bade us come eat with him. His cabin had a great big living room in front and a side ro
om he called his office, with a kitchen shedded on behind. His nice old wife gave us fried chicken and white bread and butter, and Tombs made her a present of a jar of wild honey. After we’d eaten, Preacher Larrowby came in the front door and had coffee with us, and he inquired me what I figured to do thereabouts.
“Mainly, find out all I can about Cry Mountain,” I said. “Does air soul go there?”
Just as I spoke those words, we heard the cry. It was fainter there than at Tombs’s cabin, but you could sure enough hear it, from how many miles off I couldn’t guess.
Awoooooo, it howled its call to us, and I hope none of you all air hear the like. It died down and away, and we all looked at one another.
“I’ve heard that some have tried it, long ago, and didn’t come back,” said Preacher. “I remember one such—his name was Zeb Plattenburg—and nothing’s been heard of him since, not in all those years.”
“People here have got into the wise habit of staying away from Cry Mountain,” Doc added on.
“Certainly, I’ve never been there in all my long life,” Preacher said.
“I haven't, either,” said Doc, “nor do I plan to go.”
“I plan to go,” I said.
They all opened their eyes wide on me, like as if I'd said I planned to open the brass gates of hell and walk in.
3
After some more talk, and I tell you all that it was talk that plumb steered away from Cry Mountain, Tombs and I went back to Jonas Larrowby’s store to pick up the things we’d shopped there. I looked along the shelves of canned things and chose out three different items and paid for them.
“You seem to do a good business here,” I said to Mr. Jonas.
“Good enough to live all right,” he said. “Once in a big while there’s a little shoplifting, but not enough to matter.”
Meanwhile, Tombs was a-talking to Myrrh, and plain to see she harked at him, and smiled bunchy-cheeked like as if she liked to hark at him. At last we said our goodbyes to folks in the store and folks outside, and headed back the way we’d come.
Gentlemen, each and all of us know how it is; you travel a strange way and it seems quite a trudge. Then you make your return, and it’s not so far back over the same ground. So it didn’t seem air much of a time before we came to where Tombs scrambled up the bank to that hollow tree.
But he was gone quite a spell of time, while I stood and waited and hoped he was all right. When he came back down again, he carried a curly-eared jug, but not the same one he’d left.
“I didn’t find aught up there, so I went to the house of the blockader,” he explained me. “We figured some good neighbor had helped himself. So I bought us another half gallon.”
I recollected what Jonas Larrowby had said about shoplifters.
“You should ought to have let me pay,” I said, for I had still a little money in my pocket.
“No way,” said Tombs. He unstoppered the jug and handed it to me.
“Take you a whet, John,” he invited me. “I truly tell you, this is the pure quill, it’s as good blockade as you’ll find in all these here mountains.”
I turned it up over my elbow and took a mouthful. It was as good as he’d said, lively and flavory. He took the jug in his turn and had him his drink.
“That would make a man wish he was a drunkard,” he allowed.
He undid his belt and ran it through the ear of the jug and buckled up again. As we walked on, I touched my silver strings and sang him some lines of an old song:
“You’ll nair get shed of old drunkards,
I’ll tell you the reason why—
There’s two old drunkards get theirselves born
For air old drunkard to die.”
Tombs laughed about that. “And ain’t it the truth?” he said. “Though you nor I ain’t to be numbered with the drunkards. Where did you learn that one?”
“Down in the lowlands,” I replied him. “In a county named Moore.”
We kept on a-using along, with the trees and the rocks and that little branch of water to company us, and finally we came to Chop Temple’s mill. He was ready with the meal from the com we’d left, and we each tasted a tweak of it before he did up the mouth of the sack. It was as sweet in the mouth as syrup. I hiked the sack on my shoulder, and we bade him a good day and took our trail again. It was near about three o'clock in the evening, as I judged by the sun, when we came to Tombs’s cabin and toted our stuff in and put it down.
We sat down, me on the sofa, Tombs on a chair, and he looked at me.
“All right,” he said, “what are your thoughts?”
“Right off,” I said back, “I see what you meant about the pretty girl in Larrowby. Miss Myrrh Larrowby is the pure sunshine for beauty. 1 can see right plain why you want to be with her whenair you can.”
He made a shrug of his shoulders. “There’s folks one place another would say I’m not good enough for her Folks who question why I live out here by my lone self, folks who’d even say I ain’t got a very reputable reputation.”
“If you ask me,” I said, a-thinking how to use my words, “I’d say that the important one to judge on you, it’s Miss Myrrh her own self. And I’d likewise judge that she thinks a right much of you.”
“Oh, she’s polite and clever to all the folks, she’s always that. But you know, John, she’s a big sight younger than I am. Years and years younger. Maybe she’s nice to me just because she reckons I’m an old man.”
“I’d nair think such a thing if I were in your place,” I said back. “She doesn’t act to you like as if she thought you were old. And I’ll wager you that over the years you’d find out that she’d catch up to you some way.”
“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe. And now, one other thing.”
“What other thing?”
“You allowed you’d go search for Cry Mountain. Climb it.”
“Yes, sir,” I nodded him. “I said that thing. I mean that thing. I always mean what I say.”
“Don’t you go trying it, John.”
He spoke those words so sharp, I cocked my eye on him.
“Looky here, Tombs,” I said, “are you a-telling me or a-asking me?”
“I meant just to ask you, John, ask you in a nice way. It's just I don't want aught bad to happen to you. Since I took care of you right good after you'd been lost yesterday, I’ve got what I've heard Doc Bullard call a proprietary interest in folks he's helped out of fixes.”
“Yes,” I granted him, “you did help like a true friend. And I won't forget your help till my day to die. But well you know that a man’s got to do what he's got to do.”
“All right,” he changed the subject, “why don't we go out and have us a little swim, wash off about twelve miles of sweat?”
We took the soap and towels and went out to do that thing. While we flung off our clothes at the edge of the branch, a low, far-off growl of thunder sounded at us; sounded to our left, some place away downstream. We both looked up at the blue sky. No clouds there to matter, but there had been that thunder.
“Thunder on the left,” muttered Tombs in his beard. “That has some kind of meaning.”
“I've often heard tell, it signifies that something big is on the way to happen to you,” I said. “A good thing or a bad thing, the old saying nair says which one, so far as I know.”
“Like that little verse we used to say when I was just a chap,” said Tombs, and he repeated it:
“A mole upon the face
Tells that something will take place,
But not what that something will be.
“Only you nor neither I got a mole on the face,” he added on.
We both laughed over that, and felt some easier, and got into the chill-watered branch
That’s right, the water was just as cold as when I’d been in it before, and after I’d lathered up and rinsed off I rubbed hard with the towel. We got our clothes back on and went back to the cabin. There, I built up a fire of hardwood chunks on the hearth.
&
nbsp; “Let’s call it my turn to fix dinner,” I said, and reached into the paper poke of things I’d bought in Larrowby and fetched out the three cans.
Tombs sort of goggled at them. “You a-going to feed us just canned stuff?” he wanted to know.
“Wait till you eat it before you fault it,” I said back. I found a kettle the right size and opened the first can. It was beef stew with potatoes, a brand I knew was good. I dumped that in, then a can of cut green beans, then a can of little small onions. I stood with the kettle in my hand and waited for the fire to bum down a tad, make good coals. Then I hung the kettle on its hook and stirred it with an iron spoon. When the time was right, I sprinkled in some salt and pepper.
“At least we can have some com pone to go with that,” allowed Tombs, and started to mix meal and water for it.
When it was suppertime I took the kettle off and dished my mixture into two plates. Tombs had acted sort of bothered with the idea all along, but the first forkful he put in his mouth, he cheered for it.
“This is champion to eat, John,” he said. “How’d you learn to do it?”
“Just chance,” I replied him. “Chance works the most part of things in this world. I was alone in a little cabin at Haynie’s Fork, a-getting ready to scratch up some supper for me, when Obray Ramsey and Byard Ray came to the door. I looked amongst what cans I had, and I mixed us up just what we’ve got here now—stew, beans, onions. They tied into it and ate it and vowed it as first-rate, same as you did. So now and then I fix it again/'
We cleaned up the last speck, and washed the pot and the plates and so on. After that, another drink, just a thimbleful, of the blockade whiskey. Tombs called for me to pick guitar, and I did that, and we sang a couple songs together. Then I tried the one I'd made up, back a day and a half ago when I was a-fixing to get myself lost:
“What's up across the mountain,
What's there on the yonder side?
Nobody's here to tell me,
Manly Wade Wellman - John the Balladeer 05 Page 3