The Great Forest Fire of 1930 raged from the headwaters of Gauley to Panther Crick and then swept up the valley and almost over the Elk. All week down at the village, a smoke pall hung over the schoolyard, and our cow spring up the hollow tasted of smoke. In the wind that fed it, the black, charred leaf-scraps sifted down over our fields and pastures. After the rains came, Ward and Jess went over and walked it, all day through the black and ashes. They saw the roots of the great stumps sticking up three feet above the burned out topsoil as though they still tried to clutch the earth.
It was after the Great Fire that G.D. began to refer to Over the Mountain as The Bonnie. When G.D. was dead and Ward was the old one, Ward said that there was no place called The Bonnie, that the real name of it was Bannock Run, and that it was named for a Scotch pancake. But I know that G.D. did call it The Bonnie along at the last, and he even referred sometimes to Bonnie River. Slowly, as G.D. grew older, some several years after I was married, he began to tell my husband how it all had been: the long pavilions of shade, the clear rolling rivers, the old trails and starry camps. One night, G.D. stopped suddenly in the middle of a sentence and left it hanging there. He never mentioned Over Bonnie again. Instead, he sat in his chair by his old Sea Chest and told me and my husband about the sea: the day they moved through Magellan Straits, or the night of the great storm out on the Pacific; and Over Bonnie was, for G.D., just as though it had never been.
But for me, the lumber companies had not cut The Bonnie, nor the Great Fire burned it to blackened claws. Because I was born a woman and had not gone, could not go, it lay for me as I had first found it as a girl-child by the winter fireplace, listening to the men’s wonder tales. In my obsession and possession, the hunter men still walked. The great trees lifted forever across my vision, and the sounding waters still ran. My dream of the American forest was deep and mystic and old; but the dream itself was always in the distance, moving before the seekers like the sun.
The Coming of the Roads
The chestnut blight came slowly, a gray quiet death. At first there was a canker on one old tree, and then the canker spread. The spores blew in wind, and the branches began dying.
We had always called Uncle Dan’l’s trees “the chestnut orchard,” just across our line fence on the flat knoll of his part of Old Tom’s farm. Forty or fifty big American chestnut trees stood there together, as the old men had saved them from the first clearings back in Indian times, and for generations they had been the neighborhood nutting ground. On crisp autumn days, the hilltop would be full of chestnut pickers scattering the yellow leaves with their sticks and picking up the sweet, brown, silver-tailed nuts. As we moved along under the trees, the leaves rustled, the bluejays cawed, and the sweet smell of autumn dust rose around us. When we stopped to listen, we could hear the squirrels chattering up in the branches and the chestnuts falling like slow rain.
When Uncle Dan’l sold his orchard to the lumber company, the lumberjacks came in and cut it down, and then our four trees over on the home place cankered and died. In a few years, gray ghosts of the chestnut trees stood against the skyline, their bark all sloughed off. All across the mountains their bare arms reached up to the sky, and down below the new road came and began to tie our Swago Farm to the world.
When the new road was finished, it was hard, smooth, and gray-colored, and the Model T’s came chugging along it, and the fancy Chevrolets, Maxwells, and Jewetts. When you went in by horse or foot, you could live almost anywhere, and the whole Swago mountain country had been scattered with wilderness farms, houses, and old one-room schools. But after the road was finished, new houses and new schoolhouses were built alongside it, and then the barns came down too. Then the gas stations came, and the little Dew Drop Inns. Back in the hills, the old houses and schoolhouses rotted down, blackberry vines crept over the broken porches, and the eyeless windows stared out at the encroaching wilderness.
Once G.D. got his own Model T, he had so much trouble getting it in through the swamp muck and the drifted snow that we too built our new house and moved over to the road. G.D. carried part of the old house with us: Captain Jim’s two stone chimneys and his black walnut fireboard. After we moved and had clean running water and French doors and a breakfast nook, G.D. never went back to the old house that still stood under the hill and had been turned into a hay barn. It was almost as though Granny Fanny had jerked her thorn broom handle out of the world’s axis and the whole contraption began to rattle and whirl. We three older kids began going off to college, and I began to publish poems and went dancing with Louis Untermeyer.
G.D. and Mama had planned to support all four of us children through at least two years of college, and then to let us make our own way by teaching school, saving our money, and going to summer terms. Ward and Elizabeth went first, and then I went with Elizabeth to the university as a freshman when I was sixteen years old. I had one year there, but I spent so much money that G.D. jerked me out as soon as I had a certificate and let me make my own way from there on in.
Sometime in the fall of my sixteenth year, I composed my first poem, working on a borrowed typewriter in my dormitory room. Though I had no boyfriend, it was a poem of love and passion: “When scarlet clouds fly by the moon, I’m always in my memories with you.” I read the poem to myself and something happened to me. I had felt such joy in the writing itself and in the rhythms of the lines that I swore a vow that I would be a poet and write poems forever.
Soon after, in one of the old soon-to-be-abandoned schoolhouses, I taught my first school. It was the winter of 1930, just before the yellow school buses started running. We always called it the School up in the Brush Country, but its official name was Pleasant Hill. The schoolhouse stood on an eroded hilltop and had two decaying privies hidden out in the brush. I walked in three and a half miles each way, or boarded around with the families and walked with the Wilfong children up Ress Wilfong’s hollow to the schoolhouse hill.
The schoolhouse stood on posts, and the sheep that pastured in the schoolyard sheltered under the floor. Sometimes, in the middle of a class, we could hear them bumping around under us, bawling. We had a flagpole and flag, a stove, desks, a bench, a water cooler, one shelf of worn-out books, and hooks on the wall to hang our overcoats; but in the winter of 1930, we didn’t hang our coats much, for the board of education had no money to fix the broken window sash. I tried to fix it with rags, and I kept the fire boomed up, but the blizzard winds came howling in. I taught most of that winter in my warm leather jacket with a red tam-o’-shanter on my head.
I had twenty-six pupils in all eight grades, and though I had studied “educational methods” in college, I had learned nothing about teaching school. So I remembered Miss Anne Correll and called the kids, one class at a time, up to the Recitation Bench. At noon we gathered around the stove, and the kids ate their white beans and jelly-bread sandwiches. Everybody had apples, and there were still a few wild American chestnuts and plenty of fall blackberries and wild goose plums. Often at night we would go from house to house, eating homegrown popcorn and apples and playing our mountain music: “The Little Mowhee,” “Wildwood Flower,” and “Red Wing.”
The door peg and Granny’s broom handle had held the world, but by 1932 Granny lay bed-sick over at Aunt Mat’s and everybody was talking about the hard times. The Great Depression was reaching its low point. There were stores going out of business and a lot of men walking the road. Then the government started giving away “commodities,” and Miss Moss Miller brought Mama a whole poke full of stuff: big grapefruit and lard and canned beef. There were foreclosures: Uncle Hunter’s drug store failed, and he had to go to work on the county roads with a pick and shovel. Then the bank took Uncle Dan’l’s farm; and one winter morning, Uncle Dan’l died of pneumonia, from walking his line fences in the snow.
Sometime during the Depression, Wint’s store burned down, and nobody knew why. The store went up like a box of tinder, and all over the neighborhood the eerie light shivered in the sky.
When the fire got to the shelf of shotgun shells, the shells exploded and shot off, whizzing into the night like Roman candles. All the store goods, and all the men’s tall tales, and our village center went up that night in a great display of fireworks, a kind of blazing last gesture of defiance against the coming of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his alphabet soup.
The very night of the day we moved over to the road, Granny Fanny died. She had been in bed over at Aunt Mat’s for nearly a year, sometimes sitting up against the pillow knitting socks. I had been over to see her a few weeks before and had told her about the new calves and how the garden was planted, and on my way back across the pasture that evening I had felt the strange hovering in the air of death’s gray wing.
The undertaker put Granny Fanny into a fine black dress with white ruffles at her wrists and throat. Everybody said how she looked so “natural,” but she didn’t look natural to me. She looked more like some fine, proud mountain queen who had ruled over all her people and had never bruted or slaved. I was a grown girl by then and had gone off to college, and I had made my vow to be a poet and learned all hundred verses of Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat by heart. When they took Granny Fanny up to our grave-hill in the black hearse, I went to her in my new white silk dress, carrying an armful of red poppies, for I had read in the decadent fin de siècle poetry of Algernon Charles Swinburne that poppies are for sleep:
Thou art more than the day or the morrow, the seasons that laugh or that weep;
For these give joy and sorrow; But thou, Proserpina, sleep.
During the years of my brush country schoolteaching, I would go out into the woodland or sit under my oil lamp in my bathrobe in my unheated room at Oley Jackson’s log house, and write lyric poems. Soon, I began to send poems out, copying them crookedly on G.D.‘s typewriter; I published one in Stardust, a then current little poetry magazine, and one in the Columbus Dispatch. I found an advertisement for another little poetry magazine, Kaleidoscope, in Dallas, Texas, and I submitted a thin manuscript to a prize contest they had. The prize was publication of a hundred copies of a little book of poems, and I won it; so in 1931, Mountain White was published, with its dying lover poems, its stoic mountaineer poems, its clever Dorothy Parker poems, and two or three good poems in my own style.
I kept writing, teaching, and going back to college, until I finally managed to graduate from the teachers’ college down at Athens when I was twenty-five years old. I had a degree in English, though I knew not a whit of grammar beyond the noun and the verb. But a magnetic professor there, S. L. McGraw, had helped me to discover the world of books and philosophical thought. I settled down, worked hard, and lived an almost inspired life that next year, in the company of William Thorndike, William James, and Paul Elmer More, as I taught the home school in the Swago village and lived at home on the farm.
I kept my vow to myself and continued to write poems. I sent them off to the magazines and, mostly, I got them back. One day, in exchange for my poem “Song in the Saddle,” a check came from Forum magazine up in New York. As I walked home up through Uncle Dan’l’s pasture, the weeds were purest gold and I ran to the yard gate to tell Mama. Later I won a prize of twenty-five dollars, got into Social Science, and by the fall of 1936, I had begun to sell poems to the American Mercury where Louis Untermeyer was the editor. Mr. Untermeyer wrote me letters of encouragement and praise for several months, and then he wrote that he would be speaking at our state teachers’ convention in Huntington and asked if I planned to attend.
I went on the C. and O. train in my best wool dress and my black rabbit fur coat from Sears Roebuck, rode down the Greenbrier division on through Charleston and got myself registered at the Pritchard Hotel. On Friday morning, I met Mr. Untermeyer for a poetry session, and he kept three poems to take back to New York. Just as I was leaving, he asked if he could escort me to the formal dance that evening. I had nothing appropriate to wear, but he insisted and, finally, I agreed.
When I got back to my hotel, there was a message for me to call my Cousin Pearl. Cousin Pearl had been born in a mountain cabin, but now she was married to a rich lawyer with a big house in Huntington, and she had a daughter about my age, Cousin Ann. Cousin Pearl wanted me for dinner that evening, and as we sat at her fine table talking about our kinfolks, I mentioned my date with Mr. Untermeyer. Cousin Pearl and Cousin Ann rushed me upstairs to Ann’s closet, dressed me in flowing white satin, a velvet cape of purest turquoise, turquoise earrings and slippers, powdered me and painted me, and thrust a gold mesh evening purse into my hand. They put me into a taxi, and I rode through the streets of Huntington in a misty turquoise dream.
Though I could not dance, Mr. Untermeyer labored my big-boned peasant body carefully around the ballroom floor, and told me his joke about the three little donkeys: Don Quixote, danke schön, and the other “donkey” I can never remember. Now, I remember little really—only the golden music and pearly lights and what seemed to me the utter glamor, a million miles from my dusty schoolroom and feeding the cows off of the winter haystacks.
Then I was back in my room, my face misted in the mirror. I stood there a moment, and then took Cousin Ann’s clothes off, wrapped them up to return them, and after the next day’s teachers’ meetings, I took the Greenbrier train back to the Swago Farm.
I lived on the farm and taught school all that winter, and in the summer of 1937, I began my own journey over the mountain to Oxford, Ohio, to work on a master’s degree. I requested that I be allowed to do my thesis in creative writing, a book of poems, and I gave my adviser, Walter Havighurst, an outline of a fictional mountain land called Gauley, its history from the pioneers to the lumberjacks and the new coal mines and macadam roads. That fall, I went back to teach the home school and wrote a hundred poems for a book called Gauley Mountain.
In 1938, I went back for the second semester at Miami of Ohio and won the Atlantic Monthly Poetry Prize. The success, or maybe the exhaustion, must have gone to my head, because I did the most stupid of the three most stupid things I have done in my life: I married, and the marriage lasted three weeks. The divorce cost me thirty-five dollars, but it seems to me now a no-fault divorce, and one that left only temporary scars. We wished each other happy landing, and I went off to a dark, dazed winter at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I met Archibald MacLeish there that winter, and he took my Gauley Mountain manuscript off to New York where it was published by Harcourt Brace in 1939.
In the summer of 1938, at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Workshop, I had met Roger Pease, a hard-headed, earth-loving Yankee schoolmaster, and we had quarreled in Robert Frost’s poetry class. Roger and I were married in the summer of 1939 and we began our wandering through all the years of the Second World War.
I left the Swago Farm in the summer of 1939 and never went back again except as a visitor. Before I left, I dug up some iris roots over at the old house and took them with me. I planted them beside a red barn in the Berkshires of Massachusetts, where Roger and I went to live.
Night at the Commodore
After I left the farm, I often felt as I had when I used to plumb the depth of water as a child. In summer, after every big rainstorm, a flood would come, and our tiny cow-spring trickle would become a roaring stream that flowed foamy and green over the leaning grasses. I would go out barefoot in the early morning with a long straight pole; and with my dress tied up above my knees I would wade along the shallows to measure the deep holes. I felt my way out into the current and walked slowly upstream, my feet and legs stinging with the cold. As I walked on and on up through the wild morning, I would become John Ridd of Lorna Doone with his trident, walking up the spate of Doone Valley. Then the mountains would come dark and close around me. I walked until I could feel the black danger and death in it. As I am walking still. For you walk to death, don’t you? Because you cannot ride.
Aunt Malindy told me that old women in the night can see; and now that I am old and often cannot sleep at night, I see pictures in the dark. I close my eyes and l
ong-ago pictures float before me, all in color and shadow, framed in the soft fog of the years. Most often, I seem to be standing in our yard at home and looking in through the “big room” window, and we are all there together in the firelight. G.D., my brother Ward, Uncle Dock, and Cousin Rush are by the fireplace spitting and smoking and talking about Over the Mountain; and I am there myself, listening. Farther back from the fire, Mama is peeling apples; Granny Fanny is winding her hanks of wool, and her old gargoyle clock is ticking. Elizabeth is holding Little Jim on her lap, and Aunt Malindy sits in the rocker in her fat black sateen dress, her hands folded in perfect content. Up above us, the picture of Captain Jim hangs on the wall.
I can see all this before me in the night, and then it fades away and I see my brother Young Jim, now sixty-nine years old, still farming our land, sowing lime by helicopter over Bridger’s Gap. Or I see Blix, Jim’s and Annabelle’s son; and then Blix’s only son, Little Jamie, nine years old, who sometimes helps his grandfather turn out the coral rocks or wrestle big bales of hay up into the barn that was once our faded cottage. Sometimes I see my hepatica rock, with the walking fern and maidenhair; or my white calf named Lily. Sometimes I can see Clarence Smith, our funeral director, looking down at G.D.‘s grave and saying, “Many a lame dog did this man help over the stile.” Then, and quite suddenly, I may see a dying soldier in my picture; and there is blood and mud and death.
These days I see the war pictures more and more: the mixed up pictures from the Second World War, which was my war more than any of the others I have lived through. Often I see Howard Wilfong from my 1930 one-room school. Howard is in the control tower of his ship, the U.S.S. Bone, when suddenly a Jap kamikaze plane screams down and takes the tower. Old women in the night can see. Some nights I cannot sleep at all.
Milkweed Ladies Page 7