Smokey Mountain Breakdown

The summer issue of Now & Then: The Appalachian Magazine is out and it's a really good one. I think this is my favorite of the Appalachian themed mags and not just because they are so supportive of my work. This issue's theme is "Appalachian High" and they were kind enough to publish my coming of age story, "The Truholt Madstone".

Fred Sauceman writes eloquently about one of my favorite topics--barbecue--in his article, High on the Alabama Hog. A very interesting piece by Michael Joslin titled High Time for Change examines the changing attitudes toward birds of prey held many Appalachian folks--something I used in my story Hawk Kill. Many other great stories in this issue--so please order a subscription. ETSU produces a big, glossy beautiful magazine full of Appalachian goodness.

"Truholt" is set way back in a time before the chestnut trees died out and is about a folk cure for rabies called a madstone.


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I'm very busy with the garden these days. Am going to go out there in a minute and pick corn. I have all sorts of things coming in--cucumbers, squash, beans, new potatoes, okra and fresh purple hulls. Made a pot of my momma's South Georgia garden stew. I actually associate that soup with the winter, but it's meant to be made right from the garden. Hardly even needs salt for seasoning and is heavy with corn, okra and beans. We used to use stew beef for the meat--but I had a goat haunch I needed to use up and it turned out great. So, I can honestly say I made everything in the stew from stuff here on the farm.

Yesterday was one of those odd days where it rained like the dickens in the midday sun. So violent it spat a rainbow rare and turbulent up on the mountain sky. I didn't do much but did pick blackberries--I'm getting down to the last of them. It's the right time of year "The God of all Blackberries" to make an appearance.

I'd noticed there were some tunnels under the blackberry canes that I had not put there. They were low to the ground and all the easily got to berries were gone. The only other time I'd seen something like this was at my old blackberry field that I shared with a bear and her cub. I was a bit perturbed to think I had bears visiting so close--these canes are right next to the house. Mystery solved---I heard some gawdawful snuffling--numnumnum--and it was Max. Max the blackberry eating Cocker Spaniel.

Today Betsy, The Goat Yoda, and I took an excursion to Jonesborough to the Jonesborough Flea Market. I'll do a complete post on that...it was hotter than H-E-double hockey sticks.

I got a picture of this lovely woman snapping beans for supper. We talked about how everyone has their own way of snapping beans. If you snap them too long, they don't fit in the canning jars too good. But these were for her dinner that night so she wasn't too worried about that. I thought she was snapping them a mite too small. I like a little more length on mine.

I remember when I was a child that I really hated this chore. I'd get all fidgety and I never could get the strings out. But it is something you get better at. But as I've grown older, I sort of enjoy the chore. It's a chance to sit and do something rather than being out in the hot sun hoeing.

I hope you are having a very happy Sunday. I hope you found a spot of shade to get out of the hot sun and feel a bit of breeze. Or maybe stick a toe in a cold mountain stream. It was a good day for that.

Happy, happy Sunday. The dog days are here.

Enough with the pity party, folks! Time to get back to work. I think it's time for a story!

Caidy rubbed the sleep out of her eyes and tentatively tested the air with her breath. She poked her head out from under the quilts and saw the steam emerge from the warmth of her feather bed.

Her feet hit the icy floorboards of the loft of the old cabin where she lived with her Ma, Pa and six siblings. She jerked her foot back as they encountered the icy coldness and then slowly put them down to adjust to the cold.

Aidin, her brother, snuffled in his crib. Caidy checked on him and pulled his little cap more closely around his ears. She saw the scabs and irritation that was part of having an infant in the fall. But water couldn't touch his head until the 1st of May so the crocheted infant's cap would have to cover the "cradle cap" rash until spring broke. Caidy did think it might be getting worse so she'd ask Ma if she should put some tar and sulphur on it. Though she grimaced at the thought of the smell filling up the bedroom.

Her brothers were already up and about when she climbed down the ladder into the main room of the cabin. But they hadn't tarried long enough to fill stoke the fire before going out to tend the pigs.

Caidy glanced longingly at her school shoes by the door. She sure would like to put them on to go get the firewood, but shoes were for school and not for chores.

Tucking her dirty blond hair behind her ears, she put on her shawl and hat and went out to the woodpile on the back porch. She grabbed as many sticks as she could in her thin arms and brought them in...using her shoulder and her hip to prop the door open.

For just a moment she looked over the frozen landscape of the farmyard and the mountains towering above the holler. It was one of those crystalline mornings where the entire land seemed to be breathing smoke. The creek was frozen solid and the usual murmuring of the creek was silenced as the water rushed, untroubled beneath the ice. The silence was unnerving. Everything felt dead in the pre-dawn light. February in Raven's Gap was a cruel time of year.

Her mother came in from the small lean-to bedroom she shared with Caidy's Pa as she was stirring the firebox of the big old cook stove. The water reservoir was warm from the leftover heat of the embers.

"Mommy!" Caidy said, "You shouldn't be up out of bed. You know what Nanny Hall said!"

Her mother had barely escaped death from childbed fever when Aidin was born and was still very weak. The midwife had gravely taken the 11 year old Caidy aside and told her, "Caidy, you are going to have to be the woman of the house for a while. Do you think you can do that?"

Caidy had looked up with wide blue eyes at Nanny Hall, the old woman who birthed most of the babies in these parts. Nanny Hall had long white hair and gentle eyes in her sun weathered face.

"Yes, ma'am. I reckon I can."

The fire roared to life in the firebox of the old stove. Caidy's Ma lowered herself with effort onto the bench beside the rough hand-made table that they all ate at.

She sighed with effort and said wearily, "I know, child." Her mother's soft brown eyes beckoned Caidy to her. Her Ma stroked the side of Caidy's cheek and patted the strands of hair escaping from her woolen cap.

"You are my precious angel. Did you know that? Did you?"

Caidy melted and grinned a snaggle tooth grin. Impulsively, she wrapped her arms around her frail mother and hugged her tightly. She hugged her with the desperation of a lost child.

Her mother patted her on the back and said, "That's my good girl! Now why don't you go up and get your little brother so I can feed him before he starts a'squallin'."

As Caidy scampered to the ladder to go fetch her infant brother, her mother watched her go. She drew the quilt around her tightly. Though the warmth from the stove was beginning to heat up the cabin, Caidy's Ma didn't know if she'd ever be warm again.

For Friday Ark....at the Modulator

I came across her towards the back of a big livestock trailer. Piled in the back were crates with hound dogs and further back was a sweet faced and very large donkey.

"Are you selling your donkey?" I asked.

She turned to me, revealing a face like a young Madonna. Such lovely skin and such a sweet expression. She must have been around thirteen. She wore an over-sized flannel shirt much like those worn during the grunge craze, despite the heat of the day. Swaddled in a tea towel and gently held in her arms like an infant was a four week old baby pig.

She smiled at me and said, "Oh, these aren't mine, I'm just looking at the animals."

"Oh my goodness!" I say, petting softly the head of the tiny piglet, "What sort of pig is he?"

"He's a Vietnamese Potbellied pig." She says beaming like a young mother.

We actually have something of a VPP problem in the area. Many people don't realize how huge they actually get. Then the cuteness wears off and they "drop" them off on The Fifteenth. My friend, Gaynell, took in a pregnant one that had been set out on the side of the road. She ended up with about 10 of them. They are easy to find homes for when they are this guys size. Not so much when they top 250 pounds.

And the old-timers say they have too much fat on them to eat, so it is something of a problem. But I'm sure they eat them in Asia, don't they? Perhaps we just need to expand our culinary horizons. But they evidently don't make very good "Q".

But this little fellow was far from having anyone try to come up with recipes for him. At four weeks, he was already off of milk and eating whatever baby pigs eat. And it looked like he'd already found a friend for life.

I didn't ask her if he was for sale. I had the definite impression that he wasn't.

I saw her across the crowded dirt track that was the thoroughfare of Morristown, Tennessee's First Monday Market.

I had just had to convince my friend to NOT buy me a trio of ducklings. I was disarmed by the little bundles of fuzz as always, but remembering how taxing it is to brood waterfowl, I didn't want to bring them home with me. Plus, they needed special un-medicated feed and I didn't have a brooder set up. So I left the three baby Muscovy's there with some reluctance.

I turned and saw her. Her carriage was part of what drew my eye to her. She was thin like a reed with narrow shoulders and seemed to sway with a wind that only she could feel. Her smile was soft and sweet. She stood behind a booth fashioned from two card tables stuck together and planks that rested on the bed of the farm-weathered pick-up truck. She had a pile of T-shirts and some dolls laying out on the table. Some of the dolls were complete and some were just bodies and heads laying about like infants at a crime scene.

You know the sort of doll. It's a plastic doll with an over-sized head that has been lovingly dressed up in doilies and crocheted bits of garb. You don't play with these dolls. I'm never quite sure what you really are supposed to do with them other than show them off at the craft section of the county fair. I've seen their lower bodies removed so the bell-shaped skirt can be a tea cozy or hide a tissue box.

I smiled shyly at her and asked, "Did you make these?"

She looked very closely at my mouth as I spoke and I realized she was nearly deaf.

She brushed her wispy hair from the side of her face. "No, I jess picked them up at auction."

I knew what she was talking about. I liked to attend the auctions too. They will sell stuff in lots and one lot might have one thing that you are highly desirous of and everything else is just junk. I once picked up a bronze Chinese gui vase that someone had mistaken for a tractor part at auction but had to buy quite possibly the ugliest hand crocheted afghan in the world along with it. I sold it on EBay, labeling it, "Ugliest Afghan I've Ever Seen." I couldn't believe someone bought it.

She had a darkening bruise on the side of her chin that she reached up and stroked self-consciously. She felt compelled to explain it to me. I think she knew what it must look like.

"Well, I was chasing the great grandchild an' trying to keep up with him and I slipped on the wet grass. It could have been worse, I might have broken something."

I agreed with her and I did believe she has slipped and fallen. I couldn't imagine anyone striking such a delicate and lovely old woman.

As if he had heard, a jovial male voice boomed from the side of the old pick-up.

"She showing you where I clocked her one?"

He was like a trim, jolly, Appalachian Santa with his snow white beard and rosy complexion. He was 78 by his own admission. He still had some of his own teeth left though they weren't in the greatest of shape. But there was nothing sinister in the grin he seemed to perpetually wear. He wears the new, pressed Liberty overalls that seem to be the trademark of so many older Appalachian country gentlemen. A watch fob dangles out of the bib pocket.

As a couple, the two made perfect sense. She was the shy and sweet one and he was the gregarious one. They came here to the market every First Monday from their farm below Sevierville. They didn't seem to have much to sell, but I suspect this is more of a social outing than anything else for them.

She sits with the stand while he wanders about socializing. Neither of them can hear so good anymore. She is very quiet while he can chatter on a mile a minute.

He tells me that he and his wife like "old-timey" things. They like to live that way as well. This is a matter of familiarity and comfort for them. She still cans. He still makes a garden. They keep goats and birds. He shows off the set of ring-tailed doves he bought today to add to their dove cote.

He used to work with mules. He actually worked at Dollywood for a time and some TV commercials hired him and his mules. I could see how he would appear to be straight out of Central Casting to the outside world. Here, at Morristown's First Monday Market, he blends into the crowd.

They didn't ask him to talk much, he said. "Some of those fellers could talk more plainly, but I couldn't. I don't just look like the real thing, I told them, I am the real thing."

He had a stroke some years back and can no longer work the mules. He apologizes several times and says that since the stroke he "don't string together his words so good anymores".

I tell him that I hadn't noticed.

"So, how did you two meet?" I ask. It's my favorite question.

He looks at her with unbridled affection. She looks back and smiles.

"Well, we been married fifty-eight years." He says.

She smiles slyly and says, "My, has it been that long?"

He chuckles.

The first time he saw her he was at a church social. The point of the social was for each girl to bake a pie and then the boys would bid on the pies. The boy with the winning bid would then have the pleasure of sitting with the baker and sharing her pie with her for the evening.

"I didn't have no money so I didn't get a pie." He said. "But that was the first time I saw her and she was just a skinny little slip of a thing! Her arms weren't no bigger'n this!"

He demonstrates the thinness of her arms using his thumb and forefinger.

"She were only 13 at the time though. We didn't get married though until she were 17."

It took a while to disentangle myself from the threads of their conversation. I was happy that they were living their traditional Appalachian life on their own terms. But I can't help but wonder what is going to happen when all of them are gone. All of the ones like Red and the Missus'. I know they are disappearing, even though I live so firmly in their midst that the outside is what now seems strange to me.

In my mind's eye, I don't see them dying out. I just see them disappearing into the blue mist.

I guess I'll join them there some day.