Smokey Mountain Breakdown

There was a bit of a breeze that day, but not much. The sunlight filtered through the giant giant chestnut trees, their broad leaves creating patterns in the shade of the morning. It was the sort of day that if you lay on your back in the forest and looked up, you could see the dust motes swirling like angels in the light. But there would be a storm coming soon. You could feel that on the air too, and smell the coming lightning.

Sadie was digging new potatoes when she heard the hoof beats and the muffled sound of male voices coming up the holler. She stood and cocked her head like a doe seeing a flash of white in the wood. She ran to the garden gate, brushing the soil from her hands on her skirts and grabbed her rifle from where it rested there by the fence.

The riders had come again to Raven’s Branch. She was certain of it.

“June Bug!” She called out to her sister who was sweeping the dirt of the yard. “Git your gun!”

In the darkening days following the Civil War, ragtag bands of marauders had cut a swath through the mountain hollers robbing and killing. They came in broad daylight and sometimes in darkness. They came for the children, murdering them before their mothers. Though the war had ended, they hadn’t had their fill of blood quite yet.

Her own man had yet to return from the war and she often times wondered if he would ever come back. It weren’t no matter to her. She’d kept the farm going through the long years, scraping together enough food and game to feed the family. She’d likely continue to do the same, even if he came home.

Sadie’s five-year old nephew was playing on the porch of the cabin. His feet were grimy with coal dust. He looked up at his mother in alarm as she emerged with a shotgun from the cabin.

“Ransom! Git over here now.” Sadie said, with an edge of desperation in her voice.

The child scurried to obey. She hissed to him, “You don’t make a sound or I’ll whup you…You hear? Do you?”

The little boy trembled and nodded, his lip quivering.

Sadie gathered the child up and stuffed him under her skirts and stood rock solid at the steps to the cabin, stony-faced as the ragged band rode up. June Bug took her place at her side. She pushed a strand of hair from her face and glared fiercely.

The two women watched as the men skittered their horses to a halt in the dirt, causing dust to fog the air.

The leader of the band sat his gaunt horse easily. His clothing was ragged and you could barely discern the blue gray of his tattered uniform.

“Woman. Where be your menfolk!”

“Ain’t no menfolk here.” She said. “You’uns can just move along. I ain’t got no bidness with you’uns.”

He looked at her with cold dead eyes. She tightened her grasp on the rifle and pointed it menacingly at him. Her sister followed suit.

Her eyes were cold and narrow. She stood solidly but did not try to move. Ransom had his pudgy arms wrapped tightly around her legs and his small body was plastered against her. She could feel the contours of his face, crumpling against her thigh as he stifled a whimper.

“Well, ma’am, it don’t seem right, us coming all the way up here to see you and not leavin’ with nothin’.”

He spat into the dry dust.

June Bug’s hands were shaking as she held her shotgun.

“Easy there, Junie, “ Sadie said. “You know that there thing has a hair trigger.”

Sadie, herself, spat into the dust and managed a grin like a feral she-wolf.

“Lookit!” She said. “There be a ham in the smokehouse. Why don’t you’uns take that and go on.”

The lean man looked at her narrowly. Then he nodded at one of his men, who dismounted and headed toward the smokehouse.

They all waited tensely. June Bug cut her eyes at her sister. Neither woman was sure how much longer little Ransom could stay still under Sadie’s skirts, like a fawn in the forest.

The man came back lugging a big joint of cured meat. He slung it over the pommel of his saddle and mounted up.

The leader touched his fingers to his cap and nodded at Sadie, in a mockery of courtliness. Then the group turned their horses and galloped down the path into the woods.

Sadie and June Bug stood stock still until they disappeared and they could no longer hear the horses and the laughter of the men.

Then June Bug lay her shotgun down and burst into tears. She pulled Ransom from his aunt’s voluminous skirts and drew him into her arms. She rocked him to comfort herself as much as she did so to comfort him.

Tears made muddy streaks down her face as she looked at her sister and said, “You didn’t tell me you had no ham? Where’d you git that from?”

Sadie lifted her rifle and sighted high into a chestnut tree. She shot, bringing down a fox squirrel with a clean head shot. It fell, lifeless in the dust.

“Oh. That were from the last time they’uns showed up here.” She said.

Then Sadie turned to her little nephew and said.

“Ransom! What don’t you go git that there squirrel for auntie and I’ll make us some biscuits!”

The companion essay to this ficlet is up on Feministe. It's called, "An American Brigadoon".

I've been very kindly invited to guest blog this week by Jill Filipovic over on Femimiste.

I’ll be using this opportunity to write about a subject very dear to me, Appalachian women.

One of the problems and one of the blessings that I’ve faced in the gathering of my stories has been that they are, for the most part gathered from women. This is because I am a woman myself, and there are still very strict rules regarding how women and men interact in this culture. I owe a huge debt to Friend Scott, who has been able to gather stories from the men folk that they might not tell to me.

I think what has consistently struck me about the Appalachian women is their tenacity and strength. These women are not feminists. They would be insulted to be called such. But at their core is a resolve and a resourcefulness that we could learn much from. They are action-based and dynamic. The adversity they face in their day to day living is staggering at times to the outsider. Much has been made of their poverty and lack of education by scholars and many people have difficulty seeing beyond this deficit. I will say to you that there are different kinds of wealth in this world and different kinds of “smart”.

I was talking to my friend one day and she was telling me about the Vista volunteers who came up here in droves during the 1960’s. They came here to teach people various life skills.

“So what did they show you?” I asked.

“Well, they showed us how to make mattresses, can and built outhouses.”

I thought about this for a minute.

“Ummm…but didn’t y’all already know how to do that? I mean, you’ve been living up here forever!” I said.

She smiled at me gently. “Oh yes. We knew how to do that.”

Talk about teaching your grandma how to suck eggs.

Another curious example of this was the teaching of “Forestry” in the schools here. They taught kids how to recognize and name different trees. This is a culture that lives in a forest environment. I have yet to meet a ten year old who couldn’t tell the difference between a red and “piss” oak.

So, there is indeed a paternalistic attitude that has been directed at the Appalachian people from the outside for quite a long time. It’s very easy to fall back on these stereotypes, unfortunately.

I’m hoping during this week to show from a women’s perspective how women deal with real life and hardship here. I’ll be alternately entertaining with fiction pieces based on some of the stories I’ve gathered about Appalachian women. If there is a story here, there will be an essay over on Feministe. You’ll have to go there to read the companion article.

As per usual...I'll be writing from the seat of my pants.


...Plus...I love their header...cause I was once a little girl with a big gun. And I'm all about girls with guns.

Her mother died and was buried this past weekend.

When I heard about it, I was so sorry that I had not attended the viewing or the burial. Funerals are so important here. They are in so many ways the glue that holds the community together. Death is an important celebration on the mountain.

Jilly is delicately pretty in the way of mountain women. Her hair is raven black and her face is heart-shaped. I always marveled about her lovely milk-white skin. She's my age and thus an aging beauty, but still very lovely for a mountain woman. The mountain is hard on her women. They fade quickly like store bought flowers. You can only pick out the dead stems from the bouquet for so long.

The first time I met her I had gone to her house to pick up some hay. Her family's farm is on the verge of the Gulf and has long lovely stretches of green grass pasture. She often does not feel well and lays on a day bed near the front window where she can look out onto the grasslands.

But that first visit, she was feeling okay. She showed me her glass paintings of chickens and sun flowers on old windows. I thought they were amazing examples of outsider art. I've never been able to get paint to do that on glass. I've tried. I loved her art and encouraged her to keep at it. I told her about my friends from Atlanta who would love such work.

She smiled and dimpled. Then delicately spat a brown stream of tobacco juice into an empty coke can. She wiped her mouth daintily with a handkerchief.

Her son, Bobby, had been up to my place to cut wood for me a few times. Their family knows their way around a saw mill. Bobby is tall and handsome. All of the members of this family are extremely comely. I watched carefully as Bobby used his boot to manipulate the big log as he sawed through it. I learned most of my own chainsaw technique by watching him.

So, I was sad to hear that her Momma had died. I hadn't been keeping up with the local papers and had missed it.

Betty told me about it after the fact.

They arranged her dead mother's hair into an elaborate up do of glossy black hair.

People like to keep their hair jet black up here. Dying it that color even when the face has lost the warmth and smoothness of youth.

Another woman had told me about when her own mother had died. They had not done that to her mother, but there was a bit of a ruckus at the viewing. One of her competitors for her elderly suitor's affections had shown up at the funeral. She was occupied with the business of being a grieving daughter when she caught the transgressor entering the funeral home from the corner of her eye.

Evaline was 81 years old. She showed up with her jet black wig and wore a fringed red dress with a plunging neckline that left little to the imagination in this world without plastic surgery. She had on black hose with shiny red peep-toe pumps and red, red lips. She fumed as she watched the octogenarian hussy drape herself over the suitor in the middle of the funeral home.

Widows come out of the woodwork here for funerals. You never know when a widower might need a sympathetic bosom to rest his weary head on. Widowers don't stay that way long up here. No sirree.

We dubbed Evaline the "Funereal Flirt". It's one of my favorite stories.

But Jilly's mom's funeral was a different matter. Jilly's mom's favorite color was red. She had loved red her entire life. And so her family honored her with redness for her last goodbye.

Contrasting her black hair, they painted her corpse's lips a rich bright glossy red. Each fingernail was lovingly decorated with bright red enamel. She was dressed in the brightest of red dresses and laid in her bright red coffin with white silk lining, like a cherry in a basket.

The funeral home was decorated with swags of red satin and bouquets of red roses and the usual arrangements so popular in this area. The crimson horseshoe with the white phone in the middle that says, "Jesus Calls" and sprays of red mums and the blessed relief of babies breath were everywhere.

All of the mourners wore red. They gathered for the viewing and sat there praying with soft sobbing in the background. The preacher preached his sermon of redemption for one who went to Jesus so close to Easter. Then they all filed out to ride in the big limos back to the mountain.

From a distance in the cold mountain spring air, a swath of crimson was seen for as far as one could see. A small sea of crimson mourners stood in sharp contrast to the sea of spring green that was the big pasture. They laid her to rest in the small family graveyard with two centuries of her kin.

I know Jilly is very sad. It's so hard to lose your Momma. I think she should be proud she sent her Momma off with such style. It's not what most of us would do, but I find great beauty in it.

I think I might make a Red Velvet cake and take up to them. Or they maybe might be sick of that by now, so perhaps Wet Coconut.

With a red, red rose on the side.

It was like finally finding a precious rare book that I had searched for half my life. But when I finally had it in my hands and turned the pages, the words had been wiped out by some disaster. It was like losing my sight and only being able to see shadowy fragments of figures that I couldn't quite make out. It was like watching history fade before my eyes and finding myself powerless to stop it.

Her hands were gnarled like ancient tree roots spreading sideways on rocky ground. Her left hand in particular was frozen in a grimace.

"I used to climb all the ways up in them apple trees to pick 'em. Some said I was the fastest apple picker round these parts." She said in a moment of clarity.

She looked sadly at that frozen left hand.

"Don't reckon I could even hold an apple anymore."

I can easily see in the bone structure of her face the ghost of a ravishingly beautiful mountain woman in her prime. Her eyes, now watery, must have been a cornflower blue in her day. Now in her late 80's, she sits in her chair, close to the television so those eyes can make out what is on the screen. Mizz Kay-reen can't hear so good either any more.

She says when she speaks, she hears her speech inside the bones of her face. She doesn't exactly say that, but I know that's what she means. Her good hand reaches up to stroke the bony part of her cheekbone next to her ear.

She has chosen the memories and thoughts she lives with very carefully. You can tell that other things are lurking just under the surface. She alternates between thanking God for letting her be on this earth so long and then looking impossibly sad. She is the only one of her sixteen siblings still living. She chooses to forget they are dead.

Scott is with me and when she asks, he tells her who is gone. I want to pinch him and tell him not to. I want her to hang onto her fragile fantasy because it keeps that impossible sadness from her eyes. It is painful for me to see.

She starts to tell me how she and her husband, Otis, met. Somehow, a story that must have begun with a ride in a horse-drawn wagon ends up being about the day Otis died. The two tales are now entwined in her mind. And that seems to be a metaphor for their relationship. For Mizz Kay-reen, the fifty years of marriage passed in a moment. One second, she is a fourteen year old girl meeting the love of her life, and the next, she is taking that final car ride to the hospital with him clinging to life.

She tells me not to waste time. She seems to think that Scott and I are engaged. She has projected her own love for Otis onto Scott's and my friendship.

Her eyes twinkle at me for a moment and I glimpse the wry humor she once possessed.

"Well, you ain't no spring chicken!" she says to me. "But you look like you might be a nice fat fryer!"

I laugh. I know I'm fat and I'm okay with that. We all laugh.

"What was your name again?" She asks for the third time.

Scott coaxes her to sing a few bars of "Beulah Land". Her voice is the high fluting voice of a young girl, untouched by her age. Words, she cannot remember in speech, come effortlessly to her while singing.

I listen, entranced, and silently curse my lack of a usb digital recorder. Such a voice really should be archived before it is gone. I want other people to hear her. I desperately want this.

She talks again about how God has been so good to her to let her live so long. Then she almost tears up. Then stops. Then she smiles and says God was so good to give her Otis. He never hit her and was always kind to her. Otis has been gone 20 years.

Scott told me she sometimes sees Otis in the room and speaks to him.

She comes back time and time again to the same story fragment. It is where she seems to spend most of her time.

"Otis, he would come up to me and ask...like he didn't know me...'Whose Sweetheart are you?!"

She self-consciously strokes the age spots on her left cheek, and I realize they are in the shape of a kiss.

She smiles shyly and coyly, like a young girl.

"Why I'm your Sweetheart! I'm yours!"

The land her family used to own is now a wide, smooth lake that rolls up its shores each winter. In the summer, the TVA lets the water flow in and the banks of mud are once more serene stretches of liquid. You can still see the road that went through that once lovely farmland in the winter. They left the grain silos and only those peek out of the water during the summer. It's called Dutch Bottoms.

You have to be careful about waterfront property in Tennessee. Half the year, your lakefront home looks out onto vistas of mud.

Her grand daddy was advised to move "high up" for his health. It was just in time, for the TVA was taking over the land to make Douglas Lake. They bought most of Hall Top Mountain and the clan moved there. Most of that land is out of the family now, but they still have a huge reunion up there each year.

Her father met her mother while walking down the Old Fifteenth with his fiddle strapped on his back on his way to a revival meeting. She was doing the laundry on a big rock in the stream. That rock is still there. They began meeting there on a regular basis, but she was forbidden to see boys, so it was on the quiet. They decided to run away together and on the next laundry day, her mother wore her good clothes under her laundry smock and they ran off to Clayton, Georgia and got hitched.

Her family moved around a good bit, her father chasing jobs in the cotton mills of South Carolina, before coming back to the mountain. He was a stern and unforgiving man. He had spent his youth wildly, playing his fiddle at dances and frequenting gospel meetings. It was perhaps his youthful experiences that made him so very strict with his daughters. A hard man to love well. He was cruel at times. She wonders if he'll be there in the afterlife.

Once, she wore a new pair of shoes to church. It was a five mile walk and her feet were raw. She had been forbidden to accept rides from boys, but just this once she did, since she could barely walk. Her father beat her within an inch of her life for that transgression.

The last time he beat her, she swore she'd kill him if he touched her again. He didn't and she left her home to go out in the world.

When she was growing up in that stern household, they lived on a farm on what is now Coggins road. They just tore the old farmhouse down. Often she'd comment on what a pretty farm her daddy had over there with the land all cleared and whatnot. The new people hadn't kept the place up in her eyes. They had a penchant for saving old machinery and cars and the stretch of road that her family once lived on was now decorated with hundreds…maybe thousands…of junk automobiles.

That family has an interesting story. Their daddy was a scout for geological surveyors up here in these hills. It was said that he knew where all of the rich mineral deposits were, hidden beneath the shifting stone of the hills. He couldn't read but he could dowse for minerals with eerie proficiency. My neighbors told me that there was a story that when the old man died, he had stored all sorts of gem stones in the junk cars. So the boys had to be careful what they threw away since their inheritance was hidden in old engine blocks.

The men of this family have a curse. They all die young at exactly the same age. At least most of them. Enough to make the men nervous.

She remembers the nights spent in that old house. She remembered waking up in the middle of the night as a child screaming. Huge Norway rats infested the farmhouse when they first moved in and they'd often awaken to find rat bites on their faces and necks. She has an uneasy relationship with the wildlife up here. She is terrified of snakes after having come across a nest of them mating in the creek. She says there were hundreds of the things intertwined there in the water. She still has nightmares about them.

Life was hard here, but the memories are now softened with time. In deep winter her father would wrap all of the children's legs in burlap sacks for the three mile trudge through the snow, crossing frozen creeks, to the school house. They didn't have a way to take the burlap off and would have to wear the sacks all through the school day.

The delicious freedom she experienced when she left home to work in the Magnavox factory in Greeneville was short-lived, but she traded it for the life she has had all these years, with the man she loved. They raised five strong children and farmed. It was a good life.

Her husband died nine years ago. She recalls the winter night he passed with clarity and tears up as she speaks of it. She still keeps his name on her door and her phone listing still bears his name. It's very much like he is still living at times when she speaks of him.

They had a wood stove for heat at that time. The night was wickedly cold and bitter and he was loading the stove with firewood.

As he placed crammed too many "night logs" in the firebox, she chided him about it.

"You best not be doin' that," she said, "You're gonna drive us out of the house and then where would we go?"

He wisecracked at her as he often did, "Guess I'd better find another place to sleep, then."

"Shall I pack your bags fer you?" She cracked back at him.

Her eyes tear up and she says to me, "I weren't being mean, this was just what we always said to each other."

I could so see the easy nature of their relationship. The deep love and level of comfort they had reached with each other during their long lives together.

He had indeed overloaded the stove that night. The creosote jammed the flue and smoke began to billow through the house. He had already gone to bed, leaving her to deal with the mess. She went through the house closing off doorways in an attempt to contain the smoke billowing into the house.

"I guess I should have checked on him, but I didn't." She said, missing him with every breath. Loving him with every single piece of herself.

He died in his sleep during the night.

Sometimes I take her out for a drive and she points out to me the ghosts of the thriving community that once lived here. The mountains are jealous of the land we take for our use. Places that fifty years ago were homesteads are now forest. All that remains of her childhood and young adulthood here are in many cases a teetering stone chimney left on a spot where she once laughed and danced.

I can sense the sadness in her when she points out a stretch of forest and says, "Back whence I was young, that was the prettiest farm with all sorts of beautiful flowers."

Sometimes when we are driving about, she will break into song. Her voice is sweet and melodic and mixed with the dissonances that typify atonal singing up here.

We will wind around the mountain roads singing "I'll Fly Away".

I'm just putting a short post in tonight. It's Sunday and I usually take a bit of time off from writing on Sunday. But the deal is that I must write something.

A friend came over to my house and we watched Brokeback Mountain. This is not the sort of film that shows at the Newport CinemaPlex. Well, I started choking up around the last time they see each other and it was downhill from there. I'm glad I didn't see it in a movie theater because I would have quite shamed myself. I'm not one of those people who weeps tidily. There are some women who manage to look quite lovely as tears trace out of their eyes. That's just not me. When I'm by myself, I can really rip loose with a good cry. But since I had company, I did try to restrain myself. A bit.

There's just something lovely and cathartic about a good cry. I feel like the ground must feel after a nice hard rain.

Then we got on the subject somehow of domestic violence in the community.

I think we were talking about getting "whoopin's" as children. My parents never laid a hand on me when I was growing up. They never needed to. My mother was gifted with "the look". This sort of way that she looked at you and pursed her lips that was absolutely unquestionable. It was worse than being hit. In a second, my mother could telepathically convey all sorts of horrors that would occur(but never did) if I did not immediately cease whatever it was that I was doing.

The conversation segued into domestic violence. The women here are very strong. The men have good reason to be afraid of them and if not of them, then of their male relatives. If someone threatens to kill you up here, it's definitely not a joke.

There is this tale of a woman who lived up the road more towards Del Rio. Her husband was known to take a violent turn when he got all likkered up. This one evening he came home drunk, no doubt on some of the excellent white lightning that is made up here. They tell me our community supplies the Tennessee State House with hooch, it's that good. It also makes excellent vanilla extract and elderberry cordial. Not that I'd know or anything, but it only costs 6 bucks a quart.

The husband takes a swipe at the wife and then passes out in the bed. She gets out her needle and thread and sews him up in the sheet on the bed. Then, she goes out and finds a stout stick and proceeds to beat the crap out of him, all the while him being unable to escape from his "shroud".

I'm not sure how he managed to extricate himself from this situation. I imagine that is a tale unto itself. But he left her after that. Told all his buddies that he was afraid to be in the same house with her.

I love that story.

Payback is certainly a bitch.