Highland Annals: I. About Granpap and Trees

I

GRANPAP accrued to me along with a farm in the Unakas. When I learned that my inheritance lay, or rather rose, in the Unakas, it at once passed from prose to poetry. My hundred hills became tipped with song, bloom calling to bloom from Three-Pine Point to Sunrise Spur, and Blackcap answering from his hemlock shroud with a melodious shake that did no harm to his hidden acres of anemone and trillium. The laurel, polished as by the glance of a god, drew a richer green from its storehouse a trillion of miles away in the sun. The great chestnuts leafily defied the blight that was creeping to their hearts. And where the gray rocks pushed through the quivering emerald of the mountain walls, they seemed listeningly alive, as if in wait for the key-word that would swing them open on Persia magnificent; though they needed to borrow no glamour of age from any part of the world. Unakas! Spenser, under English beeches, rustled his threefold coverlet of centuries, and began another dream — dream of a region that was old to God before Helvellyn rose or the Himalayas shone as the planet’s crest.

In the wake of a Muse so airily light of foot, I entered my forest a little stumblingly. The first cabin was Granpap Merlin’s. His welcoming ‘Howdy’ only slightly interrupted his dinner of corn-pone and pickled beans. But Poesy kept on tip-toe, swiftly picturing me fields like blowing seas; gallant stalks with waving green arms, and tassels flowing, silver, gold, and rose, in the breath of July dawns. With a thrust into memory, she brought up a rock maize-mill of my childhood, left by the Indians in a Kentucky cave; and chanted the one magic line of Lanier’s poem. As for beans, I had seen them in blossom, hiding their pinkness under round, hugging leaves, and not even their passage through a brine barrel could convert them into mere pabulum. It was a fitting meal for a mountain seer.

‘Did you grow the corn that made the meal that made that pone? ’ I asked, building Jack’s house in the excitement of getting back to the land.

‘It growed itself. I planted it.’

‘And you ploughed the field that grew the corn, and so forth?’

‘ My mule, Tim, ploughed it. I ploughed Tim.'

His face, like the broken corner of a boulder, did not tell me whether he was simply, or contemptuously, laconical.

‘This seems rather high for cornland,’ I said, in the tone of ownership. He must at least know that I had read the Farmers’ Bulletins.

‘Wait till you see it growin’. The corn gets so onhandy big and shady in Hawk Wing Cove, you can see the lightnin’ bugs in thar by daylight. But ’t ain’t easy ploughin’. Twenty-five acres of straight up and down.'

‘Oh, I’ve heard of that cove. From the head of it one can see seven curves of the river.’

‘If you look from the door thar, you can see the top of the ridge ’tween them two peaks.’

I looked.

‘It must be glorious to make one’s bread up there.’

‘I never made bread up thar but once. I baked hoe-cakes on a rock one day when Syn sent me meal and water for my dinner. I had n’t left her any stovewood, an’ she had proper spirit, Syn had,’ he added, as if his wife’s memory must be kept clear of blemish. ‘But thar wa’n’t no glory in it, as I see.’

‘I must go there the first thing. I don’t suppose there are any snakes.’

‘No, I don’t see more ’n two or three rattlers a year now. Not much killin’.’

His voice, like a retired general’s, was bored but tolerant.

‘Rattlesnakes! In those pastures of heaven! Did you ever kill one there?’

‘One? If they’d been fence-rails I could ’a’ put a mule-proof fence around that field with all I’ve killed in it.’

I looked again at the line of pallid gold just showing between two pointed barriers. It ebbed away, more like a bridge to faith, or some such unsubstantiality, than the trampled ground where man had battled for his overlordship. I would go there, come tomorrow. And I did. But what happens in aerial gardens must have its own chapter and aureole.

II

Granpap’s toleration of me passed into liking very slowly. His stolidity often brought my imagination down as if it had struck a wall; and while I gathered up the pieces, the wall would become human and wonder why I had given such an invidious thrust. Naturally the essence of comradeship eluded us for some time. But finally he understood that, my assaults were harmless; that he merely happened to be on the horizon w hen my enthusiasm was spraying the skies; and I began to see that he was too much a part of Nature to become consciously her notebook. He wore externality as a tree wears its bark, receiving all winds with passionless impartiality; but those winds of change were his breath of life.

One day I asked him if he did not sometimes feel that he would like to live in a city.

‘No,’ he said, ‘I have to stay whar thar’s somethin’ happenin’.’

Not an eyelash of me betrayed my glee. The least sign of emotion, and the gates of confidence would be snapped and sealed.

‘In a city,’ he said, ‘you don’t have seasons —jest weather.’

In the cabin with him, lived his son Sam, Sam’s wife, Coretta, and their children. Once he returned home after a night away, and was much puzzled on learning of their ‘goin’s-on’ in his absence. Cecil having the ear-ache, the father and mother had risen in the dead of night, built a fire, and administered the usual remedy — warm rabbit’s oil poured into the ear. So far granpap understood.

‘But how,’ said he, ‘could they think the roosters were crowin’ for daylight when it was only midnight — an’ git breakfast too?’

‘But, granpap,’ explained Coretta, ‘we had been asleep for hours, and how could you ’a’ knowed the time, with the night cloudy-gray, an’ no stars, an’ the clock stopped?’

‘Kain’t you feel the time?’ he asked, in concerned surprise, as if she were pathetically deformed. And later he said to me, ‘K’rettie kain’t feel the time at all.’ (She might have been a deaf mute.) ’I hope the little feller ain’t goin’ to take arter her.’

‘Cecil? Oh, no! He’s a Merlin. You can count on that. Don’t you like the boy’s name, granpap?’

He slowly cut a twig from the nearest dogwood and peeled it carefully.

‘You noticed I never handle his name?'

‘I’ve noticed.’

‘.K’rettie ain’t high-stocked with brains, but she’s got enough fer a woman; an’ she’s not great on housekeepin’, but’t ain’t every man can git hold of a woman like Syn was. I ain’t got nothin’ agin K’rettie but her namin’ the boy like that. He might as well be a furriner. I counted on his bein’ named Dick, — Richard Merlin, — like my father an’ grandfather, an’ my oldest, brother who was killed in the war. But this sissy name, it’s bitterer ’n this dogwood. I jest ain’t a-goin’ to say it.’

He cut the twig into inch-long pieces and dropped them into his pocket to be used as a substitute for tobacco.

That afternoon I remembered that I wanted to see Coretta about making me a mattress of new splintered shucks. I did not often seek Coretta. Married at fifteen, at twenty-two she was the mother of four. If she had taken her maternal honors lightly, as a child should, I could have gone happily to and from her presence. But she was determined ‘to do right by the Lord’s gifts,’ and her soft scramble for any crumbs of wisdom that I inadvertently dropped usually hurried my departure to a spot more suitable for meditation, where I could wonder what I had said anyhow. I should have liked to carry off Coretta’s children and free her petunia-blue eyes from clouds; but I remembered that I had once impulsively taken a broom from a child who was struggling to use it, and then found that I could not stay to do the child’s work. I really had to be going. And four children might prove more embarrassing than a broom. Four futures billowing to seas, and my life already pinched for room! No; better the hurried step and remote gaze as I passed.

In the least matter of business, the Unakasian expects to be approached by polite indirection. The more you curve and circle, softly as an Indian in the enemy’s woods, casually as a sparrow hops, the surer you may be of attaining your object. A straight march to the point, and you will find yourself gesturing to empty air, so swiftly will he withdraw from negotiations; so surely your breach of manners will be punished.

In half an hour’s talk with Coretta, I came somewhat hastily to the mattress, and she sat troubled. I could safely begin on my home curve.

‘His name is Richard Cecil, is n’t it? Richard is a fine old name. I suppose you ’ll call him that when he is older.’

Her surprised eyes swam in the gauzelight of pathos that I had learned to ignore.

‘Cecil is good enough for a little boy. But so many famous men have been named Richard.’

‘What men?’

‘There was Richard Lovelace.’

‘What did he do?’

‘He wrote poetry.’

‘Like you write?’

‘Yes — no — not exactly,’ I hastened. ‘And there was Richard Burbage, a great actor.’

‘One o’ them movie men?’

‘No, he played in great plays — not like you see nowadays. And Richard Lion-Heart, a mighty king. They buried him in that place I showed you the picture of— Westminster Abbey,’ I ventured, though I had visions of his death in the arms of Saladin somewhere beyond the Balkans.

She was impressed, and I thrust on.

‘And Dick Turpin, — Richard Turpin, — who was afraid of nothing.’

‘Did they bury him in the Abbey, too?’

‘No, but he died famously. Half of London went to his — er — funeral.’

She was silent a moment, and then said, ‘I’ll shore fix that bed for you as soon as Sam can shuck out the corn.’

With this grateful stab in my heart I left her; and Katy went with me to relate a story her papa had brought home. She pronounced ‘papa,’ as did all the mountain children, like the flower, poppy, with a soft trail at the end, making a dear word more dear. Katy was eleven, the daughter of Sam’s first wife.

When war stretched a hand into the Unakas, and one by one, then dozen by dozen, the young men began to disappear, the people wondered more and more what it was about. As a rule, they were not reached by the daily papers which feed us truth and bathe us in illumination; and Katy’s story showed how they had adapted the chief argument that had sifted to them.

‘There was a cripple, and he was a German. He was going over to Briartown, and stopped at a man’s house. The man and woman were gone to the store. The children were cookin’ some beans for dinner. The cripple ast to stir the beans. An’ he put something into the pot. Some powder or something. The woman come home and the children told her. The man come home and the woman told him. They took up the dinner and ast the German to set to the table. He took a chair and passed the beans. Nobody took any. Then the man said, “Have some beans yourself.” But the German said he would n’t choose any. Then the man got his gun, and said, “You will eat them beans or die.” The German took some of the beans. And in an hour his tongue was swelled out of his head.’

She paused, lifting anxious eyes, to know if I thought the story was true.

‘Yes, Katy,’ I answered unflinchingly. Could such a climax be chance invention? A mere accident of art?

‘Papa says it is true, for he found a cripple on the Briartown road one day an’ let him ride his horse for a mile. He couldn’t speak plain like papa, an’ he knows it was that German, but he don’t see how Abraham Ludd and Jim Dow let him git by.’

She was speaking of two neighbor boys in the service. One had risen to a captaincy, the other had been decorated.

‘Jim Dow — ’

‘Captain Dow, Katy,’ said I.

‘He don’t write to Nellie Ludd any more.’

‘Did Nellie tell you?’

‘No, but she’s quit goin’ to the post office. She’s ashamed to ast an’ git nothin’ every time.’

I wondered if that was why Nellie flitted so ghost-like about the hills, as difficult to capture as a bird fearing human hurt.

About supper-time I again called at the cabin, and as I sat by the superfluous fire, I heard Coretta say, ‘ Granpap, please pass the sorghum to little Dick.’

And granpap, like a stone image with a movable arm, passed the sorghum.

The full Southern moon was savagely vivid that evening, devouring dreams as easily as it did the clouds that saluted too familiarly; so I left the house by what Sam called the stovewood trail, a rear way softened by a lane of shadows. What trips the eye will hang the foot; and mine was halted in mid-air for a second or less by the sight of a hemlock bough like laced jet against the moon; as if Night, in defense, had thrown a torn bit of her garment over the face of the usurper. When I touched earth again, I was on new, mysterious ground, so quickly are worlds created for us, the ramblers of the universe, tenants insatiable. The mountains sat about me, cloaked sages waiting my indiscretions. Like the roll of a gentle, hidden sea, the valleys whispered upward with the life that stirs by night, the smaller wings, that dart fearlessly when the birds are asleep; and the lithe, furry dwellers in secret that come out of the earth to thread, more graceful than swimmers, the channels of shadow. But that purring wave was only the foam-flower of a vastly bedded silence; silence in which Nature dreamed of a way to reconquer man and rule alone, laughter enthroned; while, against that dream, Beauty everywhere uncovered her soul. In behalf of man, the first to divine her, the first to adore, she arrayed her magic, invincible if so was his love. Everywhere she shone; on the laurel shedding a vapor of light, on the laps of the orange fungi with their creamy apron cascades; on the roots of trees, and the rocks that fed them endurance. Blue mosses, pale lichens, grasses with heads of mauve and pearl, gleamed in the unsubdued strips of golden light. The world of minute things pressed as hugely significant as the solar system. And as the sea, never hushed, the valley whisper appealed — an ecstatic ache. High above me there was escape by way of a blue eternity, where two walls of cloud parted to show a chasm of sky. Lower down a mist wound reverently about a star, then crept elfishly to the most portentous peak, hanging there like a comic beard. While I waited its whim, a voice, too fervently human, came through the clump of bushes at my side. A second later, a tall figure bearing an armful of fagots was checkered disappearingly along the path toward the cabin.

The next morning when I recalled the sounds I had heard, and put them together understandingly, I had this:

‘ K’rettie can make ’most as good headcheese as ever Syn could.’ And I knew that in Merlin language granpap had said, ‘My son’s wife, please God, is my daughter.’

III

If tree-worship was ever the religion of any tribe, I know that I am ancestrally bound to that folk. Once an artist told me of his happy method of protecting his wife, children, and friends from the outbursts incidental to genius. He would go to the woods and beat a tree until his symptomatic rage was exhausted. As if a tree-beater and a wife-beater were not cousins-german in crime! And now I was going to steep my soul more heinously. The oak boards of my cabin roof had to be reinforced. I could not spend another winter with the snows driving in on me. A ‘ boardtree ’ had to be felled before the sap was up; and on one of those days which are claimed by both spring and winter, but belong to neither, I set out with granpap, the most skilful board-maker in the Unakas, to select a victim.

‘Now this white oak,’ said granpap, pausing by a giant that gazed reflectively over the valley, ‘will make as good boards as you’d want to sleep under.’

‘But, granpap, don’t you see — we are interrupting him.’

His eyes narrowed in the suspicious way of our first acquaintance.

‘I mean he is sort of on duty here, as if the spirit of the woods needed a sentry just at this place.’

His glance became a cold squint, and I plunged for a practical argument.

‘White oaks make good mast. We must think of the hogs. There’ll be three new litters to feed next winter.’

‘I reckon you’re right,’ he said, instantly at home. ‘And yander at the head of Flume Cove is a black oak that will make tollable boards if it don’t do better.’

‘A black oak! With all that green moss on it? And look at the first branch. It has an elbow crooked round a bellwood. Would you divorce such a pair? What God hath joined, granpap.’

‘ Well, it would n’t make prize boards anyhow,’ he said, moving on unregretfully.

Suddenly a fear gripped me. We were nearing a glen at whose door stood a tree which for me symbolized the perfect life. I had often wondered why no human being could achieve maturity so unblemished, and I never passed it without a wave of happy solemnity rolling over me. I began to talk about beetrees, the only subject on which granpap was excitable. Thickly, hurriedly,

I developed a rapacious interest in the wild bee and its hidden ways. And at the precise moment when we passed the pride of my woods, granpap was singsonging the lines which an old, old man had taught his grandfather when a boy:

I had lured him safely by, and we neared the road again. His eye was on a tree with a long, perfect trunk, but which slanted from the root up, leaning over the road.

‘I might do with that,’ said he, ‘It’s dangerous thar anyway.’

‘Dangerous! Don’t you see how strong it is, and how gently it leans over the road, like a great arm of blessing? I’m so used to that tree I should feel sure of accident overtaking me before I reached the village if I did n’t pass under it.’

Granpap halted. ‘I ain’t got time to waste corkusin’ around like this. I’ll go to the new ground and do some grubbin’ . Then to-morr’ I ’ll git up early and find a tree.’

I was dismissed, conscience-free.

Two warm days followed. On the second, I left my desk, feeling sure that I could find a sourwood in bloom on the south side of High Point. My path lay through the glen. Nearing it, I heard alarming sounds of activity, and running past the last obscuring half-acre of rhododendrons, I looked ahead. The pride of my woods measured two full rods on the ground, half of his broken arms digging helplessly into the earth, the other half appealing to the winds, birds, and skies that had loved him for some mitigation of his doom. Granpap’s beaming face shone above the bleeding stump.

‘You oughter seen him fall! Just ate up those little chestnuts and poplars as he went down.’

And I had thought I heard thunder! Had even speculated on the peculiar crackling quality of the vibrations.

’I don’t know how I happened to miss it when we were lookin’ around. Now we’ll get some boards.’

A tightness of the throat kept me silent. Moreover, I could not rebuke him. He was too happy. Here was material worthy of his skill.

‘ Sam is going to help me saw the cuts and make the bolts,’ he said. ‘Here he comes now.’

I turned away. I was the primary cause of the murder, but I could not stay to see the victim drawn and quartered.

A day or two later I had to carry a message to the board-maker. I found him a little sad.

‘ I’m gittin’ old,’ he said. ‘ These here boards are the sorriest I ever made.’

‘But you’ve got a good pile of them, granpap.’

‘Them’s my splinters,’ he said, with high contempt, both for me and the boards. ‘That was the desaptivest tree I ever cut. I bumbed on it as fur as I could reach and it was plumb sound. But in choosin’ a board-tree you’ve got to ’low so much for what you don’t see.’

He sat down. Speech was coming on the tide of injury.

‘A shore desaptive tree. Look at them cuts me and Sam made. Half a day’s work wasted in ’em.’

I looked at the great blocks and wondered how they had cunningly escaped further mutilation. And though I saw myself roofless for the next winter, I could not repress an inward bubble over the tree’s revenge.

‘It had lost so many limbs when it was young and pushin’ up, that it was jest the snirliest tree I ever saw.’

‘Snirly, granpap?’

‘Ay, it must ’a’ been an awful thrifty tree. Every time a limb broke off it plumb healed up, an’ thar’s eight and ten rings over some of the scars. Here I’ve cut it down an’ split into it jest to find a lot of knot-holes spilin’ my best boards. And it looked so purty and straight.’

Alas, I knew!

He got up, adjusted his brake, which was the strong fork of a limb chained to a log, fixed his bolt upright, set his adze carefully, and with precise restraint evenly separated a smooth, shining three-foot board from the rest of the bolt. From the splitting wood came an odor that must have been the essence of the forest condensed for generations into its living vase.

But granpap was not pleased with his work.

‘Did you see how tough that was? When I do git a good board I have to tear it out. But it’s nateral for the south side of a tree to be tough.’

‘Don’t you mean the north side, granpap?’

‘No,’ he said patiently. ‘It’s the sun that toughens wood. You’ll see them bolts from the north side are brickie.’

He balanced the board disapprovingly.

‘Look how narr’ it is. By the time I ’ve sapped this there won’t be enough of it left to turn a rain-drop.’

He began to chip off the inch of white sap-wood along the edge of the board. ‘I could ’a’ cast out the snirly blocks, but it was the wind-shake that finally ruined me. I never counted on a windshake in a tree as proud as that.’

‘Show me the wind-shake, granpap.’

‘Look at this block, here in the crosscut, an’ you’ll see it. A wind-shake starts at the heart an’ twists round and round, gettin’ bigger and bigger an’ breakin’ the wood as it goes, till thar’s only enough left for a little narr’ board ’tween the shake-rings and the bark. Then sometimes, when the tree weaves in the wind, you can hear it cry. If I’d ’a’ listened at this tree in a high wind it. could n’t ’a’ fooled me. But they never make no sign on the outside.’

‘Granpap,’ I began slowly.

He looked up, met my eyes, and laid down his axe.

‘Don’t you think some people are like that?’

I could feel myself trembling. If he failed me now, the line of Merlin would be extinct. There would be no more seers in the Unakas, or anywhere.

‘Ay,’ he said. He still used the ‘ay’ of Westmoreland and the hills of Malvern. ‘Ay, Syn was like that after Ben got killed.’

He thought my silence was the silence of sympathy, and in alarm took up his axe.

'’T ain’t no use to — ’

The axe finished the sentence, slicing a curl of white sap-bark. But his face was a shade grayer. The tree was avenged.

I started on, thinking of all the Syns and Bens I had known; and of a gay friend, now fallen, who liked to assure me that ‘A heart is known by the autopsy.’ My foot turned up a boss of sweet turf. A broken heart makes as good loam as a sound one, I thought. And I would have gone down the slope singing in the face of a looming tomorrow, if only granpap had not been standing so still.