Gap Creek

Praise for
Gap Creek

“Morgan has a kind of perfect pitch for the locutions of his characters … Haunting, lyrical.”

—
American Way
, American Airlines magazine

“In Morgan’s hands … details become the stuff of stern, gripping drama … Morgan is among the relatively few American writers who write about work knowledgeably, and as if it really matters … You begin to feel, as you sometimes do when reading Cormac McCarthy’s or Harry Crews’s early novels, that the author has been typing with blood on his hands and a good deal of it has rubbed off onto your shirtsleeves … I wanted to cry uncle and go bury this novel in my backyard, someplace where it wouldn’t slip into my dreams. I couldn’t take anymore, and I mean that as a compliment.”

—
The New York Times Book Review

“[Morgan] shows what it was like to be human in a time and place now far removed from modern America. He creates living, breathing souls who, as transparent as their dreams and fears may seem today, demand to be taken seriously.”

—
The Orlando Sentinel

“Pure as a mountain stream, haunting as a mountain melody.”

—
The Charlotte Observer

“In examining the hard, honest lives of his people, Robert Morgan gives voice to a time and place rarely imagined.
Gap Cree
k speaks of things both intimate and eternal.”

—Stewart O’Nan

“A gliding, unhurried story of sufferings and hope that is simple and ragged, but never seems alien. This couple’s relentless misfortunes are given no more drama than they need, and all the compassion they deserve.”

—
Kirkus Reviews

“Likely to appeal to fans of Charles Frazier’s
Cold Mountain
.”

—
People

“Julie Harmon is like other strong mountain women created by Harriette Arnow, Lee Smith, and Wilma Dykeman; she survives poverty, flood, and pain by mixing hard work with love. Perhaps because he is a poet, Morgan uses her voice in simple but luminous prose that tells the truth, whether abut the beauties of Appalachia or the human struggles during childbirth and death throes.”

—Doris Betts

“[
Gap Creek
] immerses the reader in a time, early in this century, and place where five dollars is a fortune, homemade jam a life-saving gift, and the simple act of going to church a step toward survival.”

—
Publishers Weekly

“Beautifully written and delicately textured.”

—
St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“An unforgettable voice … Will remind readers of Mattie Ross’ storytelling in Charles Portis’
True Grit
.”

—
Wilmington, NC, Star-News

“A rich story that deserves a slow, appreciative reading. It’s a wonderful pick for a long winter’s night.”

—
Winston-Salem, NC, Journal

“A story, well written, about a place and a time that Morgan has brought to life with his blunt prose and a reproduction of dialogue that brings his characters alive. This one’s a keeper.”

—
The Knoxville News-Sentinel

ALSO BY ROBERT MORGAN

Fiction

The Blue Valleys

The Mountains Won’t Remember Us

The Hinterlands

The Truest Pleasure

The Balm of Gilead Tree

This Rock

Brave Enemies

Poetry

Zirconia Poems

Red Owl

Land Diving

Trunk & Thicket

Groundwork

Bronze Age

At the Edge of the Orchard Country

Sigodlin

Green River: New and Selected Poems

Wild Peavines

Topsoil Road

The Strange Attractor: New and Selected Poems

October Crossing

Nonfiction

Good Measure: Essays, Interviews, and Notes on Poetry

Boone: A Biography

Lions of the West: Heroes and Villains of the Westward Expansion

ROBERT MORGAN

GAP CREEK

a novel

For my daughter Laurel

I would like to thank Shannon Ravenel and the staff at Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill for their crucial help in bringing this book to completion, and especially Duncan Murrell for his extraordinary persistence, tact, and insight.

One

I know about Masenier because I was there. I seen him die. We didn’t tell anybody the truth because it seemed so shameful, the way he died. It was too awful to describe to other people. But I was there, even though I didn’t want to be, and I seen it all.

Masenier was my little brother, my only brother, and us girls had spoiled him. If Masenier woke up in the middle of the night and wanted some hot cornbread one of us would get up and bake it. If Masenier wanted a pretty in the store in town we’d carry a chicken down to one of the big houses in Flat Rock and sell it to buy him the pretty. Masenier got an egg every morning while the rest of us just had grits. If he wanted biscuits and molasses, Mama or one of us girls would bake them for him.

I thought Masenier was the cutest boy in the world. He had these blond curls that stood out all around his head, and his eyes was blue as the mountains in the far distance. He loved to sing and sometimes Papa would pick the banjo by the fire at night and us girls would sing ballads like “In the Shadow of the Pines” or “The Two Sisters” and Masenier would clap and sing along. We didn’t have music that often and it was a special treat when Papa got down the banjo.

Now the year I’m talking about was the year after Cold Friday, that day when the sun never did come out and it never warmed up. Cold Friday was the coldest day anybody had ever seen. It seemed like the end of the world, when the chickens never left the roost, and it put such a chill on everything we’ll never forget that day. Papa took his coughing sickness then and it seemed like he never was well after that. But it was the year after Cold Friday when Masenier started acting poorly.

Masenier had always been such a healthy boy, even a little plump, from all the biscuits and molasses, and his cheeks was pink as wild roses. He had a pile of white sand out beside the house Papa had carried in the wagon from the creek. Masenier made roads and castles and all kinds of mountains and valleys in the sand. He even made him a church out of sticks and set it on a hill of sand, and he stuck little rocks around it to look like a graveyard. You might have knowed a boy that done that was marked in some way.

ALONG IN THE winter Masenier started to look peaked. He fell off a lot, and Mama thought it was because the cow was dry. So we borrowed milk from the Millers that lived further out the ridge. But the milk didn’t seem to help Masenier. He got paler and he lost his baby fat.

“What that boy needs is a tonic,” Cora Miller said. And she mixed up a tincture of herbs and roots that she kept in a cupboard in her kitchen with corn liquor. Mama give Masenier a tablespoon of the tonic before every meal. The tonic would bring the glow back to his cheeks for a while. We thought he was getting better. And for Christmas he got four oranges and a poke of peppermint candy.

But it was the day after Christmas when he woke up with the pains. My sister Rosie heard him holler out and she went to his bed in the attic. “My belly hurts,” he said.

“Have you got the colic?” Rosie said.

“Hurts bad,” Masenier said.

Everybody knows what you take for the colic is pennyroyal tea, and Mama boiled some as soon as the stove was hot, even before she cooked any breakfast. Masenier sipped the tea, and it seemed to make him feel better, maybe because Mama put a little paregoric in the tea, the way you do for babies with the colic. Papa said, “Too much store-bought candy will always give a body colic.”

BUT AFTER THAT Masenier got the colic even when he didn’t have any store-bought candy. After the Christmas candy was long gone he still had the terrible cramps and would wake up in the middle of the night crying. Mama would hold him in her lap and rock him by the fire. And Papa or one of us girls would hold him while Mama made pennyroyal tea. Then after he drunk the tea with some paregoric he would feel better and might even sleep a little.

That was a bad winter, not only because it was colder than usual, but because of the ice storms and the snows. It looked like the woods had been chopped down, there was so many trees broke by the ice. Sleet is hardest on pine trees, because so much ice gathers on their needles. I doubt if there was a pine tree standing whole on the mountain. And when it snowed it was a heavy wet snow that broke down more trees and made barns and sheds and even houses cave in. The church house at Poplar Springs fell down.

Because Papa had the cough, my sister Lou and me did the heavy work outside. We got in eggs and fed the stock and carried in wood and water from the spring. I hated how everybody expected me to do the outside work. If there was a heavy job it just fell naturally to me, and sometimes Lou, like it always had. The weather was bad so long we nearly run out of firewood. I took the axe into the woods and chopped up a blow-down tree. And then I hitched up
the horse Sally to the sled and drug in a load. My hands liked to froze it was so wet and cold.

“Julie can work like a man,” Mama said when I brought the load of wood into the front room.

“Somebody’s got to work like a man,” I said and dropped the logs on the edge of the hearth. My hands got rough from the cold and the hard work. I rubbed grease on them at night to soften the calluses and moisten the dry skin. I would have liked to keep my hands soft the way Rosie did hers.

DURING THE TERRIBLE winter when Papa took the chest consumption, we didn’t hardly get off the mountain, and we almost run out of cornmeal. If Papa did the least little thing he would start coughing and get so weak he couldn’t hardly set up. He had always been such a strong man before that it embarrassed him to be so helpless. Mama liked to say, “Now you can do without a lot of things, but a family can’t do without cornmeal. If you run out of meal you don’t have any bread and you don’t have any mush. And you don’t have anything to fry fish in, or squirrels. When the meat runs out, and the taters runs out, the only thing that will keep you going is the cornbread. You can live a long time on bread and collard greens, if you have collard greens. And you can live a long time on bread alone if you have to, in spite of what the Bible says.”

We got down to the last peck of cornmeal in the bin, and then to the last gallon. Mama started skimping on the size of the corn pone she baked every morning.

“Masenier won’t get better if he don’t have plenty to eat,” Mama said. “And your papa won’t either.”

“Maybe we’ll freeze to death before we starve,” I said.

“Don’t talk that way,” Mama said. “You take some corn down to the mill.”

There was still ice on the trees and snow on the ground. But I seen what I was going to have to do. I resented it, but I seen what had to be done. The road was too slick and steep for either the wagon or the sled. I couldn’t carry enough corn on my back down the mountain and back up. Even if my sister Lou went with me we couldn’t carry enough between us. Lou was the toughest of my sisters. She was almost as strong as me. I saw that the only way to take a bushel of corn to mill was to sling it over the horse’s back and lead her down the mountain. It would take both me and Lou to lead Sally.

“Lou, you’re going to have to help me,” I said.

“Why ain’t I surprised?” Lou said.

Took us all day to get down the mountain, wait for the turn of corn to be ground, while the men eyed us and told jokes, and then lead Sally back up the trail. We got home a little after dark and the sacks was damp. But we had enough fresh meal to last a few weeks, until the weather opened up and Papa was well enough to drive the wagon down the mountain.

BUT EVEN WITH plenty of cornbread and milk to eat, Masenier didn’t get any better. He kept falling off no matter how much he eat. And then he started to get a fever and the night sweats. He had terrible dreams that would make him holler out in the night. He yelled one time, “There is snakes dancing!” and when we woke him up he said there was a pit where snakes was swaying to music. He looked scared out of hisself. He was so scared by his dream he dreaded to go back to sleep. One of us had to set up with him after he drunk his tea with paregoric. There was some long nights that winter on into February and early March.

But it was after the weather broke, after it looked like things was opening up and Papa’s cough was a little better, that Masenier
took the terrible fever. One morning Mama felt him and he was hot as a coal and all day he just got hotter. By evening he was talking out of his head.

“Mama, why don’t you have Gabriel come blow his horn?” he said. We knowed he was a little beside hisself. Mama had read him a story from the Bible the night before. After it got dark he just growed hotter. When a person has a bad fever they just seem to glow. Masenier was so lit up with the heat he looked swelled enough to bust.