Gap Creek (40 page)

“You’re not going to give it to the heirs?” I said.

“And them willing to put the law on us?” Hank said.

I seen Hank was right. The Lord had kept the twenty dollars for us till the last minute, when we needed it most. It was a sign. We was free and we had something to start over with.

“It’s a little pay for all the work on this place,” I said. I wrapped the coin in the wax paper and put it in my pocket. The little packet
felt sweet as if it was sugar, and it felt warm in the cold morning air. I put all my clothes and the clean frying pan and three jars of jelly in a pillowcase. I placed the flower vase in my other coat pocket. There wasn’t room for anything else, and there wasn’t nothing else we had to take. I didn’t have but one pair of shoes, and they was near wore out. I tied a scarf around my head.

Hank fed the horse some corn and fodder and turned it out into the pasture. It was about five o’clock in the morning and completely dark. The stars was out so bright they seemed just over the treetops. It was so cold my teeth chattered and wouldn’t stop. A shooting star spit across the sky throwing off sparks. In the starlight the creek glittered and I could see skirts of ice around the rocks in the stream. There wasn’t a light in all the valley, and the mountains loomed like shadowy animals on both sides of the road.

“You’ll warm up when we start climbing,” Hank said. He had not brought a lantern, so we had to find our way along the road in the starlight. The ruts of the road was froze like wood, and puddles had set under panes of ice. When I stepped on a puddle it crackled like brittle candy.

I knowed I could warm up if I breathed deep and kept breathing deep. The cold bit my nose and stung my face. My breath smoked in the air. Grass and brush along the road was covered with hoarfrost. After about a mile we started climbing. The road wound along the creekbank and then turned and started up the mountain. I slung the pillowcase over my shoulder and leaned into the climb. When you have to climb there’s nothing to do but pitch into it. The only way to climb is slow and steady, to not wear yourself out at the beginning.

We had to step over a branch that run across the road and we stumbled on rocks that stuck up in the ruts. It was still dark, but you could see a little where starlight come through the trees. Something squalled on the mountainside. “What was that?” I said.

“Just a wildcat,” Hank said.

“Or maybe a painter?” I said.

“Just a little pussycat,” Hank said. “You want me to call it up?”

“Don’t you dare,” I said and shivered. I remembered hearing the wildcat on the night Masenier died. The climb was warming me up a little, but I didn’t feel right. Maybe I had eat my grits and biscuits too fast. Or maybe we had been walking too fast. I slowed down a little.

“Are you tired already?” Hank said.

“I just need to catch my breath,” I said.

“We have a long way to go,” Hank said.

As the road zigzagged up the mountain, we worked our way from one switchback to another. Every step was lifting us out of the valley. Every step was taking me away from the cove of Gap Creek where little Delia was buried. Every step I took in the dark was raising me back toward the mountain and the rest of my life. The road ahead appeared to go up and up forever into the sky.

“How much further is it?” I said.

“We’re only getting started,” Hank said.

There was a pain in my belly, like the pain I used to feel in my side when I walked to the store as a girl with Mama. It was an uneasy place that got shook as we walked on the rough road. I slowed down more to keep from jarring my belly. I switched the pillowcase from my right shoulder to my left shoulder. My face was stiff with cold and my hands was stiff with cold. My left hand was just about numb from gripping the pillowcase.

“Do you need to rest?” Hank said.

“I’m all right,” I said. I felt for the coin in my pocket. Its weight give me more strength and more hope. But the pain in my belly got worse. I swallowed hard and walked on. I imagined I was drawing energy from the tips of my fingers to walk on the ruts, and that I was drawing strength from my ears and from my knees. I was going to
burn up every ounce of fat in my body to climb the mountain. I still had strength I’d never used, and I was going to use it. I was going to leave Gap Creek without looking back.

It was still dark as I followed Hank past a waterfall, and past a place the branch gurgled along the road. Further on the woods was open and you could see down the valley where we had come from. There was a light in a house miles below. My belly felt like it was twisting sideways. But I swallowed deep and kept going.

We must have walked for another hour in the dark. I was getting warmer and the pain in my belly was hot. Suddenly sour water belched up into my throat and the back of my mouth. I turned my head and the sour taste flooded over my tongue. I didn’t want to be sick when we had so far to go in the cold. I stood still and swallowed hard. It was what I had learned to do to keep from being sick. If I stood still enough my stomach would settle. I had to slow time down by slowing myself.

“Are you going to throw up?” Hank said.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “It’ll pass.” As I waited in the road and got hold of myself the sourness in my throat went away.

When the pain was gone and my belly was calm again I took a step and Hank was beside me. It was getting to be first light so I could see him. “You hadn’t told me,” he said.

“I meant to,” I said. I was going to tell Hank the day before, when the preacher and the lawyer had suddenly come to the house. But in the excitement of having to leave I had forgot.

“You’ll have to have a cold drink when we come to a spring,” Hank said.

I stood very still as another cramp hit me in the belly. But this time it passed quicker. Hank took my hand. He was strong and steady as we started walking again.

“We’ll take our time,” Hank said. “It’s mostly down from here.”

I looked around and seen the sun was just coming up over the
mountains. We had reached the gap at the state line and was already in North Carolina. The valley was dark below us, but the sky was lit up and the east looked like it was on fire.

“Can you walk?” Hank said.

“Of course I can walk,” I said. I felt as weak as a newborn colt but my strength was coming back as my stomach settled. I steadied myself for a moment before picking up the pillowcase. The red sun slipping over the ridge made me squint a little. My belly felt firm and calm.

We started walking again.

GAP CREEK

A Note from the Author

Questions for Discussion

A Note from the Author

When I began writing
Gap Creek
I knew I wanted to tell a story loosely based on the first year of marriage of my maternal grandparents. They had gotten married about a hundred years before on Mount Olivet and moved down to Gap Creek in South Carolina. I knew them as elderly people when I was very young. Grandma, who kept me during the day while my mother worked in the cotton mill, died when I was three. I wanted to tell a story about a woman like her, who did heavy men’s work on the farm, and spent her life working for others, for her sisters and her husband, her children and grandchildren, the sick and needy of the community.

I tell my students that you do not write living fiction by attempting to transcribe actual events onto the page. You create a sense of real characters and a real story by putting down one vivid detail, one exact phrase, at a time. The fiction is imagined, but if it is done well, it seems absolutely true, as real as the world around us.

The hardest work I did on
Gap Creek
was trying to get the voice right. Julie, who tells her own story, is not well educated and is not much of a talker. In fact, she feels inarticulate. She feels she expresses
herself best with her hands, with her work. The trick was to create a plain voice, with simple, direct sentences, that could express the complex emotions and intimacy of marriage, even poetic experience. When I finally heard that voice in my mind I was able to write the novel.

Questions for Discussion

1. Julie is only in her teens when the novel opens, yet she has already learned to face life’s hardships with a resiliency that is remarkable in one so young. We think of adolescence as a time of rebellion, yet Julie offers very little resistance to anything Mama and Papa tell her to do. Why do you think she is so accepting of her role? Sometimes Julie inwardly simmers at what she is asked to do, “but I didn’t have any choice,” she says. Is that true? What choices does she have?

2. Even though two of her sisters are older than she is, Julie is the one everyone counts on. “Everything that was hard fell to me, and everything that nobody else wanted to do fell to me.” Why? What is the author saying about Julie? About those who depend on her? About the time and place in which she grows up? “Because you’re the strongest one in the family. And because everyone has to do what they can,” is her mama’s explanation. What do you think of that philosophy? In what ways do people live up or down to what is expected of them?

3. When Julie helps her father carry her dying brother down the mountain, “it was the prettiest night you ever saw … It was the first time I
ever noticed how the way the world looks don’t have a thing to do with what’s going on with people.” Talk about both the beauty and the impersonality of nature in the novel. What is the author saying about the cycle of human life? Where does religion fit into Julie’s world view?

4. Before Julie meets Hank she thinks about falling in love with “a strong man that knowed what he wanted and could teach you.” Contrast this image with what she finds in Hank. “I don’t know why his look stung me so deep at that instant. We don’t ever know why we fall in love with one person as opposed to another,” she says. Is this true? Is it something a young girl might think, but that a mature woman might have a different perspective on? Talk about the importance of chemistry in a love relationship. Is it more or less important to you than shared interests and values? Why? What do you think of love at first sight?

5. Julie imagined her marriage would be something wonderful, but finds it different from what she expected. Her mama’s view of marriage was simple: “Like everything else it is work, hard work.” Do you think marriage is hard work? Contrast the way Julie responds to their hard life with the way that Hank responds. How do you think the different outlooks of Mama and Ma Richards have contributed to their offspring’s readiness for the responsibilities of marriage?

6. Throughout the novel, we are given very detailed descriptions of the difficult and often unpleasant chores that Julie performs—from butchering a hog to laying out Mr. Pendergast’s body after he dies from the fire. Does this help you to understand just how hard life was in Appalachia at the turn of the last century? Do you find Julie’s capacity to endure despite unrelenting sorrows inspirational? Depressing?

7. “It was like we formed a special kinship in the kitchen,” Julie says after sharing some unexpected pleasant moments with her mother-in-law.
She experiences similar intimacy in her kitchen cooking a meal with her sister Lou. Discuss the special place that the kitchen can hold in women’s lives. Julie experiences a similar bonding experience with two new women friends from church who bring her homemade jelly and clothes for the baby she is expecting. Why do you think the author has Julie find sustenance from women during the harsh winter and so little emotional support from her husband?

8. When Hank realizes Julie has been conned out of money by a lawyer, Hank smacks her across the face and cruelly insults her. Discuss Julie’s reaction to his temper. When they make up in bed, Julie thinks “In the dark what mattered was we was together and naked … We would always find a way to live, a way to get back, as long as we could love.” Do you share Julie’s faith in their love? Why?

9. When Gap Creek rises and floods their house, something snaps in Hank who, shotgun in hand, threatens to shoot himself, and maybe Julie, too. “I ruint your life … I ought to kill us both,” he shouts. As the disasters continue to pile up that bitter winter, Hank slides into a deep depression broken by fits of rage. Why do you think Julie continues to stick by him? What do you think of Hank?

10. All alone in the house with the nearest neighbor a mile and a half off, Julie goes into premature labor with no one to help her. She finds a way to deal with the agonizing pain and fear by simply looking at it as hard work. Discuss the concept of childbirth as the work women were “meant to do.” Do you think this view of her role exalts or diminishes a woman?

11. When Hank arrives home to discover that Julie has given birth, there is a dramatic change in him. He lovingly tends to his sick wife and baby, does all the chores, and, as Julie observes, “It was like Hank had got a lot older.” Why do you think he is now ready to take care of
his family? Do you think he is able to become strong because, for once in their marriage, Julie is in a weakened state? Or do you think the strength, faith, and gentle nurturing of his young bride have finally rubbed off on him? Is the change in Hank believable?