The Hinterlands (2 page)

“What a pretty story to tell at dinner time,” Mama said. She always said that when Daddy finished the story.

“Ever after that they called Lloyd ‘The Polyphemus of the Yadkin Valley,'” Daddy said.

“Polly what?” your Grandpa said.

“Polyphemus is back yonder in the Bible,” Daddy said. “A school teacher said he was a giant with just one eye and liked to eat people.”

“Wonder if he ever got that one eye crossed?” your Grandpa said. And we all laughed, including me and little Henry.

I poured your Grandpa a second cup of tea when he had about finished his dinner. Him and my Daddy pulled back their chairs from the table to relax. Your Grandpa had not took off his red shirt and his face was flushed a little from the heat and from eating hot bread and greens.

“How long you been in the West?” my Daddy said.

“Been there twice,” Realus said. “Went first with some long hunters when I was just a boy. We stayed nigh two years gathering hides and fur and exploring all around the mountains.”

“I hear it's limestone country,” Daddy said.

“It's more than half mountains,” Realus said.

Me and Henry was listening. Some people have a genius that can't be explained. You take a thousand people and they'll be one of them that plays a fiddle best of all, and one that can survey land, and others that's mighty good shots and storytellers. Your Grandpa's talent was for charming people. It come natural to him.

“They's meadows in the West blue as the blue of the mountains,” he said.

“Are they blue as the sky?” Henry said.

“Not bright blue, but blue like the ridge yonder.” Your Grandpa sipped his tea and ignored me. But I could tell he knowed I was listening.

“And the game's plenty?” my Daddy said.

“I seen glades in the woods with so many deer grazing you had trouble picking out one to kill,” your Grandpa said. “And besides deer there's buffalo in the open country. I've seen valleys full of them. And they's turkeys in the woods like here. And bear all over the mountains. Now the mountains are not tall as they are here. But they go on and on like tater hills one after another, wooly with trees. That's why it takes so long to cross over into the Holsten. The little valleys are crazy and go off every which way. You can't travel long in the same direction till you hit another ridge.

“But the biggest thing I ever seen in the West, bigger than the bears, and the ugly old hog sturgeon in the river, and the buffaloes in the valleys to the west, was the pigeon swarms. Anybody that's been there will tell you the pigeons come over twice a year in flocks so long it takes days for them to pass. I've seen them break down a whole forest where they lit in the trees for the night. And they paint the ground white with their droppings. They'll eat anything that happens to be in their way.”

“How come they don't starve?” I heard myself saying.

“'Cause the land is covered with chestnuts and huckleberries and elderberries, and when they eat out one place, they just move on.”

Your Grandpa turned his chair and looked into the fire. “It's near planting time in the West,” he said.

“Can't plant corn till the oak leaves is big as a squirrel's ear,” my Daddy said.

Your Grandpa glanced at me but didn't say nothing for a minute. Finally he said, “It gets warm sooner over the mountains. The farther inland you go the earlier spring comes. Already it's budding out there, and the grass is green.”

“You got some land there already?” my Daddy said.

“I got a place picked out not too far from the river. It's got a spring runs right out from under a poplar tree. And a cove that's covered with pennyroyal along the creek. I've done built a cabin there, but come fall I mean to have a house grooved together. It's the prettiest ground you ever seen. And the soil along the creek is black as the bottom of a skillet.”

“And you ain't seen no Indians?” Mama said.

“I've seen Indians pass through in little bands,” your Grandpa said. “But most of the Indians has gone on toward Kentucky, and beyond that into Ohio territory. The Holsten was always a kind of in-between land, claimed partly by Cherokees and partly by others. That's why they fit so much over it.”

I went on about the business of cleaning up the table and scrubbing dishes in the tub. But I listened to every word your Grandpa said. He leaned back in his chair like he was at home, and him and my Daddy smoked their pipes.

“To go off into the West a man needs a good gun and ax,” my Daddy said.

“And a good heavy grubhoe and seeds,” your Grandpa said.

“Everything else he can make or raise,” my Daddy said.

“Except for a woman,” your Grandpa said. “He can't make or raise no woman. He's got to take her with him.”

I seen him glance at me quick and return to his smoking.

“I'd be afraid of painters and bears that far back in the wilderness,” Mama said. She always did think of the worst things.

“They's bears and painters aplenty,” your Grandpa said. “But a
man with a good dog and a good gun needn't have no fear. When I first went to the Holsten, I lived in a lean-to of brush and bark. It was plenty comfortable. But late in the winter the wolves found out my little place. I heard howling on the ridge at night, getting closer. You hear wolves in the wilderness any time, so I paid it no mind till one night I was sitting before the fire and looked out in the dark and seen the flash of a pair of eyes.

“I thought of painters, and I thought of deer eyes. But them eyes flashed and moved. And strain though I might looking away from the fire, I couldn't see nothing else. It was a dark night. They was just the firelight reflected from the buckeye trees. You know how high trees look with fire under them, like something steep as the sky falling away in pieces and spots.

“The eyes flashed again, and then again. And it come to me that these was wolves, black wolves, of the kind they have in the West. As my eyes adjusted I could see more of them, coming in close and backing away. ‘Yaaaah,' I hollered, and throwed a burning limb at them.

“You could hear them jump away in the undergrowth. But by and by I seen the eyes flash again. It was like the devil out there, multiplied by ten to twenty. I thought, was they like mad dogs, or just starving for game? It come to me they smelled the venison I had hung up beside the lean-to, on a limb too high for any varmint to reach.

“It come to me I could be at my end there in the wilderness by Shooting Branch and nobody would ever know the difference. I was alone in the world. First time I ever felt alone in the woods.

“I got my gun from back of the lean-to, all loaded and primed, and I tried to sight in on one of the devils. But it was so dark their black bodies slipped in and out of sight like fish in a deep pool. I
didn't have no powder and lead to waste. I was two hundred miles from any new supply.”

“So what did you do?” Henry said.

“I seen how hard it was going to be and how I was almost certain to miss in the dark,” your Grandpa said. “So I figured I'd aim at a spot of light falling on a bush, and when one moved in front of it, I'd fire. It took several minutes of waiting. Finally, a form passed in front of the spot and I squeezed the trigger. For a second you couldn't tell what happened because the sound ricocheted off the walls of the draw. But then I heard a snarling and tearing, and a terrible commotion in the dark. Them devils was eating their brother. I reloaded and set by the fire, hoping I wouldn't run out of wood. Finally, when I got down to my last stick, it was daylight. And they was nothing but some bones and a little fur out beside the bushes.”

“Why would a woman want to go off to such a place?” Mama said. She usually didn't interrupt my Daddy or a visitor. But if she had a feeling for something, she'd speak out, no matter who was there. I'd seen her argue with a preacher when he spoke against women.

“What for would a woman want to go off into the wilderness away from her kin?” Mama said. “A woman needs her friends and community. She don't want to raise her younguns so far out she can't see smoke from another chimney.”

“They'll be other folks in the West,” your Grandpa said. “Folks is going there every day, like you seen this morning.”

All the time I was finishing up the dishes, I was thinking how pretty it would be to live off in the promised land of the Holsten. The thing I liked best about living off in your own cabin was it was so romantic. You was there with your loved ones and your spring, and the dogwoods bloomed as you put in corn. When the white storms come in winter you stayed by the fire and sewed
quilts and taught your younguns their letters. And your man brought home a wild turkey or deer, and fur to make you a coat.

It seemed a pleasure to escape the jealousy, and feuding over boundary lines, and how property is divided up. We know so little of our connection, anyway, as people marry and move on and you don't never hear from them again. It's like in all our blood ties of cousins and aunts and uncles and ancestors and descendants we don't see but those near us. Why children, your children will have children I will never know, and their children's children will never have heard of me. No use to deny it. Looking backwards I don't know more than my Grandmammy and Granddaddy on either side, and all the rest is just a name here, a fact there, a rumor. All the people stretching back two or three generations to Pennsylvania and Wales, and back to Adam, are just lost in the fog and dust. We are isolated in the little clearing of now, and all the rest is tangled woods and thickets nobody much remembers. I always said it's how you enjoy that little opening in the wilderness that counts. That's all you have a chance to do. That's why I'm telling you this story.

Children, I'm sounding like an orator in my old age.

But it was clear Mama seen what was going on. She could read me like a schoolhouse slate. The truth is, I don't think Mama wanted me to ever get married. I was already eighteen, which was old for a girl in those days. You reached twenty and you had a good chance of being an old maid. Maybe it was because she had had so much trouble having her own children out in Mountain Creek that she feared for me. Or maybe it was her own grief of being brought down here from Virginny away from her kin that made her hold to me. Every time the subject come up Mama sulked and got silent. When Mama wouldn't talk to me, I felt the world had turned against me.

“What use has a woman got for the back-breaking burden of
clearing land and raising up a cabin back of beyond?” Mama said. “A woman that has to do the work of a house and work of the field and woods won't live to be gray. Rearing children alone will bring her down, much less the chopping and sawing, the snakes and painters.”

Mama had got riled more than she intended, I think. Your Grandpa looked at his pipe, and looked at my Daddy, and looked at the fire. He couldn't say no more about moving to the West and be polite. He was embarrassed to argue with his hostess. Your Grandpa was a big rough feller in them days, but he never could stand no impoliteness. He looked like he wanted to change the subject, but that would be impolite too. He glanced at me and looked back at the fire.

“Nothing ever turns out the way people expect,” my Daddy finally said. “Even if you plan for perfection you'll end up doing mostly what you never planned. The thing about new country is it gives a man another start.”

“And a woman another burden,” Mama said.

My Daddy looked into the fire for a few moments also. He didn't want words with Mama when she was riled up. The fire fluttered a little in the March wind coming down the chimney. “Time to heat up the iron,” he said. “Mr. Richards needs him an ax and a grubbing hoe, and a garden hoe, and a spade.”

“And I need to look for some seed,” your Grandpa said.

“We can let you have some beans,” my Daddy said. “But we ain't got hardly enough corn to last ourselves. You can try Wesleys' over in the cove. They might have corn to sell.”

Your Grandpa got up and took his hat from the peg by the door. “Thank you kindly, ma'am,” he said to Mama.

“You come back and see us,” Mama said.

“If it's not too much trouble,” your Grandpa said to my Daddy,
“I'd like the first letters of my name cut in all my tools, a double
R
. Realus Richards.”

“Re-alus,” my Daddy repeated to himself.

When the men was gone, I thought how strange a name that was. It was one I'd never heard before. While I worked, I said it over to myself. When I went out to throw scraps to the hog in the pen by the branch, I said it for the strange flavor it had on the tongue. It was good to get out of the house and in the sunshine. They was a light wind, warm and chilly by turns.

“Realus,” I said again, and the wind seemed to magnify the sound. The name seemed to make things realer.

The old sow—we called her Sally—had laid down in the corner of the pen where the sun reached. I could hear her grunting with satisfaction all the way down the trail. Ain't nothing more easy than a sow laying in the sun with her pigs suckling at every tit. It's like a sound coming out of the dirt. I could smell the new grass crushed by my steps, and the creesie greens growing down by the branch.

Then I heard a louder grunt from old Sally, and a squeal from one of the pigs like something had disturbed it. Sometimes pigs will fight over a tit and I didn't think anything about it, until another squeal come louder and they was a snort from the sow, like she was disturbed and trying to get up with the little pigs holding onto her.

The pen was about four feet high, made of chestnut poles. The pigs was squealing louder. At first I didn't see nothing, and then this man stands up with a pig under his arm. I didn't recognize him at first, 'cause he had this old cap sideways on his head.

“Hey you,” I said.