The Hinterlands (22 page)

Ain't good for a man to be that thrilled, much less a boy. I made sure my feet touched the ground as I walked to the First Baptist Church. I reminded myself I still had all the work before me, though I knowed how it was to be done. I had a girl to meet and win, but I thought I knowed how that was to be done too.

The church was already crowded. It was lit by lanterns hung from the ceiling and from the posts, and the room smelled of Christmas greens and wool. Everybody seemed to be wearing
their best winter clothes, and they was a scent of cedar chests over everything. I squeezed my way to one of the benches in the back and looked around for Miss MacPherson. I felt so good I knowed something bad was bound to happen.

Things got under way with the preacher praying a long prayer for peace in the world and the defeat of the enemies of Zion. He was a town preacher and you could tell he was educated, but he prayed just as long as the preachers in the country. I looked around but I didn't see the girl nowhere. My eyes was still adjusting to the lantern light and I couldn't see all the rows in front of me. I thought, maybe she's sick, or maybe she's not in the pageant after all. I thought maybe she had knowed somebody was coming to see her and had stayed away.

Then after the prayer somebody pulled this sheet back that was strung across the front of the meetinghouse on a wire and there was the scene of the shepherds sitting under a candle backed by a tinfoil star. And off to the side, where you could just barely see them, was this row of girls and women. Soon as the curtain was opened, they commenced to sing and I seen she was one of them. The shepherds set there looking at the star and the chorus sung this song about Bethlehem. It was so beautiful I found my eyes wet.

After the women sung a man hid by the sheets started reading from the Bible about the Christmas story. That's the way it went all through the program. The shepherds, and then the Wise Men, said a few words, pointing to the star. They was an angel carrying a candle that spoke out of the dark announcing the nativity. And the row of women and girls sung one Christmas carol after another.

When it was all over, the preacher prayed again. They pulled the sheets further back on the right, and they was a Christmas tree all covered with candles. Under the tree was bags of candy and nuts like fruit fell from the tree. They give some of those bags to
everybody. The bag I got had an orange and several kinds of nuts and a bundle of peppermint sticks tied in a red ribbon.

When it was all done and everybody stood up to go, I knowed it was time for me to act. Excitement shot through me so hard it hurt the tips of my fingers. I stood in the corner out of the way of the people leaving so I could see Miss MacPherson. She was talking with the other ladies of the chorus, and they seemed to be exchanging little gifts they brought out of their purses. I worked my way to the front of the meetinghouse. The wall behind the altar was covered with pine boughs to look like the hills of Judea, and resin scented the air. And many of the ladies must have been wearing perfume too, and what with oranges and peppermint the whole placed seemed filled with incense.

“Miss MacPherson,” I said. I felt my face go hot. But I was thrilled and surprised at myself to be so bold. She turned her brown eyes to me.

“Miss MacPherson, you have the most beautiful voice,” I said.

“Thank you, sir,” she said.

“I am Solomon Richards, a cousin of your cousins in Cedar Mountain,” I said.

“I suppose that makes us kin,” she said. She had a school teacher's voice, proper, as though trained in elocution.

I had learned just enough about buckwheat notes and song-books to talk a few minutes about singing. I knowed young ladies wasn't supposed to talk to strangers. Her mother and Professor MacPherson would be somewhere in the room looking at me. I was a little younger than her, and that seemed in my favor.

“I love singing, but I'm a builder by trade,” I said.

“What do you build?” she said.

“I build roads. I'm going to build a road up the mountain through Douthat's Gap.”

She looked at me closely, for the first time, as though to see what kind of fool or braggart she might be talking to. “I've heard nobody can build a road through that gap,” she said.

“But I know it can be done,” I said.

“It's always a pleasure to talk to a modest man,” she said, and laughed. I thought I had spoiled everything. She wrapped a cloak about her shoulders and packed the little presents she had been give in her purse. I seen two people that must be the professor and her mother standing at the door. All the space of that empty church was threatening to draw the breath out of me. She was as tall as I was, taller with the blue hat on. And she was four years older, I found out later.

“Miss MacPherson,” I said, gathering all my melting courage. “I would like to hear you sing.”

“You can hear me sing at church,” she said.

“I live over near Cedar Mountain,” I said. I seen I had lost. I had nothing more to lose. “I would like permission to call on you,” I said, trying to talk the way people in town talked.

She was sliding on her black leather gloves. They was shiny and very thin. I knowed she had a right to dismiss me because I was a stranger to her family.

“Mary, we must go,” her father called. The professor walked toward us. He offered his arm to his daughter and looked hard at me. The custodian was blowing out the lanterns one by one.

“Papa, this is Mr. Richards,” Mary said.

“Howdy do,” I said.

“Hello,” the professor said.

“Mr. Richards is interested in sacred music, and I have invited him back to the house for sherry,” she said. “He is also interested in building a road up to Cedar Mountain.”

I went to church in town that winter, and called on Miss MacPherson whenever she permitted me to. I sung hymns and songs around the spinet in their parlor. I talked to Professor MacPherson about the buildings of the ancient Egyptians, and about cathedrals. Back then I remembered everything I read, and at home I spent every free moment reading by the fire or by the lamp, when I wasn't making something. And I talked with Mrs. MacPherson about picking blackberries and huckleberries, and about putting up preserves and methods of drying fruit and pickling sauerkraut. In those days we dried both peaches and apples every summer.

You might wonder why somebody pretty as Miss MacPherson would spark a boy like me from out in the country. I wondered myself sometimes. But I wasn't a bad-looking feller myself back then, and I tried to learn everything I could. I was younger than her, and I knowed she'd had gentleman callers before. But she was not the kind of girl to string boys along. She could flirt with the best of them when she felt like it. But she was too serious for a lot of boys. And she was already past the age when most girls got married back then. You could see why she would scare a lot of boys, with her serious brown eyes and her proper speech.

I was determined, and I was lucky. I proposed to her between Christmas and Easter. I didn't even have any hope she would accept me when I asked the first time.

“I'm honored by your proposal,” she said. “But I must ask you to reconsider.”

“To reconsider?”

“To wait until you know your own mind.”

“I know my own mind,” I said. “I've never been more sure of my own mind.”

She asked me to wait a month while I reconsidered. “At nineteen a man may not know his mind,” she said.

“I know my heart,” I said. “Am I supposed to be an old man to know my heart?”

She agreed to discuss the proposal again in a month. All during that spring the MacPhersons were polite to me. My second cousin John begun courting their daughter Elizabeth, but he was two years older than me and already had his own farm out at Upward. Finally in April, Mary brought up the subject again.

“Papa says we should not marry until you have established yourself in some line of business,” she said.

“And what do you say?”

“That we should wait until you have established yourself. Marriage might distract and hinder you.”

“Then you agree to marry me?”

“When it is the proper time.”

I knowed I had won. Your Grandma was ever a woman to hold to her word.

I figured I couldn't get no backers to build a toll road from the foot of the mountain to Douthat's Gap till I proved I could survey a route. And I couldn't afford to build the road until I had backers to pay for the construction and right of way. With me doing a lot of the work, it wouldn't be more than three or four thousand dollars. But I didn't have but fifty dollars to my name. Cash money was hard to lay a hand on that year, after the 1812 war. They wasn't hardly any money around.

So everything depended on surveying a route up the mountain. I asked everybody I knowed if they would put up a few dollars, if I surveyed a route. Nobody believed I could do it. “Why you'll fall off a cliff at the jump-off,” Uncle Cephas said.

“Them blockaders of Dark Corner will shoot you if you don't get rattlesnake bit,” Aunt Arrie said.

But I seen their skepticism was to my advantage. “You sign here a pledge for ten dollars if I survey the route,” I said. “Then if I don't succeed, you won't have to pay nothing.”

I went around with a notebook where I signed up shareholders. “You all want a road out of here, don't you?” I said. “Where you can haul off hams and honey to Augusta.” They signed, thinking they would never have to pay a cent, I guess. Mary signed up fifty dollars she'd saved from teaching school. And her papa signed up for a twenty-dollar share. The truth was, if a toll road was opened into the mountains, it would pay them back a hundredfold every year. But at that time none of them expected to pay the money or see any profit, unless it was Mary herself.

I'd always been a worker and a builder, but I'd never sold anything before. I was the kind of feller that would prefer to give away anything rather than to sell it. I tended to apologize rather than to sell. But I found I could do it. I had to get the signatures to raise the money, and without the money they would be no road. And without the road they would be no marriage. And besides that, I wanted to build the road as much as I wanted to marry her. I went around and talked to people in their fields, and had dinners in their houses all up and down the branch valleys and down to the river. I went to the mill and talked to people, and I went to the little store at the crossroads and talked to people. I found that patience was my greatest tool. You talk to people long enough, and mostly they will sign up.

When I got all the pledges I was ready. It was past midsummer and the corn was laid by. I had kept my razorback sow Sue lean that summer, penned up so she couldn't breed or forage on acorns and other mast. One Sunday, I put a rope on her hind foot and led
her down to Gap Creek and across to Pumpkintown to Uncle Rufus's and Aunt Willa's house at the foot of the mountains. It was hot weather, and took us all day to make the trip.

“You can't foller a hog from here to Cedar Mountain,” Aunt Willa said, raking the hot grits onto my plate. “They's no way through the thickets and across the hollers.”

“That's why I'm doing it,” I said. “So's I can make a way.”

“Solomon's got an idea,” Uncle Rufus said. “He reminds me of old Uncle Solomon, who always had an idea.”

The grits was almost too hot to eat. I stirred butter into the steaming heap.

“I hear he's got him a girl too,” Uncle Rufus said. “Solomon's marrying into quality.”

“You're a big stout feller,” Aunt Willa said to me. “But you're not going to tear down no mountain with your bare hands to put a road through. Mountains won't step aside to please you.”

“I always thought the Blue Ridge could be split with a road,” Uncle Rufus said. “But not through Douthat's Gap. You've got Caesar's Head to climb over.”

I eat the hot butter and grits fast as I could. It was going to be a long hot day and I couldn't stand on ceremony. I could feel the heat already in the air, like a haint, though the sun hadn't come up over the ridge yet.

“The Indians had a trail,” Uncle Rufus went on. “From right here near Pumpkintown all the way to Toxaway and the Tuckasegee.”

“They didn't have wheeled vehicles,” I said, and washed some of the grits down with Aunt Willa's coffee. Aunt Willa and Uncle Rufus was awful good to me. I would walk down and stay with them a week at a time when I was a boy. They didn't have no
children, and Uncle Rufus liked to coon hunt. We'd take his dogs on a moonlit night and run all over the mountains of upper South Carolina. Hunting in the moonlight is another world. I wish I had took you more, son, like I did your Daddy, back when I was still able to tramp all night through brush.

“You stay on another day and we'll go to the singing,” Aunt Willa said.

“Much obliged,” I said, and stood up. “But I got to bust the ridge by sundown. They'll expect me home by dark.”

“Your hog ain't fed,” Uncle Rufus said.

“I don't want her fed. That way she'll hurry home faster.”

I had drove Sue all the way down Saluda Gap and through the Winding Stairs the day before without feeding her. I wanted her good and hungry. We had took the long way by North Fork.

“You'll get a mess of chiggers up there,” Aunt Willa said. “And spiders in your face and eyes.”

“I wouldn't go in them mountains without a gun,” Uncle Rufus said. “Too many painters. And somebody said they seen Tracker Thomas up there.”

“Everybody claims they've seen Tracker Thomas,” I said. “He's been dead probably twenty years.”

“They's haints up in the hollers,” Aunt Willa said. “People has heard all kinds of Indian spooks and wails coming from deep hollers under Caesar's Head.”

“That's just blockaders talking to scare people,” I said. “They don't want no road for the law to come in and find them.”