Part 4

I provided buckets and cups, as expected, and we started. The high ridge field where the berries rambled had its name from an Indian, Old Cloud, who, it was said, had lived there behind the cloud that always rested on the ridge before so many of the peaks had been stripped of their pine and poplar and balsam that had held the clouds entangled and the sky so close. After it had passed to the settlers it had taken forty years of ignorant and monotonous tillage to reduce the rich soil to a half-wild pasture enjoying the freedom of exhaustion.

I had been under roof for three days, and the spring air produced the usual inebriation. Several times I left Serena far behind, but she always caught up, and we reached the top of the ridge together. Here, panting, I dropped to a bed of cinquefoil, while Serena stood unheated and smiling.

“Did you ever run, Serena?” I asked.

“I always take the gait I can keep,” she said, her glance already roving the ground for berries. “The other side o’ that gully’s red with ’em. We’ve got ahead o’ Mossy Creek this time.”

I was looking at the world which the lifted horizon had given me. North by east the Great Smokies drew their lilac-blue veil over impenetrable wildernesses of laurel. I could see the round dome of Clingman, and turned quickly from the onslaught of a remembered day when my body was wrapped in the odor of its fir-trees and its heathery mosses cooled my feet. South lay the Nantahalas, source of clear waters. West--but what were names before that array of peaks like characters in creation’s alphabet, whose key was kept in another star? They rose in every form, curved, swaying, rounded, a loaf, a spear, shadowed and unshadowed, their splotches of green, gold, and hemlock-black flowing into blue, where distance balked the eyes and imagination stepped the crests alone. It seemed easier to follow than to stay behind with feet clinging to earth. Affinity lay with the sky.

Serena was steadily picking berries.

“But, Serena,” I called, “just see!”

“I come here once a year,” she said, standing up, “an’ I never take my look till I’ve filled my bucket.” And she was on her knees again.

Rebuke number two, I thought, and set to work. Avoiding Serena’s discovered province, I crossed to the next dip of the slope, and there the field was covered with morning-glories, still radiantly open. All hues were there, from the purple of night to snow without tint, and the clusters of berries under them seemed in sanctuary. I plucked them away, feeling like a ravager of shrines. A breeze flowed over the field, and every color quivered dazzlingly. It was plainly a protest. I gave up my robberies and passed to another part of the field, where rapine seemed legitimate. Here the rank grass of yesteryears was deeply rooted and matted, and I sank adventurously in the tripping tangles. The slope was steeper, too, and I slipped, slid, and stumbled from patch to patch before theft was well begun, losing half my captures in the struggle. It was tinglingly arduous, however, and I continued a happy game of profit and loss until I scrambled from a gully into whose depths I had followed my rolling bucket, and confronted Serena. She looked as if she had coolly swum the lake of color behind us; but her fresh apron was unstained, while mine was a splash of coral. I advised her to return. The picking was better above.

“I know it is,” she answered, “but them mornin’-glories keep me fluttery, lookin’ at me all the time. I got to fill my bucket _first_. I promised Len all he could eat in a pie, an’ it takes a big one fer ten of us. Granpap’s stayin’ at our house now. But we’d better move furder over, out o’ this soddy grass. They’s rattlers here.”

With her word we saw him. He was partly coiled not more than three feet from Serena’s undulating gingham. The black diamonds shining on his amber skin assured me of his variety--the kind that, as natives tell me, Indians will not kill because “he gives a man a chance.” Certainly he was giving us a chance. His eyes seemed half-shut, but not sleepy, as if he did not need his full power of vision to comprehend our insignificant world. His poised head was motionless. Only his tail quivered, not yet erected for his gentlemanly warning. He glistened with newness, and was evidently a youngish snake, with dreams of knighthood still unbattered. His parents had bequeathed him none of the hatred that belongs to a defeated race. Serena seemed as motionless as he. I took her hand, drawing her a few paces back, and we stood watching. Sir Rattle slowly uncoiled, quivered throughout his variegated length, and moved indifferently from us, disappearing in the clumps of grass.

“Well,” said a pale Serena, “I feel like I did after I was baptized. The preacher, he was old man Diller, put his hand on my shoulder an’ said, ‘Love the Lord, my sister’; but I was so full o’ lovin’ everything and everybody I couldn’t think about the Lord. Do you reckon snakes have brothers and sisters that they know about? Think o’ that feller throwin’ away sech a chance to git even!” She could not stop talking any more than I could begin. “Let’s get to the top o’ the field where it’s cooler. It’s got so hot I’m afeard a shower’s comin’.”

By the time we reached the top we knew that the shower was to be a heavy one. There was a cave over the ridge on the Mossy Creek side, where we could take shelter. But we would wait a little for what the heavens could show us. The doors of the sky were to be thrown open. There would be no reservation of magic. Earth knew it by the quick wind that pressed every grass-blade to the ground and made the strawberry-blossoms look like little white, whipped flags; and by the grove of tall, young poplars that bent like maidens, their interlaced branches resting, a silver roof, on their curved shoulders. The lightning rippled, and earth was a golden rose spreading her mountain petals. It was the signal for the assembling of the dragons. They came swelling from the west, pulling one great paw after another from behind the walls of distance and puffing black breath half across the sky. The lightning again, and this time earth was a golden butterfly under the paws of the dragons. Then the conflict began, the beasts mingled, and the sound of their bones massively breaking struck and shook the ground under our feet. A gray sea rose vertically on the horizon and marched upon us. We fled, blinded, to the cave, tearing off our aprons to protect our buckets.

Even here Serena did not pant or gasp.

“How dry it is!” she said, examining the berries. “They’re not hurt. My, you didn’t cap yourn!”

“But I’d never fill my bucket if I stopped to cap them.”

“You don’t stop. You leave the cap on the vine. It’s as quick done as not. Now it’ll take you longer to cap than it did to pick. O’ course you didn’t know. Some folks knows one thing and some another,” she added kindly. “Ain’t it a thick rain? But we got a good place. Some say this cave’s ha’nted, an’ won’t come anigh it. Uncle Sim Goforth died here, but he was a good man an’ wouldn’t harm nobody if he did come back.”

“How did he happen to die here?”

“They killed him. It was in time o’ the war way back. Folks are better now. They say they’re doin’ awful over the sea, but they’d never be so mean as they were to Uncle Sim. He hid here, an’ brought his wife an’ childern. But they found him.”

“Was he a Unionist or Confederate?”

“I never could make out ’tween ’em. The Unionists, they wanted to free the black people, but the Unionists here in the mountains didn’t favor ’em. So I never could git it clear. Anyway, Uncle Sim was a good man. I’ve heard granpap tell about him many a night. The men, when they found him, cut down a tree an’ hewed out some puncheons fer a coffin, an’ made Uncle Sim sit on it an’ play his fiddle. He could play the best that ever was, an’ they say he played up fine that night. They kept him playin’ till near daylight; then they shot him, an’ his wife an’ childern lookin’ right on. I used to cry, hearin’ granpap tell it, out in Madison, but it don’t make me feel bad now, ’cause I know folks are better than what they were them days.”

Such naïveté was possible in the period of our national innocence, before “the boys” began to drift back home with certain truths on their tongue.

“Looky! the rain’s stopped quicker’n it come. We can go right back, fer the ridge dreens off soon as the water strikes it. Ain’t it cool, an’ the air like gold!”

She tried to catch a handful of it to show me its quality. We went back, and in a minute, as she said, our buckets were full, though we lost a few seconds while I learned of Serena how to cap and pick at the same time. Then we started along the ridge to the gap where we had entered the field. Walking back, I lingered to pluck a giant white trillium that shone from the fringe of wood. No loss to the forest; there were thousands more lighting up the cove farther down. As I came out of the wood, the air over the field seemed visibly to precipitate some of its gold. A swarm--no, the word is too heavy for anything so delicately bodied--a band of butterflies, moving in a slow wave over the ridge, had at that moment broken into myriads of distinct flakes--a shattered blaze. Nearer, their gold became tinily specked, and showed flashes and fringes of pearl; the silver-bordered fritillaries, perhaps, or some kin of theirs. I started to call Serena, but paused softly, for she was gazing over the mountains, having her “look.” I was left to the butterflies. Were they as unconscious of their grubby origin as they seemed, holding no memory of a life bounded by a sassafras twig, or of the cove behind us where a violet leaf may have been both food and heaven?

The butterfly ought to be the symbol on every Christian’s flag. It is the perfect pietist. Its confidence in the Infinite is as patent as its wings. Serena, amid that airy fluttering, seemed, in her own shining way, the sovereign of the band. Deep as piety was her trust in the morrow. Food would come to her, raiment would be found.

The butterflies floated past, becoming a dim, coppery tremble in the shade of the valley. Serena was still gazing in the distance. At last I said that we must be going; Len was expecting his pie.

“These berries ain’t goin’ into a pie,” she answered. “They’re worth more than a pie’ll come to. They’re goin’ into jam.”

Was Serena taking forethought? No; I could trust her lighted face and wet eyes. She was still piously improvident.

III

Once more it was May, and early morning. I was out before breakfast, gathering sticks for my hearth-fire. There had been showers in the night, and an inch of new grass trembled over the ground. I tugged at a pile of brush made by my oldest apple-tree, which had fallen in a winter storm. The limbs, and even the million twigs, were all gray and green and slate-blue in their wrappings of moss, and in among them, like a burning heart, sat a cardinal.

“You ought to be singing from a tree-top,” said I.

“But I’m getting my breakfast. This is the _cafeteria_ of Wingland. Are you going to demolish it?”

“Indeed, no!” I answered, picking up some peripheral sticks and leaving his stronghold unshaken.

To thank me, he hopped to the top of the pile, and, right in my face, sang his most shamelessly seductive song. Serena put her head out of the kitchen window to listen. He paused, and deserted me for a tree-top. But sweet was air and earth. Delight summoned an antithesis. I thought of forgotten pains, some monitions of the night before. Suppose I were to die, and never again stand in that dip of the mountain when it was a brimming bowl of springtime? Perhaps there was no other planet where I might gather in my arms such beautiful gray and green and slate-blue fagots. I turned to go in, and met rebuke in the eyes of my Chicago guest.

“I wonder if you are going to tell me that your woman does not know how to pick up brush.”

My woman! If Serena heard that!

“And after last night! Did you take your medicine?”

Verily I had. She was unconvinced.

“The bottle seems full.”

“Oh, I took it from the cardinal’s throat,” said I, surrendering.

She laughed, for there was sweetness in her, and we went in to breakfast. I had prepared it before going out, leaving Serena on guard. She was with me, not so much for the help she gave, as to save the feelings of my guest.

“Do you have much of this soggy weather?” said Chicago, airily tolerant, as we took our seats.

“Why, I’ve never noticed.”

“We shore do,” said Serena, with gloom that was ludicrously alien to her face. “It’s li’ble to rain now fer two weeks steady.”

“But I had decided not to go home to-day,” cried the guest, almost resentfully declining the hot biscuit Serena urged upon her. “Two weeks! Do you mean two weeks?”

“I’ve known it to hang wet fer a month.”

“Why, Serena!”

“Showery like. You know it’s so, Mis’ Dolly.”

“Well, we’re going to have perfect weather now. Tender, bright, with maybe a bit of dew in the air. Stay, and I promise you a miracle among springs.” I held up a glass of strawberry jam. “The kind of a spring that produced this.” And I offered her the food of heaven.

“Thanks, but I’ve cut out sweets.”

I caught my breath, and looked at Serena, in whose eye sparkled a triumph that said plainly: “Now you see!”

My guest did not notice that I sat dumb, bewildered, bereft. She was talking.

“No, I think, my dear, that if you wish to memorialize a passing folk, you will find material more worthy of your pen in the twilight of the bourgeoisie. They have lived in the main line of evolution, and will leave their touch on the race. Faint it may be, but indelible. In art, in literature, perhaps in certain predilections of character and temperament, it will be possible to trace them. These mountain people will not have even a fossilized survival. They live in a _cul-de-sac_, a pocket of society, so to speak. Your mind has an epic cast, and will never fit into its limits.”

There was more; then Serena’s voice glided into the monologue.

“Mis’ Dolly, I don’t like to tell you, seein’ you were ailin’ last night, but Johnny Diller went by here this mornin’, an’ he said Mis’ Ludd’s little Marthy wasn’t expected to keep breath in her till sundown.”

“I must go,” said I, getting up.

“I don’t approve of it,” said my friend.

“I must. You don’t understand----”

“Please don’t tell me that again, my dear.”

“But you don’t!”

“Your hat’s on the porch,” said Serena.

“You can’t leave to-day, Marie, because I haven’t time to tell you good-by now,” I said, and hurried away.

Home again at ten in the evening, I found Serena sitting by a bright kitchen fire humming “Old Time Religion.”

“Is Miss Brooks asleep?” I asked.

“I reckon she is. She said she was goin’ to take a sleeper.”

“She’s gone?”

Serena’s affirming nod did not interrupt her tune.

“Please stop that humming, Serena, and tell me what you did the minute my back was turned.”

“Nothin’ at all. That was the matter, maybe.”

“You didn’t do _anything_ for her?”

“I fixed her a snack to eat on the train.”

“Oh, thank you! It was a nice one, wasn’t it?”

“I give her some pickled beets, an’ turnip-kraut, an’ ’tater salad made with that blackberry vinegar.”

I dizzily recalled a remark of Len’s. “That blackberry vinegar ’ud pickle a horseshoe.”

“Serena,” I began faintly.

She had crossed to a shelf and was looking fondly at a jar of strawberry jam.

My voice died away; I could not reproach her.

Sweets, my friend had called it. And, my God, it was May morning on a mountain-top!

IV

SAM

I

He was passing my cabin late at night, and unexpectedly found me sitting on the moonlit doorstep. I was not longing for conversation, but Sam’s voice, as mere sound, was no more interruptive than purling water or a cajoling minor wind. It mellowed its way over uncouth words in a manner that seemed to be its owner’s gentle amends for using anything in your presence so angular and knotty as the language of man.

“I thought,” he said, “maybe I could ketch that coon what uses over in Grape Vine Cove; but my dog Buck got onter a fox-trail, an’ coon wasn’t nothin’ to him after that. I knowed that fox ’ud take him to Katter Knob, so I let him go on by hissef an’ I shammucked along toward home.”

There was no hint in his easy air that he had broken my rule against hunting in springtime. Any Merlin would violate any rule occasionally, as a matter of self-respect; and of all the Merlins, Sam was the least capable of inferior misgiving. His whole mental interior was as bare of obeisance as an iceberg of things that grow.

“I could ’a’ chivvied that fox out if I had gone after him; but if a man don’t sleep he’s weak at the plough-handles. Yore work first, Mis’ Dolly.”

But a falling moon was marking 1 A. M.

“That fox-hide would ’a’ brought me four dollars, an’ Krettie keeps pesterin’ me fer a pair o’ shoes. My head might as well be under the forestick. But she’ll jest have to make out.”

This was clearly an impeachment, but I made no defense, and he passed to a topic with, presumably, no implications.

“Yer company comin’ to-morr’, I reckon?”

“Yes, Sam.”

“So ye’re enjoyin’ yersef to-night.”

I opposed another silence to his deduction.

“That makes me think now--’f I have to meet the train an’ haul ’em up, I kain’t plough to-morr’.”

“But, Sam, you don’t have to go till four o’clock.”

“Ay, but they’s a little work to do on my wagon ’fore I go down. I kain’t take any resk with friends o’ yorn.”

I could always get interested in the way that Sam made use of _yer_, _yore_, _yorn_, _you_, and _ye_. _Yorn_, with an inflection that enlarged the _n_, was an avowal of separateness as severing as the water that washed Pilate’s hands.

Having arranged for his morning sleep, he merged away, pausing on an edge of moonlight to say: “Ain’t the whipper-wills awhirlin’ to-night? Looks like they ain’t goin’ to sleep at all.”

“Whirling, Sam?”

“Ay, you know ever’ time they say whipper-will they whirl round on the limb. Whirl thersevs right round.”

“What a foolish habit!”

“Well, the whipper-will ain’t a much smart bird.”

He flowed into the shadows and left me to ponder my newly acquired bird-lore. It was the kind of information which Sam frequently distributed, and with no remonstrance from me. He was too sure and final; and withal too quieting to the intellect. One doesn’t demur to the south wind, or try to put it right.

“I reckon I ain’t a much smart bird,” I said, thinking many times I had stepped aside for the unstemmed passage of Sam’s incredibly liquid voice.

The next day brought my friend, Lucie Harvey, and her husband, whom I knew only through her raptures. They were happy additions to my tiny camp, and at the end of their three days’ visit romantically voted to make a bed in the barn and release my room, thus making an indefinite stay possible. We were verbally completing the plan when Sam appeared.

“I knocked off ploughin’.” he said, “to take yer trunks down.”

“Oh, we’re not going,” said Lucie.

“When I brought ye up, ye ’lowed ye’d be ready to go back this evenin’ an’ I’ve come fer ye.”

“Why, we’ll let you know when we want to go.”

“I’ve come out o’ the plough to take ye.”

“Sorry, my man,” said the bridegroom, “but it’s your mistake. We’ll let you know when we’re ready for you.”

“You goin’ to live in the barn?”

“There!” said Lucie, “he knew all about it!”

They turned away for the walk which Sam had momentarily delayed. I heard Lucie say, “How did he know?” and I might have followed to tell her that Sam always knew; but at that moment I was struck motionless by hearing Ned Harvey drop the word “Imbecile!”

Sam, very likely, did not know its meaning, but the tone as it floated back was unmistakable.

“I’m sorry you knocked off ploughing, Sam,” I said, my eyes slinking.

“Oh, I left Ben at it. Len said he could spare him.”

“That means Len is doing double work, so Ben can help you out.”

“He’p me out? They’s yore friends, not mine. I like Mis’ Harvey though. She’s mighty nice.”

“Mr. Harvey, too.”

He looked toward Harvey, who was wearing a hunting-jacket very handsomely.

“Well, as to that, he wears a fine huntin’-jacket, but I’ve seen folks wearin’ good clo’s that had to hunt up the nest-eggs to fry if company dropped by to dinner.”

A pensive shade came into his eyes as they continued to follow the vanishing figure of Harvey. “I always thought I’d like a huntin’-jacket,” he said; and as he walked away, something in his bearing told me that he was imaginarily clothed as his heart desired. There had been no resentment in his voice. Perhaps he had taken no notice of that terrible word. And gradually I forgot that it had been uttered.

II

A few days later Sam passed through my yard, where Ned Harvey was warmly engaged in persuading me not to have my crimson clover turned under, but to hog it off. He had carried some of my farm books to the barn, and the phrase “hog it off” had him in its power. Lucie’s eyes approved shiningly.

“And you know, Dolly,” she said, “after all, Ned is a realtor, not a farmer.”

“But, Mis’ Harvey,” said Sam, “we don’t fatten hogs round here in the spring; an’ clover makes soft meat--sorter like bear’s meat. An’ that makes me think now--hain’t ye heard about that bear runnin’ on Pitcher Mountain? Hit come down from Smoky.”

“You’ve bears here?” asked Ned, turning a captured ear.

“Oh, ay, they’s a few left. They come down from the bear-ground on Smoky oncet in a while. It’s only eleven miles straight through to Pitcher. If I can git Tom Bowles to plough fer me, I’m goin’ to have a look at this feller.”

He passed on, leaving Harvey intently gazing at nothing. His bride caught his arm.

“You are not going, Ned?”

“Not without your consent, Lucie. It’s an opportunity, of course. I have never shot a bear.”

His thoughts wandered. We could see that he was already back at home telling the boys about it.

“If only you would be very, _very_ careful, dear!”