Scott!
History has a way of sneaking up on us. It is like that old saying when you are looking for something you cannot see right in front of you, someone will say "If it were a Snake it would have bit you." To which I always say: "If it were a snake I would have seen it."
We came down from the mountain we past the sign that told about the trail, the one we read before we took off, with the pictures of the native plants, the Grass of Parnassus. I joked with them about it, how there should be a variety named Jack Onassis' Grass of Parnassus.
And on the other side of the world, he was on the set, giving the last moments of himself on celluloid. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. Who knew?
We were back down the parkway, back to Don Wroe's, Chuck switching gears into the summation of thousands of years of Italian cooking, my partner arrived with the next mornings breakfast, and I introduced them congregation to corn liquor. Mixed it with the spicy Blenheim Gingerale, like they did in the old times. We put a decent dent in the jar. The fire was relit, and the sky went dark once more.
And we were conversant, of Michael Cunningham and his works, namely The Hours, which I have smiled and thought of as I sit here pecking away. Of Sue Miller, who maybe at this minute packing her mothers china service. Of Richard C. Davids, who wrote a book thirty years ago called "The Man Who Moved A Mountain". I pulled it off the shelve and found the picture taken on Buffalo Mountain around 1900, the same rock we had seen that very day. Wulf took it in hand and began to absorb the story.
The story. Could I write a Cliff Notes version?
Here we were sitting in the lap of luxury on a mountain side that in my fathers time would be waste land. The land was what it was all about. The Scots-Irish and Germans who settled here, married the Indians and tried to have a sweet life, a desperate life is what they got. Trying to get the barren soil to feed them, eating every part of every animal they killed. It was a hard life. It was the kind of world in which my great, great, great, great grandfather, upon becoming a father for the 17th time at the age of 74 named his son Burden. He was luck, he got a name. Some were called Babe their whole life and it was not a term of endearment, it was a sign that the parents who had the energy to have sex did not have the will to come up with another name.
So it was with Babe Childress. He survived to adulthood and took a wife whose name was Lum. Their son Bob Childress was the man who moved the mountain. He came of age in that very rough time about 1912 when the world came crashing in on them.
It started on a weekday in Hillsville. In court, a member of the Allan family was charged with something, and his kinfolks showed up with guns, and shot the place up, killed several people, including the judge and clerk. The media of the day went nuts and forces nationwide arrived on the seen to hunt these animals down. And what the media had to say about us.....I guess it was true, but it was like we were too stoopid to even know we were being talked about.
The caught the Allans, put them all in the electric chair in Richmond and later put their corpses on display. But the attention they brung to this part of the mountans, changed it forever.
The churches came in and built mission schools. My Great Aent Ollie, the only girl and youngest surviving child in her family benefited from it. She got more than just the rudimentary education my granddaddy and Bob Childress got. Bob Childress went on to become a Presbyterian minister and built stone churches all over the area, drawing the people away from their home grown Primitive Baptist institutions. Ollie went to nursing school in Richmond, came home and worked for the mission school, fell in love with a man from Louisiana named Walter Pettis. He came up to the house and sat on the porch and asked my great grandmother for her hand and she said no. He was "a foreigner" and she sent him away.
There is no one now who could say why Ollie did not run away. My grandmother told me how it payed out: the doctors said it was Tuberculosis. She always thought it was a broken heart. There was that picture we were all made to look at: Aent Ollie's last birthday, 1929. She standing there on the porch with her nieces an nephews with her hands in her jacket pockets, trying to smile.
Her brothers built a sleeping porch on to the house. She slept there, in winter, under piles of blankets and quilts, in the belief the cold air would do her good, sleeping there alone without Walter Pettis. In the spring on 1930 she died and was buried in the family plot, up on the hill.
In 1946 my grandfather received a letter from Walter Pettis that sits now in front of me on my desk. He speaks of trying to learn how to write verse and about after Ollie, which he spent alone. He wrote:
When years draw nigh and slow us down,
And youth hath flown away;
When color's faded from our crown,
And wrinkles there to stay;
When friends of yore have gone ahead,
And crossed that chilly stream;
When eyes are dimmed and darkness comes,
And yet some light doth beam,
When steps do falter as we go,
And totter all the way;
When someone says we are old fools,
And says it every day;
Then we have seem a heap o' life,
And know it very well;
Then we do know who is the fool,
And know that we can tell;
Then Wisdom's refind us to know,
And wisdom's come to stay;
Then youth doth seem the chaff of Life,
And it hath gone away;
Then natures kind to us we know,
And does not hold us down;
The husks of life have blown away,
And we wear Wisdom's Crown.
But I digress, too eager to see how history snuck up on those who came before me.
Chuck put together a masterpiece, it was heavenly, because he cooked the hell out of it. We blessed his hands and ate. There was I, in the same place, with a different family, the one I chose, the one I was free to choose by time and circumstance. And that night, Wulf talked more than he had the whole time. That night, we listened to Salamander Crossing, that night I would like to believe in my heart of hearts, the cowboys of heaven danced and were happy for a little while. As sometimes, you do need to reach the destination.
Topic: Shakesthegrounds Rumblings (Read 2598461 times)