Gap Creek Read online

  GAP CREEK

  ALSO BY ROBERT MORGAN

  Fiction

  The Blue Valleys

  The Mountains Won’t Remember Us

  The Hinterlands

  The Truest Pleasure

  Poetry

  Zirconia Poems

  Red Owl

  Land Diving

  Trunk and Thicket

  Groundwork

  Bronze Age

  At the Edge of the Orchard Country

  Sigodlin

  Green River: New and Selected Poems

  Nonfiction

  Good Measure: Essays, Interviews,

  and Notes on Poetry

  ROBERT MORGAN

  GAP CREEK

  a novel

  Published by

  ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL

  Post Office Box 2225

  Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

  a division of

  Workman Publishing

  708 Broadway

  New York, New York 10003

  ©1999 by Robert Morgan. All rights reserved.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  by Thomas Allen & Son Limited.

  Design by Anne Winslow.

  This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. No reference to any real person is intended or should be inferred.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Morgan, Robert, 1944–

  Gap Creek : a novel / Robert Morgan.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 1-56512-242-9

  I. Title.

  PS3563.087147G36 1999

  813'.54—dc21 99-34995

  CIP

  New ISBN 1-56512-296-8

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

  For my daughter Laurel

  I would like to thank Shannon Ravenel and the staff at Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill for their crucial help in bringing this book to completion, and especially Duncan Murrell for his extraordinary persistence, tact, and insight.

  GAP CREEK

  One

  I know about Masenier because I was there. I seen him die. We didn’t tell anybody the truth because it seemed so shameful, the way he died. It was too awful to describe to other people. But I was there, even though I didn’t want to be, and I seen it all.

  Masenier was my little brother, my only brother, and us girls had spoiled him. If Masenier woke up in the middle of the night and wanted some hot cornbread one of us would get up and bake it. If Masenier wanted a pretty in the store in town we’d carry a chicken down to one of the big houses in Flat Rock and sell it to buy him the pretty. Masenier got an egg every morning while the rest of us just had grits. If he wanted biscuits and molasses, Mama or one of us girls would bake them for him.

  I thought Masenier was the cutest boy in the world. He had these blond curls that stood out all around his head, and his eyes was blue as the mountains in the far distance. He loved to sing and sometimes Papa would pick the banjo by the fire at night and us girls would sing ballads like “In the Shadow of the Pines” or “The Two Sisters” and Masenier would clap and sing along. We didn’t have music that often and it was a special treat when Papa got down the banjo.

  Now the year I’m talking about was the year after Cold Friday, that day when the sun never did come out and it never warmed up. Cold Friday was the coldest day anybody had ever seen. It seemed like the end of the world, when the chickens never left the roost, and it put such a chill on everything we’ll never forget that day. Papa took his coughing sickness then and it seemed like he never was well after that. But it was the year after Cold Friday when Masenier started acting poorly.

  Masenier had always been such a healthy boy, even a little plump, from all the biscuits and molasses, and his cheeks was pink as wild roses. He had a pile of white sand out beside the house Papa had carried in the wagon from the creek. Masenier made roads and castles and all kinds of mountains and valleys in the sand. He even made him a church out of sticks and set it on a hill of sand, and he stuck little rocks around it to look like a graveyard. You might have knowed a boy that done that was marked in some way.

  ALONG IN THE winter Masenier started to look peaked. He fell off a lot, and Mama thought it was because the cow was dry. So we borrowed milk from the Millers that lived further out the ridge. But the milk didn’t seem to help Masenier. He got paler and he lost his baby fat.

  “What that boy needs is a tonic,” Cora Miller said. And she mixed up a tincture of herbs and roots that she kept in a cupboard in her kitchen with corn liquor. Mama give Masenier a tablespoon of the tonic before every meal. The tonic would bring the glow back to his cheeks for a while. We thought he was getting better. And for Christmas he got four oranges and a poke of peppermint candy.

  But it was the day after Christmas when he woke up with the pains. My sister Rosie heard him holler out and she went to his bed in the attic. “My belly hurts,” he said.

  “Have you got the colic?” Rosie said.

  “Hurts bad,” Masenier said.

  Everybody knows what you take for the colic is pennyroyal tea, and Mama boiled some as soon as the stove was hot, even before she cooked any breakfast. Masenier sipped the tea, and it seemed to make him feel better, maybe because Mama put a little paregoric in the tea, the way you do for babies with the colic. Papa said, “Too much store-bought candy will always give a body colic.”

  BUT AFTER THAT Masenier got the colic even when he didn’t have any store-bought candy. After the Christmas candy was long gone he still had the terrible cramps and would wake up in the middle of the night crying. Mama would hold him in her lap and rock him by the fire. And Papa or one of us girls would hold him while Mama made pennyroyal tea. Then after he drunk the tea with some paregoric he would feel better and might even sleep a little.

  That was a bad winter, not only because it was colder than usual, but because of the ice storms and the snows. It looked like the woods had been chopped down, there was so many trees broke by the ice. Sleet is hardest on pine trees, because so much ice gathers on their needles. I doubt if there was a pine tree standing whole on the mountain. And when it snowed it was a heavy wet snow that broke down more trees and made barns and sheds and even houses cave in. The church house at Poplar Springs fell down.

  Because Papa had the cough, my sister Lou and me did the heavy work outside. We got in eggs and fed the stock and carried in wood and water from the spring. I hated how everybody expected me to do the outside work. If there was a heavy job it just fell naturally to me, and sometimes Lou, like it always had. The weather was bad so long we nearly run out of firewood. I took the axe into the woods and chopped up a blow-down tree. And then I hitched up the horse Sally to the sled and drug in a load. My hands liked to froze it was so wet and cold.

  “Julie can work like a man,” Mama said when I brought the load of wood into the front room.

  “Somebody’s got to work like a man,” I said and dropped the logs on the edge of the hearth. My hands got rough from the cold and the hard work. I rubbed grease on them at night to soften the calluses and moisten the dry skin. I would have liked to keep my hands soft the way Rosie did hers.

  DURING THE TERRIBLE winter when Papa took the chest consumption, we didn’t hardly get off the mountain, and we almost run out of cornmeal. If Papa did the least little thing he would start coughing and get so weak he couldn’t hardly set up. He had always been such a strong man before that it embarrassed him to be so helpless. Mama liked to say, “Now you can do without a lot of things, but a family can’t do without cornmeal. If you run ou
t of meal you don’t have any bread and you don’t have any mush. And you don’t have anything to fry fish in, or squirrels. When the meat runs out, and the taters runs out, the only thing that will keep you going is the cornbread. You can live a long time on bread and collard greens, if you have collard greens. And you can live a long time on bread alone if you have to, in spite of what the Bible says.”

  We got down to the last peck of cornmeal in the bin, and then to the last gallon. Mama started skimping on the size of the corn pone she baked every morning.

  “Masenier won’t get better if he don’t have plenty to eat,” Mama said. “And your papa won’t either.”

  “Maybe we’ll freeze to death before we starve,” I said.

  “Don’t talk that way,” Mama said. “You take some corn down to the mill.”

  There was still ice on the trees and snow on the ground. But I seen what I was going to have to do. I resented it, but I seen what had to be done. The road was too slick and steep for either the wagon or the sled. I couldn’t carry enough corn on my back down the mountain and back up. Even if my sister Lou went with me we couldn’t carry enough between us. Lou was the toughest of my sisters. She was almost as strong as me. I saw that the only way to take a bushel of corn to mill was to sling it over the horse’s back and lead her down the mountain. It would take both me and Lou to lead Sally.

  “Lou, you’re going to have to help me,” I said.

  “Why ain’t I surprised?” Lou said.

  Took us all day to get down the mountain, wait for the turn of corn to be ground, while the men eyed us and told jokes, and then lead Sally back up the trail. We got home a little after dark and the sacks was damp. But we had enough fresh meal to last a few weeks, until the weather opened up and Papa was well enough to drive the wagon down the mountain.

  BUT EVEN WITH plenty of cornbread and milk to eat, Masenier didn’t get any better. He kept falling off no matter how much he eat. And then he started to get a fever and the night sweats. He had terrible dreams that would make him holler out in the night. He yelled one time, “There is snakes dancing!” and when we woke him up he said there was a pit where snakes was swaying to music. He looked scared out of hisself. He was so scared by his dream he dreaded to go back to sleep. One of us had to set up with him after he drunk his tea with paregoric. There was some long nights that winter on into February and early March.

  But it was after the weather broke, after it looked like things was opening up and Papa’s cough was a little better, that Masenier took the terrible fever. One morning Mama felt him and he was hot as a coal and all day he just got hotter. By evening he was talking out of his head.

  “Mama, why don’t you have Gabriel come blow his horn?” he said. We knowed he was a little beside hisself. Mama had read him a story from the Bible the night before. After it got dark he just growed hotter. When a person has a bad fever they just seem to glow. Masenier was so lit up with the heat he looked swelled enough to bust.

  “What can we do to bring his fever down?” Papa said.

  “We can rub him in alcohol,” Mama said. We stripped the clothes off Masenier and rubbed him all over with alcohol. The room was filled with fumes and you would have thought it would freeze him to death. But after all that sponging he was hot as ever.

  “I’ve heard you’re supposed to wrap up a body that has the fever,” Lou said.

  “He’s been wrapped up all day,” Rosie said.

  “There’s nothing else to do but bathe him in cold water,” Papa said.

  I went down to the spring and got a bucket of fresh water. It was a cool night with a full moon, and the water was near freezing. “This is liable to give him pneumony,” I said.

  “If we can’t bring it down the fever’ll cook his brain,” Mama said.

  Now I’ve heard that somebody in a high fever sees visions and speaks wisdom. I’ve heard you’re supposed to gather round a fever patient to hear a message from heaven. But while we peeled Masenier’s clothes off and bathed him in cold water, he didn’t say a thing that made sense. When we put him in the tub of cold water he screamed, “It’s the haints with no eyes!” That’s all he talked about, haints with no eyes.

  “There’s no haints,” Mama said to him. “There’s nothing here but us.” But it didn’t do no good. He kept his eyes wide open and jabbered on about what he could see.

  It scares you when a fever keeps going up. It’s like watching somebody slide toward a brink and you can’t stop them. Masenier was so hot it burned your hand to touch him.

  “We’ve got to make him sweat,” Mama said.

  “How do you make him sweat?” Papa said.

  “By wrapping him in quilts and putting pans of hot water under his bed,” Mama said.

  “That’ll just make him hotter,” Papa said.

  “Sweating’s the only thing that’ll cool him off,” Mama said.

  We got nigh every blanket in the house and piled them on Masenier. And we heated kettles of water on the stove and in the fireplace and poured boiling water in pans, which we slid under the bed. It got so hot in the house we was all sweating. I lifted the covers and looked at Masenier. It was like his skin had closed tight and he couldn’t sweat.

  “He’s going to die if we don’t do something,” Papa said.

  “What else can we do?” Mama said.

  “We can make him drink hot lemon tea,” Papa said.

  Rosie and me squeezed some lemon juice into hot water and they tried to make Masenier drink a cup of that. But he wouldn’t wake up enough to drink anything. His eyes was closed and he wouldn’t rouse.

  “Drink some of this, darling,” Mama said and patted his cheek.

  “Maybe he should drink something cold,” Papa said.

  “I don’t think he can drink anything,” Mama said. She held the cup to Masenier’s mouth, but his lips was closed.

  “If we was to pour it down his throat he might strangle,” Papa said.

  It got to be midnight and Papa wound up the clock on the mantel. As he turned the key he looked at Masenier, and you could tell how worried he was. Papa was still weak hisself from the lung sickness. “I’ll carry him to the doctor,” Papa said.

  “You can’t carry him to the doctor in the middle of the night,” Mama said.

  “I’ll carry him down the mountain, and Julie can hold the lantern,” Papa said. Papa always did depend on me when he needed something. If there was a hard job to be done, it just had to be me that done it. I didn’t know but what Masenier had a catching sickness. I was near about afraid to touch him.

  “Why does it have to be me?” I said.

  “Because you’re the strongest one in the family,” Mama said. “And because everybody has to do what they can.” Mama always did know how to make me ashamed when I tried to get out of a job.

  “All right, I’ll do it,” I said, as I always did when they expected me to do something they didn’t want to do.

  IT WAS A cold, clear night with the moon shining when we started out. We didn’t even need the kerosene lantern in open places, but I lit the wick anyway and carried it like a pail of light down the path in front of Papa. He toted Masenier on his right shoulder wrapped in a blanket. Sometimes Masenier groaned, but he was so asleep he didn’t know what was happening.

  When we got to the woods we needed the lantern, and in the hollers where the moon didn’t reach it was black as a Bible. The woods smelled different at night, and I kept thinking as we picked our way down the trail how I could smell rotten leaves and water in the branch. And I thought how it was almost time to find sprouted chestnuts, where they fell in the fall and got covered with leaves and was beginning to sprout now. Nothing is sweeter than a sprouted chestnut. It cheered me up a little to think of chestnuts.

  I heard a dog bark somewhere off in the woods near the Jeter place. And then something up on the mountain squalled, like a person in terrible pain.

  “What is that?” I said.

  “Nothing but a wildcat,” Papa sa
id.

  The scream come again, this time closer. “Must be following us,” I said.

  “Just a wildcat,” Papa said, and I could tell from his voice he was nigh out of breath.

  “Here, I’ll carry Masenier,” I said.

  “You carry the lantern,” Papa said. “I’m all right.”

  But Papa was winded. He was ashamed to admit it, but he was winded.

  “Won’t do Masenier no good if you get wore out,” I said.

  “I can carry him,” Papa said. He kept walking a little further, too stubborn to admit he was tired, and then he had to stop to catch his breath.

  “Here, let me take him,” I said. I set the lantern down on the trail and turned and took Masenier from Papa. Papa was so weak his arms trembled when he handed the boy to me. Masenier didn’t feel all that heavy, except he was limp as a sack of flour. I was afraid to touch him, but didn’t have any choice. I slung him up against my shoulder and followed Papa down the trail. It took us over an hour to make it down the mountain.

  DR. PRINCE LIVED in one of the big houses down in Flat Rock. He was the son of the old Judge Prince that had founded Flat Rock, and he lived part of the year in Charleston and part in the mountains. And when he was in Flat Rock he doctored the mountain folks same as the Flat Rock people. Sometimes he rode his horse with a doctor bag slung behind the saddle out on the ridges and to the far coves beyond Pinnacle.

  I knowed the doctor had a big cur dog that he kept in a fence in front of his house. Everybody had seen the cur dog. I didn’t know what we would do when we got close to the house, for the dog was supposed to be mean.

  Though Masenier had not felt heavy when I took him on my shoulder, his little body got weightier and weightier as I stumbled down the trail. It was like somebody was adding pounds to him the further we went. I stiffened my back and locked my arm around him and followed Papa swinging the lantern. I was still mad that I had to carry him and that give me more strength.