The Road From Gap Creek: A Novel Hardcover Read online

  “Is that why you run off to Canada to trap?” I said. I liked to tease him about the time a few years before when he had a Model T Ford and drove off to Canada to trap in the North Woods. But he got scared by bootleggers somewhere in Ohio and come right back home.

  “That’s when I was young and didn’t know what I wanted.”

  “You wanted to go to Canada and live like an Indian.”

  “The dreams of youth seem silly later,” Muir said. He could talk proper like a professor when he wanted to. Maybe that’s why he thought he could be a preacher.

  “But I always dreamed of marrying you, and still do,” he said.

  There was a place at the top of the pasture hill where you could look across the bottomland toward the Cicero Mountain. We called it the Chinquapin Hill. There’d been an old graveyard just below there and you could see scattered rocks that had been tombstones. Some people said they’d been Indian graves. But others said Indians didn’t bury their people under stones. It was the first settlers in the area that was buried there. The place was a little bit scary, but it was also the most beautiful spot on a moonlit night.

  Me and Muir walked to the top of the pasture and looked down on the valley. There was no lights to be seen in all the community. He put his arms around me and was just about to kiss me but I pulled away and started walking up the hill away from him. I don’t know what come over me all of a sudden, but I couldn’t help myself. I just had to get away from him.

  “Where are you going?” he said.

  “I don’t know yet,” I said.

  “Let me know when you find out,” he said, but I didn’t answer him.

  ONE SIGN THAT you love a man is you get so mad at him and then you get over it. I can’t explain it. You argue with a man and get mad and fight with him and hate him, and a few days later, or even a few hours later, it’s like it never happened. I don’t think anybody understands that. You get angry with some men you don’t get over it and you don’t forget it. But with Muir I always got over it. Took me a long time to recognize that’s part of what love is. He irritated me and done so many things wrong, but in the long run it didn’t seem to matter.

  I always promised myself I’d never marry a boy from Green River. I wanted a man who could take me places and was going places hisself. I wanted to travel, I wanted fine shoes and clothes. I didn’t want to milk cows and pull fodder and go to an outdoor toilet. I wanted a man with a nice car. He didn’t have to be rich. I didn’t want a rich man necessarily. But he had to have a job and enough money to live on. I told myself I didn’t want to marry no farmer where I’d have to work my fingers to the bone and live on soup beans in late winter the way Mama had done.

  Now Muir had tried to go with me since I was just a girl. When I was about thirteen or fourteen he’d hang around Velmer and they’d go trapping or hunting. Muir was a year or two older than Velmer and showed him a lot about the woods. And he’d come to the house on Sunday afternoons and set on the porch and talk to Papa. But I knowed he really come to see me. When I turned around he was always looking at me. He was kind of bashful and he’d look away, but then when I glanced that way again he was looking at me.

  Muir, from the time he was a boy, liked to dress up on Sundays and for funerals and special occasions. I reckon he spent most of the money he made selling furs and painting houses on clothes. He’d growed up big for his age. By the time I can first remember him he was over six feet tall and still growing. His black hair and fine features made him look awful handsome. He would go over to Asheville on the train and buy a fine suit of herringbone or blue serge. He’d press the suit so it looked perfect on him. There was always a sharp crease in his pants, and his shoes was shined. I never seen anybody that kept their shoes shined the way Muir did unless they was in the army or was a preacher.

  He would try to go with me when I was just a girl and since Papa liked him and he was Velmer’s friend, Papa never run him off but was always nice to him. But I wasn’t nice to him. He was just a neighbor boy and he didn’t really have a job except farming, or a car. I wanted somebody different. That’s why when he stood on the steps of the church with a flashlight or barn lantern and asked if he could walk me home I kicked him one time. It riled me that he kept asking. It didn’t seem like it would be any fun going out with a neighbor boy.

  But I did end up going out with Muir even then, because he kept on asking. I was just a little bit of a girl then. Weighed about ninety pounds. Groups of us would walk to Homecomings and singings at neighbor churches, up at Mountain Valley or Mount Olivet, and Crossroads or Double Springs. And I’d walk with Muir and hold his arm. If it was nice weather, we’d sometime go off by ourselves for a while away from the crowd. But mostly we stayed with the group. I even let him kiss me one time at Double Springs, down by the double springs.

  When Muir was about twenty-two and I was fifteen, him and his brother, Moody, bought a Model T Ford, owned it half and half. Anybody could have guessed they’d quarrel about who was going to use it and when. They was always fighting about something. You never seen two brothers more different. Muir had always wanted to be a minister. He read his Bible every day. Moody got drunk every weekend down at Chestnut Springs in South Carolina and got in fights there, and he carried liquor up from Gap Creek where there was so many stills. Some people said he had his own still and made liquor with his buddies, Wheeler and Drayton, from up on Mount Olivet. It was one of those times when I was mad at Muir again when Moody stopped the Model T in front of the house and asked me if I wanted to go with him to the homecoming at Cedar Springs the next Sunday. Before I thought, I said yes.

  I don’t know why I agreed to go with Moody to Cedar Springs. I never did like him much. He was the kind of boy that never said anything and was usually in some kind of trouble. I reckon the fact that he was a part-time bootlegger must have been a little thrilling, back in those Prohibition days. Bootleggers wore fine clothes and drove sparkling cars with white-walled tires. I hate to admit it, but I must have done it in part to spite Muir. For I knowed nothing would make him as mad as for me to go with Moody and ride in that car they both had bought for two hundred dollars. Muir had made me mad and I wanted to get back at him.

  So that Sunday morning I got up early to help Mama fix dinner before she left for church. We made a banana pudding and fried a chicken to leave in the bread safe with the biscuits. Mama said she’d boil the rice when she got home from church. Then I got dressed and was ready in my lavender dress with a tight waist when Moody come to the house in the Model T. Mama was the kind of person that believed that if you went to a homecoming you should take something to add to the picnic.

  “You take the banana pudding,” she said as I was about to run out to the car.

  “That’s for your dinner,” I said.

  “Not polite to go without taking something,” Mama said. “I’ll make another one for us.” She wrapped the bowl of pudding in a dishcloth and I carried it with me.

  When I got to the car all Moody said was howdy. He never was much of a talker, unlike Muir who liked to talk romantic and even poetic. “I have brought a pudding,” I said.

  “I have brought something to drink with it,” Moody said. He reached under the seat and held up a quart mason jar of liquid clear as spring water.

  “What is that?” I said.

  “Just a little peartning juice,” Moody said, and laughed. Now I’d vowed never to go with a boy that was drinking. It never occurred to me Moody would be drinking in daytime, on a Sunday morning on his way to a homecoming.

  “If you drink, you can just stop this car and I’ll get out,” I said.

  “This ain’t ever been opened,” Moody said, and turned to me. That’s when I seen the swelling under his left eye. He’d been hit there and it was turning dark. I wondered if him and Muir had got in a fight that morning because Moody was driving me to Cedar Springs. The thought excited me and made me ashamed at the same time. I was too young to know any better.

  It’
s a pretty drive up the valley to Cedar Springs. The road winds along the edge of the hills and crosses Cabin Creek, then runs around the edge of the wide bottomlands and crosses Rock Creek below the Briggs Mill. Cedar Springs Church is set on the hillside overlooking the valley and the west end of the Cicero Mountain. The fields along the river are level as a tabletop. The springs that give the place its name are somewhere up the holler behind the church.

  We passed people walking up the road in their Sunday clothes on the way to the homecoming. Then, just as we come around the curve at the Beddingfield Place, I seen a tall man walking ahead. He wore a blue serge suit and had black hair and I seen it was Muir. A chill went through me and when we passed him he turned and looked straight at me. It appeared he had a black eye too. It surprised me Muir was going to Cedar Springs, knowing I’d be there with Moody.

  “That was Muir,” I said.

  “Maybe he’s hoping they’ll ask him to preach,” Moody said, and laughed. Everybody knowed that Muir wanted to be a preacher of the Gospel, but when he first tried to preach he done so bad they laughed at him. Even though I was mad at Muir, it made me feel bad when somebody made fun of him for wanting to preach. I didn’t want to ever be married to a preacher myself, but it wasn’t a bad thing to want to be a preacher. I hated for people to low-rate him.

  Once when I was down at the Powell house with Fay and we set down to dinner, Muir said he would ask a blessing. “Muir has to grumble a little over the vittles before he eats,” Moody said. It was a witty thing to say, but it made me feel a little sick.

  The parking lot at Cedar Springs Church was near full of cars and trucks, wagons and buggies. They’d set up a table of planks on sawhorses under the oak trees. Already women had put tablecloths on the planks and a pot of coffee was boiling over an open fire.

  There was a big crowd of friendly people, but nothing seemed to go right after we got out of the car. Moody held my arm and we set down on one of the benches under the trees. He just held my arm like he was afraid to let go and didn’t know what to say. We set there and I spoke to lots of people I knowed. Lorrie was there with her new boyfriend, Woodrow, and they come over and talked. Muir arrived and stood by the picnic table staring at me. I guess he was trying to make me nervous, and he succeeded. Moody just set there not saying a word.

  After the preacher stood up on a bench and said the blessing, people got plates and moved along the table to fill them. I’d put the banana pudding right in the middle of the table and I wanted to be sure I got some. Fay had come with Lester Jones and I followed them to the table thinking Moody was right behind me. But when I looked around I seen he’d gone back to the car. I knowed he’d gone there to take a drink from that mason jar. When he come back I could smell the liquor on his breath. There was a sweetness to the smell of alcohol, like something rich and mellow from a long time ago.

  Since Moody wouldn’t hardly say nothing, I talked to Lorrie and Woodrow and Fay and Lester and the others that come around as we eat. Every time I looked and seen Muir he was staring at me. I felt more and more embarrassed to be there with Moody, but there wasn’t much I could do about it.

  There was ice cream served from big cartons at the end of the table and we went to get cones of that. But while I was getting a cone Moody went back to the car and he must have took a mighty big drink, for when he returned he seemed a little tipsy. I guess he was embarrassed to be with me and so many people around and he didn’t know what to say.

  After we eat ice cream and people drunk coffee and stood around talking, it was time for the singing to start. Lots of musicians had come, the Raeburn family from Mountain Valley, the blind man from town named Floyd that pulled and pushed an accordion, the Williams Brothers from Brevard. There was a group of singers from up on Mount Olivet that had a banjo and fiddle. I’d heard they played for square dances on Saturday nights, but they also sung sacred music too.

  Moody made another trip to the car, and when he come back this time he said he didn’t want to stay for no singing. “Let’s go drive up to Cedar Mountain,” he said. By then he’d had so much corn liquor he slurred his words. He also seemed more talkative.

  “It’s time for the singing to start,” I said.

  “Hell with singing,” Moody said. “I want to drive to Cedar Mountain and Caesar’s Head.”

  “I want to hear the singing.” People had turned to watch us.

  “Let’s go for a drive,” Moody said, and took me by the arm.

  “I’m not riding with you,” I said, and pulled away.

  “Too good to ride with me?”

  “You’re drunk,” I said.

  Moody swung his arm like he was sweeping me out of his sight, then turned and lurched toward the Model T. I thought he was going to fall when he turned the crank, but he got it started and drove away. I went on into the church with Fay and Lester Jones. The singing had just started with “When the Roll Is Called up Yonder” when somebody come into the church and whispered to Fay and me that Moody had a wreck. We followed the man outside—I think it was one of the Capps boys—and he said Moody had run the Model T over a steep bank and down into a corn patch by the river.

  “Was he hurt?” I said.

  “He was throwed from the car and it turned over several times and then landed on its wheels.”

  “And he’s all right?” Fay said.

  “He got back in the car and drove it away.”

  I asked Fay if I could ride back home with her and Lester. I looked around for Muir but didn’t see him nowhere.

  I WAS BUT eight years old when Muir tried to preach in the church that time. His mama, Ginny, had always took part in church things, and Muir had taught the boys Sunday school class, though he was only fifteen. And Muir was the youngest person in church Preacher Liner would call on to lead in prayer. But when I seen Muir stand up at the pulpit that Sunday I thought he looked awful young to be a preacher.

  Before he started to pray he said, “Will Moody Powell please take off his hat in church?” Everybody turned around and there was Moody on the back bench in the meetinghouse wearing this wide-brimmed hat as pretty as you please. You never did see Moody in church. He give a great big grin, then took off the hat and dropped it on the floor.

  Muir then led in prayer, but you could tell he was unsure what to say. After the collection was took it was time for him to start the sermon. The congregation was so quiet you could have heard a gnat whine. He stood there looking down at the Bible like he was trying to remember what he planned to say.

  “I want to read you a Bible verse,” he finally said. He swallowed and tried to speak, and everybody in the church held their breath. Some of the boys in the back of the church snickered. Sweat dripped off Muir’s face. He started to read, then stopped. I looked down at my lap. I couldn’t bear to watch him.

  Muir said he wanted to talk about the Transfiguration. That was a word I’d heard but didn’t hardly know what it meant. “This is what can happen when you go up on the mountain,” he said. He stepped a little to the side of the pulpit and kicked over the chair he’d set in before. There was more snickers from the boys in the back of the meetinghouse. Muir picked up the chair and set it right and started again. “This is what can happen when we get up close to the Lord,” he said, but he stopped again. He looked down at the floor and at the window like he was trying to remember what he was going to say.

  “Now let me read to you what Mark says.” He flipped through the pages of the Bible in front of him. It sounded like he tore a page or crumpled up the thin paper. It was so hot and tense in the church I couldn’t hardly breathe. My chest hurt and the bones in my elbows ached. I felt like it was me up there stumbling for words.

  “Listen to this,” Muir finally said. His voice was shrill, like he couldn’t hardly control it. He read from the Bible like a boy in school that is just learning to read and ain’t sure what the words mean.

  “There is a blessing for us on the mountaintop if we will just go up there,” he said.
“We can see the shining face of Jesus, and we can see his raiment white as snow.” His voice got a little stronger and I hoped he’d go on and preach like a real preacher. I felt sick inside, afraid that he couldn’t go on.

  “We can stand with our faces in the wind and feel the spirit moving,” he said. I was just a little girl, and Muir was a big boy that was hunting and trapping with Velmer sometimes. And I was friends with his sister Fay. But I felt afraid as if I was the one standing up there trying to think of words to say, trying to find the rhythm of a sermon. The air in that church cut like razors when I breathed.

  And then there was a whine in the back of the church. It started out like the whine a dog makes or a wet log as it burns in a hot fire. The whine swelled to a blowing sound, like somebody blowing across the mouth of a bottle, and then blossomed out and flared into the longest and loudest fart you ever heard. And you knowed it was not a regular poot that just happened but somebody trying as hard as they could to make noise. It went on and on and I thought it was never going to stop.

  There was giggles and titters throughout the church. People looked around to see who’d done such a thing. The fart was like a comment, a heckling call. When it was over I looked at Muir’s face. He’d forgot what he was going to say. He mumbled and stumbled, trying to start all over again. He’d been uncertain before, but the noise of somebody breaking wind louder than a horse and all the people laughing throwed him off completely.

  Somebody got up in the back of the church and when I turned around I seen it was his brother Moody. Moody raised the back window with a groan and bang, and then stuck his head outside like he was getting a breath of fresh air. Laughter started in the back rows with the young boys and backsliders there and washed forward.

  I was so embarrassed I couldn’t look at Muir. I stared down at my hands and at the floor. The air in the room was poisoned and the light was poisoned. There was a terrible weight, like the air had turned to lead. Seconds was so heavy they crushed my breath.