Burn forever, p.4
Burn Forever, page 4
The dog snarled, jerked back, reared on his hind feet, growling. She struck him sharply across the nose. “Peace, Kilgore!” He cowered, still quivering, at her feet. She bent down. “Peace, boy,” she said softly, her hand on his muzzle.
“Thanks very much,” Ben said. “You’re very brave.”
She looked up quickly, a friendly smile in her eyes.
“No, I’m not. He just won’t hurt me, that’s all.”
As her eyes met his the smile faded out of them.
“But you’re not—”
She stopped as suddenly as she had spoken. “I thought you . . .” She smiled again. “It’s all right. He shouldn’t bite strangers.”
Ben stared at her. She wasn’t like any other girl he had seen in the backwoods. She was lovely, with long deep-fringed gray eyes and smooth shining hair, combed in two sleek gold wings into a knot on the nape of her neck. But it wasn’t that as much as the way she spoke. She did not speak the mountain dialect, except that she spoke slowly, with a little of the slow rhythmic cadence of the hills.
He did not realize that he was staring at her until he saw the expression in her eyes change from frank naïve friendliness to shy perplexity. She stood up quickly.
Ben smiled. “Sorry!” he said.
The warning frightened flash in her eyes stopped him. She moved backwards a step, then turned and went quickly back the way she had come, without a glance at the men on the porch. When Ben turned to face them they had not moved or changed expression. He went up to the steps.
Inside the cabin Julie Currier lifted the stove lid and put two clean sticks of oak on the fire. She watched them catch and flare up, put the lid back in place and stood gazing down silently at the top of the stove.
She turned at a sound behind her. Old Doss was standing in the door, his colorless eyes boring into hers, his gaunt face dark with suspicion. Julie saw him as she had seen him all her life, his thin beard straggling about his chin like dry swamp moss, his hair hanging in graying wisps about his ears, wisps of it coming through the rents in his old felt hat. It had been sandy-red once, but she could only remember it as yellow-gray. He seldom spoke, and now he only stood a moment, haggard and gray in his faded homespun shirt and yellow pants flapping around his thin hairy legs, staring at her with pale questioning eyes, before he turned and went back on the porch.
Julie’s head drooped a little. Why did Old Doss watch her like that? Why did everyone look at her—even the man out there that they’d set the dog on—as if she were a ghost? She put her hands to her flushed hot face.
“I can’t be as homely as that,” she thought.
Her heart was a hot aching lump inside her.
“If I could only see, just once!” she cried to herself. But Old Doss had taken the little looking glass the lady from Nashville had given her and shattered it to bits with the ax.
Her hands were cold against her cheeks burning like fire. She stared out of the door across the kitchen stoop into the green hillside with dry listless eyes. They wouldn’t let her out now, not even into the yard while the camp boys were working on the place, and when they went back over the ridge she could go out in the yard but not outside the gate. And Saturday night they’d bring preacher Tower and marry her to Doss. Her grandfather had told her so when he brought her back to the cabin. This was Tuesday. There were three more days.
Outside she could hear her grandfather’s familiar sing-song voice rising and falling. She didn’t try to listen to what he was saying. The young man was just another agent from the government, talking about how fine it would be to have things they’d never heard of before, lights that went on when you pressed a button on the wall. Asking questions, prodding at them as if they were possums on a hickory limb. It didn’t matter. Then her whole heart cried out that it did matter. They had no right to take the land. If they’d never come, then her grandfather would never have made her marry Doss.
She turned around abruptly, choking back the hot tears that stung her cheeks. Her grandfather’s voice rose harshly.
“Yer aimin’t’ cut down my tree today?”
Julie’s body stiffened sharply. She stared at the open door onto the porch, her breath coming in sharp broken gusts. She crept to the foot of the maple bed and looked out through a chink where the mortar had fallen from between the logs.
The stranger was standing on the top step, the sun beating down on his head. Julie looked at him, trying desperately to tell herself that he couldn’t mean what she was able to make out of his strange clipped speech, so sharp and fast compared to the slow easy talk of the Hollow.
“I’m afraid so, Mr. Currier. I hate to do it. It’s my orders from the government.”
Gover-ment, gover-ment. Julie’s heart cried out in protest against the word. That was what they all said, when they talked about moving her mother’s grave, when they talked about covering the Hollow with water. No, no, it couldn’t be gover-ment. That was something far away, in a place called Washington, and it was good. It wasn’t something to hurt people who paid their taxes and sent their men to war. She had never really believed they would really let the water come. She would have to marry Doss, but still the water wouldn’t come. One day they would wake up and find it was all a dream, their ridge would be covered with oak again, oak that the boys at the camp hadn’t really cut. Something would happen, so many of them believed it would. The President would find out about it—Julie knew two people who had written to him, telling him, so that he must know.
She gripped the bed post more tightly. Even if they had to go her grandfather would not let them cut down their tree—not the Currier cedar. But why was he just standing there not saying a word?
On the porch Nathan Currier moved a little so that she was able to see his face. For a moment she stared, bewildered, at what she saw in it; and then the truth came to her slowly, creeping over her the way she had seen the crust of ice creep over the dark surface of the rain barrel at the corner of the cabin in the winter. Her grandfather couldn’t help it. He had to let them cut down the tree, because they were stronger than he was.
She looked at the tall bronzed stranger, a sudden bitterness aching inside her. Her grandfather’s slow voice rose and fell in monotonous cadence.
“They tell me that there tree’s about seven hunderd year old,” he said.
Ben Davidge nodded.
“It’s all of that and more,” he said.
“When my great-great-granpappy brung his fire over the mountains from Virginny after the Revolutionary War, he put hit down here, an’ built this yere house so he could see that tree from this yere porch,” Nate Currier said. It was hard for him to speak. He was not used to speaking so many words to a stranger.
Julie saw his eyes move out over the yard, across the rail fence over the bright corn, and climb slowly, as if they were too old and heavy for the task, up the hill to the great cedar, towering tall and strong against the cloudless sky. A tear glistened and furrowed down his gaunt cheek into his grizzled beard. Julie’s eyes filled with sudden bursting tears of pity. “Oh, Gran, poor Gran!” she whispered. The years of fear and aching dread of the stern iron old man melted away. Hot rebellious anger at the government surged in in its place. In an instant she was out on the porch, standing straight and slim beside the gaunt gnarled old man, her gray eyes dilated black with anger.
“You shan’t cut down our tree!” she cried passionately. “It’s our tree! It’s not your tree or gover-ment’s, it’s my grandfather’s, and you can’t cut it down!”
Ben moved down a step. It brought his head even with the proud little head thrown back, defending her home against the government.
“I’m sorry,” he said gently. “I’ve got to do it. It’s a government order. I wish I didn’t have to.”
She flashed back to her grandfather.
“It isn’t true, is it, Gran? He can’t do it, can he?”
The defiance in her face turned up to her grandfathers faded slowly. The haunting terror of the fear that brooded over the valley crept into her eyes.
“Are they making us go too, Gran?” she whispered.
A slow tear coursed down the grimy furrows of the old man’s grizzled cheek. He jerked his arm up and encircled the girl’s slim shoulders, quivering under the rough homespun of her old-fashioned dress. A gnarled hand unfamiliar with caresses trembled over her smooth gold hair, stern lips mumbled, seeking long-forgotten words.
Ben looked away for an instant. “I understand that all the people who settled for their land before October first have until January to leave,” he said after a moment. “Otherwise it’s thirty days. You knew that, didn’t you, Mr. Currier?”
“I knew hit,” Currier said quietly. “I never told the girl.”
Julie shrank away from him. She was white to the lips, staring urgently at his face.
“Gran . . . have you sold our land?”
For a moment there was no sound in the tragedy of exile. The old man nodded slowly.
“But, Gran, you—you said you’d never sell, you’d never let them take our land.”
“Hit’s gover-ment, Julie. Men ain’t go no rights when gover-ment wants their land.”
She stood silent for a moment. Her gray tear-washed eyes moved from her grandfather to the steps and out over the courtyard to the stable and the corn crib as if she were seeing them for the first time. She looked up at the cedar, a little smile in her eyes. “It’s a pretty tree, isn’t it, Gran?” she said softly.
CHAPTER 6
Mike Shannon maneuvered the truck off the guttered backwoods road and into the wagon tracks across the Curriers’ bottom field.
“Looks like somebody been across here since yesterday,’’ he said.
“TVA men probably. They’re coming up to get a round of this cedar for the museum.”
Mike shook his head. “Looks like a truck tire to me, Mr. Davidge. Hello, there’s that halfwit.”
He nodded down the branch and listened to catch the sound of Edrew Mincey’s guitar somewhere at the edge of the Hollow.
“Wish he’d play somethin’ cheerful once in a while.”
Ben nodded absently. He was thinking of something different.
“Beats me how that guy gets around. He was layin’ on the bench in front of the store when we came by, dead to the world, and that’s damn near twelve miles off. And there he is now.”
Ben looked back down the road. Edrew was leaning against the shed built over the branch, picking at his guitar. The drone of his voice weaving out words of old songs reached them across the yellow field.
“Say, what is that place down there, Mr. Davidge? Ain’t a still, is it?”
“That’s a workshop, Mike. Doss Currier has a lathe. He’s the old man’s brother. Makes wagon wheels and things like spool beds. Loftus says they used to have a good business thirty years ago.”
Mike nodded. “I know. That’s where they run the TVA guy off when he was lookin’ for ‘examples of native industry.’ ”
He chuckled.
“Jeez, does that burn these guys up. You oughta hear ’em when they get a jolt of white mule in ’em. That an’ movin’ the graves. I say what the hell, they’re dead, ain’t they? But these guys look at it different.”
He swung the truck off the road and threw it into low to make the steep grade up the cleared path towards the tree.
Two cars were parked in the Currier road. One had the TVA white license plate, the other was a Ford coupe. Mike leaned out.
“Jeez, there’s a Washington tag. Don’t suppose Mrs. Roosevelt’s dropped in to watch us cut it down, do you?”
“That’s a fellow named Speer. Land appraiser.”
“Yeah? Somebody said they’d already given the old Currier guy twenty grand for his land.”
Ben looked quickly at him. “Where’d you hear that?”
“Hell, I don’t know. Funny thing the way news gets out around these hills.”
“Who told you, Mike?”
Shannon scratched his head. “Let’s see. It was in a crap game the other night. I know, it was this berry Sisky. He’d been down to Mis’ Mincey’s to get his fortune told. That’s where he got it.”
The truck was climbing slowly.
“Say, I wanted to tell you something, Mr. Davidge. You ever notice that guy?”
“Sisky?”
“Yeah. Notice the kids don’t like him? Notice he’s always bellyachin’ about the grub an’ gettin’ out of the work?”
Ben nodded. He had noticed it. He had also noticed the East Side accent, the fat city-pale face, thick moist lips, patent-leather marceled hair, and particularly the cocky self-assertiveness of the guy.
“You ever notice he’s always got money?”
“The folks get the allotment from Washington and send it back to him, I suppose.’’
Mike shook his head.
“I happen to know Sisky’s folks don’t send it back. Fellow named Kurtz lives in the same block, and Sisky’s old man ain’t had a job in a year. Anyway, it looks queer to me. This O.K.?”
“This’ll do.”
A group of men were already standing by the big tree. Ben shook hands with Anderson, one of the head foresters, and nodded to the others. Two were men he knew from the TVA. The other was Speer. He was standing by the tree, silent and self-contained, looking down into the Hollow. Ben turned around. The sunlit cabin lay nestled in the little valley, its long ridgepole swaybacked against the hills. The stable and corn crib, the smoke house and beehives clustered around it like pieces around the manger under a tree at Christmas. Smoke circled up out of the broken-lipped chimneys at either end of the low lichen-stained roof. One of the TVA men pointed to the farther chimney where faint wisps scarcely seen vanished in the air.
“That’s the fire that hasn’t been out for a hundred and forty years,” he said to Speer. “There’s another place further up where they say their fire hasn’t been out for a hundred and sixty. The old fellow won’t move till we find a way for him to take his fire with him.”
He shook his head, smiling. “You’d think they’d be glad to get out of these God-forsaken hills. It’s funny. A fellow that runs a store down the bend blew his brains out night before last, with a check for $500 on the table right in front of him.”
Speer nodded. “I guess he didn’t want to leave.”
“Crazy, of course. No wonder, living out by themselves in the woods. Look at this young Currier. You’d think he’d have got out by the time he was eighteen. Most of the young ones do.”
Speer said nothing. Ben went up to the tree. The blaze for the undercut was on the great shaggy trunk facing the Hollow. He looked down there again. The two old men were standing motionless, like toy figures, on the porch. Doss Currier was still leaning, apparently not having moved a muscle, against the vine-covered post. The slim gray figure of the girl was nowhere to be seen. “Doesn’t want to see it,” Ben thought. He was glad Anderson was there, glad he did not have to cut her tree down. He looked up at the straight brown column towering green-tipped into the blue sky.
One of the CCC boys was standing beside him looking up, his eyes wide.
“Jeez, that’s a big one. I guess he’s been here one long time.”
Ben shook his head involuntarily. This tree had been here a long time when Columbus landed. It was a giant tree when Chaucer died. When it was a sapling thirty feet high ironclad men were pouring into the Holy Land. Richard the Lion-Hearted was alive, no stone had been laid on those age-old buildings he had seen in France and England, Dante was not yet born. For eight hundred years perhaps it had stood here above the Hollow, and ten boys were cutting it down before lunch. It was a kind of murder.
He looked down at the cabin again. A lithe gray figure tipped with gold flashed across the yard. Ben stared down at it.
The sound of the guitar came suddenly from above them on the hill.
“Well, for God’s sake,” Mike said. “Here’s that damn doleful halfwit up here.”
The melody rose and fell to the rhythmic whirr of bright teeth biting into the live red wood, singing a plaintive accompaniment as the saw bit deeper and deeper into the great tree. The sun climbed high in the Hollow between the ridges, the smell of the red dust rose like the smell of church incense.
Ben saw Speer again, standing off a little, by himself, still looking down at the cabin. He went over, wondering if Speer had come back or had been there all the time.
“Hello,” he said. “Well, you showed, this morning.”
Speer’s eyes flickered an instant and were dead gray again. He nodded coolly and glanced around.
“That kid down there’s having a bad time,” he said quietly.
“Look out for her if you get a chance. There’s something up. If anything breaks you’ve got the story.”
He nodded again and moved away. Ben looked after him for a moment. When he looked back at the Hollow a quick movement in the thicket below caught his eye. A slim streak of gray wove quickly in and out in the underbrush. He looked hastily up at the tree, already swaying, and down the hill where it would fall. Julie Currier was already far out of its path. He saw her slip behind a clump of young dogwood and stand, her foot braced against the trunk of a hickory sapling, the pale oval of her face raised to the sky, watching the shivering mast with great unhappy eyes.
He looked back at the men around the tree. None of them had seen the girl. Something almost instinctive made him turn his head and look behind him. Sisky was sitting, head bent forward, watching her out of the corner of his eye, a little smile in the corner of his full red mouth. Ben felt a little wave of cold anger. He looked around for Speer, but Speer had disappeared.
“That’s enough,” the head forester said sharply. The two boys disengaged the saw and stood back. Ben could feel the shiver that ran up and down the great stem. It trembled a moment, crackling. There was a stentorian shout: “TIMBER!!” Far above their heads the green plume bent forward a little, paused, leaned out again and paused, as if gathering strength or courage, before it swept down in a gigantic arc and hurtled to the ground in a crashing of great branches. For an instant no one moved; then a great shout went up. Ben had not seen the tree fall. He was looking across at the dogwood thicket. He had seen Julie Currier’s face just before she buried it in her raised arms. She was clinging to the tree trunk, only her fingers moving, opening and closing convulsively against the smooth bark.
