THE OLD LADY AT THE TOP OF THE HILL
It was a bland afternoon. I had been crossing a green valley in North Carolina. Every man I passed had that languid leanness slanderously attributed to the hookworm by folk who have no temperament. Yet some bee of industry must have stung these fellows into intermittent effort this morning, yesterday, last week or last year.
Here were reasonably good barns. Here were fences, and good fences at that. Here were mysterious crops, neither cotton nor corn. One man was not ploughing with a mule. No, sir. He was ploughing with a sort of horse....
At last I mounted the northern rim of the circle of steep hills that kept the place as separate from the rest of the world as a Chinese wall. I met her on the crest. She advanced slowly, looking on the ground, leaning at the hips as do the very aged, but not grotesquely. Her primly made dress and sunbonnet were dull dark blue. With her walking-stick she meditatively knocked the little stones from her path. The staff had a T-shaped head. It was the cane Old Mother Hubbard carries in the toy book.
And now she looked up and said with a pleasant start, “Why, good evening, young stranger.”
“Good evening, kind lady.”
“Where have you been, my son?”
“Why, I am following my nose to the end of the world. I have just walked through this enterprising valley.”
She looked into the dust and meditated awhile. Then she said: “It’s getting late. No one has let you in?”
“No one.”
“How about that house by the bridge?” She pointed with her cane.
“The lady said she had a sick child.”
“Nonsense, nonsense. Do you see that little Ardella by that corner of the ploughed field near the house? She don’t run like a sick child.... Did you ask at the next place, the one that has a green porch?” She pointed again with her cane.
“The woman said she had no spare bed.”
“But she has. I slept in it last week.... And that last house before you start up this hill?”
“The woman said she had to take care of saw-mill hands.”
“Did she tell you that?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The old lady ruminated again, leaning on her stick. At length she said: “Sit down. I want to tell you something.” There we were, Grandmother and newly adopted grandson, on a big sunlit rock.
I give only the spirit of her words. She discoursed in that precious mountain dialect, so mediæval, so Shakespearean with its surprising phrases that seem at first the slang of a literary clan, till one learns they are the common property of folk that cannot read. It is a manner of speech all too elusive. Would that I had kept a note-book upon it! But somewhat to this intent she spoke, and in a tone gentler than her words:—
“They thought I would never find out about this, or they would not have treated you so. That woman in the last house is my daughter-in-law. She has only two saw-mill hands, and they’re no trouble. That’s my house anyway. It was my mother’s before me. No one dares turn strangers away when I am there. There’s an empty bed up stairs, and another in the hall.”
She turned about and pointed in the direction in which I had been walking. “Just ahead of you, around that clump of trees, is a hospitable family. If they will not take care of you, it is because they have a good excuse. If they cannot take you in, ask no further. Come back to my place, and” (she spoke with a Colonial Dame air) “I will make you welcome.”
“What sort of mountaineer is this?” I asked myself. “The hospitality is the usual thing, but the grandeur is exotic.”
We chatted awhile of the sunset. Then I accompanied her to the edge of the hill.
Under her sacred hair her face retained girl-contours. The wrinkles were not too deep. She seemed not to have changed as mothers often do, when, under decades of inevitable sorrow, the features are recarved into the special mask of middle age, and finally into the very different mask of senility. She had yet the authority of Beauty. She wore her white hair with a Quakerish-feminine skill most admirably adapted to that ancient forehead. I divined she had learned that at sixteen. What a long time to be remembering.
We were spirits that at once met and understood. She said: “My son, I have walked all my life across this valley, or up this hill, or toward that green mountain where you are going. I never walked as far as I wanted to. But walking even so short a path makes for consolation.”
Now she laid aside antique grandeur and took on plain vanity.
“Do you know how old I am?”
“About eighty-five.”
“I’m ninety-two years old, young man, and I’m going to live ten years more.”
It was getting late. I said, “I am glad indeed to have met you.”
She answered, “I am sorry my valley has not been kind.”
I ventured to ask, “So it’s your valley?”
I had touched a raw nerve. I was completely shaken by the suddenness of her answer.
“Mine! Mine! Mine!” she shrieked. Kneeling, she beat up the dust of the road with her cane. And then “Mine! Mine! Mine!” shaking her outstretched arms over that amphitheatre, as though she would drag it all to her breast.
She was out of breath and trembling. At length she smiled, and added so quietly it seemed another person. “And they shall not take it away from me.”
I helped her to her feet. She was once more the Martha Washington sort.... I remember her last sentence. In a royal tone, that was three times an accolade, in a motherly tone that was caressing and slow she half-sung the pretty words:—
“Good evening, young man. I wish you well.”
The man at the next house took me in. In the course of the evening he assured me that the old lady did own the valley, and that she ruled it with a rod of iron. The family graveyard was full of heirs who had grown to old age and died of old age hoping in vain to outlive, and to inherit her authority.