In the Tennessee mountains

by Charles Egbert Craddock

The hairy animal, whose jeans suit proclaimed him man, propounded this inquiry with a triumphant air. There was a sarcastic curve on the lips of his interlocutor. Clearly it was not worth his while to enlighten the mountaineer,—to talk of the unknown races whose work so long survives their names, to speculate upon the extent of their civilization and the mechanical contrivances that reached those dizzy heights, to confide his nebulous fancies clustering about the artist-poet who painted this grand, rude lyric upon the immortal rock. He turned from the strange picture, suspended between heaven and earth, and looked over the rickety palings into the dismal little graveyard of the mountaineers. Nowhere, he thought, was the mystery of life and death so gloomily suggested. Humanity seemed so small, so transitory a thing, expressed in these few mounds in the midst of the undying grandeur of the mountains. Material nature conquers; man and mind are as naught. Only a reiteration of a well-conned lesson, for so far this fine young fellow of thirty had made a failure of life; the material considerations with which he had wrestled had got the better of him, and a place within the palings seemed rather preferable to his place without.

It was still strange to John Cleaver that his lines should have fallen in this wilderness; that the door of that house on the slope of the Backbone should be the only door upon earth open to him; that such men as this mountaineer were his neighbors and associates. The fact seemed a grotesque libel on likelihood. As he rode away he was thinking of his costly education, the sacrifices his father had made to secure it, his dying conviction, which was such a comfort to him, that in it he had left his penniless son a better thing than wealth,—with such training and such abilities what might he not reach? When John Cleaver returned from his medical studies in Paris to the Western city of his birth, to scores of charity patients, and to a fine social position by virtue of the prestige of a good family, there seemed only a little waiting needed. But the old physicians held on to life and the paying practice with the grip of the immortals. And he found it difficult to sustain existence while he waited.

At the lowest ebb of his fortunes there came to him a letter from a young lawyer, much in his own professional position, but who had confessed himself beaten and turned sheep-farmer. Here, among the mountains of East Tennessee, said the letter, he had bought a farm for a song; the land was the poorest he ever saw, but served his purposes, and the house was a phenomenal structure for these parts,—a six-room brick, built fifty years ago by a city man with a bucolic craze and consumptive tendencies. The people were terribly poor; still, if his friend would come he might manage to pick up something, for there was not a physician in a circuit of sixty miles.

So Cleaver had turned his face to the mountains. But unlike the sheep-farmer he did not meet his reverses lightly. The man was at bay. And like a savage thing he took his ill-fortune by the throat. Success had seemed so near that there was something like the pain of death in giving up the life to which he had looked forward with such certainty. He could not console himself with this comatose state, and call it life. He often told himself that there was nothing left but to think of what he might have done, and eat out his heart. His ambition died hard.

As his horse ambled along, a gruff voice broke his reverie, "'Light an' hitch," called out the master of a wayside hovel.

A man of different temperament might have found in Cleaver's uncouth surroundings some points of palliation. His heart might have warmed to the ignorant mountaineers' high and tender virtue of hospitality. A responsive respect might have been induced by the contemplation of their pride, so intense that it recognizes no superior, so inordinate that one is tempted to cry out, Here are the true republicans! or, indeed, Here are the only aristocrats! The rough fellow was shambling out to stop him with cordial insistence. An old crone, leaning on a stick in the door-way, called after her son, "Tell him ter 'light an' hitch, Peter, an' eat his supper along of we-uns." A young girl sitting on the rude porch, reeling yarn preparatory to weaving, glanced up, her sedate face suddenly illumined. Even the bare-footed, tow-headed children stood still in pleased expectation. Certainly John Cleaver's position in life was as false as it was painful. But the great human heart was here, untutored though it was, and roughly accoutred. And he himself had found that Greek and Latin do not altogether avail.

The little log-house was encompassed by the splendor of autumnal foliage. A purple haze clung to the distant mountains; every range and every remove had a new tone and a new delight. The gray crags, near at hand, stood out sharply against the crimson sky. And high above them all in its impressive isolation loomed Sunrise Rock, heedless of the transitory dying day and the ineffective coming night.

The girl's reel was still whirling; at regular intervals it ticked and told off another cut. Cleaver's eyes were fixed upon her as he declined Peter Teake's invitation. He had seen her often before, but he did not know as yet that that face would play a strange part in the little mental drama that was to lead to the making of his fortune. Her cheek was flushed; her delicate crimson lips were slightly parted; the live gold of the sunbeams touched the dead-yellow, lustreless masses of her hair. Here and there the clustering tendrils separated, as they hung about her shoulders, and disclosed bright glimpses of a red cotton kerchief knotted around her throat; she wore a dark blue homespun dress, and despite the coarse texture of her attire there was something of the mingled brilliance and softness of the autumn tints in her humble presence. Her eyes reminded him of those deep, limpid mountain streams with golden-brown pebbles at the bottom. Scornful as he was, he was only a man—and a young man. With a sudden impulse he leaned forward and handed her a pretty cluster of ferns and berries which he had gathered in the forest.

The reel stopped, the thread broke. She looked up, as she received mechanically his woodland treasure, with so astonished a face that it induced in this man of the world a sense of embarrassment.

"Air they good yerbs fur somethin'?" she asked.