Gena of the Appalachians

by Clarence Monroe Wallin

But true to his promise, Paul Waffington journeyed back to the hills and sought her mountain home. He turned from the deserted home and went into the village and learned the truth. The villagers told him of the mother’s death and the subsequent going away of the brothers to the far west, in quest of fortune and fame, leaving behind them the baby of the nest, Gena, aged thirteen, bound under the roof of old Jase Dillenburger, to wear her little body away over the rocks and hills, toiling for him. He met her at the Sunday-school on the following Sunday, and went with her to the cabin on the mountainside, and was introduced to her savage foster-father, old Jase. After a brief visit, he presented the promised book, “Captain January,” and departed.

“Good-bye,” he said to Jase Dillenburger. “A fine little soul is your adopted daughter, and I know that you appreciate your position to her. Good-bye, Gena. Strive to always keep yourself as sweet as you now are, and I am sure that it will bring happiness to all. Good-bye.”

The long summer months had passed away since he who had promised to befriend her had taken his departure from the cabin on the mountain, and the succeeding days brought her only toil and abuse. Through the heat of the summer she had been compelled to go to the field with the others, and work with the hoe. Then, when summer was over, there were scores of unfinished tasks in the cabin waiting for her tired hands.

She sits tonight in the cabin by the side of old Jase’s portly wife, darning her part of the huge pile of yarn socks that lay before them. The light by which she works is not an electric burner,—not even the common brass lamp of years ago, but rather a faint light, coming from the end of a strip of cloth immersed in a spoonful of grease. Even though the light is faint and does flicker, the golden head looks shapely and the neck and eyes are beautiful. Long before ten o’clock the short little back grows tired, and the big, blue eyes grow heavy, but she works on with never an outward sign of fatigue. Whenever the last sock is darned, then, perhaps, she will be allowed to go to her hard bed. But her tired limbs are hardly relaxed in sleep until the thundering voice of old Jase commands her to get up.

“Git up, an’ git about! The clock’s struck four an’ no fires built, nor nothin’ done. You build the big fire fust, ’fore you go to the cookin’! An’ mind thet you put the back log on right, too, or I’ll tan you up when I git up. Move about now!” And thus, being driven by a hard and uncompromising hand through such drudgery as this, the tender and delicate hands were becoming thin and coarse, the pretty little form twisted and dwarfed, and the rosy-cheeked face growing pale and pinched.

Gena Filson had good blood in her veins. Joseph Filson had been born in the mountains and his father before him. But old Granny Green knew all the facts of how it came about, that Joseph Filson brought his wife into the mountains from the Pennsylvania settlements in those early days. Before Granny Green died, she had taken the Allisons into her confidence and told them the true story of the mother of Gena Filson. When Joseph Filson was young, a drover had employed him as a helper with the cattle on the long trips that were made to the markets of Pennsylvania. In the third year of Joseph Filson’s drovership, he brought back with him into the mountains his young bride, “a teacher from the Pennsylvania settlements,” as he announced to his friends.

For the first few years of her married life the wife of Joseph Filson was happy. Then her life narrowed down and became bound by the mountain fastnesses, but never a murmur from her. Years went by and Joseph yielded to temptation, but she was not too harsh. He went to prison at last, but she bore up under it for the family’s sake. But in the end, grief overcame her, and tenderly she was laid to rest in the chestnut grove along by the side of the mountaineer whose name she bore.

In the bright afternoon sunshine Gena Filson sits in the door of the cabin on the mountainside, and looks off over the thousands of peaks and wonders what will be the end of her. Hard labor is driving the red from her cheeks. She looks at her hands and notes the thinness and the corns in her palms. If she were only away over on the other side of that great peak over there, she thought! Oh, it would seem rest to her! Who lives over there, she knows not. But just to be away, to get away from the hard knocks of old Jase, would be rest to her weary limbs! But the hawk-eye of old Jase was always upon her. He had lately bound her world by the yard fence, which was some thirty feet square, unless she was sent into the field for something, and then always with another. Twice she had asked if she might visit her mother’s grave on a Sunday afternoon, and received all but a flogging for the asking.

“Go to your mammy’s grave? I’ll go ye to somebody’s grave. You let the ded alone. Nobody is goin’ to bother yer mammy’s grave. We got no time to spendin’ on ded uns. It’s hard for us to keep the livin’ agoin’. My mammy never had a flower on her grave, an’ I haint seed it in twenty year’. Your mammy warn’t no better than my mammy wuz, if she did come frum Pinsilvaney. I’m your boss now. You git about pullin’ weeds down thar in the garden or sumthin’. An’ ef I hear of ye aspeakin’ of sich foolin’ agin, I’m agoin’ to tan ye up,” and with a shake of his huge fist old Jase turned and went down the mountainside.

After the old mountaineer had gone, she ventured to go out to the yard fence and look down the mountainside towards the village of Blood Camp. It was now late in the Sunday afternoon, and she saw the people returning to their homes from the little Sunday-school that Paul Waffington had organized two years before. Her young heart was full now at the sight of the Sunday-school scholars. How she longed to be with them. True, old Jase had permitted her to attend for a time. But then she came home one day with Paul Waffington with her, and the old man had been miserably persecuted for an hour or more by the presence of a good man in his house. Since that time old Jase had told her that it was best for her to stay near him, and that he himself didn’t go to “sich doing’s as Sunday-skules.”