But here is Lory. But again a digression—: In any account of the mountains one must remember that there are three distinct types: the people of the little villages, almost all remote from railroads; the itinerant lumber workers, woodchoppers and mill-hands who follow the fortunes of the portable sawmill as it exhausts first one remote cove then another; and the permanent farmers who have inherited their dwindling acres for generations. Yet at bottom the mountain mother is always the same.
Lory lives in a one-room lumber shack, and moves about once in three months. The walls are of planks with inch-wide cracks between them. There are two tiny windows with sliding wooden shutters and a door. All three must be closed when it is very cold. For better protection the walls are plastered over with newspapers, always peeling off and gnawed by woodrats. The plank floor does not prevent the red clay from oozing up. The shack is some fifteen feet square. It contains two stoves, two beds, two trunks, a table and two or three chairs. In it live six souls: two brothers, their wives and a baby apiece.
Lory is part Indian, one surmises from the straight hair dropping over her eyes and her slow squawlike movements. Her face is stolid except when it flashes into a smile of pure fun. Dark though she is her breast, bared from her dark purple dress, is statue white. She looks down on her first baby with a madonna's love and her words have in them a madonna's awe before a holy thing: "I ain't never a-goin' to whip him. He ain't never a-goin' to need it, for he won't get no meanness if I don't learn him none."
The setting is fairyland. Mountain folk go far toward living on beauty. The women may become too careless and inert even to scrape away the underbrush and plant a few sweet potatoes and cabbages. They may sit through lazy hours mumbling their snuff sticks, as does Mrs. Cole, while children and dogs and chickens swarm about them: but even Mrs. Cole can be roused by the call of beauty.
"My husband he's choppin' at the first clearin' two miles from here, and he's been plumb crazy over the yaller lady slippers up that-a-way. He's been sayin' I must take the two least kids, what ain't never seen sech, and go up there and see 'em 'fore they was gone. So yesterday we went. It sure was some climb over them old logs, but Gawd them lady slippers was worth it." I shall never understand the mystery of a mountain woman's hair. No matter how old, how worn or ill she may be, her hair is always a wonder of color and abundance.
Ma Duncan at fifty-five is straight and sure-footed as an Indian; tall and slim and dark as a gypsy, with a gypsy's passionate love of out-of-doors. Her neighbors send for Ma Duncan from far and near in time of need. Going forth from her big farm boarding-house on errands of mercy. Up wild ravines to tiny cabins that seem to bud out like lichens from grey boulders wet with mountain streams, over foot logs that sway crazily over rock creeks, through waist-high undergrowth Ma Duncan goes with her stout stick.
As we reach a little grassy clearing Ma Duncan drops down to stretch out happily: So as I can hear what the old earth has to say me... Reckon it says, "Quit your fussin' you old fool. Ain't God kept your gang a young uns all straight so fur? He ain't a-going back on you now, just because they're growd."
Presently Ma Duncan sits up, her hands about her knees, her hat fallen from her wealth of hair, her gun on the ground beside her—often she carries a gun in the hope of getting a gray squirrel to be done in inimitable brown cream gravy for breakfast.
She looks out sadly over much worn woodland, with the great stumps remaining:
"I wish you could have seen the great old trees that used to be here. If folks wasn't so mad for money they might be here and a preachin' the gospel of beauty. But folks is all for money and all for self. Some-day when they've cut off all the beauty that God planted to point us to him, folks will look round and wonder what us human bein's is here fur—"