Listen Here (15 page)

NARRATOR/PAT—Pat is forty or so. They are the same person and
two people play her.
Pat is caught in these stories. The Narrator has the perspective to tell them and to comment. The Narrator speaks with the audience.

REE/IRENE—They are the same person and one person plays them both. Ree, 60 or so, is a victim of Alzheimer's Disease. Irene is younger and healthy. Ree/Irene is the mother of Pat.

ROSE—is old. She is not steady but she does not shake, she stares at things to see but she does not squint. She needs more light, not less. She resists the easy sort of help that is an affront to her dignity. She's hard for the social graces age sometimes strip from people, but she is not mean. Rose is the mother of Irene and Helen, the ghost.

…

At the open.

Ree is onstage lost. After a moment, Pat enters holding a jacket.

PAT. Hey, buddy, I got your jacket.

REE. Am I going home, Olivia?

PAT. You are home.

REE. My mother lives at home.

PAT. You live with your husband. Remember good old Price?

REE.  I know Price, I married him. And there's a man who says he's Price but he isn't. He's one of the Carter boys but he's not the one I married. It's that other man…

PAT. Ree. Don't start.

REE. Price does whatever that other man says, he told Price not to let me have another dog…

PAT. We have to put your jacket on.

REE. And he told him not to let me drive and Price won't let me. I can drive. Oh Olivia, you don't know what it's like not to have a car. And he said I couldn't have a dog. He calls Price and Price just goes wherever that other man wants.

PAT. Ree! Your jacket.

REE. Oh.

PAT. OK. Other arm.

REE. Olivia, you've got to help me with my money.

PAT. Your arm buddy.

REE. Price takes it.

PAT. Price does not take your money.

REE. He spends it on that other man and they play golf and they won't take me home. Are you going to take me home?

PAT. Bend your arm!
(Pat gets the jacket on Ree.)
Good. We're going to see

your mother.

REE. My mother…

PAT. In Kingsport.

REE. My job is to take care of my mother and Price won't let me drive. (
Ree shucks the jacket as if it were connected to “that other man” and leaves it laying in the floor. Punctuate this change.
)

…

(
Narrator enters. Pat retrieves the jacket and puts it on Ree with no struggle at all.
) NARRATOR. (
To audience.
) This is Ree. She used to be Irene. Irene was my mother.

REE. (
To Pat.
) I don't have children. NARRATOR. She has Alzheimer's now.

REE. My brain is turning into jelly.

NARRATOR. This is her joke.

REE. Grape.

NARRATOR.  This is my grandmother, Rose.

REE. Rose is my mother, I take care of her.

NARRATOR.  Rose's mother was Patricia. I am named after Patricia. I am—

NARRATOR and PAT. We are Pat.

ROSE. You are Helen. I know Helen.

PAT. Helen is dead.

REE. This is Olivia.

ROSE. It is not.

NARRATOR and PAT. Pat.

REE. Olivia.

NARRATOR. There is a real Olivia, my great aunt Olivia. Ree confuses me with her. I am gone from Ree's memory but I fit somehow in her memory of Olivia. Tomorrow or next month, I will be somebody else. Ruth, Bernice, Elaine, who knows. Someday she will call me mother because her mother will be all she remembers. (
During the speech, Rose hunts for and finds a box of matches.
)

PAT. What was she like, Grandmother?

ROSE. Who?

PAT. Your mother.

ROSE. She was a mule. All she knew to do was work.

NARRATOR. Old age has fragile flesh that makes it hard to pull on shoes or unlock doors or stand up from sitting or bend over. (
Rose lights a match and looks for an electric socket with it.
) Old age hurts in the joints of bones. Old age cannot see except at a certain distance.

PAT. Grandmother, you light matches to plug the heater in?

ROSE. You have to be so careful of the juice.

NARRATOR. She used to be afraid electricity ran out of sockets if they

didn't have something in them. (
Rose is afire hazard with the match. Pat puts it out, takes the box of matches
.) Old age cannot or will not hear.

ROSE. What'd you say?

REE. Mother, this is Olivia.

ROSE. You mean Helen. What does she want?

PAT. I said you are confused sometimes.

ROSE. Your time's 'a comin'.

PAT. Is this a prophecy?

NARRATOR. She and her husband bought the second model T in Hancock County, Tennessee. She drove it down Clinch Mountain with no brakes but the hand brake. It was the only time she ever drove. They kept their horses to pull it with when it wouldn't start.

ROSE. Or Floyd ran it out of gas.

NARRATOR. She is old enough to have been old already when men landed on the moon.

ROSE. Old enough I shouldn't be livin' alone. Say that and see if it don't stick in your craw, Princess Helen.

…

PAT. (
To Helen, a ghost she cannot see
) “Too old to be living alone!” Is this what you hear?

NARRATOR. My aunt Helen has been in her grave 40 years. I speak to her ghost.

PAT. She gave you birth, she held you as you died. Are you back to take care of her? (
Ree sees a ghost
)

…

NARRATOR. Ree speaks to the ghost of Burkett.

REE. Ohhh…You pulled my ears, I loved you.

NARRATOR. Ree speaks with ghosts every chance she gets. Burkett is a favorite uncle also years dead. He pulled my ears too, said it made more room for brains.

REE. And Margaret! She's not bent. Margaret! PAT. Where, buddy?

REE. (
Points to a place.
) Margaret, you want to dress up paperdolls? (
A transformation, Ree becomes Irene.
)

…

PAT. Mother?

IRENE. Pat?

PAT. Which jacket do you want?

NARRATOR. Irene, my mother speaks of her favorite jacket.

IRENE. The one that makes me look like Grace Kelly, the one that was much too expensive so I charged it, the one that makes me feel as if I received a Nobel Peace Prize for last week in that library and I am on my way to meet the king of Sweden instead of being on my way to take the queen of East Center Street to the grocery store. (
She has it on. It is the jacket from the opening scene
.) This one. You should try it on sometime. (
A second transformation. Irene to Ree. There are not big physical changes, there is an uncertainty in her bearing and an edge in her voice that turns to panic.
)

NARRATOR. Ree, my patient, speaks of her clothes. REE. Where did I put…I swear people take things. Pat takes my clothes, I used to have good clothes, I had a jacket that I really liked and I now see her with it on like I wasn't even here and she just walks around in it. What have you done with my jacket? Why did you take it? (
Pat shows Ree the jacket she has on, then hugs Ree. A third transformation begins from the hug, Ree wants loose, Pat lets go. Ree struggles with the jacket. There are physical changes. Ree has a tilt, her eyes don't focus. She tries to get the jacket off. Same as the end of the opening scene
.) Olivia…

PAT. Leave it on, buddy, you'll need it. We're going to Kingsport.

…

ROSE. (
She was on this subject last time she spoke.
) I need somebody to live with me. Helen.

PAT. You don't want me, you don't like the way I live, Grandmother.

ROSE. You'll change.

PAT. When I change, I'll come live with you. ROSE. Lord, just take me home.

PAT. You are home.

ROSE. I want to go back to Kyles Ford. You reckon anybody's still alive?

(February 2, 1899–October 2, 1985)

Rebecca Caudill was a teacher, an editor, and an author of more than twenty books for young adults and children, many of which were set in Appalachia. Caudill was born in Harlan County, Kentucky, to Susan Smith Caudill and George W. Caudill, who were both teachers. Rebecca was educated at Wesleyan College (A.B., 1920) in Macon, Georgia, and Vanderbilt University (M.A., 1922). After graduate school, she traveled and taught in Brazil, Canada, Russia, and Europe. She met her husband, editor James S. Ayars, in Turkey. The couple was married in 1931 and made their home in Urbana, Illinois. They had two children.

Caudill was in her forties when her first book,
Barrie & Daughter
, was published. One of her early works,
Tree of Freedom
, was runner–up for the 1949 Newbery Award. Her Christmas story,
A Certain Small Shepherd
, was set near Pine Mountain, Kentucky, and was honored as an American Library Association Notable Book in 1965. Seven of her books were Junior Literary Guild selections.

“My roots are in Appalachia,” Caudill wrote. “Appalachia has…provided me with certain values in writing—simplicity, integrity, exactness. I write slowly, and by hand. I also do a great deal of rewriting. This exercise in revising and finding the exact word and phrase is one I greatly enjoy.”

Caudill's Quaker faith is a thread that runs through much of her work. Recurring themes are tolerance, the value of the individual, and a search for peaceful solutions to life's conflicts.

One of Caudill's most enduring books is
My Appalachia.
The nonfiction work couples Caudill's reminiscences of her childhood with social commentary on regional problems. In this excerpt, Caudill describes her return to her childhood home.

Books for children:
Somebody Go and Bang a Drum
(1974),
Did You Carry the Flag Today, Charley?
(1966),
A Pocketful of Cricket
(1964),
Far-Off Land
(1964),
The Best-Loved Doll
(1962),
Higgins and the Great Big Scare
(1960),
Schoolroom in the Parlor
(1959),
Time for Lissa
(1959),
Susan Cornish
(1955),
The House of the Fifers
(1954),
Saturday Cousins
(1953),
Up and Down the River
(1951),
Schoolhouse in the Woods
(1949),
Tree of Freedom
(1949),
Happy Little Family
(1947),
Barrie & Daughter
(1943).
Nonfiction:
My Appalachia: A Reminiscence
(1966).
Essay:
“A Child and His Books,”
PTA Magazine
64 (February 1970), 28–29.
Poetry:
Come Along
(1963).

Kate Black, “Untapped Resources in the Appalachian Collection: Rebecca Caudill's Papers,”
The Kentucky Review
8:3 (autumn 1988), 73–75.
Contemporary Authors
, Vols. 5–6, 83.
Contemporary Authors
, Vol. 117, 76.
Something About the Author
, Vol. 1, 50–52.
Something About the Author
, Vol. 44, 61.

On a summer Sunday morning in 1938 in Harrodsburg, Kentucky, where I had been doing historical research, I glanced idly at the eastern section of a road map of Kentucky.

“Poor Fork!” I thought. “While I'm so near, why not go back to Poor Fork?”

Since I did not need to hurry home, I would go to see the place of my birth and early childhood.

Remembering vividly that other summer morning when our family had set out so blithely across Big Black Mountain, I searched the map for Poor Fork, but in vain. Never mind, I decided recklessly. It had to be there, and it was time I went back.

At the bus station, when I asked for a ticket to Poor Fork, the agent eyed me quizzically between the bars of the window separating us.

“Poor Fork, ma'am? Poor Fork's gone,” he said. “Been gone a long time.”

“Where did it go?” I asked.

“You ever been there?”

“Once.” Then, to keep him from saying it, I added, “A long time ago.”

“Well,” he said, “if you're still a thinkin of it as Poor Fork, you're in for a shock when you see it. Gone up in the world. Got a railroad through there and ever'thing. Changed its name to Cumberland. Them big coal mines in Harlan County, they've changed ever'thing. Anyway, can't sell you a ticket to Cumberland. Bus don't go there. Can sell you a ticket to Harlan.”

Harlan! The word itself frightened me. I could think nothing good of Harlan. I had never even been there, I recalled. Moreover, so many years had passed since we had moved away from Harlan County that I wasn't sure who of my relatives, if any (they would be on my mother's side) still lived there.

“You want a ticket to Harlan?” the agent prodded me.

“All right,” I said, feeling this trip was not turning out to be the carefree adventure I had thought I was planning, “give me a ticket to Harlan.”

The bus had no sooner started rolling between the pampered, undulating fields around Harrodsburg than my mind began reviewing all I knew about the trouble in the Harlan County coal fields.

Miles later, as the bus labored up steep slopes into the high mountains, I peered out the window. There stood the massive ranges, majestic and ongoing, dressed in the dark lusterless green of midsummer. Were the trees thinner on the high slopes? Some slopes, I noticed, were almost denuded of large trees and were covered instead with scrubby second growth.

The rivers beside the highway seemed much narrower and shallower than I remembered them. They were muddy, too, though I remembered them as running clear and clean. I recalled the first time I had gone home from college and had found the town near which I then lived looking only half as big as I had remembered it, the streets much narrower, the houses not grand at all but quite ordinary. Could it be, I wondered, that childhood memories are always tinged with romance—that nothing looked at through mature eyes can ever equal in grandeur one's childhood impressions?

I looked out the bus window again. This time I looked especially for the tulip poplar trees. In my childhood I had always thought of the tulip poplars as being the most queenly of trees because they stood so erect and shapely among the gnarled oaks, the crooked wild cherry trees, and the tattered and sprawling sycamores. Even in late fall, when most of the leaves on the mountainside forest had fallen, the poplars were still etched in gold by the few remaining leaves outlining their graceful shapes. But something, I saw, had happened to the poplars. I was not imagining now. The tall poplars I had known were gone from the lower slopes. I knew the chestnut trees had died of a blight, but I had not heard that a blight had attacked the poplars. I was to learn that there are other blights than natural ones, and that no blight is so deadly as that conceived in the calloused human mind.

My spirits were steadily sinking when the driver pulled up to a dirt road and opened the door of the bus. An elderly woman collected her bundles and paper pokes and started down the aisle. As she reached the door, she turned, and, including every passenger in her backward look, said invitingly, “You folks better come home with me for dinner.”

In that instant time turned backward straight to my childhood in Poor Fork. How long had it been since I had been treated to openhanded, open-hearted, innate courtesy such as this old woman of the mountains was proffering? Not since I had left Poor Fork.

Like a tree in springtime when the sap begins to rise, I felt renewed and warmed and nourished, as if I had actually sat at the old woman's dinner table and partaken of her corn pone and beans. The courtesy and kindness and the helpful ways of people among whom I had lived for a few early years, and had taken for granted at the time, made me forget momentarily the ugly face that in my mind Harlan County now wore. Not everything good and lovely in these people had been destroyed, I contented myself. The certainty buoyed me up.

An hour later the bus driver pulled up in front of a drugstore and called out “Harlan!” I got off the bus and looked around me. The town was as quiet as if it were napping on a lazy summer afternoon. Only a few persons were on the streets. Three men sat on a bench in front of the drugstore, whittling and telling tales.

I went into the drugstore and inquired of the druggist if he knew Conway Smith, a cousin of mine. Yes, said he, he knew him well, and he would put me in touch with him on the telephone.

Shortly thereafter Conway arrived to take me to his house. Obviously the grapevine, originating in the drugstore, went to work, and that evening Conway's house was filled with people. Not only is blood relationship a strong tie in the mountains. Mountain origin itself admits into a close-knit circle all who are mountain born. Until late in the evening we sat talking. Among those present, one had gone to school to my father; another, the son of John Yearey, the other Democrat in our voting precinct at Poor Fork, recalled the rugged times our fathers had had on election days; another recalled our house as the meeting place for all who enjoyed singing to the accompaniment of my mother's little organ.

As we talked leisurely, their soft quiet mountain speech fell on my ears like a lullaby, and their flavorsome mountain words and phrases awoke in me memories of things I had not thought of in years. All about me were warmth and kindness. I began to wonder if the accounts I had read of Harlan County lawlessness could be true.

“What about all the trouble in the Harlan County mines a few years ago?” I asked.

“Oh, it was pretty rough around here for a while,” someone said, “especially when all those meddlers from the outside came in here to push us around.”

“And you didn't get involved?” I asked, remembering all the influential men who had turned down Dreiser's invitation to involve themselves.

“Oh, no, we weren't involved in any way,” they assured me. “So long as nobody bothered us, we didn't bother anybody.”

As I lay in bed in my cousin's house that night, I wondered who in the human race is an outsider, and when is a person concerned for human suffering a meddler; wondered if I would have had the courage to involve myself on behalf of free speech and free assembly in Harlan County in 1931; wondered if I would have helped to feed the miners in spite of threats; wondered if I had within me the spirit of reconciliation that the Quakers had within them.

But things were different now, I could see. World War II was in the making. Already the hot winds of coming holocaust were blowing across Europe. Soon would come the bang. Operators and miners were tooling up for the boom.

As I lay and wondered, I also made a discovery. The friends who had filled my cousin's house that evening had not come out of mere curiosity to see one who, starting life among them, had gone over the high rim of the mountains and out into the world. They had come out of affection and respect to see the daughter of George and Susan Caudill.