Listen Here (47 page)

(February 26, 1948–)

Novelist Sharyn McCrumb grew up in Burlington, North Carolina, but hearing tales of her pioneer ancestors from her father, she became enamored with mountain culture at a young age. “It's in the blood,” she says, noting that her father's family settled in western North Carolina in the 1790s. “I found that all the tales and memories of substance come from that side of the family.”

McCrumb graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and received an M.A. in English from Virginia Tech in 1985. She has worked as a newspaper editor and a journalism instructor, but has been a full-time writer and lecturer since 1988. She lives on an estate near the Appalachian Trail in the Virginia Blue Ridge.

“My books are like Appalachian quilts,” says McCrumb. “I take brightly colored scraps of legends, fragments of rural life and local tragedy, and I piece them together into a complex whole that tells not only a story, but also a deeper truth about the culture of the mountain South.”

McCrumb's Ballad Novels are a highly acclaimed series set in fictional Wake County, Tennessee. Despite a fictionalized setting, the books explore the very real issues facing contemporary residents of Appalachia: pollution, the breakdown of the region's traditional culture, the loss of farmland to strip development, the moral implications of the death penalty.

Her work has appeared on the
New York Times
Best-Seller List and has received numerous awards, including Appalachian Writer of the Year in 1999, the Chaffin Award, the Plattner Award, Best Appalachian Novel in 1983 and 1992, and a citation for Outstanding Contribution to Appalachian Literature in 1997. “McCrumb writes with quiet fire and maybe a little mountain magic,” says a
New York Times
reviewer. “Like every good storyteller, she has the Sight.”

In this excerpt from
The Songcatcher
, McCrumb introduces her character Baird Christopher, who runs an inn near the Appalachian Trail in North Carolina and calls himself a “Cosmic Possum.” McCrumb credits East Tennessee writer Jane Hicks with coining the term “Cosmic Possum” to describe “the child who was born to the first generation out of the holler or off the ridge. Grew up in touch with those past generations who settled these mountains…learned the old songs, the old stories, knew how to hand-tie tobacco and kill hogs, but he did not live in that world. He may eat penne pasta instead of fatback and vacation in Aruba instead of Gatlinburg…. He lives in the modern world, but he knows what has been lost.”

Novels (Ballad Series):
Ghost Riders
(2003)
The Songcatcher
(2001),
The Ballad of Frankie Silver
(1998),
The Rosewood Casket
(1996),
She Walks These Hills
(1994),
The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter
(1992),
If Ever I Return, Pretty Peggy-O
(1990).
Novels (Elizabeth MacPherson Series):
If I'd Killed Him When I Met Him
(1995),
MacPherson's Lament
(1992),
Missing Susan
(1991),
Highland Laddie Gone
(1991),
The Windsor Knot
(1990),
Lovely in Her Bones
(1990),
Sick of Shadows
(1989),
Paying the Piper
(1988).
Novels 0ay Omega Series):
Bimbos of the Death Sun
(1997),
Zombies of the Gene Pool
(1992).
Short stories:
Foggy Mountain Breakdown
(1997).
Autobiographical essay:
“Keepers of the Legends” in
Bloodroot
(1998), ed. Joyce Dyer.

Ethan Fischer, “Highland Mastery: Interview with Sharyn McCrumb,”
Antietam Review
20 (2000), 39–42. David Hunter, “Sharyn McCrumb,”
New Millennium Writings
2:1, 10–14.
From a Race of Storytellers: Essays on the Ballad Novels of Sharyn McCrumb
(forthcoming) Kimberly H. Kidd, ed. Pamela Murray Winters, “A Trip to Appalachia: Sharyn McCrumb”
Dirty Linen
76 (June–July 1998), 15.

from Chapter 5

On the North Carolina side of the mountain, Baird Christopher was shelling peas and shucking corn for a vegetarian supper for twenty.

The Cosmic Possum Hikers Hostel was a white Victorian mansion dating from the late nineteenth century. Three miles from the Tennessee state line and a mile outside town, the house stood on a hillock overlooking the French Broad River, surrounded by manicured lawns and tall rhododendron bushes, and shaded by oaks and poplars. The mountain mansion had been built in the 1870s when the western North Carolina highlands became fashionable for summer vacationing, because, in a world without air-conditioning, the cool mountain air made southern summers tolerable. When the last of the original owners' family had died or moved out of the country, the farmland was sold at auction, and Baird Christopher bought the remaining acre of land and the big white house. Then, with the carpentry skills he had perfected in the Peace Corps, he set about renovating the elegant old mansion into a dormitory for transient Trail folk. Wallboard partitions split the spacious upstairs bedrooms into two smaller bedrooms, and the chestnut-paneled dining room with its bronze chandelier and ten-foot ceiling was now crammed with homemade pine tables and metal folding chairs set close together to accommodate the twenty or thirty hikers who would turn up for dinner.

Baird usually let one of the hikers do the kitchen cutwork in exchange for a meal, but when he had asked around at lunch today no one seemed to need a free dinner bad enough to work for it, so Baird was doing his own culinary prep work. He took care to station himself in the most conspicuous spot in the garden, however, and he kept another chair close at hand in case a volunteer happened along. Baird wasn't much on chopping vegetables, but he was glad of an excuse to sit out in the shade of the oaks and watch the world go by—migrating monarch butterflies or investment bankers in hiking boots: it was all one to him. With the white plastic colander balanced on his knees, Baird Christopher snapped open pea pods to the steady beat of a tune in his head.

“Need any help?”

A stout middle-aged man with a red face and a Cornell sweatshirt stood over him, glistening with sweat. “This is the hostel, isn't it?” he asked, wiping his forehead with his sleeve. “That potato farmer in the old green truck said it was.”

“Potato farmer?”

“Yeah. Guy in overalls hauling bushel baskets of potatoes in bed of his pickup. He offered me a ride, but I told him I just needed directions to a place to stay. Said to tell you hello. Gordon Somebody, I think he said.”

“Oh,
Gordon
” said Baird with bemused smile. “Potato farmer in an old green truck. Right. I'll tell him you said so. He'll be tickled to death.” He chuckled. “
Potato farmer
.”

“Well, weren't they potatoes? Or yams, maybe?”

“Well, they might have been yams, but old Gordon is no potato farmer. He's a cardiologist from Charlotte. Likes to come up here to his summer place and play farmer whenever we can. He'll be thrilled that you mistook him for the genuine article. It'll make his day. Now, what can I do for you?”

The man mopped his face with a grubby bandana. “I need a bath. Can I get a room for tonight?”

Baird nodded. “Welcome to the Cosmic Possum Hostel,” he said. “I'm just getting the vegetables ready for tonight's dinner. You can help if you're so inclined.” He removed the paper bag of corn from the second lawn chair and indicated that the man could sit down. “I'm Baird Christopher. I run this place.”

“By yourself?”

“More or less. Every so often one of the Trail puppies will take a break for a couple of weeks or months, either to recuperate from an injury or to earn some cash to take them the rest of the way, and I give them a job helping out around the place, but sooner or later, everybody but me moves along. You should have been here
last
month: The guy working here had been trained as a chef. Used to work at the Four Seasons. He headed out when the weather broke. While it lasted, though, we were eating like kings around here. He even made us call the grits
polenta
.”

The hiker sat down in the extra lawn chair, loosened his boot laces, and sighed. “Feels good to sit,” he said. “I'm Stan, but my Trail name is Eeyore. Nice place,” he added, looking approvingly at the gingerbread trim on the covered porch, wreathed by the branches of shade trees. He wasn't sure what kind of trees they were. Trees had never played a big part in Stan's life up until now, but in his last few weeks on the Trail he had begun to feel they were old friends. “It's peaceful here.”

Baird held a pea pod up to the light and inspected it with the eye of an artist. “There's a serenity about the whole mechanical process of opening pea pods, you know? I was watching the butterflies a little while ago, and I thought:
They know what it's like to be inside a pod, only no one helps them break out. They have to do it on their own.
Now, with people, some folks break their own pods, and some have to be broken out by others, but it doesn't matter which way you're set free. The important thing is that you emerge—get out there into the great world and seek your destiny.”

The man blinked. He looked from the colander of peas to the amiable face of his host and back again. After a moment's pause he ventured a guess: “Are you a poet?”

Baird smiled. “Well, we're all poets, aren't we?”

Eeyore shrugged. “I'm a mechanical engineer.”

“Yeah,”said Baird, “but the way I see it, just planting those hiking boots of yours on the Trail is a poem to the unspoiled glory of nature. Where are you headed, friend?”

“All the way.” Eeyore's face shone with pride. “This is my first time on the southern end of the Trail. I've done short hikes in New England for years now, but this time I'm going to try to make it all the way from Springer to Katahdin.”

“Georgia to Maine. Sounds like you're breaking out of the pod, friend.” Baird dumped another handful of peas to the strainer. “More power to you.”

“Ever hiked it yourself?”

Baird nodded. “Bits and pieces. Mostly North Carolina and Tennessee, and up into Virginia. Pennsylvania is tough going—rocky and steep. Mostly it's a question of time for me—I can't find anybody who'll stay and look after this place for six months while I take off to hike. But you know what Milton said:
They also serve who only stand and wait
.”

The stockbroker, to whom English Literature was a never-opened book, nodded politely, wondering if Milton was another local doctor turned potato farmer. He said, “Hiking the Trail is a great experience. I've already lost eighteen pounds. Feel better than I have in years.”

Baird smiled and went on shelling peas. He had this conversation three times a week, but with every hiker who told him this he tried to share the joy of it as if he was hearing it for the first time. “It's a magical place,” he said. “The Trail through these eastern mountains follows a chain of a green mineral called serpentine that leads from Alabama all the way to New Brunswick, Canada. The chain breaks off at the Atlantic coast, skips the ocean, and then picks up again in Ireland and snakes it way through Cornwall, Wales, and Scotland, till it finally ends in the Arctic Circle. These mountains here once fit on to the tail end of the mountains over there like pieces of a giant continental jigsaw puzzle. The chain of serpentine is a remnant of that togetherness, and it still links us to the mountains of Celtic Britain, where most of our ancestors came from when they settled here.
Will the circle be unbroken
.”

“Pretty country,” Eeyore said. “Great views. I hope my photos turn out.”

“Oh, this country is more than pretty. It's elemental. You know, a hiker from Queensland once told me that the aborigine people of Australia believe that their ancestors sang the world into being, and that there are special song paths that those first people took while they were doing it. Singing up the world from out of nothingness. That hiker said he thought this trail was one of them. That wouldn't surprise me at all. If this was one of the creation roads.
A song path
.”

Eeyore shrugged. “I didn't think the AT was that old,” he said carefully. “Government built it. Maybe forty years ago, something like that?”

“Yes, that's the official word on it, but parts of it follow a much older trail called the Warriors Path. The Indians made that one centuries ago, and they used it for everything from raids on other tribes to trading expeditions.” Baird smiled. “And before that the Ice Age animals made trails over the mountains to the salt pools. Who knows how far back this northbound path stretches? All the way to the serpentine chain, I reckon—and that would make it 250 million years old.”

“Interesting part of the country. Lots of stories.”

“Lots of Celtic bloodlines in the people here. Stories is what we do.”

“Well, I'll be interested to hear some stories. This is my first visit to
Appa-lay-chia.
”

Baird said gently, “Well, folks in these parts call it
Appa-latch-a
.”

Eeyore shrugged, as if the information did not interest him. “In New York we say
Appa-lay-chia
.”

Baird had this conversation rather often, too, and in this round he was less inclined to be charitable. The statement
We say it that way back home
sounded like a reasonable argument unless you realized that it was not a privilege Easterners granted to anyone other than themselves. If a Texan visiting New York pronounced “Houston Street” the same way that Texans pronounce the name of their city
back home
, he would be instantly corrected by a New Yorker, and probably derided for his provincial ignorance. But here in rural America, the privilege of local pronunciation was revoked. Here, if there was any difference of opinion about a pronunciation, Eastern urbanites felt that their way was the correct one, or at least an equally acceptable option. One of Baird Christopher's missions in life was to set arrogant tourists straight about matters like this.

“You know,” he said to Eeyore, gearing up to his lecture in genial conversational tones. “Over in Northern Ireland once I visited a beautiful walled city that lies east of Donegal and west of Belfast. Now, for the last thousand years or so the Irish people who built that city have called it
Derry
, a name from
darach
, which is the Gaelic word for ‘oak tree.' But the British, who conquered Ireland a few hundred years back, they refer to that same city as
Londonderry.
One place: two names.

“If you go to Ireland, and ask for directions to that city, you can call it by either name you choose. Whichever name you say, folks will know where it is you're headed and mostly likely they'll help you get there. But you need to understand this: When you choose what name you call that city—
Derry
or
Londonderry
—you are making a
political
decision. You are telling the people you're talking to which side you are on, what cultural values you hold, and maybe even your religious preference. You are telling some people that they can trust you and other people that they can't. All in one word. One word with a load of signifiers built right in.

“Now, I reckon
Appalachia
is a word like that. The way people say it tells us a lot about how they think about us. When we hear somebody say
Appa-lay-chia
, we know right away that the person we're listening to is not on our side, and we hear a whole lot of cultural nuances about stereotyping and condescension and ethnic bigotry, just built right in. So you go on and call this place
Appa-lay-chia
if you want to. But you need to know that by doing that you have made a po-li-ti-cal decision, and you'd better be prepared to live with the consequences. Friend.”

Eeyore blinked at him and took a deep breath.
“Ap-pa…latch-ah?”
he said.

“That's right,” said Baird. “Appa-latch-ah. Say it a time or two and you'll get the hang of it. Pretty soon any other way of saying it will grate on your ears.”

Another long pause. Eeyore peered at his smiling host, who had gone back to shelling peas and humming an Irish dance tune. “Who
are
you?”

Baird Christopher smiled. “Why, I'm a Cosmic Possum.”