Listen Here (64 page)

(June 12, 1945–)

Poet Betsy Sholl grew up in Brick Town, New Jersey, and was educated at Bucknell University (B.A.,1967), University of Rochester (M.A., 1969), and Vermont College (M.F.A., 1989). In 1976 she moved from Boston to a double-wide trailer on Clinch Haven farm near Big Stone Gap, Virginia, when her husband took a job as a probation officer in Wise County, Virginia. Although her sojourn in Appalachia lasted only seven years, she says the experience was profoundly enriching, both personally and poetically.

“Any growth I've experienced since that time has occurred only because those years prepared me, gave me a sense of depth, an emotional life in three dimensions, rather than the shallow propped-up feelings I experienced in the city.”

She is the author of several books of poetry, including
Appalachian Winter
, published in 1978. Her collection,
The Red Line
, won the 1991 Associated Writing Programs' award series, and
Don't Explain
won the University of Wisconsin's 1997 Felix Pollack Prize for Poetry. She has been nominated for several Pushcart Prizes and has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Her poems have appeared in a variety of publications, including
Ploughshares, Massachusetts Review
, and
Indiana Review.

She currently lives in Portland, Maine, and teaches at the University of Southern Maine. She is also on the poetry faculty for Vermont College's M.F.A program. She and her husband, Doug Sholl, a family therapist, have two children.

Poetry:
Don't Explain
(1997),
The Red Line
(1992),
Rooms Overhead
(1986),
Appalachian Winter
(1978),
Changing Faces
(1974).
Chapbooks:
Coastal Bop
(2001),
Pick a Card
(1991).
Autobiographical essay:
“Big Stone Gap,” in
Bloodroot
( 1998), ed. Joyce Dyer, 254–60.

Joyce Dyer, “Betsy Sholl,” in
Bloodroot
, 251. Richard Jackson, “The Place of the Poet, the Poet's Place: An Interview with Betsy Sholl,” in
Her Words
(2002), ed. Felicia Mitchell, 266–73.

from
Appalachian Winter
(1978)

1

I sit in darkness
beside the stove, rocking

like Gretel come back alone
to the old, tight place—
away from her father and brother now,
lonely as the witch herself.

I stoke the fire.

When I close my eyes
the forest returns. Flickers of trail
disappear like snakes under rocks,
ledges drop sudden as guillotines.

I see that others who came here before me
have left no more of themselves than
pieces of chimney crumbling like bread.

2

The change I want I cannot name—
perhaps the ability to live anywhere
not fearing the little shacks
scattered throughout the hollows
where women stare, grim with silence,
growing thinner each year.

I have crawled through briars
until I cannot recognize
the woman on my face.

I have cut stems, set stalks on fire.
Nights I dream of luring children
to join me.

3

These mountains were opened by men
unashamed of slaughter, mapped
by the crisscrossing of bootleggers.
Now night after night, they are held in place
by women left alone, aging too quickly in shacks,
their shotguns pointed at shadows.

Something rustles at my window.

Hansel? Hansel?
I rummage the sheets all night.

In the morning I pull out the vines
that brush and scrape against the glass.
I sift dirt through my fingers.
Learn not to hate myself.

Hansel. Hansel.
I continue
to speak out loud for months.

4

When our new mother moved in
she stood in the doorway
staring at the forest that held her
like a madwoman screaming in the attic.
Her face was so hard, Hansel and I
broke just looking at her.

We took off through the flickering of leaves.

At each cabin we came to
she appeared before us, grim, hungry.

Father was a woodsman. He taught us
to cut down everything in our paths
till we were left standing in a clearing.

5

Later, we played house. Hansel deepened
his voice and disappeared through the trees.
He left me raising mine
to screech at our imaginary children
till my face was stiff.

Once I thought I could live forever
tip-toeing on the edge of his shadow.
I tried to burn down the woods for him.

Now I tie bright cloth to branches,
hike in further and further.

Hansel! Do you hear me? I walk alone.
The bushes do not jump out and grab.
I shed layers of anger and fear
as easily as leaves falling
first from the maples on the ridge,
then in flame-colored waves moving down.

6

The sun rises. The ridge
separates itself from the sky,
comes forward with what scant color
the cold has left it.

I see that land has tides.
Our mother sank. The dirt closed over her.
But the waves of disturbance
did not spread out and fade as on water.

Father was the last part of her
I clung to—last root of the pain
that swelled within her, crying
for a life of its own.
I cannot go home.

7

I cut, trowel,
burn my roots like fuses.
I belong in this strip-mined land.

Perhaps it's her death I fear—
that body shriveling before me.

I turned and ran. The flames grew
smaller through the leaves.

Her voice cracked like dry wood.
It hissed, licked through my thoughts.

Now it is gone, that hunger
scorching the tree limbs black.

I heat my oven with sticks.
It is not so hard after all
to keep from burning myself,
to forgive the lonely women
whose love curdled inside me.

As the day warms, I open the house
and step outdoors. Rocking on this porch
rooted in mountains, I stare across the ridge
singing the old hymns I've learned here,
words that say there is nothing to fear.

(October 26, 1934–)

Ellen Harvey Showell was born in Kingsport, Tennessee, and grew up in Monroe and Greenbrier counties in West Virginia. The daughter of a teacher, Elizabeth Hudson Harvey, and a cabinet maker, Clarence Ballard Harvey, she married John S. Showell and has one son, Michael, who publishes the
Mountain Messenger
, a weekly newspaper in Lewisburg, West Virginia.

After graduating with a B.A. from Berea College in Kentucky in 1957, she moved several years later to Washington, D.C., and worked as an advertising and a public relations writer. Holding jobs in a housing market research company and in the Federal Office of Economic Opportunity and the Community Action Agency, she spent the turbulent 1960s in Washington, during the War on Poverty, as a feature story writer for the VISTA program from 1963 until 1971.

Known primarily for her writing for children, she began her career as a freelance writer in 1971. Her writing includes award-winning novels, plays, musical plays, screenplays, and chapter books. Her play about the death penalty,
The Executioners
, has been performed by church and community groups. She received the South Carolina Children's Book Award for
The Ghost of Tillie Jean Cassaway
, and a Parents' Choice Award for Literature for
Cecelia and the Blue Mountain Boy.
For her first nonfiction book,
From Indian Corn to Outer Space: Women Invent in America
, she received recognition from the Women's National Book Association. She says she “finds inspiration in her West Virginia childhood” for her stories “of crooked rivers, dark woods and song.”

Her chapter book,
Our Mountain
, includes a note on its title page explaining the story is “as told by Jimmy and Corey Allder to Ellen Harvey Showell.” These two young brothers describe for the author their home, family, and favorite pastimes.

Books for children:
The Trickster Ghost
(1992),
Our Mountain
(1991),
Cecelia and the Blue Mountain Boy
(1983),
The Ghost of Tillie Jean Cassaway
(1978).
Plays:
The Executioners, Cecelia and the Blue Mountain Boy, Twiddelaxadaffy.
Nonfiction:
From Indian Corn to Outer Space: Women Invent in America
, with Fred M.B. Amram (1995).

Contemporary Authors
(1980), Vols. 85–88, 538.
Something About the Author
(1983), Vol. 33, 210.

What Is a Mountain?

When you are far away, our mountain looks like a big round hill covered with trees. But if you climb up, it changes. Our mountain goes up and down and up again and there are high flat parts and ridges and hollows, which are little valleys. You can be in a fairly open and level place, and come to a knob. That is a rounded top of a hill that usually is cleared off. Big knobs always have snow on them in the winter. Little knobs have old structures on them that people built so they wouldn't be surprised by Indians.

Creeks start up high in the mountain and travel down through the forest to the river. They are crooked. Fields and tall grass and farms are on the part of our mountain that's more level. Electric and telephone lines come up through cleared passageways in the woods. The road that goes up to our house is winding and gravelly. There is not very much traffic.

About thirty families live on our mountain. Most people don't live close together, but they are almost all friendly.

We were with some friends in town, at the softball field. Nothing was going on, so we went over to a junkyard where there was a boxcar that used to be part of a train. We were sitting there talking when all of a sudden a police car pulled up. A police lady came toward us. A little girl who was with us started to cry for her mother. The police lady said, “I won't hurt you.” She explained to us that people who lived in a nearby trailer said that we were vandalizing city property. We hadn't done anything wrong. She said, “You aren't supposed to be playing here. You could get hurt.” So we ended up going back to the softball field and getting bored.

Another time in town we were at Old Stone Presbyterian Church for a pancake supper. We had finished our pancakes, so we went outside in the cemetery. Pinecones were all over the ground. We started throwing them at each other. A pinecone almost hit a car that was driving by. The car backed up. The driver got out. She said to me, “What's your name?”

“Jimmy.”

“What's your last name?”

“Allder.”

“What's your daddy's name?”

“Bob.”

“What's his last name?”

“Allder,”

She said, “Your parents will be hearing from me!” They haven't, though.

A long time ago people who made moonshine hid out on our mountain.
I bet we could, too, if we ever have to.

Another day, Corey and I, our cousin Timmy, and Sheba started from our house to go on a hike to the river and have a picnic. We usually go by our creek, but this time we walked through the alfalfa field, then down the mountain through the woods.

We crawled through a thicket of rhododendron and came out on a cliff. We could see the river and far down the Greenbrier Valley. Below us were some houses, and we could see a bridge way upstream.

The only way to get down from there was to slide on a bank of shale rock, so we did. At the bottom, the bank leveled off and sloped into the river. We sat there and ate crackers and cheese.

We began walking upstream, along the trail where the old railroad tracks used to be. We passed where our creek comes down. After a while, we saw some houses on the other side of the river. A woman called to us. “What are you boys doing over there?”

“We came from up on the mountain,” we called back. “Where are we and what time is it?”

“Spring Creek Station,” she said. “It's near two o'clock!” She told us that the bridge we could see was an old railroad bridge that goes across Spring Creek, not the river. We figured we'd better go back up the mountain by following our creek through the woods.

Part of the way you can walk alongside our creek on a path. Part of the way the bank is too steep and rough, and you have to walk in the creek by stepping on rocks. Sheba walks right in the water. There are many places in the creek where water falls over rocks into little scooped-out areas and makes pools. We decided to take a little bath in one pool because we had dirt on us and blood from cuts from the briers. The water was pretty cold.

We put our socks and shoes back on and climbed on up. Some of the pools we came to were muddy. We lay down on our stomachs and watched crawdads swimming around on the bottom. One was a huge granddaddy. We poked at him with a stick and he disappeared under a rock.

It was hard to walk without stepping on smushrooms, which is a word we made up. There's one mushroom that looks like a messy cow pile on the ground and you'll have to guess what we call it. Some of the mushrooms and other fungi along the creek are bright red, or orange, or polka-dotted. Some are on rocks, some on rotting wood. Some are round, like the puffball, which is a real name. Most puffballs are little, but once we saw one big as a turkey.

When we go walking, we try not to step on Indian pipes. They are flowers that stick up out of the ground and curl down, like real pipes. Some are white, but some are silvery orange.

We saw Sheba over on a big flat rock that has waves on it, just like waves in the ocean. They were made by water going over the rock for hundreds of years. Sheba was playing with something we thought was a snake. Corey jumped over to her and took it away. It was the backbone of some animal.

We were just going along, looking at things, climbing around, like always. Then something happened that made us glad for those natural bathtubs in the creek. Timmy and I had climbed up the hillside to swing on a grapevine. Timmy jumped off and came sliding down the hill. I tried to come down more slowly, but my feet slid over something that looked like a puffy mushroom but it wasn't. Yellow jackets started coming out of it. Timmy yelled and ran for the creek. The bees swarmed around my head. Timmy and I dived into a pool about two feet deep. We came up for air and the bees were still there, so we ducked under again and kept doing that, going under and coming up for air and ducking back under, until they had all gone away. We both got stung in a few places.

We decided to take a shortcut along the path made by the telephone company for telephone poles. We kept going and every time we thought we were real close, it took another five minutes before we thought we were real close again. We came to an old house that nobody lives in anymore. But the flowers in the garden were perfect. There were many, so we each took back some.

We walked to the road and followed it to the lane that goes in to our house….