Listen Here (8 page)

Note: This story was written in the late 1930s and posthumously published in
Appalachian Heritage.

She heard her mother's voice hoarse, with fright pressing it into a flat stream of sound, “You'll have to hurry.” And then her husband's call, “I've fin'ly got him saddled,” while Rebel the big gray stallion neighed and pawed by the porch steps as if he too knew the joy of the long wild ride that lay ahead. Her husband came to the door, and her father turned slowly away and then back to her so that she saw his old face, puckered into pale lines of fright and sorrow. She smiled at him and saw thoughts written into his eyes plain like words. He was loath to have her go and feared for her the long ride. She laughed to show him that she was not afraid, but her tongue seemed heavy and useless for words so that she made them no answer as she galloped away.

Behind her she heard their calling and the crying of the child. She did not turn her head or hesitate. Her name on their tongues was enough; they wished to advise her thus and so and warn her of this and that and maybe tell her again of the need for haste. Soon the wind had blown their cries away, and the road, white sand on the ridge crest now, ran smooth and straight between the black trunks of the high pine trees whose deep moon shadows lay like black bars across the silver of the sand.

She raised one hand and half rose in the stirrups and pretended to snatch at a twig on a black gum tree as they flew past, and dropped again to the saddle and laughed to herself as the wind quickened about her ears and raised her hair like the horse's mane. That was the way to make Rebel fly, Luke her brother had once said. She too had wanted to make Rebel fly, but her mother would never let her ride as she had always wanted to ride; her mother lived for the neighbors and God. The neighbors and God, but tonight she could laugh at the neighbors and God. This night was not like other nights, there was the road and the moon and the wind and the everquickening need for haste. She thanked the woman sick and about to die who gave the reason for this ride, and sorrow for the woman lay vague and weightless in the back of her mind behind the half-believing wonder that it was she who rode so, riding as she had always wanted to ride, with trust for her body in the horse's feet, and her soul flung to the moon or maybe to the wind. Tonight the wind came neither west nor south, but out of the neverland that lay between and held the freedom and strength of the west and the lazy whispering laughter of the south. The wind was the smell of spring with larkspur and wild roses by the creek and the clover in the hill field and the pine scent sharp through the sweetness, and over it all was the sound of the great trees on Fiddle Bow Mountain and the willows by Laurel Run and the simple wail of hills against the beating, rushing waves of air.

The big horse went like a brother of the wind and seemed to know the need that made her drive him so. He went like a horse undriven, like a horse of God with wings and a dragon for his heart. He did not pause when the road curved and swooped down a hill, black in the shadow with white rocks glimmering and sparks from his iron shoes rising and dying like hasty fireflies. She laughed as they went sliding down into deeper darkness, and knew that she could go there and home again in time. The woman would not die, and she would have this ride, wild and heedless and free as she had always wanted.

She laughed to think she was a woman now with heedless ways and causeless, senseless laughter gone behind her. In the last spring, early when the first wild iris came and she was sixteen, she had married Rufe, and her mother had said, “He'll keep you straight,” and her father had said, “It's better that you marry now and never give the neighbors cause to talk,” and Rufe had said, “You'll never go hungry.”

Rebel was by the creek now, and did not pause to sniff the water, but plunged right in and where his feet struck, the water rose in a flowering spray that stood for a moment clear of the shadow until it seemed that when it fell silver had touched her hair. The creek was deep but clear and the gray horse swam and she trailed her fingers by his side and watched the fan-shaped ripples grow and fade. They crossed the creek and Rebel arched his neck and tossed his head and neighed and snorted with a great trumpeting and flung the water from his sides, and leaped away up the hill and under the beech trees and past the place where the sweet william grew. Their odor rose and mingled with the wind and she thought that some time she might return this way and walk all day on the hill and see the flowers and maybe pick a few to carry home; no, not home; Rufe did not like flowers. Better that a woman spend her time in the garden than with the foolishness of flowers.

They came to a level rutted road with a zigzag rail fence on one side and a rolling pasture field beyond. She saw the field open and wide and inviting with the high grass bowing and whispering in the wind. It would be the shorter way, and she wanted to ride across the field and see Rebel race against his black shadow as it flew over the grass. She drew on the bridle rein and the great horse swerved and she felt his body rise in a flying lunge, and for an instant the rail fence in its mat of persimmon bush and red thorn lay below her, and then they were over and Rebel's front feet were striking the ground and he had fallen to his knees, but he was up again and away, and she was laughing and never looking back, her body one with the horse's body that skimmed over the field lightly as foam on swirling creek water.

She dropped the rein across the saddle and gave the horse his head and looked up at the moon that seemed to ride across the cloud-flecked sky in the same glory of reckless joy with which she rode the field. She remembered the woman sick and like to die, and sorrow for the woman sharpened her own joy in the world. Tonight she thought that she loved the moon and the wind-torn feathers of cloud more than yesterday or any of the days before yesterday; though always she had loved light and darkness and rain and sun and snow and the red leaf-whispering dawns of autumn and the half-sad half-sweet twilights of spring when the whippoorwills began their plaintive callings and the short gray days of winter with the hills secret and shut into themselves against the shrieking, clawing wild beast of the wind. But tonight the world seemed even better and more worthy of her love.

On one side of the hill pasture lay a field of knee-high corn, the freshly plowed dark earth glistening with drops of dew, fine like seed pearls she had read about in school. She smelled the earth and the sweetish smell of the growing corn and loved that too, even as she remembered that sometime, once a long while ago in some vague, formless past when she was heavy and tired from the work she did in the corn rows and some great weight that had pulled against her back and pressed against her heart, the smell of the corn had sickened her nigh unto death it seemed and she had hated the corn and the earth and cried out against them. She bent low over Rebel's flying shoulders and felt a shame and a wonder at the memory, and joy in the lightness of her body and the goodness of the world made her wish to ask forgiveness of something for that faint memory of hatred and pain.

They crossed the pasture and she saw the dark woodland sloping away over the hill down into a narrow valley and up another hill, and past that hill she could see nothing, for it was higher than all the other hills, so high it was like a mountain with its crest hidden in shifting shimmering fog. That, she knew, was where she must go, and by the length of Rebel's flying shadow she knew that she had not been long on the road and would be there on time.

They leaped another fence and plunged into a wood where the wind sang loud in the leafing trees with no sobbing as in the pines, and drops of dew, heavy as rain, fell from the leaves onto her face and hair. Rebel leaped a moss-grown log and leaped through a moonlit glade, cleared a low limestone crag, and plunged again into the deeper darkness of close-growing trees. He went less swiftly now and above the slower beat of his heavy hoofs she heard the roar of a creek and trembled with hungry eagerness for the battle with swift white water coiling in darkness and moonlight.

Heavier drops of dew fell on her face and she impatiently flung them back and glanced up to search out the mountain, for it was dark here and she feared she had lost her way. But it was there, higher and brighter and more beautiful, like the Big Rock Candy Mountain it was a sin to sing about because the singing made you want to dance. She sent Rebel crackling through a prickly grove of holly bush. The ground was soft and the horse's feet sank deep and made no sound, and it was then she heard their calling, louder and more insistent. She checked the horse and paused to think. Their call puzzled her, and she wondered that they could have followed all this way and carried the crying child. She saw them then by scarcely turning.

There was her mother with a glass of water in her hand as she stood and looked down at something that seemed to be just behind her own eyes. There was her father, and Rufe too with his muddy shoes and the overalls she had forgotten to mend. His face looked pale under the sunburn, tight and hard as if he were afraid to come farther than the door where he stood with one foot on the sill. She did not want to look at him. He seemed a man in trouble, and with the joy of the good ride still upon her she had no wish for trouble.

She looked down and saw a hand, small and thin and brown, cupped like a fallen leaf, and as she stared at the hand she wondered at the dew. There was dew on the hand just as on the corn, great drops of it shining yellow in some light that did not come from the moon. She wondered if the dew had fallen on all things and moved her eyes slowly and saw a little mound of patchwork quilt like a hill made small by distance. Her glance which seemed heavy and tired came slowly away from the hill, drew nearer and fell upon a strip of white cotton nightgown with pearl buttons winking in the light. The buttons troubled her—they were so much like some she had once had with four eyes and sewn with coarse white thread. She puzzled over the buttons and heard rain roar on the roof boards, and thought that the next creek would be yellow instead of white.

She heard Rebel's impatient angry neigh and the thud of his pawing feet against the ground. She heard the planks of the floor creak with the weight of heavy hesitating feet, but she did not lift her eyes. It was such a deal of trouble. She heard her mother cry in a thin hoarse croak, “Don't go away, Paw. It's we've waited too long,” and then her father's voice, flat and unlike his own, “Yes. No man could ever a made it over th' creek anyhow.”

She knew he was wrong about the creek, and hated herself for this waste of time when now they seemed so troubled by the time that had gone. Her thoughts churned in a panic of thinking that she might have lost her way and would maybe be too late. She looked again and smiled to herself for it was still there, high and wreathed in a white fire of moonlit fog. She heard the child crying in another room and Rufe's calling of her name, and there was pity in his call, something more than pity—like terror almost. She saw tears falling on the cupped leaflike hand, and then Rufe's head bent over the buttons on the nightgown. Maybe he had taken her buttons and put them on the nightgown and now was sorry and ashamed. She wanted to tell him that he could have the buttons; there were so many things out there in the night for her to love. It was all so good—she remembered the need for haste and knew that she must wait until another time. Rufe called again, and as she rode away she wondered at the pity in his call.

(December 28, 1900–December 4, 1967)

Sylvia Trent Auxier was the eldest of sixteen children born to Dollie Blaine May Trent and T.J. Trent. She grew up in Pike County, Kentucky, attending a one-room log school. She went on to Pikeville College Academy, where she graduated at the head of her class.

She was a teacher for two years before earning an R.N. degree at the University of Cincinnati Nursing School. She began her career as a public health nurse in eastern Kentucky, traveling by horseback to patients in Pike, Knott, Perry, and Leslie counties.

In 1928, she married Jean Auxier, a lawyer, and they lived in a rustic log and stone house in Meta, Kentucky. The couple had one son.

Her family has claimed that “the first sentence she spoke was in iambic pentameter and the second rhymed with it.” Long before her first book was published, her poems appeared in a number of publications, including the
Saturday Evening Post, Christian Science Monitor
, and
Progressive Farmer.
Auxier's first collection of poetry, published in 1948, was followed by five additional volumes, with the final one published posthumously by Pikeville College Press. She died near Pikeville in an automobile accident.

On the book jacket of
With Thorn and Stone
, Pulitzer Prize—winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks praised her work: “The poetry of Sylvia Auxier is sane as well as beautiful. In it are to be found balance, a tenderized exaltation, and a comprehensive clarity.”

Auxier paid attention to the women in her life and to everyday activities—and she paid tribute to them in her poetry.

Poetry:
With Thorn and Stone: New and Selected Poems
(1968),
Green of a Hundred Springs
(1966),
No Stranger to the Earth
(1957),
The Grace of the Bough
(1957),
Love-Vine
(1953),
Meadow-Rue
(1948).

Dorothy Edwards Townsend,
Kentucky in American Letters
, Vol. 3 (1976), 21–24. William S. Ward,
A Literary History of Kentucky
(1988), 344–45.