Oral History (9781101565612) (14 page)

“Excuse me.” I stood, nodded curtly, and withdrew. The girl's eyelids merely flickered; a vein in her temple throbbed blue. The old woman slept on.

I made my way through two cars to the rear platform, where I stood rocking with the movement of the train, watching as the town of my birth receded behind me. Richmond: I saw only the rag-tag remnants—those sad little houses, row upon row, where fat men sit out on the stoops in their undershirts and the dingy wash flaps on the line. Then the tarpaper Negro shacks, the unpaved streets, and so variously peopled: huge black women with their heads wound in bright-patterned fabric, thin old black men bent over and shuffling along, the giggling high-hipped bronze girls with their jutting breasts, the immaculately fashionable swaggering gent with the yellow hat; and all those dark barefooted children who stood by the tracks to see us pass, impassive as stones with their huge round dark eyes as we came and went. Beyond all this lay the part of Richmond I would see now only in my mind's eye: Monument Avenue, the wide calm street with those wonderful statues, all that upright Confederate bravery, and the lovely flying hooves. And the intricate grillwork atop the garden walls, the generous wax-leaved magnolias within, the huge columned houses themselves with their shining beveled windows, their wide cypress halls, their glittering chandeliers. Ah yes, I thought. All that. I felt relieved, increasingly relieved, my spirit somehow lightened, as we clattered through the bedraggled edges of Richmond and passed into the flat open country beyond.

The fields stretched green and endless then, shimmering on either side, Negroes working the cotton, an occasional imposing farmhouse set back up a long driveway, surrounded by shade trees, the dusty country court-towns where we stopped just long enough to toss a mail pouch out and take on parcels. Powhatan, Midlothian, Cumberland.

In the dining car, I treated myself to a fine, lingering lunch. I nodded to my fellow diners, but spoke to no one. I wondered how I must appear to them—student, young father, man of the cloth? But in those bland faces, I could find no clue. The apple pie was excellent. Virginia rolled past slowly, as a green and fertile dream.

The girl disembarked at Lynchburg, met by a tall earnest young man who clearly worshiped her. I pitied him as I watched the two of them walk away, fingers entwined, he the willing recipient now of all her baggage. I went back to my seat, napped, and read a bit. The afternoon slowly passed as we rolled westward into the setting sun. My companion slept on. It crossed my mind several times that perhaps she had died, a circumstance which would place me in an undeniably awkward position, but she stirred in sleep just often enough to assure me of her continuing mortality.

The landscape was changing now before my eyes, flatland to mountains, and I found myself enthralled by the passing view. The Valley of Virginia, as it is called, is unbelievably, breathtakingly beautiful. The mountains rise like improbable monoliths to brood over the broad sweeping valleys, producing a landscape of such texture and hue that merely to see it is to thank God. Such beauty cannot but proceed, one feels, from the Divine. Darkness fell. I dined upon roast pork and candied apples. Easily making my way back to the seat, I remarked upon how I had accustomed myself to the bucking, rolling motion of the train. The lights were dimmed; the man brought around some pillows. Sleeping thus was profoundly uncomfortable and I wished I had acceded to my mother's desire to purchase a sleeping-coach ticket, yet it had seemed a foolish extravagance, inasmuch as we should reach my stop before morning. I instructed the man to wake me, turned my face to the window, that impenetrable rolling darkness, and slept. Roanoke: a lengthy stop. Christiansburg. I never fully woke, nor fully slept.

I awakened in the dead of night, understanding immediately what this oft-encountered phrase actually meant: the dead of night! My heartbeat seemed loud and irregular. Our engine was straining as we proceeded slowly on an upward grade. The mountains! at last. Something akin to panic clutched at my throat. As we attained the summit, I pressed my forehead to the cool glass. Pale moonlight fell on a stretch of landscape which reminded me of the storm-whipped surface of the sea: the mountaintops were whitened by moonlight like the crests of waves. I had never seen a view so cold, or strange, or beautiful. I felt a sense of awe and wonder, and then of foreboding as we plunged down through a stand of trees and the light was gone, that lovely land torn as if by magic from my sight.

“Here. Get ye a chicken leg.”

The voice was old and soft, with a true sweetness; nevertheless, I confess I jumped in fright as she spoke.

I turned from the window to view my companion—old priestess of the realm of Lethe, as I had dubbed her in my mind. Amazingly, she had spread a huge repast upon her seat, and ate hungrily. “Here's ye a chicken leg,” she said.

I was too startled to answer. The interior light was so dim that I doubted my eyes; it was as if this whole encounter were taking place in a badly-made moving picture. It must have been four o'clock in the morning. Everyone else in the coach slept on. And yet this was the time which the strange old woman had chosen for her repast. And I had eaten two large meals within the past twelve hours. “No, thank you,” I started to say, but I found to my amazement that I was suddenly ravenous.

“You are very kind,” I found myself saying instead. I accepted the proffered chicken leg and a good deal of other food besides. Of course, this was a most peculiar response on my part: while never finicky, I am nonetheless a regular and somewhat disciplined partaker of both food and drink. Yet I joined the old woman in her unorthodox spread without the slightest hesitation. She was going back home, she told me. She had been to stay with her sister in Richmond, who was sick. She would not say much more than that. Ours was a brief and difficult conversation, in fact; she volunteered nothing. The track was rougher now, the coach swayed, and cinders flew out in the night. I ate chicken, pound cake, deviled eggs, dried peaches. “That's right,” she crooned, “you'll need it. A young man like you, traveling. You'll need it,” she said. A chill went through me at her words, but I shook it off directly. I have always been too prone to the workings of the imagination, a tendency I am well aware of. We finished our strange repast in silence as gray light grew in the windows of our car. My man came to wake me. He looked surprised and somehow disapproving when he found me thus engaged; he withdrew quickly.

The bell clanged once. “Mar-i-on!” the conductor shouted. The train ground to a jolting halt. I gathered my belongings furiously, jumped into the aisle so burdened, and turned to thank my companion again. But it was as if our breakfast party had never occurred. All the papers and bones and scraps had been swept into some bag or other, apparently, and she had folded her hands again and closed her eyes. Had I dreamed the whole thing, in my overwrought state—had she ever spread that huge meal out upon the seat and bade me join? She slept.

The conductor deposited me rudely upon the platform at Marion, Va. Some bags of mail and some parcels were exchanged in the cold gray light of dawn; a man laughed, a cock crowed, a dog barked furiously. Then, with a huge gushing rattle, the train, like some lumbering medieval monster, moved on. Marion, Va. It was colder here. I put on my coat and entered the tiny station, where a lone bald-headed man in shirtsleeves sat behind the ticket-counter. Several people, inert folded forms, slept on the long hard benches. It was an old marble floor, tobacco-stained. My footsteps echoed hollowly when I walked.

The ticket-taker looked up over his wire-rimmed spectacles, observing my approach. “Now where are you bound for, sir?” he asked. “Can I send you to Price's Hotel?”

“No,” I said. “No thank you. I'm going on to Black Rock,” I told him, “and I understand I must make connections here for a smaller-gauge lumber train.”

His eyebrows shot up several inches. “Black Rock!” he exclaimed in a dubious voice which sent my heart plummeting down to my feet. “You don't say!” he squinted at me.

“I'm going to teach school,” I said.

“Are you now?” The fellow grinned odiously; I thought perhaps he was dim-witted, yet his evident responsibilities appeared to settle the question. “Ralph!” he yelled suddenly; I confess I jumped! Ralph, a grizzled, portly old fellow, appeared in due course, and a lengthy conversation ensued. I could ride the lumber train
part way
, it developed. I could ride the lumber train to a town named Claypool Hill, which was probably the best thing to do, and then I should have to hire an automobile and a driver, or—more reliable, because of the roads—catch a ride on a mule wagon across the mountains to Black Rock. In any case it would be nearly dark again before I attained my destination. The man named Ralph was chewing tobacco. He spat on the floor as we spoke, several times, dark “splats” which resembled stars. It grew light, people awakened, the doors to the station opened and closed; at length I went up to Price's Hotel for some coffee, leaving my baggage with Ralph. Now Ralph was not the sort of person with whom one would normally entrust one's belongings, any more than the old woman on the train was the sort of woman I am accustomed to dine with. But I confess that I never thought twice—at the time—in either case. (Perhaps my education has already begun?)

At length I boarded the narrow-gauge line, which originated at our station.

It stopped at every crossroads, it seemed, and every store; the two passenger coaches were soon packed beyond capacity with mountaineers carrying everything from babies to live flapping chickens. Their stench rapidly became overpowering, yet I was so fascinated by their physiognomy that the long day's journey passed swiftly. The men were tall, lanky, with not a spare ounce among them. Most were all dressed up for the occasion of traveling in their best dark suits, which gave them the appearance of a convention of pastors; a few, poorer men, I imagine, wore faded clean overalls. They spoke little, mostly to each other and rarely to the wives who accompanied them—if, in fact, they deign to call these women wives! The women were a sad, downtrodden species, from what I could tell. They appeared to be quite subservient to the men, speaking only when spoken to. Some of the girls were remarkably pretty, and yet it was apparent that they age quickly here—the men appearing, by and large, much less the worse for wear. These solemn mountaineers were interspersed with an occasional flashily dressed salesman, or “drummer” as they're called here, hauling his shoddy case of samples into the hills.

And the hills themselves: I have never seen such impenetrable terrain. The mountains here are not grand and rolling, as they are around Lynchburg and Roanoke. They are steep, straight up and down, with rocky cliffs and vertical gorges. It astounds me that anyone ever thought to settle here in the first place! Viewing this virtually inaccessible land from the jolting train, I was struck forcibly with a thought: seeing this, who would choose to live here? And yet there is an inescapable appeal, I find, in the very strangeness, the very inaccessibility. As our little train jolted ever farther into the rough terrain, I realized that, unwittingly, I had probably picked the most remote area still left in these United States; certainly I could not have felt more a stranger had I just entered India. My few attempts at conversation were promptly repulsed, and I sat in silence until the squeal of metal on metal and a violent bumping and grinding stop nearly threw me into the floor. “What's happening?” I asked wildly. When no one answered, I made my way through the dirty children to the platform between cars and looked out.

A tiny old man stood in the mud by the side of the track, head flung back, mouth open. An extravagantly dressed younger man, wielding some sort of pincers, had him in a kind of stranglehold with the pincers, and indeed, his whole hand, thrust inside the old man's gaping mouth. Several of the trainsmen stood about the pair, commenting and laughing.

“What's the matter?” I asked. “What's going on?”

“This old man here flagged us down,” one of the trainmen said. “Says he knowed we'd got Doc Winter on this train. Says he has got a toothache what's killing him, and Doc Winter has got to pull the tooth. Says if he don't do hit, he'll up and throw hisself beneath the train. You think he would've, Rip?”

“Sure! He'd do it in a minute,” said the man who was obviously Rip.

“Aha! You rascal!” Doc Winter shouted, holding aloft the infamous tooth.

I turned away.

The “doctor”—who resembled no doctor I have ever seen, neither in dress nor manner nor mien—regained the train, the little old man left, grinning his wide, bloody, gap-toothed grin, and we shuddered into motion again. I considered trying to find the “doctor” in the next car in order to speak with him, yet riding conditions in our car had become such that I could not bear to press myself through the throng.

“Clay-pool Hill!” The cry finally came.

I disembarked to find myself in the middle of Main Street. It was a town resembling a stage set for a motion picture: plank sidewalks, badly paved road, horses and mule teams tied up along the way, although some automobiles were parked, too, in front of the buildings. As I stood blinking in the harsh mid-morning light, trying to breathe despite the dust raised by the passing vehicles, a man stepped out from the crowd and approached me.

“Mr. Burlage?” he asked.

“Yes?” I turned to look at him. He was well over six feet tall, with a bushy red beard and a wide, free smile. He stuck out his hand.

“I'm Wall Johnson,” he said, “over here trading, and they said I was to look for you and bring you on back with me if you was to come on this train. Mr. Perkins said I was to git you if you was to come.” I nodded, amazed by his diction, which I attempt to record faithfully here. Mr. Perkins is the local superintendent of schools, with whom I had corresponded.