Smoke on the Mountain Read online

  Ellen Crain was born in Tennessee and at present lives in Missouri. She has been a teacher and also the half owner of a private camp for girls in the Tennessee mountains. It took her several years to collect background material for this book. She knows the independence-loving mountain people and spent a summer in the Great Smokies when the land was being acquired for the park.

  “I felt the urge to write the story,” she says, “because newspaper reports of the park’s progress had little sympathy for the natives who were descendants of the first pioneers to cross the Smokies. It was the old ones who were most affected by the upheaval in their lives.”

  SMOKE ON THE MOUNTAIN

  Although the background for this story is historical, the action taking place in the Great Smoky Mountains during the time land was being acquired for the national park, the characters, events and incidents are entirely imaginary. The story was written in sympathy for the old natives, descendants of early pioneers who carved from this beautiful and rugged wilderness a way of life so distinctly individualistic, their story cannot be ignored in our American heritage.

  Ellen Crain

  Chapter 1

  Grandma weller seldom talked of the past any more. No one else was left who could share these remembering years with her. If sometimes she reached back into her memory searching for comfort, if at these times her eyes were dreamy and vague, folks said Grandma was getting queer and was not responsible.

  Grandma never heard these conclusions voiced in words but she saw the eyes that expressed them and, for each pair, she had a pity kindled with humor and understanding. She had a feeling of charity that dispensed in services of healing the very knowledge her years had given to her, and which the recipients of her healing powers took now without pay or recompense.

  Her ninety years sat heavily upon her shoulders and bowed her back to meet a cane that she had carved from a hickory sapling. The hand that clutched the support was a hard and callused claw—long, twisted fingers that were never still. The skin was stretched over the bones of her face like brown rubber, its elasticity spent in rivulets of flesh that crossed and intermingled, hanging in wasted and left-over ends under her chin. Earth-worn and sky- weathered was Grandma, part and parcel of the wind, sun, and rain.

  When her husband Ethan died and left her alone at the age of seventy, she had accepted her lot without complaint or regard that her situation was pathetic. To Grandma, independence to do for one’s self was exceeded in value only by the pride that prompted self-sufficiency. She had worked and filled her needs alone for over twenty years and she had been too busy with her affairs and those of her neighbors to be affected by the transition about to take place in the mountains. Moving the people to the valley had been like the cry of “Wolf! Wolf!” It was idle gossip and unsubstantiated rumor. This for all the cry had worked great changes in her neighbors’ attitude and ways of living. There was a growing feeling of impermanence everywhere.

  There was no longer a unity of feeling. Each was a family in itself and each man seemed bent upon his personal aims and intent. Not a fragment was left of the old spirit of survival handed down from early settlers. This old spirit had accepted defeat in nothing, not even death. For where the parent tree fell before the axe, its seed flourished and carried on, blood for one’s blood, loyalty without question, recompense without reason. Share and share alike was the old cry of the wilderness and out of this had grown a community interest, a neighborliness that made of this tiny cove a kingdom in itself, each family leaning and depending on the other and held together by the wise dictum of an old granny woman whose words were law even as her healing powers were divine. But not any more.

  Grandma Weller sat in the doorway of her cabin one morning smoking her pipe, using the last of her tobacco. She pulled her shawl a bit more tightly around her shoulders and moved so the sun would strike her back. Grandma was worried over that pain in her shoulder. It was a funny thing she could brew medicines and tonics to cure everybody on the mountain excepting herself.

  She cocked her ear when a low rumble, growing louder and clearer, sent the hound dog Ezra whining under the steps.

  “Autymobeels.” She sniffed. "It’s getting so a person ain’t got no privacy a-tall.”

  When the car stopped, Ezra grumbled low in his throat. A man sat in the car, his eyes taking in the rising sweep of land back of the cabin, the ridge beyond where the timber stood tall and massive. Then his gaze came back to the cabin, to the crone hunched in her hickory rocker. He opened the car door and walked up the path.

  "Hello, Granny,” he called.

  "I ain’t your granny, feller.”

  The man laughed. “They told me you would be like this,” he said.

  "Who?” she demanded.

  "Why, the people round and about. They are mostly friendly, you know. My wife heard you had a little sugar chest and I came by to see if we could trade.”

  “Huh!” Grandma sniffed. “Trade, eh? Well, I ain’t seen nothing you summer folks has got I’d want in the first place.”

  Grandma placed her pipe on the floor and, folding her arms under her shawl, she leaned back and began to rock.

  ‘‘You might as well set down and rest,” she invited grudgingly. “I reckon you didn’t come just to buy an old sugar chest.”

  The man smiled as he took a pipe and a tobacco tin from his pocket and seated himself on the step. Soon the smoke drifted in Grandma’s direction and she sniffed. Never had tobacco smoke seemed more alluring. She eyed the tin eagerly and when the man slipped it into his pocket carelessly, she sighed with disappointment.

  The man looked from Grandma to the cob pipe on the floor.

  “I brought you a little present, Grandma, a brand-new pipe and a tin of tobacco. Here, fill it to the brim and see how you like it.”

  Even as Grandma’s eyes caressed the pipe held before her, her body stiffened, her eyes coming to rest finally on the man, in studied suspicion.

  “I’m not a land agent, Grandma,” the man said, smiling.

  “Wouldn’t make no difference if you was,” she said tartly. “I ain’t selling my land. Nobody wants to buy it, anyhow. Nothing but talk, twenty years of talking.”

  “Well, I don’t know about that,” the man answered, laying the pipe in Grandma’s lap. “Sometimes it takes twenty years to work things out.”

  Grandma disregarded this remark as not worth considering. It was the same old story and she had heard it too many times. And besides, she was fingering the smooth and polished pipe in her gnarled hands. She looked down and saw the gold band around the bowl, the stem, curved and graceful. Never before had she seen so beautiful a pipe. It cast a spell over her, so that accepting the lighted match from the man was an unconscious movement. The sweet and soothing draft which she now drew into her lungs was strangely satisfying and new.

  Along with her well-laid plans, Grandma had mentally filled her bin with a winter’s supply of tobacco from Aaron Bigger’s crop. Aaron raised the best tobacco on the mountain and was as stingy as a miser, but he’d part with a goodly amount of that tobacco for Grandma. Aaron didn’t know it yet, but some of his family would break out in a rash that would keep them awake nights, burning and scratching, moaning and uncomfortable until desperation drove Aaron to Grandma’s for some curing salve.

  So, even as Grandma puffed on the new pipe in peaceful enjoyment, her eyes closed and her mind moved in reflection.

  With the cold snap of Squaw Winter, Grandma had felt for the first time in her life a sort of fear. The pain in her shoulder had kept her wakeful and restless, thinking and uneasy. The firelight flickering on the walls lit up the rafters, empty of onion strings, peppers, sage. Her mind’s eye visioned the empty corncrib, the hayless loft, t
he cellar empty of vegetable roots and other provender. There, too, was the sprinkle of bony chickens, scratching among the clods of last year’s garden.

  When the cow had wandered off and got lost, when she had viewed the bottom of her lard can one morning and fried the last chunk of salt pork, then Grandma had sat at her kitchen table and viewed her situation with desperate pride and righteous indignation: anger that her years had brought her to such need, that her frailties, which could no longer be ignored, should bend her pride now to public admission of want.

  The tears that rolled down her wrinkled cheeks and fell to her twisted fingers was no more than an overflow from a deep well of pride. This pride might admit frustration when alone and in secret, it would run deep and silent, impregnable by the very wall the years had built around it. That well of pride would never be covered with a lid of admission. It would stand open for all the world to recognize and honor, and if it did not gain the recognition it merited, then it would sink deeper and deeper into the soil and bury itself finally with honor. Grandma Weller would starve to death before she would admit either her needs or her inability to meet them.

  She opened her eyes now and speculated on the stranger who sat studying her from the porch steps.

  “What did you say you come up here for?” she asked.

  “Sugar chest,” the man answered gently.

  Grandma laughed. “Mister,” she said, “you are either a good liar or you’re the only honest feller I’ve met from the valley. Now, if a man comes miles to buy a sugar chest, then he knows a value for it I don’t know.” Grandma took a puff on her pipe, then went on. “I’ve lived a long time and I’ve seen surprising things happen. You ain’t the only one hunting up old furniture.” She leaned forward on her cane and her question was a demand. “What fer?”

  The man on the step sat with pipe in hand, studying Grandma. His mission was not so much to please his young wife in search of antiques as to satisfy his curiosity. That Grandma was the oldest resident left in the mountains was point enough in interest. That she continued at her age to ply her trade of midwifery was so astounding to him he felt urged to seek her out.

  There lay between this man and the wrinkled old woman before him a great bond of sympathy and understanding. Whether he could, because of his background, overcome a prejudice that lay between them like the mountain peaks rising in the distance; whether he could surmount those peaks and stand on a footing with this wise old woman, he did not know.

  As a doctor from the valley, he carried the power of healing to this old midwife, for sick she most assuredly was, whether as a healer she knew it or not.

  Grandma sat back in her rocker, dismissing the mission of her visitor as unimportant, this is the face of her personal problems that were so acutely pressing.

  “You have a wonderful place here, Grandma. I’d like to think that when my work is done, I could sit and rest in such an atmosphere as this—face those mountains in the distance, hear the creek down there in the hollow, listen to the wind in those trees back on the ridge. There’s a sort of company here that makes you feel alone and yet not alone. I suppose you might call it peace.”

  “I reckon,” she answered, “nobody’s work is done till their usefulness is gone. You ain’t lived long enough yet, mister.”

  Dr. Mayberry laughed. “I’ve lived fifty years and worked long enough to look forward to a just rest.”

  “.And when that time comes, you’ll know there ain’t no such thing as peace. Peace is inside ye, not in and around your house.”

  “Tell me more, Grandma.”

  Grandma had met many people from the valley but never one like this man. She looked at him more closely. Yes, he looked all of fifty and there were lines in his face, tired lines. He was tall and rangy like Tom Jenkins. He had a shock of black hair, white at the temples. There was a gentleness about him. Even as she felt herself drawn to him, she wished he would go away now and leave her to think.

  He made her think of Callie Jenkins who was always coming to talk things over, and then going away eased in mind. Funny that a person like her could live so long that a second sort of sight came to them. This power however was limited to the folks she knew, to familiar things around her. Grandma closed her eyes, sweeping her visitor from her horizon, going back twenty years and from there to the present.

  Twenty years ago it was, since her husband Ethan died. She wanted to kill the mule because the mule killed Ethan, but Tom Jenkins’ pa had said she needed the money and Wade Turner gave her fifty dollars for the mule. This with seventy-five dollars that Ethan left was the only money Grandma had had in all these twenty years. It didn’t take much money, not with having a cow, and each fall a hog that her neighbors had slaughtered for her. She had her garden and her cornfield. Each spring she hired Tom Jenkins to do her plowing. When the folks needed her in time of sickness or to bring a baby, they came for her in a wagon, and payment for her services was in foodstuffs of various kinds, piled in the wagon on the trip back home. They gave her sacks o£ shelled corn, potatoes, apples, tins of lard, hams and sides of bacon, buckets of sorghum, and even gallons of corn whiskey. All these things, added to what she herself raised, had kept her in comfort. Her money she spent only for plowing and wood cutting.

  She never had been out of coffee, sugar, salt, and spices. Somebody slipped into her house on her trips away and placed these things on her kitchen table. She was sure it was Tom and Sam Acree who contributed these store- bought items but she never mentioned it.

  But all this was up to a year ago when the cow got lost and her hog had died. The folks had been so stirred up about the Government buying land, some of them had not even planted crops. Not only that, there had been very few calls for her services.

  In the spring, she found the old teakettle empty of money, so she told Tom she didn’t feel able to make a garden. She was too prideful to tell him she didn’t have the twenty-five cents. Although Grandma did not like leaving home, save on missions of mercy, she had been forced for the past few weeks to visit around a lot in order to get enough to eat. She gathered blackberries and wild plums and canned them without sugar. She borrowed meal from Callie until she could no longer borrow without arousing suspicion. She knew that reproach toward those who failed her now was only an admission of her inability to meet her personal problems. She also knew that she must meet them in whatever way seemed left to her.

  So it was that one evening when dusk crept up from the hollow, climbed the hill, and enveloped her cabin in darkness, Grandma fortified herself with her evening pipe and sat on her porch to wait. In two hours now, the moon would be high and full. In two hours, Tom and Callie Jenkins would be asleep, and Tom’s field of green corn would be open to her. Just a mile down the road it was, and with the moon clearing a pathway before her, she could go in and borrow just a few ears.

  Even as the plan grew in her mind and formulated itself around right and justice, there lay in her heart the grim knowledge that taking what belonged to others was stealing.

  Over the ridge, then, came a breeze, light and balmy, sighing through the trees, fanning Grandma’s cheek. She thought she heard the wind rustle among the leaves in the new corn. This was the first summer in all her remembering years that she had failed to hear this rustle in her own cornfield; a light rustle, which as summer wore on maturing the corn, drying the fodder on the stalks, and hardening the grain on the ears, grew louder and more pleasurable. The rustle had become to her a promise of plenty, Nature’s way of speaking to her.

  Soon, it said, I will be ripe for the harvest. Cowpeas growing on my stalks must be gathered and hung to the rafters to dry. Pumpkins hidden among my rows must be placed in the cellar. These are the yield of the cornfield.

  All the time the old song was running through Grandma’s ears, she was hobbling down the road toward Tom Jenkins’ field, reaching out to take the song more clearly to her heart. She did not know her cane hung on the crook of her arm. She didn’t know that she walked unaided, d
riven by a spirit of other years, a spirit that gave her strength she did not normally own. The music of the corn beckoned to her and led her finally inside the rail fence where she stood proudly, listening. Grandma was under a spell of magic that made of the moonlight on the cornfield a mirror reflecting all the other cornfields of all her other years. Each stalk was a human thing that moved and left its shadow on the ground. She did not move into the corn. The corn moved to her and held out to her its fruits, willingly, as many fruits as she could carry.

  Only when she reached home and fell wearily to the porch was she conscious of what she had done. She had not meant to do it and yet she had, for there on the floor before her lay two dozen roasting ears, taken from Tom’s field, not her own field. She was sick with shame, so she hid the ears behind a barrel in her lean-to, and though she lay in bed for hours, no sleep came to her. She rose from her bed, then, got on her knees and prayed.

  “Well, God, what do Ye expect me to do? I can’t live on roots and herbs. You send me this worrying heart to punish me, but unless Ye send me something to eat, God, I’ll just have to keep on a-stealin’ because I don’t aim to starve.”

  She went to sleep, then, and God sent to her a dream. An angel hovered over her bed. As clear as glass she saw him and his words were plain to hear.

  “The laborer is worthy of his hire.”

  To herself she repeated the message and for hours she lay thinking. She had never worked for hire. Labored? Yes. For eighty years Grandma had labored and much of that had been for others, not herself.

  Suddenly, she sat up in bed, the tangle unraveled. The angel had told her she was to be rewarded for her labors. She lay back on her pillows again and as a plan unfolded in her mind, she grew calm and she went to sleep, a smile on her face.

  “What are you thinking about, Grandma?”

  Grandma came to herself with a jerk that sent a wince of pain across her face. When she clutched her shoulder, the doctor rose quickly and stepped to her side.