Gap Creek (41 page)

12. In her fevered state after childbirth, Julie is visited by her dead father in a vision and he tells her she will live and continue to work and love. How does Julie use work to get her through her grief when her baby dies? A continuous thread throughout the novel, work is always hard and necessary, sometimes ennobling, and often the only path to survival. Talk about the various functions that work serves in the novel. In our lives? What is your own view of work? If we didn’t need to work for the material benefits it provides, what would its value be?

13. Novelist Robert Morgan is also a prizewinning poet, and critics have praised
Gap Creek
for its “starkly beautiful” imagery and “simple but luminous” prose. The
New York Times Book Review
says Morgan’s “stripped-down and almost primitive sentences burn with the raw, lonesome pathos of Hank Williams’s best songs.” What do you think of Morgan’s writing style? Can you think of any other fictional characters—in novels or in movies—whom Julie reminds you of? Do you enjoy reading this kind of fiction? Why or why not?

We hope you enjoy this preview of Robert Morgan’s next novel,

THE ROAD FROM GAP CREEK

Coming in Fall 2013 from Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

A Note from the Author on

THE ROAD
FROM GAP CREEK

When
Gap Creek
was published, I kept telling myself and others I would continue Julie and Hank’s story into the twentieth century and even to the Great Depression. After all, the novel was loosely based on the lives of my maternal grandparents, whom I had known as a child in the 1940s and early 1950s. But I’d already begun another novel,
This Rock
, and I’d promised myself to finally finish a story set in the American Revolution, which became the novel
Brave Enemies
. Though Hank and Julie appeared as characters in
This Rock
, I kept postponing the continuation of
Gap Creek
. And then I had the opportunity to write a biography of one of my frontier heroes, Daniel Boone (
Boone: A Biography
), and that led to the writing of
Lions of the West: Heroes and Villains of the Westward Expansion
. But when
Lions
was finished I knew it was time to go back to the lives of Hank and Julie. It had been ten years since
Gap Creek
had been published. Throughout that decade I’d assumed I would continue the story in Julie’s voice. As I began writing I saw Julie had already told her story. Her later life should be seen through the eyes and voice of her daughter Annie. And I also saw it was important to have a fresh perspective on the events of Julie’s later
life, her marriage, her children, the tragedies and satisfactions of middle and old age.

Once I began to tell the story in Annie’s voice I knew I’d made the right choice. Rather than going back, I was moving forward, from a new point of view, seeing Hank and Julie and their world from an intimate but different angle. The events of their move to Green River, the typhoid epidemic, the life of the beloved German shepherd Old Pat, the anguish of the Great Depression, the death of their son Troy in a plane crash in World War II, unfolded with mounting intensity.
The Road from Gap Creek
became a story not so much of looking back to Gap Creek and those trials but of looking ahead to the uncertainties of the future, the struggle to define one’s self, and, beyond all the grief and unforeseen losses, the discovery of enduring love.

Robert Morgan

THE ROAD
FROM GAP CREEK

——

A NOVEL BY
ROBERT MORGAN

© Copyright by Robert Morgan. All rights reserved.

One

The thing about Mama was she’d never tell you how she felt. When she was feeling bad she’d just go on with her work, washing dishes or peeling taters or mopping the floor. I’d know she was feeling pretty low, but she wouldn’t say nothing. Work was what she done, what she’d done her whole life since she was a little girl up on Mount Olivet, and she’d keep on scrubbing the dishes and cups with a rag in soapy water and rinse them in cold water and dry them with a linen towel.

It would make Papa mad that Mama wouldn’t say nothing when her feelings was hurt or she had the blues. It was a difference between them that went all the way back to the beginning of their marriage, back to the days on Gap Creek. Papa would argue and say she’d spent too much money on flower seeds or a shrub for the yard. He never could see wasting money on beautifying flowers, while Mama was crazy about flowers and liked nothing better than a rose of Sharon bush blooming in the yard and attracting bees and hummingbirds, or colorful geraniums in pots along the edge of the porch. She once said that it was a sign that God loved us that He put such colors in the world as you seen in the red of geraniums or the pink of dahlias or the dark purple of ironweeds along the road.

“Julie, you’re going to break us up,” Papa would say if she paid a peddler a dollar for some bulbs to hide in the ground. Mama wouldn’t say nothing back. She’d just go on with whatever she was doing or maybe start something harder, like washing the chicken piles off the porch or sweeping the backyard. I never saw nobody take more pride in keeping the porch clean than Mama did. Chickens would get up on the porch looking for something to peck and leave their piles like big melted coins on the boards. If the piles got baked in the sun they’d be hard to get off, set hard as cement or glue in the cracks of the wood. So almost every day Mama would heat a bucket of water on the kitchen stove till it was near boiling. Holding the bucket with a towel or the tail of her apron she’d splash tongues of smoking water on the planks that made them steam like they was burning. And then with the broom she’d scour the chicken piles off, flirting the dirty water into the yard. She’d splash and sweep until the porch was clean as the kitchen table drying in the sun.

About once a week Mama done the same thing to the yard, splashing and sweeping, running away the chickens, sweeping again, sometimes sprinkling white sand she got from Kimble Branch, till the yard looked smooth as a piece of white twill cloth that had been washed and ironed.

That day when the black car stopped in front of the house and the two men in uniforms got out, my heart sunk right to the soles of my feet. It was November of 1943, and you didn’t see many cars then because of the gas rationing, even on the big road, and on our little gravel road you could go half a day and not see a vehicle pass except for the school bus. That car could not mean any good as it stopped there on Mama’s swept yard, beside the boxwoods.

Those two men walked across the ground she’d swept so careful, and I wished I could close my eyes and make them disappear. We’d read in the paper about two men coming to deliver bad news from the war. It made me cold in the belly to see them, and then it made me
mad. I wanted to fling open the kitchen door, and tell them to go away. They had no business coming on us all of a sudden like this. I wanted to tell them to get back in their black car and drive back to town or some army base or Washington, D.C., or wherever they’d come from.

They knocked on the kitchen door, and when I opened it the taller one said, “Is Mr. Hank Richards here?”

“No he ain’t,” I said. The truth was Papa was out cutting firewood on the Squirrel Hill with my brother Velmer.

“Is Mrs. Richards here?” the second man said. He took off his army cap and put it under his arm.

“No … I’ll see,” I said, trying to think of some way to keep Mama from having to see them. But the other man took off his cap and looked past me. I turned and seen Mama standing right behind me, in the light from the door.

“Ma’am, I’m awfully sorry to be the one to bring you this news,” he said and handed Mama a tan envelope. Mama held the folded paper a minute without opening it, then handed it to me. As I ripped open the paper and looked at the telegram I told myself this was a mistake. We’d read in the paper about men reported killed who later turned up wounded in a hospital or lost from their unit.

The telegram was words printed on paper ribbons pasted to the page. “Dear Mr. & Mrs. Richards, it is with profound regret I report your son Troy Richards, Serial No. 34119284, lost in the crash of a B-17 heavy bomber on Nov. 10, 1943, near the village of Eye in East Anglia. Stop. A grateful nation mourns the loss of your son whose sacrifice for his country will never be forgotten.”

I read the words glued to the page to Mama, and she just stared at the door like she didn’t see nothing.

“Ma’am, if there’s anything we can do for you just let us know,” the tall man said. But Mama had already turned away from him. I thought she was going back to the fire in the living room, but she didn’t. Instead she walked to the far side of the kitchen and set down in the
chair by the bread safe. The two men said more things. They talked real gentle, like they was truly sad, and asked again if there was anything they could do. I reckon it was what they done every day, going around and delivering those telegrams and telling people how sorry they was. Finally they said a letter would be coming in the mail, along with a box of Troy’s personal effects. And then they put on their caps and walked slow back to the car and drove away.

“Mama, you go back to the fire. You’ll get cold setting in here,” I said. But she didn’t answer. She just set in that chair by the bread safe looking down at her hands clasped on her apron. I still held the telegram, and didn’t know where to throw it down on the floor or fold it back up in the envelope it come in.

“Go tell Hank,” Mama said.

“I don’t want to leave you,” I said. Mama’s face looked gray, the way somebody with a bad heart looks.

“I can make you some coffee,” I said.

“You go on,” Mama said. “I’ll be fine.” She waved me away.

I put on a jacket and tied a scarf around my hair. Clutching the envelope, I stepped out into the chilly breeze. Chickens scratched around the edges of the yard. The cotton mill whistle sounded three miles away. It was the end of the first shift. I wished Muir was there so I could tell him. He couldn’t tell me what to do, but just knowing that he knowed would help. That’s what a husband was for. When something bad happened he was supposed to be there, not off building army barracks at Holly Ridge or Wilmington or preaching at a church down there. It would be comforting to just let him know. Papa had come home for a long weekend, and Velmer had come from Columbia, South Carolina, but Muir had stayed in Holly Ridge to preach at a little church near there.

To get to the Squirrel Hill I had to cross the road and then the cornfield. The corn had been gathered and the stalks leaned this way and that. We’d cut the tops and pulled the fodder back in August, and the
stalks was mostly bare and broke. The field looked bad as I felt. I stepped around briars, going real slow. Every second I delayed give Papa a little more time of peacefulness. I wished I could just turn around and go back to the house.

It took me a minute to find Papa and Velmer in the woods. The Squirrel Hill was hit by lightning more than any place I ever heard of. Some said there was iron in the ground under the hill and that’s why lightning always come down there. Every time there was a big thunderstorm a bolt hit an oak tree and split it down the middle, flinging splinters and limbs all over the woods. There was dead wood all around the hill to cut up. It was also a place the squirrels loved because of the acorns and hickory nuts, which was how it got its name.

Papa and Velmer was using the crosscut saw. It took a man at either end to pull the saw back and forth. They was cutting up a big limb that had been blasted off that summer by lightning. Papa seen me coming and he must have thought I brought bad news because he turned away like he hadn’t even seen me. My breath was short from walking.

“Two men come to the house and brought this,” I said and held out the envelope. Papa looked at the telegram and sighed and put down his end of the saw. Fishing his reading glasses out of his shirt pocket he slid them on and read the words pasted to the page, then let the telegram drop to the leaves.

“Poor boy,” was all he said.

“What is it?” Velmer said. I picked up the paper and handed it to him. Velmer read it and shook his head. I was going to say Papa should go back to the house, but he’d already started. His head was down and he stumbled against a bush, and that was how I knowed he was crying. It was the only time in my whole life I’d ever seen him cry. He never cried when his mama died that I could remember. And he never cried when his oldest boy nearly died of typhoid. I followed him as he lurched between the trees and fallen limbs toward the house.

Now when we got to the house, Papa walked straight to Mama
where she set by the bread safe. He put his hand on her shoulder but she didn’t even look up at him. I’d seen her do that before. She couldn’t stand to be comforted, or show affection in front of anybody. He’d touch her, try to put his arm around her, and she’d just pay him no heed. I thought she was too shy to show her feelings when another person was looking. Maybe she thought her and Papa was too old to act intimate. But when she just set there paying no attention to Papa reaching out to her at that awful moment, I seen it was something else. She’d give her life to working for other people and caring for other people. She’d put up with Papa’s whims and rages, and all it had led to was this. She’d lived on grits and molasses when they was young down on Gap Creek. She’d give everything to raise her children, and she had lost her favorite child. She didn’t want to show no emotion anymore.

“Julie …” Papa said as he squeezed her shoulder, but his voice broke and when he seen she wasn’t going to answer he turned away and shuffled into the living room and set down by the fire.

“Mama, let me make you some coffee,” I said.

“Too late in the day for coffee,” Mama said. “I’d never sleep tonight if I had coffee now.”