Spencer's Mountain (26 page)

By the middle of August Clay-Boy and Mr. Goodson came to the end of the textbook. They spent a week in review and on Monday Clay-Boy spent three hours in examination. When Clay-Boy came home he carried a note which read:

When Clay-Boy gave the note to his father, Clay nodded with satisfaction and said, “Fine. We'll take it down to Dean Beck first thing in the mornen.”

***

The campus of the University of Richmond was oddly deserted when Clay-Boy and his father arrived there at eleven o'clock the next morning. Clay remembered the building where he had found Dean Beck on his previous visit and was lucky enough to find it again. After parking the pickup truck
he led Clay-Boy up to the Administration Building but found when he tried to open the door that it was locked.

“They must be closed here for the week end or somethen,” said Clay.

He pounded on the door, but the sound of his knocking faded away and the pervading quiet settled over the morning again.

“Damn it,” swore Clay, “I reckon we're just goen to have to come back another day. Might as well look around while we're here though.”

Clay-Boy was wordless. The campus was the most beautiful place he had ever seen. He had tried to imagine how it might look, but had succeeded only in summoning up vague images of classrooms and blackboards and bearded professors. Now that he was here and walking along the pathways that crossed each other, each opening on a vista more beautiful than the last, he had the feeling that at any minute he might wake and find himself in his bed at home and the whole thing a dream. They came into a quadrangle where the Science buildings faced each other and Clay-Boy's mind surged with the realization that behind those windows, somewhere in those buildings lay the College Education, a magic passport to some unimaginable new and wondrous world.

Clay looked at his son and he could see the thrill and delight that were in the boy's eyes.

“It's a right pretty place, ain't it, son?” he said.

“I don't know what I'll do if they don't take me, Daddy,” the boy said.

“They'll take you,” said Clay. “You've done your part. From now on it's up to these folks down here.”

They had started walking back to the parking lot behind the Administration Building when they saw coming toward them a man who was dressed in paint-spattered coveralls and carrying a ladder.

“Morning,” the painter called. “Help you folks?”

“We come down here to see Dean Beck,” said Clay. “But it looks like they're taken the day off.”

“They're closed for vacation,” said the painter. “Nobody around here but a few workmen.”

“When they goen to open up again?” asked Clay.

“First week of school. Sometime in September usually.”

“Damnation!” exclaimed Clay. “We've got to see that feller before then.”

“I'd try up at his home, if I was you,” said the painter. He gave them instructions for finding the dean's house and Clay-Boy and his father set out up the walkway, across the streetcar tracks into the wooded area where the members of the faculty lived.

When they came to the house the painter had described Clay's knock on the door was answered by Mrs. Beck, a handsome woman whose kind smile put both the boy and the man at ease immediately.

“I'm looken for Dean Beck,” said Clay.

“Won't you come in?” she said.

Clay and the boy entered the house and were ushered into a warm and beautifully furnished living room. All the while Mrs. Beck chatted away about the beautiful morning and how pleasant the summer had been, and though neither Clay-Boy nor his father had uttered a word they felt that they had taken part in a brilliant conversation. Saying that she would go to find the dean, Mrs. Beck disappeared somewhere into another part of the house.

Clay and Clay-Boy sat solemnly side by side on a comfortable sofa which had been covered for the summer in a light flowered slip cover. Clay lit a cigarette and after hesitating for a moment over a little glass dish, decided that it might be the ashtray and dropped his match there. Hearing footsteps approaching, both Clay and his son stood as the dean entered the room and came bouncing toward them.

“Neighbor Spencer, I'm delighted to see you again,” he said.

“I'm sorry to butt in on your vacation,” said Clay.

“Not at all,” said the Dean. “It's the only time I have the time to really visit with anybody.”

“This is my boy,” said Clay.

The dean turned and looked at Clay-Boy in a quick but appraising glance.

“I'm glad to meet you,” he said.

“How-do, sir,” said Clay-Boy, returning the dean's firm handclasp.

“Sir,” said Clay, “the last time I was here you said if Clay-Boy got a semester of Latin you'd let him in the college.”

“I did indeed. I spoke to the other members of the Admissions Committee after you were here and they agree that young Clay should have every opportunity.”

“Show him the note, son,” said Clay.

Clay-Boy extended the note Mr. Goodson had given him. Dean Beck read it, folded it and placed it in a pocket in his jacket.

“Give my regards to Goodson when you see him,” the dean said. “Registration and orientation begin the second week of September. I'll see you then, young man.”

“Don't you even want to hear the boy speak any Latin, Dean?” asked Clay.

“Goodson's word is good enough for me. By the way, is he a good preacher? He showed great promise when he was a student.”

“I'll tell you how good a preacher he is, Dean,” said Clay. “I been a heathen all my life, hadn't been to church since I was a boy, and right now I'm sitten in the Amen Corner every Sunday mornen.”

“And it was Goodson who persuaded you to come to church?”

“I wouldn't say he persuaded me,” grinned Clay. “Starten to church was the price he charged me to give Clay-Boy them Latin lessons.”

“
Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit
,” said the dean with a wink at Clay-Boy.

Clay looked puzzled.

“He said something good might come of that bad luck,” explained Clay-Boy.

“Somethen already has,” said Clay with a smile. “The rest of the choir has to sing so loud to keep up with me that we near about drown out the Methodists.”

***

Clay and Clay-Boy sang all the way home. Mixed in with the Baptist hymns Clay would sometimes do a solo from his
vast store of bawdy songs while Clay-Boy would grin in sheepish merriment.

It was only when they were in sight of home that Clay-Boy asked the question that had to be answered.

“Daddy,” he said, “where are we going to get the money?”

“I'm goen to get that money, boy,” he said. “I'm goen to borrow it off Old Man John Pickett.”

“It's right smart money, Daddy,” said Clay-Boy. “Are you sure he'll lend you that much?”

“I'm putten up the kind of security that Old Man John Pickett can't turn down,” said Clay.

“What security you offering him, Daddy?”

“You'll see when the time comes, boy,” said Clay. “Right now, looks like we're home.”

He drove the truck up into the back yard. As soon as the truck stopped, the back door of the house flew open as Olivia, the grandparents and all the children came running toward them to learn the good news that was written all over the faces of Clay-Boy and his father.

“This is goen to be the catfish of the waters,” Clay warned Clay-Boy as he looked up at the old oak tree he had decided to cut down.

The tree was diseased and would be pushed over by the wind in time to come. Clay had chosen to get rid of it now; if it fell in a storm it was close enough to the house Clay was building that it would undo all he had done.

Clay walked around the tree studying it carefully. He decided to cut it with an axe rather than slice through the trunk with the cross-cut saw he and Clay-Boy usually used.

“Too dangerous with all that rot in there, boy,” he said. “You back off a ways where it's safe and I'll tend to her.”

Clay-Boy ran to the site of the new house and climbed over the foundation Clay had built and sat down. The foundation of the house was beginning to take shape now. Already the skeleton outline was visible for the kitchen, the pantry, the living room and the two downstairs bedrooms. If work went slowly now it was only because of time and the fact that Clay would accept no inferior piece of wood. If a two-by-four or a four-by-four went out of proportion in the sawing, Clay would reject it and start all over again. The sawing was all the
more laborious because the power saw was designed for sawing firewood, not finished lumber. Yet Clay worked with joy every week end from sunup until darkness forced him to quit.

Sometimes Clay-Boy would watch his father sweating and cursing joyfully over the house, and the boy would wonder how it was that his father could envision the finished house so clearly. The boy could only see what had been accomplished; each new addition was a revelation to him. It also added to the pride he felt in his father when Clay would make some addition that brought the house closer to reality. He knew from his visits to the kitchens of the villagers when he delivered buttermilk and butter that some of the people felt his father was dreaming a foolish dream and that the house never would really be built. For a while Clay-Boy had shared these doubts, even though he defended what his father was doing, but now, during this summer, Clay-Boy saw that the house was no longer a dream but almost daily was assuming the shape of a good strong house.

He knew that his father expected to finish the house during the summer of the next year, and Clay-Boy planned to spend the entire summer vacation helping his father with the finishing touches, the painting of the inside walls, sanding the floors and plowing the yard so that grass might be planted. It was not a thing his father had asked him to do. The boy had promised it and the promise pleased Clay.

While Clay-Boy dozed in the sun and his father wrestled with the tree, farther down the hill from them Zebulon Spencer was cleaning up the family graveyard. It was a job he did several times during the summer, and while there was really very little work to do there he used it as an excuse to go and sit in the place and think.

The graveyard was located in a grove of pines. A still whispering wind seemed forever moving through the green canopy overhead, and underfoot blue periwinkle covered the row after row of Spencer dead. The old family burial ground had been used for so many years that many graves were merely unmarked mounds. Others had sunk in, but Zebulon never failed to leave the place sobered and thoughtful after communion with his ancestors.

Zebulon threw out some pine branches that had fallen from the trees overhead and noted with pleasure that the white rhododendron they had planted on his mother's grave was growing well. Farther down the row he came to the grave of his brother, Ned. Chiseled in the soapstone marker were the words:
Ned Spencer. Fell at Bull Run. August 2nd, 1862.

Old ghosts came alive in the quiet morning and Zebulon remembered the days of his own growing up. He had been too young to go off and fight with Ned, but he had gone with his father in the wagon down to the train station at Esmont where the train stopped in those days and where they had left Ned's coffin off. His earliest memories were of Ned's being returned to them dead and then of the other boys coming back with tales of what had befallen them at Chickamauga, Antietam, Manassas and Chattanooga.

The old man dreamed for a long time, and when he woke he thought for a moment that he was back in the time when he and Eliza still lived on the mountain and that all he had to do was to walk up the hill and he would find the house they lived in and all the boys would be small again. But then as his mind became more fully awake and he heard the rhythmic sound of an axe eating its way into a tree, he remembered that Clay was cutting a tree this morning, that the old house was gone, had settled down into a pile of decayed wood.

He had not seen the house Clay was building in several months, so the old man left the graveyard and made his way up the hill.

He thought with pride of the house Clay was building. There were not many boys like Clay. Most of the men in New Dominion were happy to sit around all week end swilling down beer or Miss Emma and Etta's recipe, but not Clay. The boy was a cut above the other men in the village, and his father had always been proud of him. Another year and they'd all be living in the new house and they would all be back on the mountain again. There had been times when he had feared that Clay might follow the other boys' example and sell his part of the mountain, but now that the house was well under way, the old man was sure that Clay would never
let the land go, had indeed promised his father that he would never let it go, and the knowledge that at least part of the mountain would always remain in the family had been a comforting thought to Zebulon.

Clay-Boy, half-asleep on the foundation, thought at first his father was calling to him.

“Papa, go back!” were the words he heard, but then as he sat up and looked to where the voice had come from every muscle in his body went rigid with the horror of what he saw. His grandfather stood transfixed, unable to move as he looked up at the tree which slowly and gently had begun to fall toward him. In that same instant Clay-Boy saw his father throw his axe aside and run toward his father, shouting as he ran, but even before Clay reached old Zebulon a splintering groan came from the tree trunk as it separated from its stump and then the crashing mass of green enveloped the old man and Clay.