The Hinterlands (39 page)

Honey, it was always hard for me to come to the end of a job. It was getting up toward dark and I still couldn't bring myself to leave the cut where we had worked so many months. A few yellow leaves floated down into the turnpike from the poplars way up on the ridge, beyond the top terrace and shelf we had dug. I picked splinters of meat off the bones of the pig and eat the last morsel of the barbecue. And then I throwed all the mess of bones and sticks and half-burned wood over the bank and watched them slide far into the weeds and brush below. The ridge down there looked like the scar of a landslide, like the guts of the mountain had give way and spilled all the way to Terry Creek and dried to a scab.

I found more sticks to pick up, and papers people had dropped at the ceremony. I wanted the turnpike to look perfect when it was opened for traffic the next morning. My hands was sticky with the grease of the pig, and I tried to wipe them on the new grass. I wanted to keep the grease off my good suit of clothes. I climbed up one of the terraces to see how the cribwork and walls of wattles and gabions was holding. Everything was tight as a barrel and weeds and grass was beginning to grow on the new dirt. By the next spring pine seedlings would begin to spark the shelves. Every foot of space we had measured and shoveled with the chaingangs would be covered in a few years by trees.

The sun was low over Corbin Mountain and edging into Painter Gap. And still I couldn't bring myself to leave the site. I guess I was savoring the end of the job. The pleasure of walking through the cut with the gold rattling in my pocket was too sweet to end. The mountain had fought me all summer, and I was tickled to be standing in victory over the finished cut. The weather had not beat me, and the mud had not beat me, and Mr. Lance and his crooked ways had not beat me. Most important, the mountain had not beat me. I looked down at the holler where the old turnpike went. The new road swung like a king's procession through the cut and around the mountain in an easy grade.

Finally I knowed I would have to go, if I was to get back to the Lewis house in time for supper. Me and Miss Lewis was going to tell her parents that night we was to be married. And I would pay Mrs. Lewis mine and Noble's bill for the summer.

I thought to take the trail one last time back to the Lewis house. For the rest of my life I would be traveling the new turnpike through the gap. The trail was a kind of shortcut through the woods, and I could gain some time by going that way. All my tools was already back at the house.

Part of the trail was covered up with spoil dirt, and I slipped around the brush and blackberry briars, trying not to pick my good clothes on the stickers. The trail, once I reached it, dropped quick out of the sunlight. I couldn't even see at first, and had to let my eyes get used to the shadows. Ain't nothing darker than a laurel thicket, unless it's a cave. The bushes growed right over the trail, shading out whatever light got through the trees above. The woods smelled sour the way leaves do right after frost has hit them.

I was going down the steep zigzag of the trail, jumping from side to side, when I heard this terrible scream in the trees above. It sounded like a woman in childbirth. It was the kind of squall that
tears through you and hurts the middles of your bones. I knowed it was a painter, a big painter.

I stopped for a second and heard it drop heavy out of the trees, and pad along the ground in an odd pattern of steps. It come to me that was a three-footed animal. A painter with four legs runs like any other cat, but this one sounded one, two-three, one, two-three. A shudder went through me. It was Old Tryfoot that I had caught in a trap four years before, way over on the yon side of Pinnacle.

Painters don't never attack grown people in daylight. But it was already dark in the holler. I could just see to find my steps. I started walking, and the pad of feet follered me, one, two-three, one, two-three. The painter was coming on steady. I tried to think what to do. Was it better to run, or slow down and make the painter think I wasn't afraid of it? Dogs could be bluffed that way, but I didn't know about a painter.

The grease was sticky on my hands and I seen it was the smell of meat that had drawed the cat. I reckon I had the smell of barbecue all over me. I eat barbecue like a youngun eats watermelon. It had got on my clothes and in my hair, like as not.

The painter climbed up in a tree behind me and shook it like they was a big storm. I wondered if it was going to jump from tree to tree right down on me. Could be Old Tryfoot remembered me. I couldn't see nothing but the laurel bushes right around me, but I knowed cats can see in the dark good as in daytime.

The painter was after the smell of meat, and I didn't have no meat to give it except that on my own bones. The smell that drawed it was mostly on my hands. I took the handkerchief out of my coat pocket. It was a silk handkerchief that had been give me by Miss Lewis. She had embroidered my initials on the corner. I wiped my hands on the silk and throwed it on the trail.

Don't reckon I had gone more than thirty or forty feet when I
heard the painter snarl and start ripping that handkerchief. Sounded like it tore the fabric to pieces with its teeth. While it was ripping the cloth, I hurried on and got maybe a hundred yards further down the trail. The path went deep into the holler past a spring and across a branch. I didn't want to start running yet. That would seem too much like panic. But I walked fast as I could and started climbing toward the tableland.

The painter may have eat the handkerchief or just tore it to shreds. But after a few more seconds I heard the thud of paws on the trail, one, two-three, one, two-three. It was gaining. I didn't even have a knife with me. I wished I had my squirrel rifle, or the shotgun I always carried on my trap line. But you don't carry a knife or rifle to a ceremony wearing your new suit.

Sweetheart, let me stop here and go back a little. I'll come around to that old three-legged cat again. I want to tell you about them days. You know how a grandpa likes to talk about the old times.

It was the beginning of change back then in these mountains. We had lived so far back in the hollers and coves, and high on the ridges, we didn't pay no attention to what happened in Raleigh or Columbia. Politics was for flatlanders, for the cities of the plain, you might say. Our county seat was way off in Asheville, and all it done was collect taxes and send out the sheriff to bust up a still from time to time. We tried to leave government alone, and make it leave us alone.

Then about 1838 everything changed around all at once. It was like something touched the elements, and the light and air was different. They broke off the south end of Buncombe and started a new county. We didn't care, for it was closer to pay our taxes and we could go to court on Decoration Day and listen to the lawyers.
It always was a pleasure to hear lawyers string out their big words and glittering lies. Then they got to fussing about where the county seat was supposed to be. They was the River Party that wanted it by the French Broad, and they was the Road Party that wanted it on a hill just north of Flat Rock, along the Buncombe Turnpike. The rich farmers of Mills River wanted the town near them and said they'd be steamboat traffic on the river. The flat-landers in Flat Rock said no, the seat should be near them, in the center of the county. Old Judge King said he'd even give the land on the hill there free for the courthouse.

The parties got to feuding, and they was fistfights and shouting and lawsuits in Asheville and torchlight rallies. Finally the legislature down in Raleigh stepped in and said they wouldn't be no new county if they didn't shut up. I reckon the uppity-ups in Flat Rock finally got the town put on the hill by the Buncombe Pike where it is today. But they was hard feelings all around for a long time.

Right in the middle of the mess was a politician from Asheville named Lance. He was a short man, and he had been crippled since he was a boy, and he walked with a cane. He had a terrible temper and a loud voice. Lance had made a pile of money in one thing and another. He had a bunch of wagons and teams that carried freight up from Old Fort and Greenville to Asheville, and across the mountains to Tennessee on the old turnpike. And he owned several taverns and drovers' stands. And they said he had bought thousands of acres of speculation land and was selling it off in squares and quarters. He also loaned money at high interest to folks in trouble.

How come I got to know Lance was he cabbaged the contract to build the new turnpike. They was so many hogs and cattle and wagons and stages coming over the old road, it was wore out and had almost washed away. In places it wasn't fit for use. The old
road come through the gap, and it hadn't been kept up at all. They was places the old pike wasn't much more than a ditch.

Lance was on the committee that let out contracts for construction in both North and South Carolina, and I reckon he give the biggest one to hisself. Whoever got to rebuild the road could collect tolls for the first five years. And whoever started collecting them would probably just go on collecting them.

What's that? Why girl, even in 1845 it cost a dollar for a wagon to drive across the pike. Even to ride a horse cost two bits. And they charged a penny a head for hogs driv along the road. In the fall when stock was took to market a toll house collected hundreds of dollars a week.

I had built roads with Pa ever since I was a boy. After he made the way up through Douthat's Gap to Cedar Mountain, people everywhere asked him to build roadways for them. When I was younger than you are now, I started helping him survey routes. We dug out the road up on Hebron, and we made a road along the Blue Ridge out past Upward to Dana and Hickory Nut Gap. We even built a road up on Mount Olivet, though it wasn't a very wide one.

But I never thought of myself as no builder when I was young. I wanted to tramp through the woods and trap fur. Road building was what Pa done. I wanted to get away from roads, back to the creeks and high branches where the muskrats and mink was. It was like they was gold and treasure in the woods and high mountains, scattered in dens and along streams. A mink pelt is so soft you just want to rub your hand on it. In a cold year their fur gets thick and warm and almost black.

Fur was what I seen when I was sixteen and looked at the mountains to the west, at the creek valleys and Flat Woods and the rim of mountains over toward South Carolina. It was a
thing that thrilled the first settlers, and beyond them it drawed the hunters and traders and explorers, and before that the Indians had loved to catch and trade fur. I thought of the sparkling pelts of red foxes and gray foxes and coons with rings on their eyes and tails. It was the shining wealth and song of these mountains.

It was always hard to catch a fox or a mink. Don't let nobody tell you different. I reckon the Indians caught them in deadfalls and snares, and they shot foxes with bows and arrows most like. They was awfully good trappers. But with a steel trap you've got to catch a mink in water where it drowns or it'll gnaw the foot off and get loose. You put the trap in water just deep enough so the mink will step in it, not swim over it.

Now a fox will outsmart you every time. A fox will find your trap and spring it. A fox will steal your bait and leave the trap untouched. They can smell your scent on the metal and stay away. To catch a fox, you've got to boil your traps and handle them with gloves and put scent on them to cover any human smell. And you hide the trap under just enough dirt and leaves so they can't see it. Put it too deep and it won't spring fast enough.

But you say you want to hear about the painter? I'm coming back to that. Be patient. What folks want most to do is what is hardest. You'll find that true with near everybody. A girl that is hard to get is most wanted. Something you can't hardly get, you try every way to secure. Something is scarce and has to be brung a long way the price goes up. That's one of the mysteries of people, how much they like to strive and worry.

When I was a boy, Pa made me work with him, building little roads and big roads. But because it was what I had to do, I didn't take to it then. I had to work around the place too, hoeing corn and milking the cows, but I never took much to that either. I
couldn't think of nothing but trapping and hunting. Every chance I got, I was off in the woods with my gun and traps.

In them days I knowed every valley and ridge between here and Dark Corner. I tromped the woods to Big Springs and the Long Holler, and back to the Sal Raeburn Gap and the mountains toward Brevard. I felt like I knowed every tree along the trails and along the trap line. I knowed the trees so well I could remember what I was thinking when I passed one the time before.

A trap line is like a net throwed out over the mountains. But nobody is supposed to see it except the person that set the traps. A good trapper hides his traps so you could walk right over them and not see them. And you remember where every set is, no matter if they is dozens, strung out over twenty miles of branches and trails. You're like a peddler that knows all the places in a region.

I don't reckon they's no finer feeling than coming home with four or five pelts and one of them is mink. Even if you was cold, you could come in and set by the fire and skin off the hides and stretch them on boards. Mama complained about me skinning animals by the fire, but she let me do it. And I always cleared away the mess and wiped up the blood. I hung the stretched hides on the back side of the crib, out of reach of dogs while they dried and cured.

Some days, if I had run into a polecat, they could smell me coming all the way down the valley. If the wind was right the stink carried for miles. A skunk gets in your trap you have to take it out, and when it's riled, it throws the stink on you before you can kill it.

When I come home smelling like a polecat, Mama would meet me out at the barn with clean clothes and a piece of lye soap. I had to wash up in the branch and then burn my dirty pants and shirt.
I never did think a polecat smells as bad as other people do, but maybe I got used to them.