The Hinterlands (41 page)

It was a wisdom I learned by accident. Yet maybe I was born that way too. It just suits me to finish what I start, while other people have to run off to fresh things, which they will probably leave to start something else. In building they's a special ease in seeing things through. You might call it the rewards of patience.
But whatever you call it, the feeling is real and important, and I hope it will be important to you.

Honey, I want you to be patient. It may look now like you won't ever have another chance to get married. But they will be another boy come to love you, and your baby. You've got to see this through. To see things through is the best we can do. They ain't no escape and I don't believe they is no higher purpose than to finish a task right down to the end without giving up and without turning away from the grief that is give us.

My girl, though I hated to work for Pa, I loved to find an easy way through thickets and big rocks and split the mountain so folks could get across. It was a pleasure to make a level track through steep slopes, to move dirt and rocks around for people's use. The gentle grade of a road is like a lever that moves a mountain out of your way, a foot at a time. If you make a road right, you can take any load anywhere. Switchbacks up a ridge are like threads on a screw that twist right up to the highest summit. I hated it, and I loved it.

A road brings order to the wildest country and makes a flow of people and wealth into the wilderness. A road is like the blood and breath to farback valleys and dark coves. I hated to do it, and I thrilled to do it. Now I ain't sure how I feel.

“Richards,” Mr. Lance said, “we're going to build the first real road these mountains ever seen, and we're going to build it cheap.”

“Cheap ain't always the best business,” I said.

“We got convict labor,” he said. “We don't have to pay them hardly nothing, except a fee to Mr. Howard, the warden.”

“I can get my own crew,” I said.

“Who you hire comes out of your pay,” Mr. Lance said. “The
heavy work will be done by Howard's gangs.” Mr. Lance winked when he talked. He leaned on his cane and sweated from the strain of standing.

“We'll build a plank road over the low places,” Mr. Lance said, “so there won't be no mud. And we'll make a grade so gentle the finest carriages can drive up from Greenville without a pause and the horses won't fart on the pretty ladies.”

Honey, sometimes you come to a place and it seems like they's no way to get beyond it. The more you worry and fuss the worser everything gets. I know how you feel. That's why I'm telling you this. When your heart is about broke, ain't nothing helps but knowing other people have their troubles too. That, and getting on with your work. Here, don't cry.

The jump-off into South Carolina is the steepest place I know. You've seen it yourself. If you set down on the leaves at the top you could scoot all the way to Chestnut Springs. When people took their wagons that way on the old turnpike, loaded with hams and maple syrup and such, they had to tie the wheels back with rope on one side and hickory withes on the other. It was all a horse could do to hold the wagon back and men got on each side and helped. Coming back with a load from Greenville or Augusta, they had to make several trips up through the gap, or carry most of it on their backs. But coming up wasn't nigh as scary as going down. Climbing up was bone-wrenching, gut-busting work. But going down, it was like the earth fell away and left you nothing to hold to. Even if you wasn't afraid of high places it felt like the ground was tipping way down toward the treetops in Dark Corner and they was nothing between you and the trapdoor of hell.

The old turnpike had been graded up the side of the mountain,
but was too steep for all but the lighter wagons and coaches. Most people had to get out and walk at the worst places. And every time it come a bad rain, the road washed away a little more. Runoff would cut across the turns and leave ditches and rocks exposed. The curves had never been drained right, and in the low spots the road was a swamp in rainy weather and a trough of dust and manure in dry times.

I got out my dial and leveler and tromped across the gap. I done some measuring and some figuring, and I seen what we was up against. I worked it out on paper and showed the numbers to Mr. Lance. “Best way to make the grade is to swing around between Corbin and Painter Mountain,” I said.

“How much longer will that make the road?” he said.

“About three miles,” I said.

“That's too expensive,” he said.

I should have pulled out of the project right there, but I was too young and ignorant to know it. Lance didn't care about nothing but money. His face glistened with sweat as he tapped his finger on my page of figures. “Build it shorter,” he said. “It ain't that far to Greenville.” He was worried about paying for right-of-ways.

“Only way to make it shorter is to cut away half the mountain,” I said.

“Then cut it away,” Lance said. “The convicts will do the digging anyway.”

“We'll have to move a whole lot of dirt,” I said.

“Then move it, son,” he said, like he didn't have time for the likes of me.

“Yes, sir,” I said. And felt silly for agreeing. I should have quit right there, except I wanted to start that big job for Pa, so he could build the road for Mama's sake. It was my first contract, and if Pa didn't get well enough to make the road, I would never have that
good a chance to show what I could do myself. Some things seem meant to be, no matter how hard or painful they are. It was like I
had
to build that cut through the gap; I didn't even choose to do it. From the time I heard about the new turnpike, it was like that mountain chose me. We don't understand most of the things that happen. They come at us, and we handle them the best we can. I knowed Mr. Lance and his contract was going to be trouble, but I couldn't back down. It was like this job and grief had been give to me, and it was my job and my grief. Honey, that's what makes the difference. It's like having children; you'll do anything to protect them and raise them, because they're yourn. A task is the same way. If we see a labor has to be ourn, we'll do it, no matter how hard or dangerous. I think that must be what a soldier feels when the bullets start flying, that they's nobody else there to do what he has to do.

All along I kept Pa up to date about the job and about the survey I had done. Of course he knowed how steep the gap was. He knowed all the mountain gaps by heart. “I hope you have to cut through rock,” he said. Right then I knowed he wasn't going to do this job.

“Thanks for your good wishes,” I said. I was mad enough to hit him, except he was a sick old man. He had been running things so long, he was bitter because he knowed, better than me, he couldn't do the job, because he knowed he had to set in his chair and let me do it.

We didn't have nothing but black powder to blast with back then, and it took two men a day to drill a hole for one charge, one turning the drill and the other swinging the hammer. Up on the gap it was too high to get water for heating and dousing to break the rock, unless you carried it up in buckets. Until the road was
built they wasn't no way to carry it up. Blasting through rock was the hardest work to be found, and the most dangerous. Somebody was always being killed by a short fuse or a flying rock. Pa seemed to wish me misery and failure. “Thanks for your help,” I said, and stomped out of the house.

It's one thing to brag what you will do, and another to get out and do it. A mountainside ain't nothing but trees and rocks and thickets, and you have to figure where a road has to be. You have to have what carpenters call “the idea,” to see the road as it will be, when leaves and logs and briars are out of the way. The mountain at the gap is so steep, you have to dig your heels in the leaves to keep from falling.

I took my leveler and my compass and my ax, and me and my younger brother, John, and my cousin Noble—we always worked together—started hacking out a right-of-way. Other crews working from South Carolina had already laid out the turnpike from the foothills to the bottom of the mountain. And they was coming right along with the building. We could look down the mountain and see the gangs hammering little bridges over creeks and laying down logs in the low spots and nailing boards on them for the plank road. The convicts sung as they worked, and their voices echoed off the hollers below. The old turnpike had been built by slaves, but these was a gang of white convicts and a small gang of black convicts Mr. Howard was in charge of. The gangs worked on the same roads, but they lived in separate prisons and they worked apart. Back then, the warden of a prison didn't get no pay. He took what he could collect for the labor of his prisoners. In South Carolina the gangs built railroads as well as roads, and they even worked on farms, and digging sewers in Greenville.

It didn't seem possible to grade the road gentle enough from where they worked to where we stood. If the grade was steeper
than eight feet to the hundred, a heavy wagon couldn't be pulled up it with a team. If we couldn't get an easy pitch it wouldn't be no better than the old road.

“Comes a rain, we could use the slope as a muskrat slide,” Noble said. We was always joking while we worked, but I didn't feel like laughing that morning. I stood right on the South Carolina line and it come to me why Mr. Lance had hired me. He didn't care if the turnpike was a good road or not. He just wanted it built quick and cheap. He figured I was so young and ignorant I'd do whatever he said.

Ain't nothing on a mountain straight or regular. That's one thing I knowed about laying it off. You draw a straight line, or a smooth curve, right through the roughness and roll of a ridge. You cut a road out where it needs to be, not where it's easiest to make. You shovel ditches and lead water where you want it to go. You take out trees and rocks and shape the dirt like you think it should be shaped. The Bible says man was give dominion over the earth. But you have to work with the soil and rock and slope you find. If a mountain is in the way, you bust through it. You make the lay of the land fit your idea and purpose. But you also make your idea fit the place you're working on.

“Drive a stake here, and here,” I hollered to Noble and John. Holding onto trees and bushes they drove stakes and tied white rags where the road was to be cut. I made the right-of-way extra wide, knowing the cut would be deep at the top. “There, and there,” I shouted, aiming my leveler to get the right pitch. It didn't seem possible they could be a roadbed under us, deep in the mountain. But I knowed it could be done. They was a perfect grade inside that ridge and I was going to reach it. “Yonder, and yonder,” I said, pointing to places for John and Noble to make ax marks on trees and drive more stakes. I slashed laurel bushes
aside to see where I needed to go. This mountain ain't been fit for nothing but ginseng and blockade liquor, I said, and I'm going to make a way here. As I worked up a sweat I felt like tearing the mountain apart with my hands. Saluda Gap had stood in the way long enough. I wanted to sweep away the trees and laurel slicks and rocks and rake out a road the way a youngun makes things in sand. I looked at the trees like a farmer looks at weeds. I'm going to improve this ridge a little, I said.

I knocked away spider webs to get my sightings. Once I seen a copperhead in the leaves and kicked it with my boot halfway down the mountain. We come on a hornet's nest in a chestnut bush and I broke off the limb it hung from and throwed the whole thing down the ridge, and only got one sting. When I come to a rock or boulder I rolled it out of the way. “There,” I hollered, “and there,” pointing to places for them to drive more stakes.

“Is this the place?” John said, standing by a flame azalea in bloom.

“It's the only place,” I said.

The mountainside in spring was still a tender green. Some laurels was blooming yet and the azaleas was busting out. We broke limbs of flowers out of our line of sight and chopped down saplings. Twice I got out my compass to make sure of the angle I had figured. In the heat of work it seemed strange to be checking our direction with the North Pole so far away. But we was right on course. I knowed we had to come into the gap at an angle of twelve degrees off the straight north, or almost north-northeast, as it's called. I was going to hit it exactly. All the brush and trees on the ridge was trying to get in my way, but the compass could see right through them. “There, and there,” I hollered to John and Noble.

By dinnertime we had marked out near quarter of a mile. “I
ain't never been so rushed,” Noble said, when we set down on a log and opened our dinner buckets.

“You ain't never had such a big job,” I said.

“Hurry won't make it easier,” John said. “Pa always said hurry's sign of being scared.”

“You ain't working for Pa no more,” I said. I don't know what come over me. I guess I was afraid that if I didn't get the survey and the job done quick I would lose my chance. I was scared maybe Mr. Lance would give the contract to somebody else, or that the government would decide not to build the new turnpike. I don't know what I was afraid of. I had to prove I could do the job, and if things went wrong I didn't want nobody to blame me.

“I ain't busting a gut for nobody,” John said.

“This is my job and you'll do what I say,” I said.

“I ain't working for you,” John said. He picked up his dinner bucket and ax and started climbing back up the way we had come.

“You walk off now, you can't come back!” I hollered after him. “I don't pay no quitters.” But he didn't answer. He just kept on walking till he got out of sight over the lip of the gap. I felt even worser then, for I had never done a job without John. We had always worked together for Pa. But I didn't call to him or run after him to bring him back.

With nobody but me and Noble working, the job went slower that evening. We slapped at flies and brushed mosquitoes out of our eyes. Limbs whipped back and stung me in the face, and I smacked them out of my way. One time the leveler fell over and slid down the mountain till it lodged against an oak. I had to climb down to get it. We was getting closer to the work gangs, and their singing and hollering made me nervous, I guess. It seemed like I could smell the sweat of the convicts below.