The Hinterlands (42 page)

As soon as we finished marking the right-of-way, they would start sawing down the trees and clearing it. And then we would begin digging the cut. I wasn't used to bossing over men, except for John and Noble. Mr. Lance said the convicts had their own guards and warden. “Just tell them where to dig and drill,” he said, “and Mr. Howard will make sure they do it right.”

It was almost dark when me and Noble got to the place where the highway from the foothills stopped, down close to Chestnut Springs. The convicts had already quit work and gone to their camp. We could hear them hollering and banging pots, and smell their cooking. It was dark in the holler, though the trees up on the ridge was still lit. A shot was fired and a bullet sung through the air like a sick banjo string. Me and Noble started back up the mountain.

It was too far to walk from Cedar Mountain every day, and me and Noble and John had took a room at the Lewis house just north of the state line. The Lewises had a big house with porches on both stories, and they kept boarders from the Low Country in summer and stock drovers and any other travelers too. Captain Lewis had several thousand acres there on the line, and he owned property in South Carolina also. They had slaves that worked around the house and served at the table.

Soon as I seen your Grandma, I was attracted to her. She was the oldest daughter of the Lewises and helped her Ma run the place. I flirted with all the girls back then. I seen her in her long, white, summer dress going around to make sure everything was ready for supper, and I couldn't take my eyes off her. I talked to her a few times, like the young will if they get a chance. But I didn't really fall in love until we sung together. Us Richardses always could raise a song, in church and at home, at infares, and
even by ourselves out in the woods. Somebody said music is the food of love, and I believe it.

They was a big parlor in the front of the house with a fireplace at both ends, and they was a little organ against the wall away from the window. Evenings they lit the lamps above the organ and I would play it after I washed up and had supper. After the rough work of surveying and digging, it was a pleasure to work the white keys, and pump the peddles like I was dancing or marching somewhere. One night the second week I stayed there, the guests was gathered in that big room. Some was reading the papers, and some was smoking their pipes, and some was arguing about the president and all the crooks and thieves in Washington, and whether we ought to go to war with Mexico. It was a cool evening, and the flames in the fireplaces looked red as roosters that stretched and crowed on the logs.

“Can you play this?” Miss Lewis said, and handed me a song-book.

“I'll try my best,” I said. I had always loved the old songs from Scotland. They are sweet and pure in their sadness. I begun peddling and playing the first chords and Miss Lewis started to sing the first line. By the time she reached the second line I knowed I was in love. Her chin and throat looked so white and perfect in the lamplight I couldn't quit looking at them. And her voice touched me in a way I had never been moved before. They is a point before which you can resist love and think you are just being playful. But after that point is reached, they is no turning back. I felt the pain and thrill and jolt that instant.

That evening we read through most of the numbers in the songbook. The light from the lamps seemed bright as a sunrise. I forgot about the time and the other guests and the worry of road building. Noble was off smoking his pipe by hisself, I reckon. I
watched Miss Lewis's eyes and lips while she sung. When our eyes met it was as though the light was coming from her.

I had sparked a number of girls back in Cedar Mountain, both while I was in school and after. But I was too busy working with Pa on roads and walking my trap line to ever really fall for one. Now Miss Lewis had a lot of beaux among the local boys. They was boys from South Carolina that come up to see her, and boys from town too. If I had any advantage it was because I was working on the turnpike that went by her house, and because we sung together.

While I stayed at the Lewises, I went to church more than I ever had before. I walked with Miss Lewis to the regular services, and to a singing school at Crossroads. Nothing softens your outlook like love. I felt like I had discovered music and Miss Lewis and goodness at the same time. Everything that summer seemed to have the face and voice of love, Miss Lewis, the hymns and songs, the words we said, every cricket chirp and sunset. Even the hard work on the cut, the harshness of the mud and cussing and sweat of the convicts, seemed part of the new plan of things. Every evening I walked the trail from the gap and washed up on the back porch and put on my clean clothes. “Ain't never seen you so primpy before,” Noble said as I splashed cologne on my neck and cheeks.

“I ain't never heard such jealousy,” I said.

Miss Lewis and me took walks in the evening, when it was still light. We walked past the big cribs where they stored grain to sell to the drovers in the fall. We walked past the distillery and the indigo vats. Katydids was already singing in trees. They was crickets in the grass and a jarfly somewhere in the orchard. We walked down the trail that was the shortcut to the gap.

“Everything is making music,” I said. The evening star had
come out and was sparkling like the note of the crickets. Far off we heard a church bell and the sound of a waterfall. When you can hear a waterfall like that, it is a sign of rain.

“We're making the best music,” Miss Lewis said, “just us together.”

After me and Noble marked out the right-of-way, the chaingangs cut down all the trees to the top. They used crosscuts and axes and buck saws. When a tree was felled, they rolled the logs off down the mountainside. “Don't you want to save the wood?” I said to the warden.

“Got no use for more logs,” he said. They had already finished the plank road to the bottom of the mountain. The big logs knocked down little trees and piled up against each other all down the mountainside. It looked like somebody had poured scalding water on a bank of lush weeds. You never seen such a mess of laps and broke-down poplars and timber going every which way like logjams high in the air. The dead oaks soured and the broke limbs wilted.

“We could saw up the logs and pile them to cure,” I said to Mr. Howard.

“Ain't got time,” he said. I think he resented that Mr. Lance had put me in charge of the cut, and him so much older than me. He showed me quick he wasn't taking no orders from me. Mr. Howard carried a gun on the job, like the guards and foremen. And he told everybody what to do. He was used to building roads in the piedmont and flat country. He talked like a flatlander, and he hadn't especially wanted to come up here and dig a road out of the belly of the mountain.

“My men ain't used to climbing rock cliffs,” he said, and spit.

“A road has to be built right,” I said.

“Any way you can build a road is right,” he said. He leaned down toward my face. “Ain't that right?” he said.

“I guess it is,” I said. I didn't have no choice but to work with him, Mr. Lance had said. Just tell them where to dig and where to drill and where to stop.

After they got through clearing the right-of-way, it looked like a storm had hit the mountain and broke off all the trees. I had heard of blow-downs, where one big tree fell in wind and all the little trees would go down too, in a line up the mountain, because they had no protection once the opening was made. That's what it looked like, except the trees spilled below was all crisscrossed and twisted up. And the ground looked ugly as the mange where it was exposed.

Once the trees was down, that left the stumps, all through the gap and down the mountain. Howard's gangs had a stump puller they could use on flat ground. But the gap was too steep for it. You never heard of a stump puller? Why honey, it's on wheels like a big cart, wheels higher than a man's head. And it has a chain wrapped around a big spool. You hook the chain to a stump and pull the whole thing with ten or twelve oxen. The spool turns and jerks the stump out of the ground.

Ain't nothing harder than working stumps out. You take a shovel and mattock and dig out around them and then chop the roots. But every stump is different. Some you can split down the middle and pull out. And some has a taproot like a big carrot that goes straight down and you have to dig the whole thing out to get to it. Pine stumps is easy, but hickory and oak and sometimes chestnut is nigh impossible to dig loose.

Howard put the convicts to working and they chopped and heaved and rolled stumps off down the mountain. The stumps with all their roots looked like big ticks pulled out of skin. The
convicts sweated and shined in the sun. They hollered and cussed as they strained. But they didn't sing much while they was pulling up stumps, neither the black chaingang or the white chaingang. They always worked about half a mile apart.

“Boss, this is
bad
work,” one said.

“These stumps don't never give up.”

“These stumps was put here at creation, and they'll be here till Doomsday,” another said.

The biggest stumps Howard blasted out with black powder. Every time a stump blowed up in pieces and sailed down the mountainside all the convicts cheered.

The third stump they blowed must have had a bad fuse, for the convict that lit it didn't have time to get away. I guess the spark jumped the fuse, for he hadn't run more than twenty feet before the stump exploded. A piece hit him in the back, and down he went in the leaves. Howard took a dipper of water from the bucket and throwed it on the man's face. “Carry him over to the shade,” the warden said.

“Maybe his back is broke,” I said.

“He'll be all right,” Howard said.

Where I got real sick of Howard was when two convicts started to fight. I don't know what they quarreled about, but they got to kicking and hitting with their chains. One knocked the other down and was kicking him in the head. Howard had the winner tied over a log and his clothes pulled off. “Boss, don't whip me,” the man said. But Howard cut a hickory withe about six feet long and stripped the leaves off. He whipped the man on his back and on his white butt while he screamed. He beat the convict till his back was bloody and he messed all over hisself. And after the man passed out, Howard left him laying there in the sun, with flies buzzing in the blood on his back and where it had run down in
his hair. I wanted the job to be over with right then. I didn't want to have no more to do with Howard and his chaingangs.

Where the stumps had come out the red dirt showed through the leaves and trash and topsoil. The dirt was so red the holes looked like sores, and when it rained they started bleeding down the mountain.

When the gangs started digging the cut I got a shovel and helped them. I never could stand to see people work in dirt without pitching in. Why is moving dirt around so thrilling? To carve and shape a mountainside makes you feel good, and to open a ridge for a road makes you feel worth something. Just by shoveling dirt in the right places you let light into hidden coves and farback hollers, like sunlight touching raw dirt that's been hid for thousands of years. It was almost painful to do.

“You don't need to work with prisoners,” Noble said.

But I couldn't stop myself. I stood around with my compass and chain and leveler for a while, like I was inspecting the gangs' work as they started loosening the right-of-way with picks and mattocks. But I seen how rough they was cutting along the upper line we had laid off.

“Let's make a clean cut,” I said to Howard.

“Won't make no difference how clean it is to start with,” he said, and spit ambeer.

“People work better if they're doing it right,” I said.

I got a shovel and dug along the upper boundary to make a neat cut. The woods dirt broke easy until you hit a root. Then you had to chop the root with an ax or mattock, or big grub hoe. Roots streamed with sap when they was sliced, and they smelled like seeds or sour fruit. I dug through leaves and rot and black dirt, and in a few inches turned up yellow and red subsoil. The
black dirt on mountaintops is never thick. I dug the line across the top straight as a rifle shot to show the convicts how to do it. I wanted them to take pride in their work.

The gangs labored without shirts, and they was dirty and shiny with sweat. Their backs glistened as they swung the picks. Looking down from the top, it was like watching a crowd of locusts and grub worms attack the ridge and eat down into the red quick. They hollered and cussed, and Howard's slave boy carried water among them. “Hey, Henry,” they called to him. And when he come they drunk from the dipper and ruffled his hair and slapped him on the backside. “Hey, Henry,” they called, “bring us some of that sweet water.”

One of the pleasures of opening dirt is it's different in every place, and it keeps changing. Every shovelful has different grains and smell. Some deep dirt is gritty as sugar and sparkles in the sun like little mirrors. Some is dull as rotten rocks way down in the ground. Some dirt is gray and some yellow and some orange. Soon as you get away from topsoil you don't find no black dirt, or even brown dirt. The soil you move out of a mountain is always red or light-colored. And it has a smell when it's exposed to air, sometimes like liquor or camphor, sometimes like water that ain't seen light in a long time and blinks. When you dig, every shovelful seems to touch a secret, like they's treasure, or a big snake, or passage down there. You get down to grave level and spring level, and feel the mystery of deep soil. And when you bring it up into light it's already starting to dry and go stale. In a day or two dirt starts to form a crust.

I have dug into soil that was like bread, and dirt stiff as the meat of a chestnut. And sometimes you reach into mealy dirt that is almost green and has specks of mica in it like little fish scales. And sometimes you touch into clay pure as butter. When I dig, I am curious to see what the next shovelful will show.