At dawn the morning after my well-attended event at Asheville’s Malaprop’s Bookstore, I was high in the Cumberland Mountains, making my way west in the general direction of Nashville. Just at sunrise I came upon a black bear, promenading along the top of a stone wall to keep the dew off its big padded feet, with all the aplomb of a seasoned Parisian boulevardier. The little sidehill farms and wooded hollows and quick mountain brooks of Kentucky reminded me of the Northeast Kingdom.
Up ahead beside the road, a mountaineer in faded overalls and a dark slouch hat was selling snake-shaped walking sticks out of his dooryard. “Pull in here,” said my uncle. “He looks like someone we should meet.” The carver showed me his great-granny’s bed snake. It looked like an old-fashioned wooden wash stick, about three feet long and three inches wide, flat like a yardstick, with a shallow notch cut in the business end. Over time, granny’s bed snake had devolved into a stick for stirring boiled peanuts. But the walking-staff carver remembered his grandmother using it to beat the quilt on his boyhood trundle bed to drive out any blacksnakes that might have dropped out of the rafters of their cabin during the day. If necessary, you could pin down an unwelcome bedfellow with the fork in the stick, then remove it, unharmed, to the outdoors.
I bought a walking stick, a beautiful length of native mahogany in the shape of two intertwined serpents sharing a single head. At fifteen dollars, it was by far the best buy, other than the books I purchased, on my entire tour. Then I bought Phillis a jar of sourwood-blossom honey. “Do you see that clump of snakeweed over there?” the carver said, pointing with the bed snake at a wiry bunch of grass on the edge of his neatly swept dirt dooryard. I nodded.
Well, he told me, two days ago he’d witnessed a battle royal, right here in his yard, between a rattler and a king snake. Every time the rattler struck, the king snake would slither off for a mouthful of immunizing snakeweed to counteract the venom, then return to the fray. Eventually, the storyteller assured me, the king snake strangled its larger adversary and ate it whole.
Was the raconteur storying a credulous Yankee descendant of those dastardly perpetrators of the War of Northern Aggression, as my beloved Georgia son-in-law refers to the Civil War? Who cares? Truth may or may not be stranger than fiction, but as that most accomplished of all American storytellers knew, it surely isn’t any truer. He was sitting in the catbird seat of the Loser Cruiser, looking right at home in his impeccable white suit, and of course I recognized him immediately.
“What mainly ails fiction these days,” Mark Twain told me, “is that most of you newfangled writers have forgotten how to be entertaining.”
Twain lit a cigar. “You modern-day storytellers grouse day and night about your poor sales. And they are poor. Do you know why? It’s because nine out of ten of you are boring. I ask you. Was Shakespeare ever boring? Was Dickens? Tarnation, son, if I want to be bored, I can go to church.”
I laughed, but Mr. Twain was just warming to his subject. “How about the second-greatest yarner of all time? Did Jesus ever spin a story that was anything less than entertaining? Not that he didn’t try out a few stretchers from time to time. But they certainly weren’t tedious. Runaway spendthrift sons, friendless women about to be stoned to death, victims of highway robbery sprawled senseless along the pikes. Now there was a storyteller. And he liked to bend his elbow at a wedding and laze around in the sun and wet a line like Tom and Huck. No wonder Christianity’s so popular. What do the Bible and Huckleberry Finn have in common?”
“Not much,” I ventured.
“Maybe not,” Twain said. “But you aren’t apt to find either one in a remainder bin.”