BACKSTORY: My wife and I have long theorized that Johnny Cash could sing any song, and we’ve spent many a mile in the car playing the game described in this story, with the same results: he can sing them all but two. One that he sang to great effect in his late career was his version of John Routh’s “Field of Diamonds.” When I first heard it, the interplay of the simple melody, the sparkling harmonies, and Johnny’s dark baritone led me to a visual image—I actually saw deep contrasts of color and shading. I found myself thinking of a clear night sky against a field of snow, and of the different worlds that might lie under that sky. From there, it was only a short trip into the Blue Ridge Mountains to reach this story.
WIND RUSHING THROUGH THE PINE TREES atop the ridge, and I can smell a distant fire somewhere in the cold. The western sky is almost cloudless, the air clear and just below freezing. Somewhere ahead of me—grunting and muttering—is Greylen. Small clods of dirt and twigs fall down the slope, rattling off one another and bouncing from rock to rock. I haven’t heard a bird in hours.
“See anything?” I call.
He doesn’t answer, and of course I don’t really expect him to. Greylen tends to speak only at one volume, slightly too loud when you’re indoors and slightly too quiet when you’re out in the open. Right now, with the March wind whistling through the cracks in the mountain’s face, he makes no more noise than a catamount on the prowl.
Or so I imagined, safe behind the wheel of my Forester, downshifting as I made the turn onto Field in the dim November light and searched for the neighbors’ Labrador, which was usually ready to chase me all the way to my driveway. I had never seen a catamount. I’d bet that not a single member of my extended family had, except maybe for Greylen. But he was never one to give a straight answer. If you were to ask him, “Greylen, are there any catamounts around here?” he’d just lean back in his chair, look over your head, and say something cryptic: “I recollect two or three times I went out to the orchard to gather some windfalls, two or three times, and I was out there maybe quarter of an hour, and I knew they was eyes on me.” Then he’d shift in his chair and take a drag on his pipe, deepening the wrinkles in his lean face in the process.
Greylen was my wife’s cousin, I think four or five generations removed, but no one really knew. The Weakleys were a clan so numerous in Innskeep County that anyone with the name was automatically accorded cousinhood and expected at all family gatherings. Greylen appeared dutifully at every Thanksgiving, Christmas, wedding, and funeral, eating lightly and saying next to nothing. His chief contributions to the celebrations were a few muttered greetings and clouds of sweet tobacco smoke, which I guiltily enjoyed. I hadn’t been around anyone who smoked a pipe since my own grandfather had died fifteen years before, and though Greylen’s blend had a faint air of molasses about it, the scent’s similarity to that produced by Grandpa Polk’s pipe had always made me feel affectionate toward Greylen. Not that he seemed to notice.
I had trouble feeling that way about a lot of Corey’s family. They never did anything overt, but I was always painfully aware that I was an outsider—a Flatlander, capital F. Perhaps I just imagined it, but sometimes they seemed to harbor a hope that someday she’d move back to the hollows under Walker’s Top and forget everything she’d become since leaving to attend college down in the foothills. To that end, they always called her by her birth name, “Cora” or “Cora Marie,” even after she’d asked them not to. All except Greylen, that is. He just called her “little girl.” It was his name for any of the two dozen women under the age of sixty who might be encountered at a reunion. I was “son,” which had bothered me at first, as I told Corey on the drive home from my first Weakley Thanksgiving.
“What’s wrong with ‘son’?”
“It’s just—belittling.”
“What?”
“It’s like he doesn’t believe I’m an adult.”
“Well, compared to him, you’re not. You’re twenty-five, and he’s probably three times that.”
“I just don’t like being treated like I’m ignorant. You remember Dr. Garcek.”
Corey turned to look at me. I kept my eyes on the road, but I could see her hair fly around in the corner of my eye. “What does Dr. Garcek have to do with it? I thought he marked you down for using ‘y’all’ in a poli-sci essay.”
“Exactly!” I said. “He said in class one day that it sounded backward. That pissed me off so much I put it in my essay on purpose.”
“You are not gonna win this contest with me,” she said.
“What contest?”
“The ‘I Got Treated Like I Was Backward’ Contest. I’m from the hollows, hon. My freshman roommate was from Charlotte, and she kept asking me to say the word ‘night’ because she thought it sounded funny. I’ve heard every inbreeding joke ever made. And every moonshining joke, too.”
“But that’s what I mean,” I protested. “I’m a Southerner, so every New Yorker and Californian I talk to docks me a couple IQ points just for my accent. I don’t like it, but I’m used to it. But I don’t think I should have to put up with it from Greylen. He’s from the South, too.”
“There is no such thing as the South,” said Corey firmly. And that was all she said until we got home.
The next time we went to Innskeep County, I bristled silently until I realized that Greylen called every man and boy in the family “son.” He apparently didn’t use it out of disrespect, but just so he could get along without having to learn a lot of proper names.
Corey and I had been married for three years when we happened to visit her parents in the early spring. Her cousin Louise was getting married, and Corey seemed sure that the wedding had been arranged in some haste. “I don’t know that a shotgun’s involved,” she said, stuffing her suitcase with one more pair of warm socks. “But I’ll bet somebody stood near Matthew McKellen and whispered the word ‘paternity suit’ very slowly and clearly.”
We drove upwards, back into the winter—cold rain splattered down from time to time, and the scenery wasn’t worth discussing. Our car stereo was on the fritz, so we soon fell to playing an old favorite game: trying to find a song Johnny Cash couldn’t sing. I still don’t recall whether Corey or I had first voiced the opinion that he could sing anything, but we would occasionally test the hypothesis. I sing baritone, though not with anything like the twang and gravel Johnny had, but I’m not a bad mimic. Corey would come up with a song title and I’d do my best to deliver it in Cash style. Usually it sounded pretty good.
“How about ‘Alison’? Elvis Costello?” she said as we passed the city limits of Grindstaff, where the grocery store sign read FO D LI N.
“Totally Johnny,” I replied. “Oh, it’s so funny to be seein’ you after so long, girl. . . .”
“Yeah, you’re right. He gets kind of country anyway.”
“You’ve got to get a little more off the beaten track than that.”
“Okay. . .‘I Will Survive.’”
“‘At first I was afraid, I was petrified. . . .” ‘I rumbled, and suddenly the song changed from disco camp to a sincere statement of purpose. A man’s survival really had been in question, and now it really was assured. “How the hell does he do that?”
“Authority,” said Corey. “Whatever he says, he says with authority.”
“Damn straight,” I replied, and shifted down as we hit the first long slope into the mountains.
In three years, we’d found exactly two songs Johnny couldn’t sing: “I’ve Never Been to Me,” and Cyndi Lauper’s “She-Bop.”
Nobody mentioned shotguns or litigation at the wedding, of course, and Matthew looked suitably happy to be joining the Weakley clan. I was a bit surprised not to see Greylen around at the reception, though, and mentioned it to Corey’s father.
“Greylen? Oh, we won’t see him again till April.”
“Why not?”
“He’s scouting.”
“For what?”
“Snow.”
On the drive home, I asked Corey about Greylen’s absence and she seemed to fall into that zone I knew well, the one between fierce pride in the noble people of the hollows and harsh condemnation of their backward ways. I think the technical term is “conflicted.”
“What did Daddy tell you?”
“He said Greylen was out hunting snow.”
“You mean chasing snow.”
“Okay, chasing. What does that mean, exactly?”
It was dark, but somehow I could tell that she had rolled her eyes—maybe the steering wheel shifted or something. “It means that he spends the last part of March every year wandering around Innskeep County looking for patches of snow.”
“Why?”
“To find the last one before it melts.”
“He’s looking for the last one—”
“He wants to be the one to find the last patch of snow left in the county.”
I mulled that one over for a minute. “Does he win something?”
“Bragging rights, from what I hear.”
“You’ve never done it yourself?”
I think the eyes rolled again. “The only person I know who’s ever done it is Greylen, and you know how talkative he is. As far as I know, it’s just him and some friends all trying to one-up each other.”
“So why do they do it?”
Her mountain twang became deliberately sharp. “Well, there ain’t much to do up there, you know?”
That was all she said, and all I asked, but the idea kept rattling around in my head. Snow fell in Innskeep County every year, and it wasn’t unusual to see bits of it in shady spots days or even weeks after a snowfall. Where Route 88 passed over the ridge in Johnhall Gap, you could look to your right and see nothing but bare limbs waving in the cold sun that fell on Johnhall’s Peak. Look to your left, though, and you’d see the north face of Walker’s Top, pale blue with shadowed snow. The idea of long-fallen snow in the mountains was completely understandable.
What I didn’t understand was the desire to look for a patch of it. Oh, I like snow—well, to be fair, I used to like it more than I do now. When I was a kid, of course, a snowy day was a holiday—the best kind, one that couldn’t be planned for, a gift from above. It was gluing myself to the radio to wait for the song to be over so that the announcer could read the list of school closings, then launching myself into the closet to burrow for fallen scarves and mittens. It was clumping up the hill of Austin Road in boots that squeaked against the powder, my Flexible Flyer alternately sliding behind me and bumping my heels. It was launching myself downhill with a muffled oof and letting my cheeks go red and raw with the bite of the wind and the occasional stray flake, hauling back hard on the right bar to bend my path away from the curb and the stand of redbuds beyond it. And it was staggering back in, exhausted, to find a toasted-cheese sandwich, bubbling under brown streaks of seasoned salt, and a saucepan of Campbell’s Tomato Soup, all waiting for me.
But nowadays? Now snow is just weather. Nicer to look at than rain, certainly, but not fundamentally different. I like the neighborhood after it’s snowed, though—all the various patches of lawn, the driveways, the trees, all whited out, all distinctions erased. It’s a calm and peaceful picture. But then the markings appear—the tire tracks, the footprints, the scars of shovels—and the mud beneath is revealed. The same mud made by rain, just covered over with white.
Maybe it was different up in the hills. Maybe from up there, snow looked different. Maybe Greylen and his friends saw something in it that made it more important, more desirable. But for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what it was.
When I saw Greylen next, there was no snow anywhere. It was Father’s Day, and the Weakleys were gathered at the old John Hall Weakley house for their reunion. The house had been expanded and renovated from its old days when John Hall had built it back in the 1830s. In fact, Corey’s dad said it had been the first house in Innskeep County to have both wiring and indoor plumbing, though I didn’t know the truth of that claim. The current inhabitants, Calvin and May Weakley, hadn’t made any major changes, at least not that I could see from the photos that covered the walls of the front room. It was still a yellow two-story box, tin-roofed and twin-chimneyed, and the long low wing that jutted eastward along the slope behind it had been there since sometime in the days of sepiatone. Okay, the satellite dish was new.
Greylen sat on the porch of the east wing, cocked back in a rocking chair with a pipe in his mouth and a few bits of debris on his plate that turned out to be the remains of Aunt Emma’s grape pie. Balancing my own overloaded plate with care, I settled heavily into the rocker next to Greylen’s and smiled at him.
“How’ve you been, Greylen?”
“Can’t complain, can’t complain,” he said after a pause. He had that way of answering even the most inane comments with what seemed like real deliberation. “You and that little girl still gettin’ on?”
“Like you said,” I replied around a bite. “Can’t complain.”
I’m sure we must have talked about something else for a while, but whatever it was has slipped away as surely as the meal. A plate of Weakley food is something to treasure, but the shame of it is that each dish obscures the others—at every gathering, there is too much, in too much variety, for an ordinary mind like mine to recapture the particulars. I could bet that my plate that day was overflowing with fried chicken, black-eyed peas, collards, two kinds of cornbread, two kinds of biscuit, baked beans, and Uncle Will’s lemon pound cake, but it’s only a guess. I have spent too many years bewildered by the choices spread out in Calvin and May’s dining room to know now whether Greylen watched me slurping down fresh string beans or Aunt Maria Belle’s chicken and pastry. But I do believe it’s important that I try to remember.
Eventually, of course, my curiosity got the better of me. “Greylen, Corey was telling me that you chase snow.”
He nodded curtly. “Not lately.”
“Why not?”
He’d been waiting for that, so he took a second to puff his pipe. “It’s June, son.”
I snorted appreciatively. “But you were chasing snow back in February?”
“Oh, no. Too early, too early. It’s still fallin’ up here into March. I’ve found it in April before. ’Course, that was after a big fall on Saint Patrick’s Day.”
I’d never heard so many words out of Greylen’s mouth at one time, and they didn’t stop there. If I’d had a notebook with me, instead of a plastic fork greasy with barbecue sauce, I could have written the definitive treatise on snow chasing, but now only fragments remain. How the object was to find a patch bigger than two hands side by side. How the real chasing began in early March, after one of the early snows was melting away and revealing the likely spots for the last snow’s remnants. The basics were clear even to an idiot like me: shelter, height, north. Look for a shady spot at a high elevation on the north side of the hill. But then the nuances came into play. Some high spots were too exposed to wind, and snow might blow away. Some shady spots were so deep in a hollow that meltwater might wash them clean. And if another storm followed the last snow, the whole game changed. A new snowfall started the whole thing over, of course, but if it rained, any spot might go bad in a hurry, unless the rain was blowing in from a different direction than the snow had blown in—that might leave a small patch of snow safe in the lee of a rock or a log. Most unpredictable of all was a late ice storm. It might seal up parcels of snow that could last for quite a while, but it also made finding them difficult—glaring white reflections foiled the chaser’s eyes, and slippery rocks and limbs underfoot might send him down the mountain in a hurry, or at least give him a nice set of bruises to take home.
Eventually he paused to draw on his pipe. “That more’n you wanted to know?”
I smiled. It was, of course, far more, but now that I’d heard it, it wasn’t enough. And by the time I got back in the car to make the two-hour drive downhill to our house, I’d somehow decided to come up and meet him after the last snow.
“You’re what?” said Corey, as we took a big curve on the downhill ride.
“I’m going to come chase snow with Greylen in March.”
“Why on earth would you want to do that?”
That was a good question, and I duly noted it aloud, but I didn’t answer it at the time. I thought about it at some length, though, there in the passenger seat, and even more over the rest of the summer and fall. Part of it, I eventually decided, was envy. Dixie envy. A Southerner like me is supposed to be close to the land, full of folksy wisdom and arcane knowledge, but of course it isn’t so. For all my drawling, like most of my contemporaries, I was a suburban American through and through, better versed in Andy Griffith Show reruns and basketball scores than in the way of birds and beasts, and sometimes I envied Corey. For all the chafing she’d done under the grip of her family, that close connection to tradition, to the hollows and hills of Appalachia, gave her a foundation, something she could either stand upon or push against. When I would catch her in the kitchen, belting out an old hymn I’d never heard before, I would sometimes find myself feeling unmoored and weak by comparison. What songs lingered from my own childhood? “The Ballad of Gilligan’s Island.”
But there was also the fact that Greylen had spoken at such length. There is a certain appeal in obsession. A man speaking about his passion, whatever it may be, tells us that we can find something worthwhile in even the most mundane places. A dark and empty sky still has stars, tiny bits of beauty and light. And if you take the time and trouble to pick out the constellations, there are even stories to be told about them. So maybe there are some bits of purpose even in the front yard, there between the bits of Labrador poop.
Corey’s car was already in the driveway. Since she gets out of school about an hour before I get off work, this wasn’t so unusual, but when she met me at the door, I knew something was up. She didn’t cry, but her hug was a little tighter than usual.
“What’s wrong?” I said, muffled against her shoulder.
“Greylen,” she replied. “He died yesterday.”
The next day we made the drive up to Walker’s Top through trees long past their bright colors, now gone brown or bare, and saw Greylen laid to rest in the tiny graveyard behind Grouse Hollow Presbyterian. I looked around for faces I didn’t know, and there were only a few—the Weakleys seemed to be the only people there. Where were his snow-chasing buddies?
Calvin and May had of course done what every Southern family knows to do when someone dies: cook. The dining room was once again full, and we all once again loaded up our Chinette plates and balanced them on our knees, perched on folding chairs and trying to keep the grease off our clothes. I was chewing on pound cake, and Corey had found a piece of grape pie—one of her favorites, but only when Uncle Will made it—when May sat down next to me with an enormous slice of coconut cake.
“Thanks for putting all this out for us, Aunt May,” said Corey.
“No, thank you for coming all this way,” said May.
“Oh, we had to come for Greylen’s sake.”
“Well, I’m sure he appreciates it. He didn’t have many friends, so having the whole family here means a lot.”
I put down my fork while she scooped up a big piece of cake. “Actually, Aunt May,” I said, trying to drag out the question while she chewed, “I’m a little surprised to hear that. I would have thought some of the people he chased snow with would be here. Or at least might have come to the service.”
She chewed thoughtfully, swallowed, and picked up the cup of sweet tea she’d set by her feet so she could wash the cake down properly. “Well, that’s true,” she said at last. “I honestly don’t know them, though. Calvin—come here a second, I got a question.”
Calvin didn’t know, either. Nor Will, nor Maria Belle, nor Louise, Matthew, or any of the other dozens of Weakleys gathered in John Hall’s house. None of the family could name a single snow chaser other than Greylen. In fact, none of them could say much about the practice of snow chasing—who did it, where they met, how they conducted the contests, who’d won in previous years, where the last patch had been. Nothing.
I soon stepped out of the house and went to sit in one of the porch rockers in front of the east wing. The scent of pipe tobacco was long gone, but the tang of wood smoke filled the evening, and I was able to pick out the stars between the tree limbs. And looking at them, the same stars I could see from Field Street, I didn’t feel duped, or foolish. For the first time, I felt like these hollows and hills were a part of me—not something foreign, but just my own flat lawns, folded and wrinkled, but still mine.
“Authority,” I said quietly.
To this day I don’t know whether Greylen was a true astronomer or not. I do know he was a great storyteller. But whenever it snows on Field Street, and the flakes are caught whirling in the glow of the streetlights, I like to think about the cold dark places on the north side of Walker’s Top, and about the patches of white that may linger there, and about the dark shape that guards them on silent paws, with eyes that glitter like diamonds.
PETER CASHWELL is a University of North Carolina graduate. Peter’s book The Verb ‘To Bird’ was named a Barnes & Noble “Discover Great New Writers” selection in Summer 2003, as well as a Book Sense 76 selection. The book’s irreverent tone and eclectic approach to its subject attracted attention from a wide variety of sources. Martha Stewart chatted with Peter on an episode of Martha Stewart Living Television. John Hanson Mitchell, editor of Sanctuary, the Massachusetts Audubon Society’s journal, called the book “[a] fine literary ramble and a good laugh to boot—no mean feat in a genre that perhaps takes itself too seriously.” The Bloomsbury Review described the book as “[a] delightfully literary and eclectic memoir about the manifold joys of birding,” and its author “[a] very literate, observant, insightful storyteller.” Peter’s work has appeared in The Comics Journal, The Readerville Journal, and Woodberry Forest Magazine, as well as on WVTF public radio. He lives with his wife, Kelly Dalton, and their two sons in Woodberry Forest, Virginia, where he teaches English and speech.