Take warning how you court young men – Mountain Ballad
The Foot of Turtleback Mountain
Legend had it that Mona Parsons could stir up dust devils by spinning a stick in the dirt. She called up a storm whenever farmers needed rain. She could twist a rain shower into a ferocious tree-breaker if the farmer denied her pay and call it back thrice-fold with a nod of her head. Word had it she came into the world dancing. The daughter of an established Parsons family in Covington, Virginia, born to a mother no more than eighteen and a daddy at least ten years older, she spent childhood evenings on the grass, stomping dew into the earth as if she tried to awaken Mother Nature herself.
Each night, her father called to her from behind his unkempt beard to come inside. Not a deferring child, Mona glanced back at him, dashed through the gate and down the bank to Broken Rock Creek. Tiny, no larger than a wood sprite, she spent days on Turtleback Mountain gathering flowers and herbs and, some say, conjuring with wild beasts. Some days she came down the mountain, her hair filled with moss and sticks, looking like a disheveled elf, her lips and fingers blue from blackberries she had eaten off the sides of ditches.
Had Mona then known of the communities of Cherokee Little People, she would have sung out to the Laurel People to share her joy on Turtleback Mountain. But she did not know. She would not know until Beloved Mother began Mona’s training.
More forward-minded neighbors told her parents they were blessed. “Such an open, creative child,” they said.
“Wild heathen,” others whispered. “A reed shaken by the wind,” some said. “Cursed.”
The Parsons accepted the latter, deemed themselves steeped in hexes and bore no more children for four years. The Virginia mining town of Covington watched and waited. A family who owned an entire mountain could have access to mountain spirits, the old people intoned, and a child could breathe such spirits into her soul unknowing. Those who wield the obvious can manipulate the unseen. That’s the Lord’s own truth, they vowed.
The summer Mona turned thirteen, an angular man sauntered into Covington as if he held the world in his back pocket. He carried a black valise and a hatchet swung from his belt. She first spied him at the base of the Lost Miners Monument in the Square. Without speaking, she followed him about day after day as if she had lost her power to the gleam in his eye. Folks later said he must have cast a spell on her.
Her father belted her evenings when she came back home, but still she slipped out the window before dawn. Before any rooster could crow and when the river behind her house moved lazy and low, she was gone again, without thought of leaving her people behind.
Early August, the man was seen leaving town at dusk. That night Mona’s bed lay empty. The town searched Covington for her. They scoured Turtleback Mountain for her. They went east to Spencer’s Mountain. They did not find her. They asked about for the man’s name, but no one could remember.
Some within Covington said the shadowy stranger was Squire Dan Sparks from down ’round Cade’s Cove who had more land than anybody ever had.
Some said he was Squire’s oldest boy who was untamed and a mite crazy.
Some who knew not the Cherokee said he was meant to be a Cherokee medicine man but gave up and left for city ways.
Great Spirit and Sister Sun and Brother Moon laugh so hard at such foolishness that Sister Sun forgets to leave the sky before Brother Moon appears in the east. Great Spirit has to send her on her way.
Had the Cherokee been in the valley beneath this mountain, as they had been for generations prior, they would have explained that this Ama idnai, this Turtleback Mountain, was Great Spirit’s sacred place. He made it to specification before he ever thought of making a man.
Here on Turtleback Mountain and in its shade stood hemlock and oak with fifty-foot canopies. Mountain oaks grew leaves so thick that little light could pass through. The soil beneath rested dark and dank. Thick laurel grew in so many colors Great Spirit had not named them all. Here streams rushed clear and cold year round, their waters filled with fishes, their banks alive with verdant mosses and ferns heavy with spore. Teeming marshes overran with cattails tall as young girls. Concealed here were fur-coated chipmunk, squirrel, fox and bear. Turtleback Mountain. Covington’s enduring and overarching guardian. Great Spirit’s personal garden.
Cherokee would have told how the massive buzzard, who swooped down Turtleback with his mighty white-tipped wing, carved out the valley at the mountain’s solid foot. How Great Spirit was so pleased with the valley he decided here would be the place for his new creature: man. It was here on this mountain, in this valley, that Great Spirit placed Cherokee, the “real people,” molded from mud of Broken Rock Creek. It was here he took melted snow waters and filled the Cherokee with pure blood. Here, masquerading as the wind, he blew breath into the Cherokee, and they became one life.
Most of Covington did not know the Cherokee way, so they in time labeled the lone wanderer “Beelzebub,” who had come to walk the mountains and steal young virgins.
But the stranger was none of these. He was Jackson Slocomb, a vagrant from Pennsylvania who chanced upon Covington when he turned southeast off Turtleback Mountain ridge, rather than continuing west to Kentucky. He was Jackson Slocomb, a man who through years of practice could sway young girls to his favor. Here in Great Spirit’s valley he found Mona Parsons, of an age that had her primed to go.
The year was 1923.