Oh that I were a pretty little sparrow – Mountain Ballad
Lily could not remember when she had begun to call the granny “Kee.” Her mother always referred to the granny as a mountain granny and simply called her “Granny.” One day she had asked the granny, and the granny had gifted her with the memory. It happened during the Month of Nut. Lily was newly six. Nights had first taken on their chill. Sun had slipped close to the mountain ridge. In the distance, ridge trees, sparse and naked, allowed light to pass through, giving the impression of a choppy haircut with individual spikes poking up across the horizon.
She and the granny took to the woods looking for what Lily called her “dolly roots.” Ginseng root that looked to Lily as if the long tan roots were arms and legs. This evening the granny plodded along, weary from the night before when she had spent hours with the dropping of a small, but stubborn, baby.
Lily could be as skittery as a squirrel. She pranced through straw so quietly the granny had to shield her eyes against the western sun to know where she was. Trudging along, the granny stumbled on an outgrowth of pine root. She fell. To rest, she sat where she had fallen and allowed Lily to wander.
Lily disappeared over the rise, laughing. When the laughter stopped, Granny called out. Silence answered. Angry at the child for disappearing, she threw a heavy stone against the trunk of a high-rising oak. Three wild turkeys took to the air, squawking a chorus of kee, kee, kee, as if announcing the onset of bedlam.
A dip cut into the far side of the rise. The granny climbed the rise so she could look down. She called again. This time she heard a faint giggling of kee, kee, kee. It sounded as if a poult were trapped underground. The granny edged closer on her lightest step, across leaf covered ground. Nothing out of the way indicated the direction from which the sound had come.
Thinking a poult might be injured, she called, this time in the voice of the turkey. “Kee. Kee. Kee.” A barely audible “Kee Kee” returned. The granny stood tree-like to decide on the location of the response. She repeated her call. An answer came from an open space among the trees.
The granny stepped gingerly to avoid frightening the poult more. Before her, she saw a rotted-out oak stump where a grand tree had once thrived. She crept over and peeked inside the hollow. There sat Lily, a scratch across her cheek from where she had tumbled into the hole.
Lily grinned up at the granny and lifted her arms to be hoisted up into the light. “Kee,” she said laughing. “I knew you would find me, Granny,”
Granny stepped one foot into the hole. Soft pulp gave beneath her, and her leg sank into the trunk. She reached over and took the child’s hand, pulling her closer so she could lift the child out. She plopped her out on the ground and put on the stern Cherokee face she had learned from Tall Corn. She spoke in her most formal Cherokee tone. “You must not run away again. You belong on this mountain,” she told her. “But you must know how to live with the mountain before you roam alone.”
“When I’m old, like you?”
“How old do you think I am?” The granny fanned her face with her apron.
“A thousand million years old,” Lily said.
“Oh,” said Granny. “A person that old must be very wise,” she muttered.
Lily scrunched up her forehead and sucked in her cheeks, trying to imitate Granny’s face. She spread out her lips and exposed her teeth. “Kee,” she said. “Kee Granny.”
The child looked so ridiculous that Granny clapped her hands and laughed.
Lily jumped up and danced an elf-like jig, grabbed Granny’s hand, and pulled her back in the direction of the rise. “My Kee Granny,” she said and laughed.
Summer days when Anna could not rouse herself from the granny’s belladonna berry juice or St. John’s tea, Kee Granny wrapped her influence around Lily as if she were weaving a silken web. Mornings together were spent with Lily learning about plants. Pine for its power over fever, black gum for its tooth preserving sap, ginseng for back pain, and dandelion for low blood. Those were good.
Belladonna, pennyroyal, mistletoe, and foxglove to make digitalis for the heart were dangerous, herbs the granny never allowed Lily to touch. “When you are older,” she would say when Lily asked about pussy willow bark and berries as a woman’s remedy. She would distract the child with a search for ginseng or bloodroot.
Afternoons spent mixing poultices especially delighted Lily, for she loved the soft, slick feel of lard as she kneaded wood ash into a gritty salve. She wanted the poultice for her own, to take home with her so she could continue to squish it between her small fingers, but the granny refused. She insisted that what Lily mixed would have healing plants or herbs added later to help someone ailing in Breakline or a poor family who could not pay a doctor.
“You will be like the creek in flood after the snow melts,” Kee Granny said. “Filled with knowledge of Great Spirit and his ways.”
There were days without Kee Granny, days when Kee Granny did not come for Lily and made no attempt to explain her absence. On those days, lonesomeness overwhelmed Lily each morning after sunrise and pushed her out the door. From there she roamed Turtleback. At no more than fifty pounds, she could walk leaves and pine straw as quiet as a chipmunk. She learned to dart into a grove of trees and stand, unseen, more slender tree trunk than child.
She followed the roar of the Falls up the holler and splashed its icy waters against her face to stave off hunger that dogged her treks into the woods. In time, she would strip her clothes and teach herself to paddle about, then how to survive the turbulent underwater current set up by the violent churning that rock created at the base of the Falls. She learned the sensory pleasure of lying naked in the sun, letting its heat dry her body and thick chestnut hair.
Over time, she moved higher up the mountain to Old Man Farley’s place, the shed she had stumbled upon with Bad Billy and Gertie during the spring of the big storm. Anna had told Lily Old Man Farley’s story in an attempt to bring her home when dusk settled on the mountain.
Farley had lived in a time of war when men were needed to march, wait, march, wait, then run to meet each other, face-to-face, each trying to outshoot the other so he could crawl back to camp, chew on a strip of jerky, and perhaps return to the field to drag back the dead. The Civil War for some and the War of Northern Aggression for others.
Farley, in his late thirties by 1864, sat in the middle of the conflict. With only two sons, neither old enough for conscription, he wanted no part of war, of the slaughters reported daily in newspapers. But no place, no man, was immune to battle. Many men were pulled from farms who knew little about soldiering, yet they rode broad-hipped horses from camp to camp deciding the place and time for the next battle. In camps, unprepared men and boys, once enlisted or conscripted because they had lingered too long in some small town or field, rushed each morning to posted newspapers to see what their day held. For many of them the answer was death disguised as places such as Stones River, Murfreesboro, Brentwood, and later sites along the Mississippi, a river they had never heard of.
Covington had nothing to add to the War but bodies. Farley was a stout body. He rode faster and shot straighter than anyone, including men immortalized in legend. Covington expected him to join the Confederate Army and make the town proud. Once he failed the townspeople, he became “Old Man Farley,” a name that killed whatever laurels they had hoped to bestow on him.
Old Man Farley owned the blacksmith shop. He had raised his two sons without his wife, who died birthing the younger boy. With news of what had happened at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, the older son raided his father’s purse and rode off carrying a knapsack and canteen. He spent twelve dollars on a Starr revolver. Convinced his talents matched those of his father, he headed toward Washington, D.C. in search of Winfield Scott, the general-in-chief, to join what would become the Union Army. Within two weeks of enlisting, he was promoted to Lieutenant and sent to the Western Front.
The last Old Man Farley heard of this son came in a message he had scripted in a tent hospital on his deathbed. A wounded soldier who hailed from Bristol, Tennessee returned from the Fort Donelson battle in northwest Tennessee. The soldier, now dressed in plain clothes, limped into Covington with the note. Its words were terse, piercing.
Would that I had not taken this journey. War is not the glory some say it is. I am shot dead by my own comrades.
Your loving son, Adam Farley
The younger son, Wyman, raged at the death of his brother. Revenge attacked his mind with gusto. Old Man Farley locked him in the corncrib to keep him from enlisting, but the Home Guard, now desperate for men to feed the war machines, found him, put him in chains and took him east to Lee’s Army of Virginia near Radford. The year was 1864.
On May 9, Union soldiers, after a three-hour battle for control of the New River Railroad Bridge, set fire to the wooden structure but failed to destroy the stone piers. Farley’s youngest was charged with using his smithy skills in rebuilding the bridge for the South. On a sweltering June day, Wyman’s sweaty hands slipped off a support beam, and he fell to his death in the rushing water below.
The night before the Home Guard came for Old Man Farley had been moonless and uncommonly cold. When they arrived to take him, he was nowhere to be found. The town of Covington, left with only fourteen young males and the town cripple who had a clubfoot, fought within itself over whether to give their blacksmith to the war or to keep him for themselves. In the end, they listened to the Home Guard.
Weeks passed with Home Guard walking and riding over Spencer’s Mountain to the east, south toward Bristol, and finally west up the Turtleback. On the east side halfway up, they found a mound of vines and tree branches near the Falls, more a large burrow than a dwelling. When they pushed back the covering, there was Old Man Farley lying in a small hut, sick and starving.
Their attack was quick and violent. The Home Guard took extra time to punish him for causing them so much trouble. He was horsewhipped and hanged. They left him in a tree, some say Old Oak, for buzzard meat. Stories say the Home Guard tied the noose just so, in a slipknot so that it would take him at least three days to die.
Lily had not wanted to hear this story. She hated it. So distressed was she that she questioned such cruelty. Anna told her it was God’s way, and it was not for her to ask. Anna’s response only intensified Lily’s questions. Old Man Farley would not leave her be. She saw him in shadows within the forest and in dark corners near her bed. Her need to find a sense of peace led her to Kee Granny’s sacred cedar. She climbed zig-zag steps Kee Granny had cut in the earth to a height she never attempted less she sought the tree. Afternoons she sat nearby its broadening trunk, breathing in its pungent fir aroma, but the cedar gave her no answers either. In time, Lily decided the solution lay in Old Man Farley’s shed.
Old Man Farley’s doublewide door beckoned her back inside. She watched cardinals, bluebirds, and yellow and black finch flitter back and forth before the opening. Other days, she brought food and a blanket, spread the blanket, and napped until the chill brought on by the setting sun awakened her.
The crib never spoke to her of violence or death, so it became her haven. If a lizard or snake crossed the threshold, she studied its movement, sitting as still as Owl waiting for his nightly meal. No creature bothered her. Within some unspecified part of herself, she found the ability to melt into the environment and become part of the wild.
One day while Lily roamed alone, she followed the stream behind Boone Station. The water behind Boone Station flowed downhill until it merged with Parsons Branch below the Falls. The two eventually became Broken Rock Creek in Covington.
Lily had once walked the road leading toward Breakline, then turned right to Kee Granny’s. There she made her way through the same overhanging trees that had shaded where her mother had once walked. The trek wore on her short legs, so she thereafter waited for Kee Granny to come for her.
She searched for trillium in bloom. Kee Granny had said they crave water, so she went first to the stream. Her eyes examined each side of the creek, but she saw only fiddlehead fern and an occasional wild aster, its purple bloom stark against the greens. She stepped away from the bank. Her bare feet noticed a difference. Ground that had been cushioning her steps now felt brittle. Packed down over the years, it refused to give under her weight. Curious, Lily turned away from the stream. Within less than a yard, she realized that she walked on a series of flat rocks. Lily had found a trail leading up the mountain into the trees. Sunlight dappled the forest floor. The trail ascended slowly then took a sharp rise up the Turtleback, moving left, then zigging back to the right like a piece of rickrack Anna might have sewn on Lily’s dress.
Lily climbed easy. Stones were set so precisely someone in an earlier time must have laid them there with purpose. Blackberry bushes bordered the path. She thought of Kee Granny’s son and his strange name Briar, and she wondered if the name had been chosen because of the bushes’ thorns. Ragweed and tree saplings closed each side of the path. Farther back, hearty cedars, poplar, oak, and Canadian hemlock shaded the trail. Had Lily been asked, Kee Granny would have said that Great Spirit kept the path open so a young girl just Lily’s size could discover it some glad-filled morning.
At the end of the climb, she walked past the beehives and found Kee Granny weeding her flower garden. “Did you make the trail?” she asked.
Kee Granny shook her head. “Probably been here since before the white man came,” Kee Granny leaned on the hoe handle. “Part of Turtleback that’s always been. You must not destroy it.”
As children are wont to do, Lily thereafter took that path to Flatland, leaving the road to grownups.
Thinking back later, Lily would have had no idea how many times she had walked the path without noticing the diamondback rattler hidden within his den’s smoky mist. A purposeful serpent, he had chosen the spot to give him visual and striking advantage over whatever or whomever moved his way. He could have struck Lily at any time of his choosing, but he had not.
On a high summer afternoon, Lily made out the rattlesnake. It lay with his head tucked into his coil, sleeping, waiting for nightfall to cover his movement into the underbrush for feeding. When she realized that she was looking at a monstrous Eastern diamondback rattlesnake, she staggered and fell. Eyes wide, she scooted backwards on her butt.
The rattlesnake filled the trunk of a massive oak that had once grown tall, its roots embedded in a dip that held fog no matter the hour. The tree had fallen decades before, opening its heart to rain and snow. Nature etched out a bowl with a jagged rim. The rattler molded itself into the bowl as if it had been crafted to be a part of the wood itself, its dark brown bands with their grayish edgings the perfect camouflage. Its girth thick as Lily’s upper arm, it had burrowed as far into the bowl as she could see. It rested, much like a lid on a pot.
She looked at its slanted eyes and knew it was old, perhaps older than Lily herself.
Sister Sun fires up her energy and blasts hot rays to frighten Lily away from the snake, or to push the rattler deeper into his hole. Her surge is so intense the universe instantly smells sugary sweet.
Brother Moon, waiting behind Spencer’s Mountain, snaps at her. “Stop that. It’s time for me to be cooling the day.”
“But look,” Sister Sun argues. “The child found the serpent.” Sister Sun shoots out another flash. The stench of sulfur fills the darkest dark of the outer universe.
“Stop it, you little spit fire,” Brother Moon says. “Or I. . . . I’ll eclipse you.”
“I’m supposed to take care of her,” Sister Sun says.
“Quiet, both of you,” says Great Spirit. “Some things are beyond your understanding. Leave them be.”
The serpent sensed Lily’s presence. It lifted his head from his coil and looked at her through the haze surrounding its stump. Beneath its narrow neck, a thin, white scar marked where it had perhaps outwitted some hunter or wild boar. Lily surmised it must be a wise creature to have survived for so many years.
With her on the ground, it was too high to strike her. Had she been standing, and standing close, with the height of the stump, the length of its body, and the power of its coil, it could hit her hard and high, a blow that she could not survive.
“Great Spirit,” Sister Sun whispers. She pulls back from the earth and trembles.
“Wait,” replies Great Spirit. “Stay in your own place.”
“But…”
“Wait, I say,” says Great Spirit. “Some things lie within the realm of random.”
Lily pulled herself off the ground and wiped her face. She ran back down the path. Rather than have the rattlesnake think her rude, she called back, “I have to go. It’s hot.” As if a serpent needed a weather gauge.
The next day, Lily brought a hoe to clear a wider path past the stump, a berth that allowed her to travel to Kee’s yet skirt the den. The serpent sensed her approach. Its reptile eyes, mere slits, opened once to tell Lily it knew she was there. It slept as she worked, its head resting on top of its coil. Each strike of the hoe unsettled the mist surrounding the stump, but the serpent never flinched.
There was something unnatural about him. Lily craved to reach out and touch. The triangular head had no pointed edges to suggest the intensity of its venom. A strange warmth enveloped her when the rattlesnake looked at her, as if someone had taken a blanket fresh from before the fire and draped it over her. Such a sense of luxury comforted her. She clinched her fist to keep her hand steady.
That day, at the end of the path, Lily told Kee about the snake. Lily reasoned that a person as old as Kee Granny would be wise enough that Lily could trust her. “You must tell me when to stroke rattler and when to leave him be.”
“You saw Uktena.” Kee’s eyes grew dark. “He’s magic, so you must not touch him. Not all can see him. You are an honored one, for he respects you and will not strike.” Kee Granny grasped Lily by her shoulders. “Did he speak?”
Kee Granny’s intense stare startled Lily. “No,” she said and tried to pull back.
“Good.”
Lily had not thought about animals coming to life in the human sense and talking. “I will name him Rattler.”
She left Rattler in his den. Rattler allowed Lily her footpath.