Mountain Part 1

Mountain.

by Clement Wood.

I

BIRTH

I

High places have always held for a man a spell and a mystery. He could not traverse the windy ways of air, the s.p.a.cious trails of the birds; but he could climb these rocky steeps, as hard-won steps toward the billowing mountains of clouds, and the beaconing stars, and the sky-homed mystery of mysteries. The hills were a fastness to daring souls, yielding far vistas of shrunken valleys. They were a menace to the low-dwellers: out of the heights fierce warriors darted, like plunging eagles or swooping hawks, to plunder the placid wealth below.

Men were their bone-whitened victims, and their lengthened, pliable arms.

The chill mantle of snow, the provocative veiling of clouds, rested upon them; their streams were arteries to the valleys below, offering life to tree and beast and man, and later an easy path to the sh.o.r.e and the sea.

They were size made tangible, power made visible. From their crests the lightning flamed, the hoa.r.s.e tongue of the thunder spoke. The mountain in labor sometimes brought forth a mouse; sometimes, a rain of fiery death to the Herculaneums cowering at its foot. Ararat and Nebo, Popocatapetl, Pelion and Pele, Olivet and Calvary, were hills. It is no wonder that men sought them: Mahomet in the end went to the mountain. It was on Olympus that Jupiter held his home; it was from storming Sinai that Jehovah thundered.

Four low hills lay side by side, near the center of a southern state.

They stretched their p.r.o.ne forms, like four gray and red-brown serpents, from the piney foothills above the Black Belt to the craggy Appalachians. Their visible bodies were parallel; but their rocky skeletons, that jutted into water-worn summits, were not. The two outer hills were like the top halves of the sh.e.l.ls of a huge bivalve; their gray structure, chipped by the persistent artisans.h.i.+p of time, still indicated that they had once folded high above the two central heights.

The stony structures of the latter leant toward one another; they were now taller and of a darker hue than their gray outposts.

It was the second hill, as you came from the east, that was called simply "the mountain." It ran almost due north and south; its western half was a steep and even slope, its more gradual eastern side was toothed with countless p.r.o.ngs flung into sunrise lowlands, brought up abruptly by the sandstone crags to the east. The crest of the mountain was indented irregularly by rounded gaps or pa.s.ses, like pie-crust carelessly forked.

The rocks that broke through its summit tilted sharply to the east, just under the surface of the mountain. Four miles nearer the sunset, beyond Bragg Valley and Adamsville, the iron city, was the third hill, whose rocks slanted at almost the same angle as the mountain's, but in the opposite direction. This had once been the mountain's sunset slope.

Flanking the central heights to east and west the sandstone hills, "Shadow Mountain," and "Sand Mountain" beyond West Adamsville, were at once younger and older than the central ridges,--later in their depositing, earlier in their contact with the sky.

A mountain has no memory, as men have. Outside forces may gash and groove it, as memory is cut into the mountain's wandering sons; but these scars have no meaning to the hill itself: they are only legible to its more meditative children.

If the mountain had had memory, it would have been able to think back to a period long past. Then it lay germinating beneath a slowly thickening crust of clay and sand, under a restless sea swarming with jelly-like bodies and strange sh.e.l.led creatures. The former left no trace; the armored creepers, dying, left their self-built monuments, to swell and pimple the oozy wave deposits. Buried, unborn, the mountain lay for lengthening ages.

But the skin of the earth is restless, as the inner fires waver in their long cooling. Beneath the volatile cloak of air, and the tidal robe of waters, the rocky layer encrusting the unknown vast core of the earth moves in its own hour. A slow adjustment, a period of planetary shudders, and a land is engulfed, a continent pressed upward. The thick strata, the product of long and intermittent deposits, are buckled, folded, and squeezed into mountain chains; huge slices of ageless schists and gneisses are torn away and driven above the younger strata; there is an immense crumpling and rupture. So are the hills born.

At last the time of parturition came for the mountain. Force, says Marx, is the midwife of progress; force, a vast and burning upheaval from below, a strained and spasmodic pressure from the molten womb of the earth, bowed the mountain out of its deep resting place, tilted away the early sea, arched its summit high over the surrounding lowlands. The stress of its long birth-pangs squeezed and fused its scattered substance into a closer, more welded body. Above it still folded its sandy younger covering, shutting it from sun and cloaking sky.

Out of the northern lands the tilted waters came, joined by brawling floods of melted snow and rain. Slowly, following the central creva.s.s cracked by the main upheaval, these wore off the mantling sandstone, until it retreated sulkily to east and west,--bared breast-works of grayness, bald and h.o.a.ry crests whose dull whitening seemed a stooped and withdrawn age. Down the midst of the mountain swirled the flood, until the first widening fissure opened into a long bowl four miles wide; and two cowering hills separated by this gradual bowl-like valley were all that was left of its curving majesty. The stream slowed, narrowed, became a paltry creek, noisy only in wet weather.

So was the mountain born.

Green scarfed it in the green seasons; but barer months revealed the weathered red outcropping on its summit. Its red stain smudged the valley, and tinted the water that carried its message to the far gulf.

The mountain did not know the red and stiffened earth-blood within its heart, or the secret of the red stain. No more did Shadow Mountain know the reason for its grayness. The square sandstones quarried from it and faced to support thin wooden walls, the unconcealing gla.s.s fired out of its materials into goblets and vases, could not tell their origin. Nor could the rough red boulders carted away to hungry charcoal-fed furnaces, nor the iron sows and pigs, and the tempered rails and chains that were fas.h.i.+oned of its being, explain their nature, or the hard red substance that was the mountain's heart. But at last its self-conscious children knew the secret, and called it iron.

Redness, iron, congealed earth blood,--the name is unimportant. The thing itself was the multiple-veined heart of the mountain, red, cold, and waiting.

II

THE JUDSONS

II

Sixty miles southeast of the mountain drowsed the town of Jackson, sinew of the old South as surely as Adamsville was brawn of the new.

Gettysburg and even Appomattox had said their words before the earliest Ross had squared the logs for the first shanty over Ross Creek, from which the iron city grew; and at that time Jackson had already counted its half century.

It lay in the crotch where the river forked. Protected by water on two sides, and by open barrens on the third, its location had attracted wandering Cherokees into building here their huts and log stockades, until guarded Tallulah became the Indian heart of the region. The persistent seeping of pioneer migration from the eastern seaboard eddied around it; the white interloper treated here with the native, coveted the prosperous red fortress, and made it his own. Its name was changed later to that of the popular hero who drove back the redcoats from the rich levees of New Orleans, and scattered before him the redskins of the palmettoed peninsula at the southeast land's end. When the young nineteenth century brought statehood, bustling Jackson became the capital. It is hard for those who remember Jackson, or Charleston, or Richmond, in the sleepy glamor of their later years, to think of these as uncouth pioneer clearings: but such was their beginning. The first town hall in Jackson was a blockhouse, and more than once the straggly strings of huts at the split of the river, which const.i.tuted the settlement, had seen marauding Indians repelled from its main street.

Political dignity transfigured the village out of its buckskin and bowie-knife existence, into a leisurely civic siesta. Governors and legislators peopled its walks; pillared mansions grew at the heads of long avenues of water oak. The hilly barrens and sedgy river-fields were combed into ordered rows of large-bladed corn and stocky cotton bushes.

Slavery came early, and the slave quarters stretched behind the mansions and in the parched treeless opens. The anomalous shanties of the poor whites sprang like fungoids on outlying poor lands, and bunched near the river pier, where the fussy side-wheelers, the _Tallulah_ and the _Southern Star_, churned the muddy water, eager to paddle away past swampland and sandy waste to the gulf. Idling negroes sprawled along the pier, and on the bales before gin and compress; vehement orators in the Capitol fisted their defiance to the dastardly Liberty Men coiled like vipers in the arid North. The heavy pour of the sun, and the formal courtesy of the lords of the dark soil and the dark soul, mellowed the manner of the place, shaped it into that unhealthy beauty and charm men call the Old South.

One of the earliest white settlers had been a Potomac planter, Derrell Judson. His vigorous descendants had grown up with the town, and left their touch upon the whole somnolent section. There was a disused Judson's Landing three miles up stream, and a ramshackle Judsontown on the Greenville Road to the southwest. Two of the family had been mayors of the village; there had been a wartime lieutenant-governor, and at least one congressman, with a proud host of lesser officials. None of the family had meant more to Judson eyes than a grandson of the early settler, Judge Tom Judson, whose flas.h.i.+ng spirit had broken from his last year at college, in the troubled early spring of '61, to enter the gray cavalry. A year later, a captain now, he had hurled himself in daily desperate charges against the imperturbable Army of the Potomac, following his beloved Stonewall. At last an exploding sh.e.l.l carried off an arm, and with it his military usefulness to the Confederacy. When he walked weakly out of the hospital, two years later, the cause had become too hopeless for his capable direction to be of value.

With the war's end came the order, signed by his own governor, calling for emanc.i.p.ation. In front of the weather-etched pillars of the portico, Judge Judson lined up his slaves, and dismissed them from servile happiness into precarious freedom. Close beside him were his three sons, Derrell, Pratt, and Paul, the eldest only six; their young minds were black with tearful rage against the "d.a.m.n Yankees" who were causing the exile of the loved negroes. The black faces were grimed with tears; this changed social condition seemed nothing but a calamity to the well-tended household.

Many of the slaves could not be persuaded to leave. Old Isaac, the coachman, hung onto the reins until he dropped dead at the cemetery, one broiling Decoration Day. Aunt Jane, who superintended the cooking, dared "them Bureau-ers" to meddle around her kitchen. The younger negroes gradually straggled away; but their places were filled with servants as well known to the family. The masters' att.i.tude toward them, as might have been expected, remained almost the same as during "slavery times."

The judge built out of the empty days an enviable practice of law, and trained one son to aid him in this. The three brothers gradually took their father's place in Jackson living; and at the beginning of the last decade of the century, they were essential to the well-ordered existence of the community. The Jackson Hotel, where the present Derrell Judson had succeeded an uncle, had been the center of the town's visiting life for fifty years. The time-specked s.h.i.+ngle, "Judson & Judson, Pract.i.tioners in All Courts of Law and Equity," still hung above a run-down office entrance, where Pratt Judson kept the firm name in use, although there had been no partner for more than fifteen years. The youngest brother, Paul, had graduated from the State University at Greenville the year of his father's death. With an initiative tendency unpromised by his blood, he determined to lead off into a new line, deciding upon real estate, through a belief in the physical expansion of the river town.

Two doors from the Judson house was the Barbour "city" place. It was during the solemn painfulness of his father's funeral that Mary Barbour first impressed herself upon the sorrowing youngest son's imagination.

They had been boy and girl together; in those days they had decocted frequent mud confections with Pratt, and Jack Lamar and Cherokee Ryland.

But the girl had grasped a rare chance to attend an art school in Philadelphia, just after Paul started to college; and now, after the absence, he found her grown into a new and surprising grace of person.

There was a hint of shy primitive beauty in her irregular features. The hair was chestnut, and as straight as an Indian's; the eyes possessed that quality of sympathetic comprehension that spoke the mother-soul.

His heart, emptied by the gap of his father's absence, needed a new object to cling to; and she was attractive, obvious, and near.

Mary Barbour had already admired Paul with an artist's aloof gaze; she saw in him a tall, black-eyed young beau, the best shot in the Jackson Grays, the invariable cotillion leader. Now she began to know him as the ardent lover as well. With characteristic determination, he elbowed all tentative rivals out of the way. The girl found herself escorted with gallant insistence everywhere by this headstrong and heartstrong wooer; dances, picnics, gossiping church suppers,--for eleven months his attendance delighted heart-coupling minds in the little town.

One cool June night he caught her hands within his, in the honey-suckled dimness of the Barbour side-porch.

"Mary, dearest, dearest,----" His a.s.surance deserted him for a moment, his throat gulped. He clung to the relaxed fingers. "We--we've waited----" he paused lamely, then finished a.s.sertively, "It's been long enough!"

A caressing smile went with her answer. "It's not a year, Paul,--mother was engaged almost four."

"I can take care of you now," he urged with affectionate crispness.

"We've had enough of this, honey. You fix the date--to-night!" His arms bound her closer.

"Paul--you hurt----"

"Then do as I say," he laughed, triumphantly pa.s.sionate.

He won her answer.

The wedding helped christen the new Baptist Church. The systematic sweetness of the honeymoon included a flashed glimpse of Mammoth Cave, and a short stay at Niagara. Upon the return followed eager days and nights in which she was allowed to grow into his plans. He discussed his projects fully with her, taking her to see the houses, lots, and subdivisions from which their living was chiefly derived. She marveled at his ceaseless energy. Drive, drive, drive,--in a fading community dozing in the enervating aroma of decaying days: no wonder he succeeded so well! The business constantly broadened in importance and scope.