Fugitive Day

Yonder Hills it was called then, and still is now, after the first line from an old hymn my grandmother used to sing, “Yonder Hills are very Fair.” And the Smokies still are very fair, stretching out in the valley below. I sit rocking on the broad veranda, breathing the cool, sweet air of hillside Tennessee , as we did so long ago. Humming birds dive in fast and furious when I hang the nectar pots that draw those air born jewels. Inside, the same cool straw matting covers the wide plank pine floors, downstairs and up. The pale green parrots, gold beaked, still swoop across the fading paper on the dining room walls. And there is still no plumbing indoors, in the old home place. Washstands capped with cool marble hold china pitchers and basins in the high ceiling-ed bedrooms, as in the old days. One bedroom anchors each corner of the fine old house, each claims its own quadrant of the compass, and its own generous view. Valley, meadow, hill, barn.

I slept then, and sleep now, on fair weather visits, in the pink room. The breeze even in summer blows cool off the meadow below, and the light curtains shiver with the soft breath of dawn. I have always loved to rise and swing my bare feet over the edge of the bed onto the smooth straw mat and walk to the washstand. Cool water, distilled rainwater pumped the evening before from the cistern and carried upstairs, has waited all night long in the smooth porcelain pitcher. I pour the limpid stream into the flowered basin of old china, the bowl’s surface crazed with a fine web of lines like the criss-cross gauze of wrinkles on my face in the cloudy oval mirror above the washstand.

And then, I plunge my arm into the basin of cool rainwater. And it never fails, the liquid kiss brings back the sweet sharp memory of that fugitive summer day. Calls back the taste and touch and sounds of that day, that burning August day, deep in the woods below. My memory, like my sight, like my hearing, sometimes blurs a little now. But the cool water in the flowered bowl pierces the gray shroud of time and decline and I am young again.

It was a terrible time. Kingdoms had stirred into the war that devoured the young men of Europe, and demanded with rapacious appetite even the youth of Tennessee . Still, the world seemed sure and pure up here at Yonder Hills. Mountains outlast the strife and grief of man, trees bloom and leaf and fruit oblivious to war and peace.

My brother had gone as a soldier, leaving his ten month bride, Birdie, and unborn baby at our family home place, Yonder Hills. Bird and I had been dear friends at Grandview Seminary, rooming together in the girls’ dormitory. Our teacher Miss Larned used to say, “ Grandview is well named. It affords a good view of the Tennessee Valley but also gives those lucky enough to pass this way a Grand View of life and its possibilities.” It was at Grandview I fell into the love of books and learning. And upon commencement, I became a teacher there. And Birdie married my brother Walter, and so became my sister. I was happy the next summer to come to take care of her during the last weeks of her pregnancy and escape the sultry heat of Chattanooga . Happy also to escape my mother’s worried supervision of her maiden schoolteacher daughter home under her city roof for the summer. I was happy to be back at Yonder Hills, summer home of my childhood.

Birdie, great with child, was tired and awkward. We whiled away late mornings and afternoons on the wide veranda that embraced the house, sipping ice tea in heavy glasses from the corner china cupboard in the dining room. Tea garnished with mint from the garden I weeded alone now that she was too stout to stoop and bend. We read aloud to each other – Bird loved poetry, and wrote some of her own verses. We gossiped and remembered our Grand View days. Bird didn’t speak much of Walter but I sometimes caught her in a moment of soft melancholy, gazing out over the hills beyond. Birdie was a preacher’s daughter, though she wore it lightly, and I know that she prayed silently for Walter’s safe return and for their baby’s safe arrival. I know she kept her Bible marked to the Psalms beside her bed.

Afternoons, she would make her cumbersome way upstairs to nap. Birdie, so called because she was slight and quick, was grown swollen and slow. I followed, to make sure she had a crystal tumbler of water by her bed, that the chamber pot was handy so she would not need to come downstairs to the outhouse. I placed book, embroidery, his latest letter, on her nightstand in case she did not doze. “You’re so good to me, Fern,” she would sigh from the mound of pillows. I kissed her fragrant cheek, drew the light curtains against the noonday sun, and pulled her tall door to behind me.

Then afternoons were mine to roam in the woods behind the house, into the little gully cut by a mountain stream. To ramble in the soft shade of the trees holding onto the mountain side – persimmon, holly, oak and pine. To rest on a carpet of pippsissewa, crowsfoot, and partridge berry, beneath the dense green canopy of wild magnolia, mountain laurel, and rhododendron.

The waterfall was my favorite place. Now, I can no longer climb there, can no longer see it except in mind’s eye. The falls shot down the rock slope, even in the driest of summers. There was a shelf of solid rock just below the six-foot drop, just wide enough to stretch out on. Water coursed into a crease carved into the rock, and overflowed into a deep, cool pool in the streambed below. As children we had scrambled down from the rock table and plunged and splashed in the pool.

That summer, on my solitary afternoons while Birdie slept, I stripped to chemise and underskirt and swam around and around the little rock bowl. Then I stretched out on my stomach on the warm rock and baked my hair and linens dry, staring into the water, watching crayfish scuttle in the shadowy pool and water spiders skate across the surface.

One afternoon there was a knock at the front door, just as I came down the back stairs into the kitchen, Birdie settled above to rest. Doors were never locked there then. We had few visitors, and all were neighbors, friends. I came into the broad, dim entry hall. Looking into the burning August glare beyond the wide screen door I could only discern a dark shadow, a man’s silhouette. Coming up to the screen I saw with surprise that it was Mr. Edward Holloway, the young Mathematics teacher who had taken Professor Woodworth’s place in the middle of last year when the old Professor fell ill. Mr. Holloway was from Cincinnati, how he came to our little Presbyterian school in the mountains had been a matter of eager speculation among the older girls and the younger teachers like myself. He was tall, and fair, and his sweet tenor voice was a pleasant addition to our Musicales. And he became the star of our Literary evenings, held on alternate Fridays, reciting verse as sweetly as he sang....

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Painting by Kevin Kutz

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