Hill Towns
Authors: Anne Rivers Siddons
Tags: #Romance, #General, #Family Life, #Fiction
ANNE RIVERS
SIDDONS
HILL
This book is in memory of my father, MARVIN RIVERS,
who would have loved a Tuscan odyssey; and for Cliff and Cynthia, who did.
“Only the very young can live in Eden. Innocence prolonged
ignores experience; knowledge denied becomes a stone in the
head.”
ANDREW LYTLE
“I remember Rome chiefly as the place where Zelda and I had
an appalling squabble.”
SCOTT FITZGERALD,
LETTER, 1922
WHEN I WAS FIVE YEARS OLD I MADE A
I MARRIED HIM ON THE AFTERNOON OF
“THERE ARE THESE BANDS OF GYPSY
EVEN BEFORE WE LEFT—WEEKS BEFORE,
THAT NIGHT I GOT DRUNK WITH SAM
ON MY FIRST MORNING IN ROME I SLEPT
WE MET SAM THE NEXT MORNING IN THE
WE CAME INTO VENICE AT DAWN, BUT AS
THERE WAS A NOTE. I PICKED IT UP FROM
HE CAUGHT A COLD. OF COURSE HE DID.
THEY LEFT EARLY THE NEXT MORNING
YOLANDA SENT ME THE OLD WAY. IT
WE NEVER DID EAT DINNER. I THINK I
OTHER BOOKS BY ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS
W
HEN I WAS FIVE YEARS OLD I MADE A COLDLY
DESPERATE decision to live forever in a town on a hill, and so I have, from that terrible night in June until this one, thirty-seven years and one month later. If it has been bad for me, as many people these days seem to be telling me, I can only consider that anything else at all would have been worse.
“They never saw it coming; they didn’t know what hit them,” everybody said after my parents were struck and killed by a speeding truck on the old chain bridge over Tolliver’s Creek. After that, I knew as simply and unalterably as a child knows anything that staying alive meant always being able to see what was coming. Always knowing what might hit you. So when my father’s parents, kind and substantial Vir-ginians from the Tidewater who might have given me every advantage, made to take me home with them after the funeral, I simply screamed and screamed until, in despair, they left me behind with my mother’s eccentric people, who 1
2 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS
lived on the top of the mountain where my parents had died.
I had great affection for my Virginia grandparents and little for the erratic, reclusive Cashes, who were strange even in that hill country, where strangeness is king, but the ramshackle, overgrown Cash house commanded the Blue Ridge foothills in all directions. From there I would always know what was coming. From there I would see it long before it saw me.
I could not have explained this at age five, of course; I have only recently become fully aware of it. Then, I only knew that on the mountain I was safe and off it I was not.
Everything in my small being strained after my grandmother and grandfather Compton as they drove away from the sly, sunless home of my Cash grandparents in their sedate old Chrysler that sunny afternoon; I felt as if sunlight and laughter and gentleness and childhood itself were rolling away with them. But the new flatland fear was stronger.
When I turned my face into the sagging lap of my grandmother Cash, she thought I wept in sorrow for my parents and said for the first of a thousand times, “That’s all right. You done right. You stay here with your own kind. Your mama wouldn’t be lyin’ there in her grave if she’d of stayed with her own kind.”
But I’m not your kind, I remember thinking as clearly as spring water. I don’t need you. It’s your house I need. It’s this mountain.
It was, I realize, an extraordinary insight for a small child.
And it did not surface again for more than thirty years. Still, the power of it served. It held me on the Mountain through everything that came afterward, all those years that seem in retrospect to have been lived in a kind of green darkness, until I met Joe Gaillard in my senior year at Trinity College and the last lingering darkness took fire into light.
HILL TOWNS / 3
When I told him about my parents’ death—and I remember it was long after I met him, only days before he proposed to me—he cried. I stared at him doubtfully; no one had ever cried upon hearing the manner of their deaths, and some few laughed outright, nervous, swiftly stifled laughter. Even I had not cried after that first obliterating grief. I was not too young to perceive that they had somehow simply died of ludicrousness. I learned early to parrot laughter along with the children at Montview Day School, where my Compton grandparents’ absentee largesse sent me, when they taunted me with it: “Cat’s mama and daddy fucked themselves to death!” “Hey, Cat! Wanna go out and hump on the bridge?”
Later, when I began to perceive the dim shape of their meaning, I stopped laughing and began fighting. By the time I was ten, I was on the brink of being expelled for aggression.
Time and Cora Pierce’s influence put a stop to that, but I still hear the laughter sometimes, in the long nights on the Mountain.
“I’m lucky you weren’t a serial murderer or a Republican,”
I told Joe later. “I’d have married you anyway. It’s pretty obvious I would have married the first man who didn’t wince and grin a shit-faced grin and say, ‘Well, at least they died happy.’”
“I wasn’t crying for them; they probably did die happy, at that,” he said. “I was crying for you. Nobody should laugh at a child’s grief. Nobody. Ever.”
“Well, it wasn’t at my grief, exactly,” I said. “It’s just—you can see why it’s funny, in an awful sort of way, can’t you?
I mean, there they were out on that bridge, just going to town, and here comes this chicken truck—”
“Nobody,” Joe said fiercely. “Never. Not under any 4 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS
circumstance. Jesus Christ, when I think what that laughter must have taught you about the world—”
“It taught me never to screw on bridges,” I said, and he did laugh then, the exuberant, froggy laugh that always made people’s lips tug up involuntarily at the corners. I knew he was laughing largely because I wanted him to. Joe was a lovely man then, in the supple greenness of his twenties.
My father was a tall fair boy who came to Trinity College because his father and grandfather had come before him; and before them his great-grandfather Cornelius Compton, an Episcopal bishop of modest fame in the South, had helped to found the university. There had been Comptons at Trinity since the beginning. The theological seminary, Compton Hall, bore their name, and young Corny Compton IV from the Tidewater was destined to take his place in the southern Episcopal hierarchy of the last half of the twentieth century.
He had, everyone assured his proud parents, a real passion for the ministry.
Instead he met my mother in the village at the start of his senior year, in our lone dry cleaning establishment. She had come down from the Cashes’ old home, hidden away on the very top of Morgan’s Mountain, to make a little money and see a little life, and all his fine passion fled the church in a rush and poured into her. Literally, probably. They were married by the New Year, and I appeared in the earliest days of May. I was a quiet child who absorbed a great deal of grown-up talk, and while I was still small I came to know that my mother and father had done it practically the day they met and whenever afterward they could, and I was lucky they stopped doing it long enough to marry and give me a name. I knew what “it” was, too, vaguely; I heard them HILL TOWNS / 5
so often in the night and sometimes in the daytime, whispering and laughing and then breathing in that sharp, short way, and finally moaning and shouting aloud, that I ceased to be curious about what actually transpired and never even bothered to spy on them. I suppose I assumed that everybody’s parents were the same. It did not bother me at all; I truly believe they loved each other profoundly as well as lusted after each other, and much of that love overflowed onto me. We were a happy little family, even though both sets of my grandparents predicted nothing for us but ruin.
If they had lived there probably would have been more children. Despite my mother’s assiduous use of the pill, the law of averages would have undoubtedly caught up with them sooner or later. My father barely managed to graduate from Trinity between bouts in bed; as one of my Cash aunts observed, “His brains must of leaked out, his fly was un-zipped so often.” His grades were flaccid and his ambition flown, and after commencement he simply stayed on in Montview and got a job at the hardware store. The same aunt said he took it because it was the only thing he could find where he could come home and bang my mother at lunchtime. I don’t believe that aunt ever married.
By the time I was five my parents had still not let up much and were becoming adventurous in their choices of arenas.
I was now old enough to lift from sleep and bundle into the back seat of their old Nash, and they would range the mountain on moonlit nights, laughing and fondling each other, my mother reaching back to check on my blankets and send me back into sleep with a pat, and when they found a spot that was inviting, and later one that demanded a certain amount of daring, they simply stopped the Nash, made sure I was asleep,
6 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS
and got out and did it under the cold smile of the moon. I think they were probably becoming a little jaded, a little flown with the sheer audacity of the spots they chose, by the time they died. The old chain-hung bridge over Tolliver’s Creek was daunting even in daylight; it hung a good fifty feet in midair over the white-rushing water below, with space above and below and all around it. I hated it even before that night.
But it must have swayed gently and irresistibly before them in its frail emptiness that June night, because they parked the Nash on the far side, off on the ferny verge, and left me sleeping in it, and went onto the middle of the bridge and took off their clothes and began to make love, and it was during their final blinded and deafened transports of that love that Leon Crouch, drunk in his father’s chicken truck, caromed onto the bridge and smashed them off it and onto the granite rapids below. If they weren’t dead when they went off, they most surely were as soon as they hit. It was a closed-casket funeral, a disgrace nearly tantamount to the manner of their death in the Cash family.