Hill Towns (3 page)

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or Revelation, to convert anyone who came within range of her terrible God.

And he
was
terrible. He was a God of fire and blood and vengeance, who demanded of his followers flesh and fealty and money and whatever else they had. He took and he judged and he damned. In my grandmother’s ruined mind, he left it up to her to save and instructed her to do it with her tongue and her hands and her broom and even the occasional kitchen knife, if the occasion for that arose. She murdered one of Papaw’s two prized heifers, destined to fatten and thrive and keep us all in milk and butter for winters to come, because her God demanded of her, one steaming July day, the sacrifice of a fatted calf. She went after the social worker from the county, who heard about the calf and came to see how I was faring, with the same knife. Only the inter-vention of the pastor of the church to which my grandmother was indentured, and my grandfather’s promise to keep me away from her, saved her from being committed then and there to the state mental facility in Knoxville.

Papaw wasn’t stupid or mean, only frozen in his bitterness.

He could see the trouble my slender fairness and the betray-ing chocolate eyes of my mother portended for me. As for Pastor Elkins, he was indeed a snake handler and half mad himself, but he was a consummate fund raiser. His ramshackle prophecy-haunted tabernacle in a tangled hollow at the base of the Mountain owed half its provenance to the money Mamaw appropriated from Papaw’s wages, money kept aside to feed and clothe us. Even more largesse flowed from the sums my Compton grandparents sent regularly for my schooling and general well-being. I don’t doubt that those gentle, cultivated Anglicans financed the upkeep of more than

16 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

one thick, sluggish, deadly Mountain rattlesnake or water moccasin. Pastor Elkins looked upon his handmaiden’s rapt, mad face and saw there many more years of affluence from the Tidewater before I attained my majority. He smiled his bleached feral smile at the county folks and promised there would not be any more unpleasantness from Sister Cash.

“She is God’s daughter in her heart,” he said. “She’s only just got so full of the Holy Spirit that it runs over sometimes.”

“Holy Spirit, my behind. That old bat is as crazy as a bedbug,” I heard the young woman from the county say to her supervisor as they got back into the battered county sedan and bumped out of our yard.

The next morning I went for the first time up the winding road to Trinity College with my grandfather in his old truck and passed for the first time under the arch and into the Domain.

“Yes,” the small part of me deep inside that knew about such things whispered. “This is right. This is the place.”

And when the first of the faculty members passed me, sitting quietly, as my grandfather had bidden me, on the gray stone steps of Lawler Hall, where the college’s administrative offices were, I raised my head and looked straight at them and smiled.

“It’s a pretty morning, isn’t it?” I said, and when they invariably stopped and asked me my name and whose little girl I was, I said my name was Catherine Rose Compton, and my mama and daddy were dead, and I lived now with Papaw, who made the college clean. And smiled again.

I was six years old, then, and on that day saved myself.

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“And the rest, as they say, is history,” I told Joe soon after I met him. I told Joe everything about me soon after we met, except the manner of my parents’ death. And that came just a little later, for it was only months after we met that I knew we would marry and I might, with luck, stay forever on the Mountain. Only then did I feel I could trust Joe with the thing at the heart of my fear of leaving the Mountain, though I knew from the beginning I would have to explain.

I told him, finally, on a day when he had asked me to go with him down off the Mountain and over to Chattanooga, to hear an organ concert in one of the big Episcopal churches there. Like many other new converts to Trinity’s Oxbridgian magic, Joe had fallen in love with all things Anglican and wanted Passionately for me to go with him and hear Bach and Palestrina played on the new organ at St. Anselm’s. I simply could not do it, but no excuse would serve. I was abundantly healthy, lived in one of the dormitories and would have been warmly encouraged by my housemother to attend the concert, and by that time was seeing no one but him.

“I have all the God up here I need,” I said finally. “I don’t need a dose of anybody else’s.”

He looked at me in thinly veiled alarm. Joe was a good Congregationalist boy from a poor, rocky little village in rural Vermont; he was both beguiled by and still a bit wary of the lush half-mystic eccentricities of the Domain. I think some buried puritan part of him expected me suddenly to forsake the orderly, dreaming gray and green spell of Trinity and start handling serpents myself.

“I’ve often wondered what you must have made of God, after those early years,” he said. “I mean, your grandmother’s fanaticism, and then up here, all this, 18 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

your great-grandfather and Compton Hall. God must have confused you terribly. Nothing about him was consistent for you.”

“I don’t think I was confused, exactly,” I said. “What did I know about consistency? I just concluded there were two of him. One for up here and another one for…you know.

Out there. Down there.”

“Cat,” Joe said. “What is this out-there down-there business? Why won’t you leave this mountain? What are you afraid of?”

And so I told him. And he wept. And I knew I would marry him if he asked me, and he probably would. And he did, not long after that day.

I fell in love with him on the first day of his seminar, in the winter of my senior year, when he came into class wearing a gray flat-topped Confederate officer’s forage cap. Atop his thick fair hair, with his silky, full mustache and short golden beard, the cap looked wonderfully easy and contemporary; it was like meeting Jeb Stuart himself, or someone equally mythic and dashing. His academic gown was flung carelessly over a worn Harris tweed jacket, his blue oxford-cloth collar was unbuttoned, and his tie was jammed into a hip pocket. His eyes were blue and full of a kind of swimming light behind the round wire glasses, and his features were narrow and sharp and tanned by whatever he had been doing the previous summer, before he had come to Trinity. We heard he had been snatched away from somewhere like Yale or Williams and was considered a great asset to Trinity. He was the first of the influx of young Ivy-League-educated faculty Trinity managed to lure south at the start of the seventies, that decade of greatest change, and those of us who had qualified for his elite senior seminar sat silently and stared at him. He

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did not speak, only stood still, hipshot, in the forage cap and looked back at us. He was tall and very thin.

“Hey, y’all,” he said, in a truly terrible parody of a southern drawl. His voice was flat, nasal, and harsh, with two hundred years of New England in it. He fairly honked. We burst into laughter and he grinned, and I caught my breath sharply.

He was the image of my father when he smiled, of my young father as he smiled down at my mother and me on a long-ago sunny day on the edge of the Steep, in the only photograph I had of him. Mamaw had searched out and burned all the others.

“My name is Joe Gaillard,” he said. “Josiah Peabody Gaillard. The Josiah and the Peabody are Vermont Yankee from back to Adam, but the Gaillard is a Cajun merchant marine who met my mother in Boston on her high school class trip and married her three hours before I was born. I just figured I’d get things off on the right foot and let you guys know you didn’t have the lock on Gothic down here.”

We laughed again, and I was lost.

I
MARRIED HIM ON THE AFTERNOON OF MY GRADUATION

from Trinity, in austere little St. Rhoda’s Chapel, in the sacristy wing of All Souls. I think we could have filled the great pennon-hung main Chapel if we had chosen; the entire college was infatuated with our marriage. Fads pop up like mushrooms after rain on the Mountain, and we were that season’s craze. Relatively little creeps in from off the Mountain to divert Trinity even now, and it was doubly so twenty years ago. Even the firestorm of unrest and change that consumed the country in the early seventies reached the Mountain only as an echo.

Oh, there were nods to the times. Women students came to Trinity. A good proportion of the faculty was recruited off the Mountain, from other parts of the country and abroad.

Male and female hair alike brushed the shoulders of the black academic gowns, blue jeans belled at ankles and tie-dye was everywhere, and the sweet smell of another kind of smoke curled into the air of both student and faculty parties. The music that

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flowed from lit windows was as much protest as plain-song, as much rock as Respighi. But the Mountain held its own.

The Domain prevailed. The dream at the top of the world that is Trinity has never been completely breached by the present. The Age of Aquarius drifted over the Mountain like smoke and did not settle.

The few people we had chosen to see us married were so quintessentially
of
Trinity that in the dim light it might have been a twilight in the forties, the twenties, or even the closing of the last century. Flowered hats bloomed, and white gloves, and the ubiquitous seer-sucker suit. I wore a simple white eyelet dress that Cora Pierce had married in, with wildflowers from the Steep in my hair, and Joe wore his Dartmouth doctoral hood over his Trinity gown. We had to ask official ecclesiastical permission for him to do that, but the Reverend Dr. Scofield had offered no objection. It was very much Trinity’s own wedding, ours was, and somehow the hoods and gowns of academia were right.

Dr. Scofield had known both of us since we came to Trinity. He was, to me, as much a part of All Souls as its famous rose window. I knew it was largely his good offices that had prevailed upon the college not to interfere with Joe’s courtship of me. Student-faculty relationships were forbidden then and are frowned upon even now. But, as I said, Joe was Trinity’s first golden boy from the Ivy League, and I was their poster child. Joe had melted any incipient resistance by simply going to Dr. Pierce, still our provost and my unofficial guardian since the death of both sets of my grandparents, and formally declaring his honorable intentions toward me.

I think he may even have asked for my hand, though he insists that he did not.

Dr. Pierce conferred with Dr. Scofield, who said, in 22 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

the lovely Anglican rumble that had propelled him straight up the Mountain to All Souls decades earlier, “If exceptions to rules cannot be made in this, the very bastion of the thinking man, we should cease calling ourselves a liberal arts institution.”

“And besides,” Mrs. Pierce told me later that he said, “it solves the problem of Catherine’s future very nicely. I have often worried that she would choose a husband not of Trinity.”

“Or not choose one at all,” I said to Joe later, laughing.

“This way you get to support me, and the Compton stash can go into the general fund. What if the school had had to dish out for me until I was ninety-five?”

When they died, five years before, quietly and peacefully within four months of each other, my Compton grandparents had left to the theology school a much larger bequest than had been anticipated, but with the stipulation that my full tuition, room, and board be paid from it, plus a generous living allowance, until I either married or died. When one of those eventualities occurred, the balance would revert to the school to use in any way they saw fit. Dr. and Mrs. Pierce were asked to administer the fund and oversee my welfare as long as I stayed on the Mountain, and since I had been living with them ever since my Cash grandparents died when I was thirteen, in the final fire set in the old house by mad Mattie Cash, they agreed—I think, happily—to do so.

It was an unusual arrangement, but Trinity was used to unusual arrangements when it came to me. Exceptions for Catherine Compton were made with regularity. Old Bishop Compton’s largesse, all those years before, had been great indeed. And I truly loved the gentle, childless old couple who had plucked me off a stone doorstep all those years ago, and I knew they loved me

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in return. They had become the grandparents the Comptons might have been to me, if I could have made myself leave the Mountain. But even at thirteen, the fear of the outside world that was born by Tolliver’s Creek was too vivid, too real for that. I had made one visit to their home just after Papaw and Mamaw died, and my anxiety was so overwhelming that I trembled and vomited for three days, only stopping when I passed once more under the arch into the Domain.

It was then the suggestion was first made, by Grandmother Compton, that perhaps a discreet stint of psychiatric therapy would not be amiss. But by the time she made it I was radiant and restored in my relief, and so happy to be back at Trinity that I fairly shimmered with it.

“It’s not you,” I said into my grandmother’s lilac-smelling neck. “You know I love you and Grandpa. It’s just that…I have to be up here. I have to be.”

“Then, my dear Cat, you shall be,” she said, and hugged me hard, and went into the Pierces’ house with Grandpa Compton to talk with Dr. and Mrs. Pierce about the matter.

I did not realize until she had driven away again that the tears on my face had been hers and not my own.

After that, I saw my Compton grandparents regularly, and always on celebratory occasions such as birthdays, graduations, and the bestowing of academic honors. But always it was at Trinity. After I enrolled and moved into the fresh-men women’s hall, upon graduating from Montview Day, I left the Mountain only for infrequent, reluctant shopping and academic field trips to nearby Chattanooga or Knoxville or Nashville and very rarely Atlanta, and I left under the serene kiss of a tranquilizer administered by the college physician, an old friend of the Pierces, with no questions asked. Even then, anxiety