Milkweed Ladies (10 page)

T
he chestnut blight came slowly, a gray
quiet death. At first there was a canker on one old tree, and then the canker spread. The spores blew in wind, and the branches began dying.

We had always called Uncle Dan'l's trees “the chestnut orchard,” just across our line fence on the flat knoll of his part of Old Tom's farm. Forty or fifty big American chestnut trees stood there together, as the old men had saved them from the first clearings back in Indian times, and for generations they had been the neighborhood nutting ground. On crisp autumn days, the hilltop would be full of chestnut pickers scattering the yellow leaves with their sticks and picking up the sweet, brown, silver-tailed nuts. As we moved along under the trees, the leaves rustled, the bluejays cawed, and the sweet smell of autumn dust rose around us. When we stopped to listen, we could hear the squirrels chattering up in
the branches and the chestnuts falling like slow rain.

When Uncle Dan'l sold his orchard to the lumber company, the lumberjacks came in and cut it down, and then our four trees over on the home place cankered and died. In a few years, gray ghosts of the chestnut trees stood against the skyline, their bark all sloughed off. All across the mountains their bare arms reached up to the sky, and down below the new road came and began to tie our Swago Farm to the world.

When the new road was finished, it was hard, smooth, and gray-colored, and the Model T's came chugging along it, and the fancy Chevrolets, Maxwells, and Jewetts. When you went in by horse or foot, you could live almost anywhere, and the whole Swago mountain country had been scattered with wilderness farms, houses, and old one-room schools. But after the road was finished, new houses and new schoolhouses were built alongside it, and then the barns came down too. Then the gas stations came, and the little Dew Drop Inns. Back in the hills, the old houses and schoolhouses rotted down, blackberry vines crept over the broken porches, and the eyeless windows stared out at the encroaching wilderness.

Once G.D. got his own Model T, he had so much trouble getting it in through the swamp muck and the drifted snow that we too built our new house and moved over to the road. G.D. carried part of the old house with us: Captain Jim's two stone chimneys and his black walnut fireboard. After we moved and had clean running water and French doors and a breakfast nook, G.D. never went back to the old house that still stood under the hill and had been turned into a hay barn. It was almost as though Granny Fanny had jerked her thorn broom handle out of the world's axis and the whole contraption began to rattle and whirl. We three older kids began going off to college, and I began to publish poems and went dancing with Louis Untermeyer.

G.D. and Mama had planned to support all four of us children through at least two years of college, and then to let us make our own way by teaching school, saving our money, and going to summer terms. Ward and Elizabeth went first, and then I went with Elizabeth to the university as a freshman when I was sixteen years old. I had one year there, but I spent so much money that G.D. jerked me out as soon as I had a certificate and let me make my own way from there on in.

Sometime in the fall of my sixteenth year, I composed my first poem, working on a borrowed typewriter in my dormitory room. Though I had no boyfriend, it was a poem of love and passion: “When scarlet clouds fly by the moon, I'm always in my memories with you.” I read the poem to myself and something happened to me. I had felt such joy in the writing itself and in the rhythms of the lines that I swore a vow that I would be a poet and write poems forever.

Soon after, in one of the old soon-to-be-abandoned schoolhouses, I taught my first school. It was the winter of 1930, just before the yellow school buses started running. We always called it the School up in the Brush Country, but its official name was Pleasant Hill. The schoolhouse stood on an eroded hilltop and had two decaying privies hidden out in the brush. I walked in three and a half miles each way, or boarded around with the families and walked with the Wilfong children up Ress Wilfong's hollow to the schoolhouse hill.

The schoolhouse stood on posts, and the sheep that pastured in the schoolyard sheltered under the floor. Sometimes, in the middle of a class, we could hear them bumping around under us, bawling. We had a flagpole and flag, a stove, desks, a bench, a water cooler, one shelf of worn-out books,
and hooks on the wall to hang our overcoats; but in the winter of 1930, we didn't hang our coats much, for the board of education had no money to fix the broken window sash. I tried to fix it with rags, and I kept the fire boomed up, but the blizzard winds came howling in. I taught most of that winter in my warm leather jacket with a red tam-o'-shanter on my head.

I had twenty-six pupils in all eight grades, and though I had studied “educational methods” in college, I had learned nothing about teaching school. So I remembered Miss Anne Correll and called the kids, one class at a time, up to the Recitation Bench. At noon we gathered around the stove, and the kids ate their white beans and jelly-bread sandwiches. Everybody had apples, and there were still a few wild American chestnuts and plenty of fall blackberries and wild goose plums. Often at night we would go from house to house, eating homegrown popcorn and apples and playing our mountain music: “The Little Mowhee,” “Wildwood Flower,” and “Red Wing.”

The door peg and Granny's broom handle had held the world, but by 1932 Granny lay bed-sick over at Aunt Mat's and everybody was talking about the hard times. The Great Depression was reaching its low point.
There were stores going out of business and a lot of men walking the road. Then the government started giving away “commodities,” and Miss Moss Miller brought Mama a whole poke full of stuff: big grapefruit and lard and canned beef. There were foreclosures: Uncle Hunter's drug store failed, and he had to go to work on the county roads with a pick and shovel. Then the bank took Uncle Dan'l's farm; and one winter morning, Uncle Dan'l died of pneumonia, from walking his line fences in the snow.

Sometime during the Depression, Wint's store burned down, and nobody knew why. The store went up like a box of tinder, and all over the neighborhood the eerie light shivered in the sky. When the fire got to the shelf of shotgun shells, the shells exploded and shot off, whizzing into the night like Roman candles. All the store goods, and all the men's tall tales, and our village center went up that night in a great display of fireworks, a kind of blazing last gesture of defiance against the coming of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his alphabet soup.

The very night of the day we moved over to the road, Granny Fanny died. She had been in bed over at Aunt Mat's for nearly a year, sometimes sitting up against the pillow knitting socks. I had been over to see
her a few weeks before and had told her about the new calves and how the garden was planted, and on my way back across the pasture that evening I had felt the strange hovering in the air of death's gray wing.

The undertaker put Granny Fanny into a fine black dress with white ruffles at her wrists and throat. Everybody said how she looked so “natural,” but she didn't look natural to me. She looked more like some fine, proud mountain queen who had ruled over all her people and had never bruted or slaved. I was a grown girl by then and had gone off to college, and I had made my vow to be a poet and learned all hundred verses of Omar Khayyam's
Rubaiyat
by heart. When they took Granny Fanny up to our grave-hill in the black hearse, I went to her in my new white silk dress, carrying an armful of red poppies, for I had read in the decadent
fin de siècle
poetry of Algernon Charles Swinburne that poppies are for sleep:

 

Thou art more than the day or the morrow, the seasons that laugh or that weep;

For these give joy and sorrow; But thou, Proserpina, sleep.

 

During the years of my brush country schoolteaching, I would go out into the woodland or sit under my oil lamp in my
bathrobe in my unheated room at Oley Jackson's log house, and write lyric poems. Soon, I began to send poems out, copying them crookedly on G.D.'s typewriter; I published one in
Stardust
, a then current little poetry magazine, and one in the
Columbus Dispatch
. I found an advertisement for another little poetry magazine,
Kaleidoscope
, in Dallas, Texas, and I submitted a thin manuscript to a prize contest they had. The prize was publication of a hundred copies of a little book of poems, and I won it; so in 1931,
Mountain White
was published, with its dying lover poems, its stoic mountaineer poems, its clever Dorothy Parker poems, and two or three good poems in my own style.

I kept writing, teaching, and going back to college, until I finally managed to graduate from the teachers' college down at Athens when I was twenty-five years old. I had a degree in English, though I knew not a whit of grammar beyond the noun and the verb. But a magnetic professor there, S. L. McGraw, had helped me to discover the world of books and philosophical thought. I settled down, worked hard, and lived an almost inspired life that next year, in the company of William Thorndike, William James, and Paul Elmer More, as I taught the home school in the Swago village and lived at home on the farm.

I kept my vow to myself and continued to write poems. I sent them off to the magazines and, mostly, I got them back. One day, in exchange for my poem “Song in the Saddle,” a check came from
Forum
magazine up in New York. As I walked home up through Uncle Dan'l's pasture, the weeds were purest gold and I ran to the yard gate to tell Mama. Later I won a prize of twenty-five dollars, got into
Social Science
, and by the fall of 1936, I had begun to sell poems to the
American Mercury
where Louis Untermeyer was the editor. Mr. Untermeyer wrote me letters of encouragement and praise for several months, and then he wrote that he would be speaking at our state teachers' convention in Huntington and asked if I planned to attend.

I went on the C. and O. train in my best wool dress and my black rabbit fur coat from Sears Roebuck, rode down the Greenbrier division on through Charleston and got myself registered at the Pritchard Hotel. On Friday morning, I met Mr. Untermeyer for a poetry session, and he kept three poems to take back to New York. Just as I was leaving, he asked if he could escort me to the formal dance that evening. I had nothing appropriate to wear, but he insisted and, finally, I agreed.