Wiley Cash - A Land More Kind Than Home

When I heard it, I sat straight up in bed.

“What’s that?” I said, and wouldn’t you know there wasn’t a soul there to answer. Never had been nobody but me, but still there I was sitting straight up in my bed. “Who’s there?” I called like I expected an answer from a voice that hadn’t ever been there. I’ve lived alone just about all my life except for those years up on Parker Mountain with my great-aunt before she sent me off the mountain and down into town.

There wasn’t a single time when I was little that I didn’t live with her in that old cabin that smelled like dried leaves and lavender in the winter and damp earth and bergamot in the hot summertime. She was a storyteller if there ever was one, and she’d shell beans into a patch quilt she’d spread out across her lap and talk about my dead mama and daddy like they’d just stepped out into the yard to check the sky for rain clouds. My only memory of my mama is a wispy shadow thrown against the cabin wall by candlelight, and in my mind my daddy is a black shadow blotting out the sun in a cleared field. But she brought them back to me and made sure I understood the lives that had come before my own.

Her memory was sharp as a blade. She could remember the exact year of the best burley tobacco crop she’d ever raised, and she could tell you the name and lineage of just about every person up on Parker Mountain, even though most of them folks had less than nothing to do with us. She’d shuck bushel after bushel of corn in the candlelight and tell me the names of all the animals on her daddy’s and granddaddy’s farms. I’d work alongside her and listen to her talk as far into the night as she’d let me. I was just an itty-bitty little thing, even for my age, and she was the oldest person I knew, and I thought she must have been the oldest person who had ever lived.

It was 1919 the year I left her, the year she made me go. Late spring, and hadn’t nothing come up out of the ground fit to eat, and Lord knows we didn’t have no cash money and nothing to trade with. There wasn’t much to go around for none of us then.

“You need to get off this mountain and down to the city and get yourself set up to a job,” she said. “We ain’t going to last the summer through on what we got, and besides, it’s time you lit out on your own. Girls your age been give away by now and laid up with a baby or two and a piece of land all theirs.”

I was fourteen, and I didn’t know any better; I just figured she wanted to get rid of me. I didn’t know we’d have both probably died had I stayed the summer through.

Now, I had me a choice to make between Marshall, which is the county seat, Burnsville over there in Yancey County, and Asheville. Well, I’d been to Marshall once or twice before and back then there wasn’t too much there but the courthouse and a couple of feed stores and the like, and I figured Burnsville wasn’t much better than that, and knowing what I know now it would’ve been a long, tough trip there. I decided I’d go to Asheville, and I can tell you this, and this may surprise you when you hear it, but that’s the farthest away from Madison County I’ve ever been. I ain’t never had no reason to go no farther.

BUT IF I DON’T REMEMBER COMING INTO THE CITY THAT SATURDAY evening in the spring with all those trees budding along the French Broad River, that man on the wagon that carried me in from Weaverville pointing to that brown water and saying “We had us a flood here three years ago,” and then I looked out on the banks and seen some of them market and warehouse buildings all tore up from the river rising like it did and carrying with it all them tree limbs and all that trash and whole heaps of other stuff from downstream.

We came in the city from the north, and if that wasn’t the dangdest thing I’d ever seen, taking that cart through the farmer’s market on Lexington Avenue and all that food looking like it had just been ripped off the vine and all them chippies there wearing their makeup and their powder and waiting on them farm boys to close up their stands and pack up their wagons and spend a little time with them before lighting back out for the country. We rode right through there, and my head almost fell off with all the looking around I done.

“Where you wanting me to stop?” that man asked me.

“It don’t much matter,” I told him. He must’ve thought he had a real mountain yokel on his hands, and I can’t say I much blame him. If I wasn’t the greenest thing he’d ever seen, then I don’t know what was.

“Well, what kind of work are you hoping to find?” he asked me.

“That don’t much matter neither,” I said.

That must’ve frustrated him because that man stopped that wagon right smack in the center of town with all those cars and trolleys whizzing by and me sitting up there all bright-eyed and scared. He sat there with the reins in his hands and watched me get down and dust myself off and reach up for my little piece of luggage.

“What you figuring on doing now?” he asked me.

“I’m figuring on finding me some work,” I told him, and it wasn’t hardly no time at all before I’d done just that.

That night I found me a bed in a little tenement shack for girls, and the next day I took a job as a laundress taking in wash from the summer folks who stayed in the boardinghouses around the square and uptown in the hotels. And Lord, if those folks from places like Charleston and Atlanta and Savannah didn’t have just about the nicest, finest clothes I’d ever seen. But even all that fine fabric didn’t make that job no easier; washing is some hard work on your hands. You keep them wet like that for long enough, and you can just about peel off your skin like an onion. It’ll give you some soft hands, but Lord if they don’t get to hurting you good after you done it awhile. I hated it, but that was about all the work I could find. It was early summer and a good three months before the apple season sprung out there in the south of town and there wasn’t no tobacco coming in yet, so washing was about all the work I could get and about all the experience I had with the kinds of jobs folks did in town.

I washed clothes like the devil all summer long to keep my belly full and my back covered, and the first day them tobacco barns on the river opened up I was down there trying to hustle up a little work. They took one look at me, a skinny little girl from the hills, and they said, “What in the world do you know about tobacco?”

Of course I’d worked burley all my life, and I told them, “I know more about it on both ends than you do on this one. You let me work for you and pay me a fair take, and I’ll show you just what I know.” And let me tell you, there was me at fourteen hustling that market like nobody’s business.

“You there,” I might say to some or other seller, “what in the world did you do, drag that burley through the French Broad on your way here? Y’all going to have to dry that out good before it gets on this scale,” and “Yes, sir, you got yourself a right pretty crop, and we want to make you a right pretty deal to go with it.” I used to carry on like that just about all the time, trying to get those buyers a good price.

They’d say, “Where in the world did you learn to talk burley like that?” and I’d go into some or other long windy about being born with a burley knife already in my hand, and I’ll be doggone if some of them fellers didn’t want to believe it.

But if that wasn’t a tough time for folks with all the boys gone off to fight and then bringing that sickness home. It wasn’t bad enough the city was about slam full of lungers. You could see them sitting up on the screened porches of some of the sanitariums along the road from town and on the way to the tobacco barns. Folks would try and hide it, but you could tell them right off when you saw them. Just sickly looking and trying their best to hide those little handkerchiefs, those little red spots on the cotton. When the boys started coming home from the war in spells, it got a whole lot worse than it was before. The flu they brought home with them just spelled out disaster, and not only in town neither, and not just in this part of the country. Thousands died, thousands. We ain’t never seen the like of it since, and I hope we don’t in my day. Whole families just up and dying in only a week or two. Ain’t never seen the like of it since.