Charles Buck - The Code of the Mountains

This morning the boy from the forks of Troublesome Creek had back his name once more. It was not a distinguished name, nor one to be flaunted in pride of race or achievement. On the contrary, it was a synonym for violent law-breaking and in the homely parlance of the Cumberland ridges, where certain infractions are condoned, it stood for "pizen meanness." Generations of Spooners before him had taken up the surname and carried it like runners in a relay race – often into evil ways. Many had laid down their lives and name with abruptness and violence.

When the pioneers first set their feet into the Wilderness trail out of Virginia, some left because the vague hinterland west of the ridges placed them "beyond the law's pursuing."

Tradition said that of the latter class were the Spooners, but Newt Spooner had no occasion to probe the remote past for a record of turpitude. It lay before him inscribed in a round clerical hand on the ledger which the warden of the Frankfort Penitentiary was just closing. Though the Governor's clemency had expunged the red charge of murder set against his name at the tender age of eighteen, there was another record which the Governor could not erase. A sunken grave bore testimony in a steep mountainside burial-ground back in "Bloody Breathitt," where dead weed stalks rattled and tangled ropes of fox-grapes bore their fruit in due season.

However, even the name of Newt Spooner is a better thing than the Number 813, which for two years had been his designation within those gray and fortressed walls along whose tops sentry-boxes punctuated the angles.

This morning he wore a suit of black clothes, the gift of the commonwealth, and his eyes were fixed rather avidly on a five-dollar note which the warden held tightly between his thumb and forefinger. Newt knew that the bill, too, was to be his. Yet the warden seemed needlessly deliberate in making the presentation. That functionary intended first to have something to say; something meant in all kindliness, but as Newt waited, shifting his bulk uneasily from foot to foot, his narrowed eyes traveled with restlessness, and his thin lips clamped themselves into a line indicative of neither gratitude nor penitence. The convict's thoughts for two years had been circling with uncomplicated directness about one focus. Newt Spooner had a fixed idea.

The office of the warden was not a cheery place. Its walls and desk and key-racks spoke suggestively of the business administered there. The warden tilted back in his swivel chair, and gazed at the forgiven, but unforgiving prisoner.

"Spooner," he began in that tone which all homilies have in common; "Spooner, you have been luckier than you had any reason to expect. It's up to you to see that I don't get you back here again."

He gazed sternly at the boy, for he was still a boy, despite the chalky and aged pallor of his face, despite the tight-clenched line of the thin lips, despite the stooping and emaciated shoulders. The Kentucky mountaineer withers into quick decay between prison walls, and, unless appearances were deceitful, this one was already being beckoned to by the specter of tuberculosis.

"You have been pardoned and restored to all civil rights by the Governor," went on the official. "Your youth and ill health appealed to some ladies who went through the prison. You are the youngest homicide we have here. They interceded because you were only an ignorant kid when you were drawn into this murder conspiracy."

Newt's eyes blazed evilly at the words, but he only clamped his mouth tighter. He would not have called it a murder conspiracy. To him it was merely "killin' a feller that needed killin'." "Since," continued the warden quietly, "you were full of white liquor, and since you had never had a chance to know much anyhow, those ladies got busy, and you have another chance. You ought to feel very grateful to them. It's up to you to prove that the experiment was worth the risk it involves – the risk of turning an assassin loose on society."

The boy from Troublesome said nothing. From his thin chest came a deep, racking cough. He spat on the floor, and wondered how long this man would hold back the five-dollar bill and prolong the interview.

"Well?" The warden's voice was impatient. "Don't you hear me talking to you? Haven't you got any sense of decent gratitude?"

A fiercely baleful wrath shot instinctively through Newt's gray hawk-like eyes and smoldered in their deep sockets, but there still was need to leash his anger – and conceal his purpose.

"I'm obleeged ter ye," he answered in a dead voice of mock humility, though his tongue ached to burst into profane denunciation, "but I hain't axed nobody ter do nothin'. I didn't 'low ter be beholden ter nobody."

"You are 'beholden' to everybody who has befriended you," retorted the warden with rising asperity. "Do you mean to go back to the mountains?"

At once there leaped into the released convict's mind a vision of being spied upon and thwarted in his purpose – a purpose which the law could not countenance. To cover his anger he fell into a fit of violent coughing, and, when he answered, it was with the crafty semblance of indecision.

"I 'lowed I mout go back an' see my kinfolks fer a spell."

"And after that?"

"I 'lowed," lied Spooner cautiously, "thet atter thet I'd go West."

"Now take a tip from me," commanded the warden, and, since he still held the five-dollar bill, the boy from Troublesome was forced to accord unwilling attention. "Every mountain man that goes away drifts eventually back to the mountains. God knows why they do it, but they do. You have just one chance of salvation. I had that in mind when I spoke to the Governor and asked him to include in your pardon a restoration of civil rights. If you get well enough to stand the physical examination, enlist in the army. Once in, you'll have to stay three years – and in three years a fellow can do a lot of thinking. It may make a man of you. If you don't take that tip I'll have you back here again – as sure as God made you – unless you get hanged instead."

The warden extended his hand containing the provision with which the commonwealth of Kentucky invited this human brandling to rehabilitate his life. The mountaineer bent eagerly forward and clutched at the money with a wolfish haste of greed. Ten minutes later the prison gates swung outward.

The Frankfort Penitentiary sits on a hill looking down to a ragged town which straddles the Kentucky River. In the basin below somnolent streets spread away and lose themselves in glistening turnpikes between bluegrass farms where velvet lawns and shaded woodlands surround old mansions that mirror the charm and flavor of rural England. The state capital is a large village rather than a city, but to this boy who had known only the wild isolation of the Cumberlands, where sky-high ramparts have caught and arrested human development, Frankfort seemed a baffling metropolis. In the lumber-yards and distilleries that cluttered the steep river banks he saw only bewilderment and in the dome of the capitol the symbol of a power that had jailed him; that except for his youth would have hanged him.

One thing only he saw which struck a note of the nostalgic and brought a catch to his throat. That river had its headwaters in his own country. One branch flowed through his own county seat, and those knobs that hugged its banks and framed the straggling town under the singing June skies, were the little cousins of the mountains where his forefathers had lived their lives and fought their battles for a hundred years.

If he followed them long enough, they would mount from knobs to foothills and from foothills to peaks. The metaled turnpikes would dwindle and end in clay roads. These roads would in time give way to rougher trails, rock-strewn and licked by the little, whispering waters that make rivers, and he would travel by creek-bed ways over which wagons, if they go at all, must strain their axles and where men ride mules with their luggage in saddle-bags. There forests of age-old oaks and spruce, pines and poplars and hickory and ash would troop down and smother in the hillsides, and the rhododendron would be in bloom just now. The laurel bushes would be all a-glisten and the elder tops would be tossing sprays of foam-like blossom between towering sentinels of rock.