WALK THAT LONESOME VALLEY

joines cemetery whitehead



Stopped by Jr's grave yesterday. The death date still has not been put on the stone. I'll have to take care of that myself. I'll go to somebody who does that and get it done. Fell through the cracks, as they say. In the photo above, the view from Jr's grave, the mountain on the left is the Peak. It's on Blum land. Jr's homeplace was to the left of the Peak. The little white church in lower right that looks like it's sitting on the tombstone is Liberty. Over the last years they've been doing quite a lot toward the restoration and upkeep of the church Jr and Elvira Crouse grew up in. Thanks to the churches keeping records of baptisms we were able to find the date in 1935 Jr was baptized, meaning he was saved, which eased the minds and hearts of many of his friends and relatives. When I learned the date and was able to tell it, the relaxation that came over several was visible. It was a measure of how much they cared.



It's odd to think of Jr in the grave. While he was living, we didn't know which of us would go first. Whitehead without Jr is a very different Whitehead. I delivered one of the cds of his music to Ray Wooten today, visited with him a little bit. Ray plays bluegrass rhythm guitar, used to make music with Cleve, Jr and Art. At the dump, I ran into Doug McMillan, guitar picker and country singer at home and with friends, someone I know now because I knew Jr. Jr's friends have added quite a number to the people I'm happy to know in these here hills. I often think of what Elvira said the day Jr died, "Now Whitehead knows who you are." I thought I understood what she meant, more or less intuitively. Since then, I've seen what it means. All the ones I know in Whitehead are as wide open friendly with me like they were with Jr. I treasure it. Part of what I was doing passing around the cd was thanking my new friends for their consideration. It gave me reason to go around and see them individually.



Conversation with nearly everyone I saw today on a run to town was curious about the new radio station owner, wondering what was going to become of it. What I piece together from what I read in the paper and have heard, they'll continue with the obits, but probably not get any closer to the community than that. That's entirely uncertain. I'm thinking if they want to reject participation in the community, they'll go the way of the last bunch, a long, slow decline unto nothing. It doesn't matter to me what they do. I'll never listen to any of it, anyway. Probably will never turn it on out of curiosity. My feeling of the new owner is he likes to see himself in a corporate light, like CEO. I don't know. Don't want to know. I'd rather listen to NPR when I turn the radio on during the day. I won't pay enough attention to the station for what I think or don't think of it to matter the most miniscule iota. I don't even know if I wish them well after what I witnessed second-hand of the takeover. I remember listening to Tom Pruitt on money preachers. He spoke my own thoughts and feelings in eloquent brief. I asked him for what he thought of the radio preacher, George Farmer, who preached on WCOK every day. Tom's answer, "Money preacher." The money part voided the preacher part. That was all he had to say. It brought to his mind memories of other money preachers along his way.



I came to these mountains with that way of seeing it. It was such an unpopular concept to disregard preachers who do it for pay, favors, wealth. There again, in America the measure of the value of what you do is the money you make. The preacher that makes the most money, Billy Graham for example, is perceived as the best, which increases his following, especially after he counsels presidents, and fattens his coffers. I was surprised and heartened the day Tom let me know his views on the matter. As I've lived in the mountains, the number of people I know who disregard money preachers is quita a large number. That's the old-time way. And it's gone away. We're in television culture now and tv culture is all about money. This is a major reason I don't cohabit with tv. When it gets down to it, the more money a preacher makes, the more fraudulent his status in my way of discerning trees by their fruits. Jr didn't have any use for any of them. I'm inclined to that direction, myself, but have known some I know in my heart were true and actually were called by the Holy Spirit. Millard Pruitt, primarily. His power in the pulpit was the truth that borrowed his vocal chords for a little bit. He was not uncommon back in the old days.



I paid a great deal of attention to Elder Millard Filmore Pruitt. I saw him an old-baptist monk. He was hard shell in his beliefs and I was not. But it was no problem for me that he saw it the hard shell way. I just don't see anything that way, I hope. One doesn't meet many people whose every moment is in the presence of the Lord. Millard was. Tom was. Bessie Brooks was. Malissie Pruitt was. These people were examples to me that the mountain old-time religion is a true path up the great high mountain. These are some of the characteristics you hear people bring up when they remember grandma and grandpa, the most devout people you could ever know. At the same time grandma was just a woman and grandpa just a man. They went about their lives here on the earth with the spirit as their guide, neither above nor below anyone around them. Good neighbors. They lived good lives. They lived through deep sorrows. Death was not kept out of sight in their world. It was right there with you all the time. Graves were dug with picks and shovels. The bodies were cleaned and dressed at home. They lived so much closer to the bone than we do now, their way of living can't even be imagined for comparison. I tend to find tv culture lacking, considerably, in relation to the old-time ways. When it's gone, books, movies, what have you, none of it will have It. Thanks to old-time fiddle music and hymns, some of that old-time spirit continues to live as a subculture in the new culture guided by tv.



The devotion I saw in the old-time mountain people during my early years in the hills, the late 70s and the 80s, was such that it put me in awe of the culture that had in its people so many brilliantly lit-up souls living in the light. I don't mean anything less than that. They know what they believe through experience. Jr carried the tradition in himself. He stayed away from church, however, drank to his own satisfaction, lived his life to his satisfaction, not to some preacher's judgment he doesn't even respect as a man. He went his own way. He carried his devotion in his heart. I always saw it. It's part of what I most respected in him. Jr's heart was right. He spoke through the heart to everyone. He lived his life in the light, too, though kept his spiritual beliefs entirely to himself. He said the Ten Commandments were his guide. Enough said. It's all there. Jr lived a devout life while allowing himself to go ahead and be who he was, play banjo in a bluegrass band, keep his blood purified with the best white liquor around, he was definitely particular about the quality, and live his life the best he knew how. I saw in Jr a man like myself going his own way, making his own decisions, not adhering to anybody else's agendas, walking his own path. In the time I took care of him I saw him the brother monk in the monastery of our way of living in relation to the Most High. If I were to write of the time with Jr as a play, it would be 2 monks in a modest country house, the older one dying, the other one making it possible for the older monk to die in his own bed, which the care giving monk believed was as important as the older monk held it to be.

THE OLD HOUSE

tom pruitt's house



Tom's house from this point on Waterfall Road where I was standing is beautiful every time of year. A bit of geometry in landscape. Triangles and squares that have occupied this spot in the landscape a hundred years, possibly older than any of the trees around it, white planes surrounded by multiple webs of tree limbs glistening in ice. It brought the house to life, made it feel like Tom would be sitting by the fire and I'm on my way up to see him. He would be amused without letting it show or be known in any way that I was out there with a camera taking pictures of it. It's all weeds to him. Stupid city kid. His ideal is all the land cleared with crops growing on it, horses and cattle grazing it. Tom also never said it, but I know he thought what Jr once said to me, 'You tell me the craziest damn shit I ever heard.'



I'm done now projecting onto Tom what I think up for him to say. For all I know, he was jealous because he didn't have a camera, though I doubt that so much it seems retarded to say it. Not a bit of it. He'd more than likely think how times change, the mystery gadgets the younger people are carrying around, seeing it about like I see kids with iPods and video games. I have to say it was educational seeing myself through the eyes of an old man of the mountains who didn't have electricity or running water for a long time after he could have. Didn't need it. A man who lived so simply it made me laugh when I thought of myself living simply. I wasn't even close. I was still caught up in the cult of the latest. That took awhile to fade as it was the culture I'd lived in all my life before.



Tom sat facing a wall, keeping the wood burning stove going, thinking. Jr was like that. He could sit endlessly by himself with no radio, tv or anything but a clock and a thermometer. Tom had 3 different calendars on the walls of the room he lived in. All were on different months and different years long past. Instead of putting up a shower curtain, he kept a mop beside the shower to mop the bathroom with when he was done. He built the bathroom on the side of the house with the help of a couple of his nephews. He already had water flowing to the kitchen. It was 16 years before he connected water to the bathroom.



Tom was a teacher in my first years in the mountains. He taught me farm work and he taught me mountain customs. He was not one to teach by questions and answers. He sometimes gave me a brief on what to watch out for using a wedge with a sledge hammer. Just the one thing I needed to know, all the rest I could figure out by looking. I learned by being his assistant. I was quick to learn everything. I wasn't looking to be a farmer or even to raise cattle. I wanted to learn the old-time way. That was the only way Tom knew.



We stretched many a mile of barbed wire together. Tom never wore his gloves working with barbed wire. I would get tired of taking them off, putting them on every move I made, and it wouldn't be long I was working it bare handed too. It was easier. Tom's hands ran with blood by the time we were done. Mine were fairly sliced up too, but I was being a little effete at the beginning, watching it the best I could, unlike Tom who paid it no mind. Kerosene will take care of it. The backs of Tom's hands were like webs of narrow straight line scars, like a spider web with no order to it. I have several on the backs of my hands. There came a time with me too when being careful didn't matter any more. Jr evidently didn't use his gloves working barbed wire either. His hands had webs on the backs as complex as Tom's.



It felt good to look up at Tom's house and see it looking alive again. It has been without him so long it seems the spirit is gone. It's a shell now, an empty snail shell found in the woods. It's a noble old house made of oak that has been let go so long it becomes less a candidate for restoration every round of the seasons. It's come to represent to me what I've seen of the last years of old-time mountain culture. Little left but the shell and it leaving no traces of the living being that occupied it, vanished and gone as if never was. That's how it goes for us. I felt like with both Tom and Jr were unafraid facing their last days and hours, but I had the impression neither one could imagine the world without them. It's the only way they'd ever known the world, with themselves included. Vanishing from their places in this world seemed like something they couldn't grasp. I'm interpreting, interpreting what I saw in both of them, how they talked about things in their last days as if they'd continue right on and on. They always did. Neither one left final words. When Tom woke up in the hospital, he sent word, 'Tell TJ I aint gonna make it.' That was it.



Air Bellows has 5 original houses left. My house was the school Tom went to and all his brothers and sisters, and all the kids from around here. I've known, met and talked to 10 people who went to school here. They also had revivals that went on and on. It was taken apart, board by board and moved by either pickup or wagon, moved a couple hundred yards up the road and rebuilt with the roof different. It used to go up at an angle in front and back as well as both sides. I don't know of any existing photographs of it as a school house.



I like Tom's house with trees grown up around it. It's become another metaphor of change as all the people who were born in the house, who lived in it, everyone who lived there is gone. Not one living. The empty shell the mice move into in winter followed by blacksnakes in the summer. Tom, in telling me his life, included the lives of all the people who lived in the house, his mother, his dad, his brothers and sisters. Once, a self-sustaining farm with barn, work horses, milk cow, chickens, a big garden, meadows of oats, meadows of corn. Now empty, though still catching snow on the roof, surrounded all the way around by Christmas trees, the old house is a relic of another time, another Age. I'm grateful I've known so much of its life.

GOODBYE OLD WAYS

jr & jean 2 and a half years ago

Today I have been thinking about the day I dropped by Jr's shop when I saw him sitting in a wooden chair inside. I wanted to talk with him about the music store I wanted to open to sell cds of mountain music and strings. He was all with it. While we talked I was taken by how depressed he was. It didn't seem right for Jr Maxwell to be that depressed. It was just a few years after Spider Woman. He asked me to the house to have a drink with him. I found him so depressed that, like I said, it didn't seem right. I hadn't seen him in several years to sit down and talk with him.

I've always known someone here to sit and talk with for hours at a time. It's how I learn the culture, listening to someone from the old time ways tell of those times, telling their lives that hold my interest every word they're saying. First was Tom Pruitt. I discovered in Tom an awful lot that is from another place and time. He stayed in place and everything changed around him. Over 14 years he had told me memory after memory of people he's known, his family, preachers, church, working 2 big horses to haul tree trunks out of the woods, his mother dying in his arms. She was the love of his life. He told me one time that there are two kinds of women, mothers and whores. His mother was the only one that wasn't a whore. He also told me he could cook better than any woman. You already know that's not so. I've never known a woman as bad a cook as Tom. For bread, he put water in self-rising flour, wadded it up in his hand and sat them on the woodstove. White bread.

Another time he told me that men with a lot of hair on their bodies, and women that have twins and triplets are closer to animals than the rest of us. This is somebody who didn't believe evolution at all. He was back in the flat earth cosmology, pre-Copernican, where rational is not an issue. Pre-reason, living by the heart, feeling deeply, emotional. Electricity moved in here when Tom was late 30s, early 40s. There was no urgency about electricity or plumbing. Tom built a bathroom off the side of the house. It was 16 years before he connected water to it. That was all he had to do, connect water that was already in the kitchen, a gravity line from a spring box up the hill. After he ran water to it, he would take showers. He never bought a shower curtain. He kept a mop by the shower stall. After a shower, he mopped the bathroom floor.

I learned Tom's beliefs. For one, he only read the red letter text in the Bible. His Bible was a NT. For Tom, that was what it was all about, the sayings of Jesus. All the rest of it was all right, but the only part that's important is what Jesus said. I agree. So did Thomas Jefferson. He printed some copies of a Bible that was only the words of Jesus. They're still in print. The Jefferson Bible. Tom was very much a pilgrim. When they sang Amazing Grace at his funeral, the Old Baptist way, a pool of tears on the floor between my feet grew larger and larger making a miniature pond on the polished hardwood. The fullness of who Tom was I felt was in that song.

Tom's Brother, Millard, I've listened to for 14 years tell his and other people's stories in his life. Millard was a Regular Baptist preacher, among the last that preached the old time way. Millard was a good preacher. He really was a vessel for the Holy Spirit. He told me about preachers from the past, how the church meetings were, his own visions, like the time an angel appeared to him in his living room. Millard was a hard-shell. He was born a Regular Baptist and a republican. And he died a Regular Baptist and republican. He believed never changing was a form of Godliness. God doesn't change, so God's devotee shouldn't change. A Bible scholar and a very interesting man.

Jr is from the same world as Tom and Millard, Whitehead. He grew up in the old time way, that was changing from about the age of 20 onward. He started out riding horses. Model As came along. He has lived through the changes of the 20th Century that started here around 1945. Jr has told me thousands of experiences that all go together to tell me his life. A few years ago it came to him he'd told me everything about his life and there wasn't any more to tell. We were up to the present. So we stayed in the present.

I started seeing that the worst thing for Jr was lonesomeness. He was the embodiment of a bluegrass song. Lines from bluegrass songs he thought of as truths he carried, a kind of scripture. Every evening I'd leave to go home, he'd ask me to come back the next evening. Gradually the despair lifted a little bit. Jean came around quite a lot. Often she would cook a meal for all of us. Jean told her story over a period of years. I was thinking I can't do anything to help Jr. It's a totally inside himself, his own business kind of thing. It cheered him up over time as we talked over two drams apiece over a two hour period. Both of us are sippers. His blues gradually lifted, a bita, if for no other reason than having someone to talk to who pays attention.

After awhile of telling each other our lives, we became friends. He learned he can trust me and I learned I can trust him. A few times he asked me why I don't talk much about my life. I said, It's too damn boring. His life was spent taking the moment face on, in motion, seeing a lot of people, having experiences with other people like hunting, being married, work and so on. I live almost entirely in my mind. It entertains me, but to somebody else, I don't know. It wouldn't register anything to Jr if I were to tell him about Andrei Tarkovsky's film Andrei Rublev, when the Tartars, Mongols, were slaughtering the people of a medieval town in Ukraine. Things that interest me like film, reading, varieties of music, are of no interest to Jr. I've told him of a scene or two from Steven Seagal films where Seagal is shooting it out and pulls some clever trick. It wouldn't do to attempt to tell him my appreciation for Peter Greenaway's film, Prospero's Books. It wouldn't work. And I don't care.

All my mental stuff is for my entertainment. Nonetheless, he appreciates my painting. He likes that I can render a likeness. He tends to think I can't do anything, because I can't weld, take a tractor motor apart and put it back together so it runs better than it did before, or operate a bullnoser. But when he looks at one of my paintings he appreciates that there is something I can do. That makes up for not knowing how to operate a backhoe and not wanting to.

We don't know every detail about each other's lives by a long ways, but we understand each other, and that's worth a lot. That's why I want to be his care provider, because I want him to have somebody with him who understands him to help him in this most difficult time of his life when his mind is gone and he can't do for himself. I want him to have someone with him he can trust absolutely. I know for a certainty he can trust me absolutely. And I want to know how he's doing at all times. And I believe God gave him to me as a teacher for this experience. Jr is possibly the most humble man I know. Right now he's passing to me lessons in humility.

GOOD OLD BOYS

Tom's house 16July09

After Jr and I knew each other well enough to risk popping a bubble without consequences, I was telling something about Tom when Jr felt it necessary to let me know in a gentle way, Tom wasn't all that bright, in case I thought he was. I realized I had left out knowing that about Tom in our conversations. When I speak of Tom with anyone it is only in praise. There have been people who thought Tom really had the wool pulled over my eyes, but I didn't care. I knew Tom's weaknesses. I just didn't care to tell them around, out of respect for Tom himself, who he is/was. I was more interested than amused by Jr noting that I had only let on like I knew nothing but the best about Tom.

It's that way with Jr too. I never remark about Jr's weaknesses. The funniest was the time one of my friends said, like he was letting me in on something everybody knows but me, "You know, Junior is a redneck." I laughed inside, some of which spilled outside, thinking, Duh; saying, "I'm aware of that." Of course, then you get into definitions and I didn't care to get technical about a silly word like that. Instead of a Larry the Cable Guy redneck, Jr is a Flatt & Scruggs, Don Reno redneck, a banjo pickin son of a gun.

Jr told me he never let Tom use any of his horses. Tom was unnecessarily rough with animals. Tom was known for taking a two by four and beating a cow with it. Tom, himself, had told me that sometimes you can't get a cow to do somehting without a beating. He told me, when a cow gets out of control and starts acting up to hit her just behind the knot on top of the head with a 2x4 with all you got. Anything less than all you got won't do it. You want to bring her to her knees. A few years later I found myself in such a situation helping Gene Dysart with a cow that refused her calf. He had her tied to a post in the little barn across from my house. He kept trying to force her to accept the calf while I held the rope that went around a post a couple of times so I could tighten and loosen it at will.

The cow got frisky, tired of his shit is more like it, and kicked Gene in the knee, then tried to break loose from the rope, jumping about. I had thought the whole thing a bad idea, but it wasn't the time to discuss that. I had to take a board and hit the cow like Tom said. First time, I hesitated, not wanting to hurt the cow and gave it less than all I got. It just bounced off the cow's neck and made the cow mad. So I had to hit a home run and sure enough, she dropped to her front knees. I hated to do it, but everything got out of control, as I knew in advance it would, and it was up to me to bring events back to order or something like it. She calmed down and gave in to the calf eventually, though not that day. Gene's knee hurt him for a long time. Gene thought Tom funny as a "bigger hammer" man, the bigger hammer the solution to everything. There Gene was too, forcing something that could be handled better more gently.

It was true about Tom, however, as the bigger hammer man. One time we were working on some piece of farm equipment and Tom was fumbling around with whatever it was and called for me to bring him "a bigger hammer." I don't like to admit it out loud, but Tom had perceptions that were truly unique. When I experienced or saw the same thing I heard Tom telling about later, I'd never have recognized it in the telling without him first reminding me of when and where it was. There was the time the remains of a kite string was up high in an oak tree over the road. Over years of wind, weather and chance, a twig a couple feet long and maybe half an inch diameter, was caught on a piece of the string. The stick had a curve to it and it turned in the wind lengthwise making it look alive and wiggling like a snake. We were together when I noticed it first time, I said to Tom, pointing at it, "Look at that stick turning in the tree." He saw it and said, "That aint no stick. It's somethin livin." I didn't know what to do with that, so I let it be. I already knew I could never explain it to him. There was no need to convince him anyway. Just two different ways to see the same thing.

When he was in school, the teacher said the earth was round like a baseball. Little man Tom said, "I aint never seen no mountains on narry baseball." Of course, my impulse I edited out was to note that you take a steel ball the size of a baseball, polished as smooth as steel can be polished, mirror smooth, enlarge it to the size of the earth and you'll have mountains that make the Himalayas look like molehills. The threads on a baseball would make unimaginably high mountains that could never be crossed because even the gaps would be way high up out of the atmosphere.

I had a feeling Tobe thought the least of Tom of all his boys. Tom had a hesitant relationship with his daddy who drank a good bit. Tobias was a rough and hard working man. He was never good to Tom. I think it was because Tom was a little slow, and quiet. I'd venture that he was a boy who had a hard time learning to catch a ball. But maybe not, he liked baseball too much to have a disability with a ball. I never liked to guess Tom, draw conclusions about him, because every time I came to some conclusion about Tom, the next time I saw him he'd bust it without even knowing he was doing it.

Tom was the one who took care of the whole family during the 1918 flu epidemic. Everybody in the house had it but Tom, so he was the one to take care of everybody's chamberpots, the cooking, cleaning, everything, night and day, a kid. Tom took care of them and they all came through. Tom was never interested in appearing to be a tough guy, never cared about being tough. His entire life he had to be rough and tough to take much of it. He'd been screwed from every direction, but he was never one to want to be a macho man. Who needs tough when you have a .32 in a shoulder holster uinder your jacket and aint afraid to use it?

Tom had a rough life full of troubles and trials, another man of constant sorrow. Once, he sang for me his favorite hymn, When Sorrows Encompass Me Round. Tommy Jarrell sang it very much like Tom sang it. When he sang for me, I knew him well enough to know a great many of his sorrows and how immense some of them were. Up in his 80s I took him to the dirver's license office to take the test, knowing he could only fail, and he didn't need to be on the road anymore. A test situation was the same as from outer space for Tom. The examiner started mocking him and ridiculing him about his age and ignorance, only speaking to him in wisecrack smart remarks. My face was getting red. She kept it up and my ears started steaming. She took a look at my face and backed off. I was on the verge of saying something she didn't want to hear when she saw what I had to say in my face. I was that way with Tom the way I am with Jr now. Treat him with respect or the dog starts growling and the hair on his back stands straight up. Tom was not to be judged by the rules of a test-taking society. Neither is Jr. In both cases, experience taught them everything they know, which was considerable. The best of what they know test questions can't be made for.