HAD A HOUSE FULL

Today is Jr's birthday. He's been telling people for months that he's 87, so today he caught up with himself. More than a few times he's said he may not make it to his birthday. The day is here, he's having a good day. Was up earlier, but went back to bed just because the bed felt so good. I have a feeling that time in the nursing home looking at the ceiling for 2.5 months rendered him inwward. He stays in the bed most of the time now, because I think he likes that place between asleep and awake where he can follow whatever floats through his mind. It's easier than being up attempting to pay attention when he doesn't hear well anymore and his mind drifts indward. "I'll be damn it to hell, I can't remember shit!"

Richardsons turned up with chicken cooked some kind of way from some place that specializes in chicken done a special way. Betty brought a "cake" that was a big rectangular chocolate chip cookie and white icing on top with a little toy tractor looking like it was going through the snow except it left no tracks, like it was set down from above. A gallon of tropical fruit drink. A bawdy birthday card about being old. Ross and his work partner Harry Taylor came in. Harry is a retired helicopter mechanic. He's somebody who loves to work. He's like Jr in that way. He'd rather be doing something than not. Ross's biker nurse girlfriend from Wilkes brought the chicken and quite a lot more. I held the storm door open for everyone coming in with hands full. Jr sat in his place like a hen on a nest, focused inward.

Betty asked him, "How old are you, Junior?" He said, "Sixty-six." She said, "And holding?" Jr said, "That's right." And he drifted back into what I've come to think of as his in between place, in between asleep and awake, in between paying attention and not. He shifts back and forth with ease. It's an effort for him to pay attention to so many people in the room, them talking, and it sounding like a blur where all the voices mix together and he can't make anything out of it. Then he drifts back within. Someone speaking to him has to call his name a second time to get his attention. The first time alerts him it's time to emerge from the dream state and pay attention, somebody is saying something. He understands well what is being said and responds in kind according to subject.

He was in tune with the gathering, needing periods of rest from the effort of paying attention. He would fade away for awhile, then someone would speak to him and he'd have to say, "What?" A paper plate heaped with food was set before him. I knew what he was feeling: I can't do it. He'd had a bowl of Total raisin bran about an hour before and didn't even want that. At the end he choked on it so bad he coughed and gagged and carried on for a long time. I've learned to pay it no mind. He works at it until he clears whatever the problem is, spits a glob into the wastebasket of wadded Kleenexes from a continually running nose. And it's over. He'd been resting from the energy drain of all the coughing and gagging.

We decided to take a drive in the car over some back roads, starting with Cheek Mountain Road. He hobbled with the walker to the car, tiny footsteps at a time. Half way to the car, which was about 15 feet from the cement slab porch, and it a slightly downhill incline to the car, he said, "I'm not gonna make it." I said, "I won't let you fall." He said, "I know it," and kept on pushing the walker. At the car, I opened the door and felt the rush of heat billow out. Holding the door for him, I saw Robin drive up the driveway and stop. He was ready to go back to the house, glad she turned up. She got him out of going for the ride, which he realized by the time he reached the car he didn't want to go, but wouldn't have told me, not wanting to disappoint me, thinking I wanted to go for a ride. I'd suggested it as something I believed he would enjoy. I like it when he tells me who lived in an old house that's falling in and something from their lives, or points out the place one man shot another man over something or other, or another man's pickup fell over on him and killed him.

Jr crept up the hill pushing his walker with baby steps. I stood behind him ready for a sudden lurch in any direction. He doesn't like me hovering, but when I'm behind him he can't see, hands often just a few inches from his ribs on either side ready to catch any sudden change in direction. He couldn't see it, so it didn't provoke his need to be self-sufficient. I respect that need in him at all times. When his knee gives out and he starts down, I catch him and hold him by the ribs long enough in place until he can gather his balance and be ready to take the next step. It has become torment for him to walk. Mostly, it's the pain in his right knee and the knee's propensity to let him down.

Yesterday I picked up a wheelchair and brought it into the house while he was sleeping, putting it in another part of the house. I didn't want to give it to him for his birthday. "Happy Birthday! How d'ya like yer new wheelchair, Junior?" I want it here in the house for the first time we'll need it. I don't want to suddenly need it NOW and it be a Friday night, or just have to drive in to town to get one and get back as fast a s possible. I want it to be a moment when he realizes he needs one and has to give up the pride of not being in a wheelchair. More practice in humility. I'd like to be able to say the day he finds he cannot stand up from a chair and can't stand on his legs anymore, "Let's see how this works." He learned to operate one in the nursing home, so he's checked out on wheelchair mobility. I don't want to introduce it before it's necessary and want it to be on hand first time needed. This appears to be the direction we're headed.

LANGUAGE AND THE OLD WAYS

Every morning through that first winter Tom pulled up out front and honked. I was to get out there in the truck with him and we'd ride to the barn. In times of ice, he put chains on all four tires. With 4-wheel drive, Tom went anyplace he wanted. I'd go into the barn and he would drive around under the opening at the opposite end of the barn where the hay was kept. I dropped however many bales we needed into the back of the truck. I'd close up the barn and get back in the truck. We'd drive to the meadow where the cows were kept. I'd get out, open the gate, Tom drove through, I closed gate and climbed into the back with the hay. With pocket knife I cut the twine on the bales to throw them out on the ground in small squares to break up hitting the ground. Here come the cows. He wintered the cows on the meadows we used for hay in the summer for the obvious reason of fertilizing them with manure all over it. Where we went to put out the hay would be different every day.

Riding over the meadows I sat in the back of the truck along the side. Tom, who spent a large part of his life on horses and working horses, would drive over the meadow like he would on the road. I think he liked the bounding up and down over the uneven ground, because he sure never caught on that it rode smoother going slower. He liked it rough. In the back, I'm mostly paying attention to my balance, taking the shocks of up and down with loose knees and a good bit of hanging on. I always put the seat belt on riding in the cab with Tom. I did anyway. A law passed in NC about getting fined for not wearing the belt. One day not long after that was on the news Tom asked if I wear the seatbelt because of the law. I said, "Yeah," feeling it unnecessary to explain it's to keep the roof of the truck from bashing the top of my head every few seconds. Learning to stand in the back of the pickup became a skill I enjoyed getting good at.

Forever fresh in soluble memory was a morning with snow on the ground. We were passing the meadow with the cows and their calves in it on the way to the barn to get some hay. A small brush pile was in the meadow. The calves were at the age where they run and play like lambs. One jumped the brush pile and Tom suddenly jerked the truck back into the road. He said, "Caif jump 'at braish almost run off the road." That's how it was with Tom. He didn't make himself clear the way we do by being specific and providing context. The way we talk now is all school learned. Tom spoke the music of the old way of talking. Much of what we of our time call being specific, getting the particulars lined out, was implied in the old way. His sentence concerning why he almost ran off the road was perfectly clear. He was watching the calf just like I was. To be specific and particular it was too long a sentence to say comfortably in one remark, so he edited it down to essentials, like in Chinese where the words are pictures.

I loved to listen to Tom talk. It was the language of the old way of talking that had music in it. We talk now in grammar. They talked then in music. Colloquialisms and turns of phrase were used for rhythmic purpose. In a few really poor people I've met who live back in hollers, the rhythm they speak with is Shakespearean, iambic, meaning emphasis every other syllable. The one man I've known who talks the cloest to the old way as I've heard is an old boy named Kyle Shinault. Very emphatic when he talks, the iambic rhythm, every other syllable heartily emphatic, as strong in his voice as a drum. Once, I listened to him talk for three hours without a break. It was music such that I was the same as listening to a symphony. He told good stories, like the time he was working with a circus and the elephant and some other critters got out in Roanoke.

The old old-time fiddlers that have been dead a long time, played the fiddle with a very strong rhythm. Joe Birchfield of the Roan Mountain Hilltoppers played a fiddle that way. I'm guessing, as I'm not a folklorist, that keeping rhythm with the fiddle in the time before guitars and banjos would be essential at dances when it was only the fiddle playing, and dances was why the fiddle played. That's how it got named by Baptists, the devil's instrument. Mountain music has had banjo, guitar and bass so long now that for a fiddler to keep a strong rhythm becomes simply a part of his style.

When I say Shakespearean, I don't mean it came from Shakespeare, but Shakespeare, like early American mountain people, used the English language of Elizabethan England, the old-old way of talking with emphasis on every other syllable. Spending a little time in London, listening to the English not just accent, but rhythms and everything else, I felt I understood English poetry the first time, contemporary and past, esp. the poetry of Ted Hughes. His writing had an awkward feel to me that I couldn't quite get my mind around. I picked up a book of his poems after I'd been there a few months and found his rhythms those of the English language as spoken mid-Twentieth Century. Then I had the chance to see/hear him read at Royal Festival Hall, of all places, from Crow, then new. I understood him for the first time. I was in the world of his rhythms. Yeats and Blake came to life for me, too.

The rhythms of speaking change in place and time in whatever language. Language, like everything else is fluid, subject to ongoing change. Here, now, the older people talk a softened version of the old time way, the next generation speaks the way that generation talked, the Del Reeves, Hank Williams generation. Then you get the rock generation when mountain boys let their hair grow long, and how they talk. Next is the rap generation that is totally out of touch with older people. Can't even communicate. Not even the same language. They're off California dreamin in the Southern Cal of television.

All the time I knew Tom, I was fascinated by the different worlds we lived in in our minds and experience while inhabiting roughly the same place. He was from the time of my great grandparents which was not all that long ago. He was from the time before electricity. If electricity and plumbing hadn't come along, we'd be talking the same language as then, old-time music would be just music, no old-time about it. There's no going back. Once we've had the experience of a toilet instead of an outhouse, there's no turning back. The principle is too easy. Where this passion for the New is leading us nobody knows. We do know that all the traditions from that time before electricity are falling to the ground like the old barns over the last 50 years.

I treasured Tom as a peephole into the time before electricity when the traditions the people lived by without question were the foundation of community. Now the traditions are gone, the language is gone, the way of life is gone, even old-time religion has reformed or it would be gone. We're in the age of homogenization by pop culture. I see now in my own advanced years that I cannot connect with pop culture as something to live by. When I was younger I could, to a point, but it got away from me. Now I'm going off in another direction. Living what I believe are the best of the old-time ways, to carry some of it into the future like Whitetop Mountain Band carries old-time music into the future.

THE OLD MAN OF THE MOUNTAIN

Tom Pruitt, who went to school in my house, grew up working his daddy Tobe's farm with his brothers in a time when the landscape at Air Bellows was corn fields, oat fields, hay fields. All the boys were too young for WWI and Tobias was too old. In a photograph I've seen of old man Tobias with the Air Bellows landscape behind him, there was only tree in sight, and it was cut down 35 or more years ago. Big areas that are all trees now were cultivated then for grains. Tom said it was a sight how many birds they had back then. His brother Millard told me the night sky was thick with stars. A few nights ago I was outside looking at the Milky Way. It looked like a thin cloud. It wasn't very long ago I could see the billions of stars in the Milky Way. In much of Europe the moon is the only star in the night sky.


Tom lived his first at least 40 years without electricity. By the time it came to Air Bellows, over a period of years in the mid 40s, people had been listening to the Carter Family on radios powered by batteries for years. Tom worked those big draft horses with hair over their feet like in Budweiser commercials. That was the kind of work horses people here used then. The logging trails you see all over these mountains were the double paths for these horses to pull wagons and drag logs on chains to the road where they could be hauled away. He said there was a time in the 30s that a logging company came through here and cut out all the trees. There was one spruce pine/hemlock above the waterfalls I believed to have been perhaps the only tree to survive that siege. Hurricane Hugo took the top half of it in 1984. He said a big rain in the fall (hurricane) caused landslides all over these mountains. I assume it was in that time the big rocks, boulders, made it to the streambeds all around here. I don't know that, but it's the only way I can see they got there.


Air Bellows the land of Tobias Pruitt, Elbert Crouse, Jim Scott, Clint Caudill, also Brinegars, a Holloway and some others. These were the families whose kids Tom and his brothers and sisters went to school with, went to revival meetings with when they'd have revival at the schoolhouse. A lot of people got saved in my house. Tom's mother, Luella Church Pruitt, found her salvation at the waterfall. If I can remember the names of the kids, I'll give it a go: Archie, Estil, Colonel, Boyd, Tom, Millard, Bessie, Hazel. All of them good people. Archie and Millard were preachers. Estil was a well respected guitar picker of the area. Colonel broke his back "grubbing" and spent the rest of his life in bed. He kept notebooks of every day's weather. Boyd worked in a factory in Maryland, retired here and is buried at Big Springs cemetery on Edmunds Rd. Hazel was the mother of the Pruitt boys I wrote you about yesterday. Her husband Sherman laid down on the steering wheel of his tractor, dead, heart attack, when the oldest boy Don was 15 and Judy a baby, 4 boys and 3 girls suddenly on welfare.


For church they went down the mountain to Landmark in Whitehead, then Regular Baptist. The cemetery at Landmark is the Pruitt cemetery. Millard, who had a church with its own cemetery in Glade Valley, chose to be buried at Landmark with his family. They also went to New Salem in Pine Swamp, also Regular Baptist. As times began to go out of balance, Tom was disgusted in his church that a particular preacher was ordained who had not demonstrated his calling to Tom's satisfaction. Later, he heard with his own ears this preacher tell a lie on him. That was it. Tom never returned to church. He said they were happy to take his money. Then they got no more from him. He was adamant in the telling of it. The feeling ran all over him remembering it.


Tom took care of his mother and his dad up to the day they died. Luella died in his arms. In Tobe's old age he would only let grandson Bill feed him or take care of him. Bill was with Tobe when he died. Tom continued to live in the old farm house, which was built around 1900 and Tobias bought it when it was 8 years old and moved his young family up the mountain from what is now called Pruitt Road in Whitehead. The man who built the house is the same who built a house on the Parkway at the exit at Laurel Springs that becomes Hwy113 a little farther on. I believe it is called the Woodruff house. It's in excellent original condition for a good idea of what Tom's house was before he let it go. The Pruitts of Whitehead and the Pruitts of Laurel Springs are the result of two brothers who came to Laurel Springs. One stayed and the other bought some land in Whitehead several generations ago.


The Caudill farm sold for a vacation farm to Winston-Salem people. The Scott farm was bought for a vacation farm by people from Winston-Salem and the Scotts moved to Pine Swamp. Elbert Crouse died. His daughter Sadie and her husband Reed Poole kept the land, but didn't live there or cultivate it. Reed used the land for rabbit hunting. He sold the hay on it, which probably paid the taxes. Then Tom was the only native living at Air Bellows surrounded by city suburbanites who wanted a farm and somebody else to take care of it. Tom made a good living taking care of two vacation farms. To them, he was cheap as dirt, but to him he was making good money. Gene Dysart bought his land and gave Tom lifetime right to live in the house as long as he lived. Throw in the money he made from the sale, Tom ended up with no money worries in his old age. Suburbanites coming in all around him. He was the last old man of the mountain, the one everybody who bought land up here loved. Everybody loved Tom. They stopped in to visit him, enchanted by the otherworldness of stepping into his house with three calendars on the living room walls, not one on the present year or month, a flight out of time.

THEM PRUITT BOYS

When I arrived in these mountains, Tom Pruitt had his nephew Bill staying with him. Bill was at loose ends after a divorce. Sometimes he was at Toms, mostly not. Bill and I were the same age. His brother Don, 4 years older, lived in a small trailer up the road the opposite direction from Tom's and about the same distance. Don's wife worked at Hanes underwear factory in town. Don worked as work turned up. Sometimes he did farm work on the Willis farm and Stern farm for Tom, like putting up hay. He worked for Jr Maxwell off-bearing at the sawmill some.

The first two months, Nov and Dec, I stayed in the old farmhouse, the Caudill homeplace. Only heat source was the fireplace. All the heat went up the chimney. I didn't know enough about fireplaces to set it so the heat went into the room, but am here to tell it. It wasn't lethal. I lived on the floor in front of the fire. Had a couch pulled up close, where I sometimes slept at night. Mostly slept in the back bedroom added onto the house after Caudills had left, probably added by Leinbachs of Winston-Salem, who sold the place to Stern. It had an electric heater in there, seriously dangerous. First several days I was anxious as in anxiety. One morning I was washing dishes and somehow a teapot slipped from my hands and somehow hit the edge of the sink as I grabbed for it. It exploded into a shower of shrapnel that fell to the floor. Except one that dug into the underside of the wrist of my right hand. I'm not one to go to emergency rooms, but this called for it. The nurse's last name was Gray, and she was good to me, so genuine a human being I never forgot her.

It was a desperate time for me. I wanted to do everything at once. I wanted to know some people. I found right away in Sparta, nobody wants to know a fur'ner. Nobody wants to know anybody they don't already know. It's a very strange feeling to be in a place where nobody knows you, you don't know anybody, anyone you've met doesn't recognize you the second time they see you. At the laundromat I'd be stared at like I was a television. I'd speak to the one staring and there would be no change of expression, no recognition in the eyes the person had been spoken to, just blank like watching tv.

First time I drove to town to get some gas, Tom told me vehemently to go to the Wilco. I wondered why he was so vehement about it. It was the cheapest. It didn't have the convenience store that goes with it now, though now it is Hess, Wilco-Hess Corp. It was all gas pumps and an island in the middle for paying. I'd been a believer that city people were unfriendly, but country people were friendly. I went to the place about the size of a phone booth with a man inside, a little opening in the Plexiglas to hand the money through. The man put out his hand for it, didn't look at me, didn't speak, nothing. I put the money in the hand and it withdrew. I thought of one of those banks with the place to put a coin that activates a plastic hand that jumps up and snatches it.

I found Sparta to be aggressively the unfriendliest place I'd ever heard of. Next time I was in NYC I was astonished at how friendly everyone seemed. I recall making a white-haired Sparta society woman furious overhearing me talking with someone else, saying Sparta is the least friendly place I've ever seen. That was not exaggeration. To the last time I saw her, she gave me the same look she gave me then. Whenever I'd go someplace, like Charleston rather frequently the first few years, I was struck by how friendly everybody seemed. The man at the Wilco station came to symbolize all the rest for me here.

There was quite a number of years I hated it here. The worst was any time I'd have a conversation with somebody, they'd look right through me next time I saw them like I wasn't there. I started calling it the Sparta Look, the look that says: thought I saw something, guess I didn't. It's a look that looks right straight at you and sees nothing, and not even self-conscious about staring. The Sparta Look. There came a time I learned the Look and would give it to the people who'd done it to me. They hated it. Really hated it. Called me arrogant behind my back. What's a feller to do?

Bill and Don Pruitt were my first friends. Working with Bill we talked and got acquainted; he taught me how to sharpen a chainsaw and cut down a tree so it will fall where you went it to, important things, like he was enjoying being my teacher. Though Bill was a hillbilly and I was a city boy I felt there was no difference between Bill and me when it came right down to it. He was like cousins of mine, guys I knew at school, except he listened to country and I listened to rock & roll. Bill lived his life a bit more head-on than I did. I admired it in him, though it cost him a hell of a lot in liability insurance and broken bones. Like me, Bill was a little guy in a big guy's world, and neither one of us wanted to be big. I couldn't talk about American writing and 20th Century art with Bill, but couldn't with anyone in Charleston either.

After we'd worked together the first week, Bill drove up with his brother Van and parked in my driveway. I went out to see what they wanted. He'd been to town to cash his check and had a bottle of Four Roses. I saw right off this was test time. See how much TJ can drink. I'm thinking no big deal. I left Charleston partially because I was on the verge of alcoholism and wanted to cut out the drinking, or cut it way down. So I had to show the boys I could drink. Take it from the bottle then chase it with 7up. Yuk. I let the 7up pass, thinking it's a shame we have to have a drinking contest with Four Roses. Johnny Walker or Glen Fiddich would have suited me better. But I was done with that phase of my life. Four Roses it was.

I tipped the bottle upward grossed out by the taste, didn't like bourbon anyway, took a good swig and handed it back. Big smiles. TJ can take it. Now, this is a contest I can hold my own in, I was thinking. We sat on the ground outside my house drinking and laughing and talking, telling crazy tales. There came a time I was on my back, laid my head over to the side and puked a couple of times, and stayed there. When I woke, Bill and Van had returned from town with another 5th. They were just getting started.

A few months ago I saw Bill the last time. I'd heard he was in the nursing home in Sparta with advanced Alzheimers. When I was in there seeing Jr during his first nursing home round, Bill was across the hall from Jr's quarters. One day I came face to face with Bill in the hallway. He shuffled about in untied shoes, seeing nothing, hearing nothing. I went up to him and said, "Bill." He looked at me. I said, "Remember me? I'm TJ." He smiled and said, "Wellington." That was close enough. I almost broke into tears. It was an emergency holding them back. Bill died a month or so ago. His brother Van followed him a week later. Don is in a nursing home situation in Black Mountain.

My first year here I ran with the three of them on weekends. They taught me where I was living. The Nile, the Pool Room, riding the back roads throwing beer cans out the windows, laughing, meeting people I still know and appreciate knowing like Wade Pruitt and Jerry Hawkins, among others. It was a one year crash course on the nature of what was to become the home of my soul. Bill said once he didn't want a preacher talking at his funeral like he was some great guy who never did anything wrong. He said, "All I want the preacher to say is, He done the best he could." And that he did.