Mountain Part 6

Pelham learned much on these walks,--the birds, trees, stories of dead heroes, episodes of the war, and the stirring times when the raiders had overrun the village. Grandmother had hidden two brothers, one wounded, for weeks in her cellar, all unknown to the Northern visitors who forced themselves upon her. The boy absorbed indiscriminately the acc.u.mulated store of eighty years of active life.

After supper, the sweet-faced grandmother would slip a knitted wrap over his shoulders, and walk out with him in the great oak-surrounded square before the house. She taught Pelham how to find the North Star, from the bottom of the Big Dipper; and then the Little Dipper, that had been twisted back until the Milky Way spilled from it. He learned to recognize the big Dragon waddling across the summer heavens, and many of the dwellers in the strange skyey menagerie. These were days and nights of wonder and beauty.

He longed to stay here forever, away from the acidity of his father's commands, and the ever-present fear of the belt. But as the autumn came, he wept his farewells and went back.

Until his return from that first absence at Jackson, he did not realize how the mountain had claimed him. He maintained a mild, glowing regard for the grandparents' plantation; it was free from the irksome paternal irritations that scarred his home days. But its appeal did not go down to the deepest parts of him.

With the mountain it was different. Not merely Hillcrest Cottage, although he felt bound to every board and stone of it; not even merely the Forty Acres, the family name for the fenced, pathed, and parked half of the original eighty on which the house stood; but the whole mountain, its rises and unexpected hollows, and the thicketed valleys that drooped sharply away toward the East,--he responded to all of these. The rest of the Judsons had taken the cottage and the Forty as their home. But this was only a small part of home to the eldest son.

The mountain became his castle, his playground, his haven of refuge, the land of his fancy. He was its child, and it was his mother.

He got along better with his father that winter. Diligent application to his school work and his tasks at home was the price of liberty on the mountain. Two weekday afternoons, and Sunday after midday dinner, were allowed him. He filled every minute of these respites.

The little Barbour cousins spent Thanksgiving week with the children.

Pelham showed them all the treasured spots on the mountain. To them, even the walk up the hill was an adventure, as they explored the long sloping dummyline road, through stiff palisades of golden rod and Flora's paint-brush, the stalks silver-dusty from the nipping November winds, and ready to scatter at the tentative poking of a rotting stick, or the breath of a skimmed stone.

One wonderful picnic they had to Shadow Creek, before the relatives returned home. All drove over in a wagon to the deserted mill dam, Aunt Sarah, grumbling her good-humored threats to return to Jackson and leave "dis mountain foolishness," riding along to mind the children. Jimmy learned the first few swimming strokes in the cool, brownish pond; Pelham and the older girls had long been going in regularly with their father, and were fast becoming expert.

A baby came in April,--another boy, named Edward after Mary's father.

This kept the mother from joining their rambles, so it was necessary for Pelham to devise the games without her resourceful a.s.sistance.

Here the boy's impelling imagination, added to his knowledge of fairy stories, came to his aid. All the myth-creating urge of the past moved in him. He peopled the varied crests and valleys with these volatile companions, visible only in the dusk out of the corner of a friendly eye. The V-shaped slope from the gap to the railroad was Dwarfland; Hollis was their prince. Crenshaw Hill, clear to the Locust Hedge, was Yellow Fairyland; a chum, Lane Cullom, a year older than Pelham, a.s.sumed leadership over these beings. Black-haired Nell, when she could be got to play, was the princess of the Black Fairies, whose haunts were in the outcrop before Hillcrest Cottage. Sue was anything needed to complete the story,--a mere mortal, the queen of the moon-fairies, or of the rock gnomes. Pelham, himself, in crimson outing flannel cloak, was the king and lord of the Red Fairies. They were the real spirits of the mountain, and of fire, and came in their red chariots down the flaming lanes of the sunset sky, to battle for their dispossessed heritage against all the forces of night and darkness.

The fights were not all bloodless. On one of these a.s.saults, as he charged with brittly reed lances up the precipitous quartz quarry, he stumbled and drove a stiff bit of stubble into a nostril. It bled furiously, until his stained handkerchief was the hue of his crimson mantle. But even the three st.i.tches which the doctor took were only an incident in the n.o.ble warfare.

The endless sieges, ambuscades, tourneys and adventures filled volumes--literally volumes; for Pelham wrote, on folded tablet paper, a history of the fairy occupation of the mountain, copiously ill.u.s.trated with pencil and crayon. It was one of the regrets of his later years that this history had disappeared completely; even its details vanished from his memory.

Always he directed the sports. They varied with his invention; spear-tilting at barrel hoops around the circle of the daisy bed, bow and arrow warfare at Indian enemies hulking and skulking behind pokeberry bushes, cross-country running to Shadow Creek and back, when he became interested in this at the high school,--these were only a few of the games.

His name-giving had a curiously permanent effect. Dwarfland never lost the t.i.tle he gave it, nor Billygoat Hill, where he and Lane surrounded a patriarchal billy and almost caught him.

When his father became busied with planning the subdivision of the mountain lands, to throw them upon the market, the imitative boy divided Crenshaw Hill into "Coaldale the Second." He borrowed, without permission, enough deeds and mortgages from the real-estate office to run his city for a year, and acted as seller, probate judge, and clearing gang. The streets, two feet wide, were carefully walled from the lots by the loose outcrop stones. There was a hotel, a court house, a furnace, and multiplying homes and stores.

Finally the sisters and brother lost interest, since only Pelham could untangle the intricacies of the allotments. It was all cleared away three years later by a real clearing gang, although this part of the hill continued to be called Coaldale Second.

The mountain was a lonely place for children, after all. Even though Lane braved the temporary isolation, and the girls occasionally had spend-the-day parties at the cottage, it was usually deserted except for Pelham and his imaginary companions.

He learned all of its moods. There was the plentiful springtime, when it blossomed a flood of unexpected beauty. Rich summer brought blackberries, dewberries, and hills rioting with azalea and jasmine.

Autumn furnished muscadines by the creek beds, hydrangeas, and the sudden glory of changing leaves. Winter was a black-boughed multiplication of the hilly vistas.

The boys lived in dog-tents several summers. Old Peter built them a tree house in a big oak near a fallen wild cherry tree; when they slept here, the floor rocked and swung all night; they were like sailors buoyed upon a sea of restless leaves. Thus the nights revealed the mountain as personally and intimately as the days.

This close contact with it had another effect. It cut Pelham off effectually from the city boys, and forced him to a high degree of self-reliance, both as to body and mind. The wiry legs toughened, the arms grew long and able to swing him from bough to bough of the big trees, the shoulders spread strongly apart. His surplus energy was trans.m.u.ted into an adaptable, powerful body.

Greater than this was the other effect. He felt safe, with the mountain as ally; not even his father could touch him, in its secret haunts. An unconscious sense of self-completeness, a rooted belief in his own and every person's liberty, became an integer of his faith.

Thus he grew away from all other people, except his mother. To her he was drawn closer, particularly when her relationship with Paul grew strained. This had been especially obvious after the birth of Ned, the fifth baby; the father had had sharp words with Mary about it.

"It was all right for Mother Barbour to have six; people had more children then. Two of them died, anyhow. It's different now."

"But, Paul,----" The calloused injustice of it silenced her.

He watched her averted face. "I see Mamie Charlton's getting divorced.

Jack got tired of her and her eternal children. I saw her the other day.... She's getting old. Too many children responsible for it."

She flinched dumbly before his brutality.

He spoke savagely, through clenched teeth. "It's your fault. You ought to be more careful."

Her womanhood rose in rebellion. "Any time you're tired of me, Paul,----"

"It's easy to talk." He laughed abruptly. "And since the business is doing so well, there are always younger women,----"

He did not finish--her look silenced him.

With no woman to confide in, Mary turned to her son, rather than to the girls. His whole horizon was filled with love for her mellow brown-eyed beauty, and for the mothering mountain that came to stand for her in his fancies.

On the walks with his father, Paul's mind was filled with thoughts of the planned development of the land for residential purposes, while Pelham was busied with fantasies of fairies and knightly escapades.

Father and son were continually jarring over little things; the estrangement widened.

"I think we'll continue the gap road as an avenue to the railroad tracks. Logan Avenue, we'll call it. Mr. Guild thinks that would be a good place."

"Down Dwarfland?"

The father was plainly irritated. "'Dwarfland' ... what poppyc.o.c.k! Why can't you get your head down to business, Pelham?"

He would meekly smother his wandering imagination, and listen to long monologues about grading, restricted allotments, and similar boring topics.

The father's sympathy went no further than to approve, in the boy, the things which the man himself liked. His son should naturally take to those things which the father cared for. Fishing trips to Pensacola or beyond Ship Island, which Pelham enjoyed more for the novelty of scenes and faces than for the tedious sport, called forth Paul's gusty admiration when the boy succeeded in holding to a game mackerel, or in a skillful handling of spade fish or mullet. The boy's undistinguished prowess in swimming and tennis, his fumbling success with a shotgun after bull-bats or meadow larks, were magnified in the father's eyes.

The pleasures that Pelham devised for himself were scoffed at. The imaginative reliving of knightly days or frontier activities was as distasteful to Paul's matter-of-fact mind as the embroidering at Grandmother Barbour's. The boy's collecting craze found no response in the parent; when the haphazard interest in tobacco tags, street-car transfers and marbles gave way to a real absorption in stamps, that consumed the son's spare money and time voraciously, Paul issued a ukase on the subject. "Get rid of them. Collect money, as I do, if you want to collect anything."

Pelham rehashed his arguments. "They teach you geography, and history...."

"They're trash; cancelled stamps, worth nothing."

"People pay lots for some stamps."

"You've got something else to think about. Sell 'em, or give 'em away; get rid of 'em. You understand?"

Pelham finally sold them to a local barber, from whom he had bought many of the unused South American specimens. "Sure, I buy 'em," Mr. Lang smiled. He went through the scanty pages, repeating all his stock jokes: "You're a guy, and a pair of guys," as Uruguay and Paraguay were reached, being his favorite. "They're not worth much to me. Tell you what, I give you thirty-two dollars."

The boy had to be content with this.

Less than a year later, he surrept.i.tiously bought back the collection for forty, keeping them concealed in a corner of the attic.

The third summer brought weekly target practice upon the mountain. This grew out of a lynching at nearby Coaldale, following a brutal a.s.sault upon a white miner's wife by a negro. The Judson a.r.s.enal contained three rifles, several shot guns, and half a dozen revolvers; they were all put into use in the hollow behind Crenshaw Hill. The girls of course took part, and Mary, a good shot, thereafter carried her pistol in her handbag whenever she went to the foot of the hill. An exaggerated account of this spread among the negroes; only the boldest vagrant would think a second time of daring the unerring gunfire of the Judsons.