Milkweed Ladies
The Milkweed Ladies
Louise McNeill
University of Pittsburgh Press
Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260
Copyright © 1988, University of Pittsburgh Press
All rights reserved
Feffer and Simons, Inc., London
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McNeill, Louise.
The milkweed ladies.
1. McNeill, Louise—Biography—Youth. 2. Poets, American—20th century—Biography. 3. Farm life—West Virginia. 4. West Virginia—Social life and customs. I. Title.
PS3525.A283Z467 1988 811′.52 [B] 88-1334
ISBN 0-8229-3587-2
ISBN 0-8229-5406-0 (pbk.)
A portion of this book first appeared in Appalachian Review, vol. 13, no. 4, 1985.
“Night at the Commodore” first appeared in Northwest Review, vol. 22, nos. 1–2, 1984.
My thanks to the editors of these journals for permission to reprint.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8229-7977-7 (electronic)
To Roger W. Pease
whose earth-love and long labor went into the slow construction of this book
THE RIVER
Now they have bridged the canyon of the Gauley
And built a lock above the Swago shoal
To float the barges past the lazy shallow
With loads of river sand and mountain coal.
Along the shore where passing Mingo warriors
Built drift-wood fires to parch Ohio maize
Cook ovens glare red-eyed upon the darkness
And belch their cinders at the fevered days.
But in the broken rushes of the inlet
Where herons rose with beaten-winged alarm
That autumn evening when an Irish rascal
Knelt by the stream to bathe his wounded arm,
…White herons sleep, their folded wings unstained
By all that blood the savage Gauley drained
From pale-faced men whose kindred now possess
The last dark current of the wilderness.
—from Gauley Mountain
(New York: Harcourt Brace, 1939)
Contents
Acknowledgments
A Patch of Earth
G.D.‘s Sea Chest
Granny Fanny’s Thorn Broom Handle
The Door Peg
Green-up Time
Apple Butter Red
Neighborhood Ways
Signs and Portents
Over Bonnie
The Coming of the Roads
Night at the Commodore
Acknowledgments
Acknowledgment and appreciation to staff members of the University of Pittsburgh Press: Frederick A. Hetzel, Catherine Marshall, and Peter Oresick.
My gratitude to Maggie Anderson, a young poet from West Virginia. Maggie believed in The Milkweed Ladies and, when I was disabled by an accident, volunteered to act as my agent. She was successful in placing the book, and then gave her editorial skill, her poetic intuition, and her knowledge of the mountain culture as she and I shaped and tightened the manuscript to its final form.
Many others have contributed editorial suggestions, financial aid, encouragement, and factual notes. My appreciation to Norman Fagan, René de Chochor, Walter Havighurst, Ruth Cantor, Dr. Robert Munn (deceased), Gayle Mason, Sharon Tate, Larry Groce, Thelma D. Quick, “Young Jim,” Annabelle, Rae, Doug, “J.B.,” Devon, Jean, and Reed W.
Among those who, in the period 1865–1988, saved or helped to save “The Farm”: Captain Jim and Granny; G.D. and Grace; Jim and Annabelle. Also Ward K., in his time; “C.P.,” in his time; The Slashing, in its year; and—in current time—Elisabeth, Blix, Cheryl, Doug and Dave Morrison, and Jamie C.
Milkweed ladies, so fair and fine,
Won’t you have a sip of my columbine?
Or a thimble of thimbleberry wine?
A Patch of Earth
The farm, a wide plateau of rocky, loam-dark fields, lies above Swago Crick, along the Greenbrier River of West Virginia and some twenty-five to thirty miles north of the Virginia line. This patch of earth is held within a half stadium of limestone cliffs and mountain pastures. On the surface, the Swago Farm is quiet and solid, green in summer and in winter deep with snow. It has its level fields, its fence rows and hilly pastures. There are some two hundred acres of trees and bluegrass, running water, and the winding, dusty paths that cattle and humans have kept open through the years. There are three small woodlands, two of them still virgin and mostly of oak.
On one of the knolls is the weedy myrtle-grown graveyard where we have buried our people for 150 years. Before then, we buried them where we now forget. We call the knoll the Graveyard Hill, and the cattle graze there outside its wire fence and crooked gate. Higher up on the ridge-top and canting over toward Captain Jim’s orchard is a rusty pole set like a crucifix—a television antenna that stands as though it were put there to mark our soldiers’ graves. One grave is for Captain Jim, my father’s father, who went with the Virginia Rebels; another is for the boy, Elbert Messer, who was fatally wounded in World War I.
Some of the gravestones are too old to read, their names eaten away by time and water; the faint rock-etchings are filled now with gray moss. It is one of these stones that marks the grave of our great, great, great cousin Jacob, who died back in the 1800s when he was just nineteen. Cousin Jacob was sick of the “bloody flux” a long time before he died and used to come up here on the hill to sit under an oak tree and read his Bible. So they buried him under the oak, and for a hundred years it stood there, heavy with age and old funeral keenings, and was called the Jacob Tree. But that tree is gone now, and Little Manfred’s tree too, and the willow tree Granny Fanny planted over the grave of her dead baby back in 1875.
But even older than the old graves were the primordial oceans that once covered our fields and cast their seashells into our rock. When the ancient waters receded, strands of pink and broken coral were left scattered—as they are still scattered—across the meadows. This is not coal country. No rotting swamps lay over these slopes and upland valleys, only the oceans weaving and receiving as they laid the pink coral down: coral rock and white limestone rock, and the underground streams sucking in the dark. Through all our generations, we have picked and hauled corals and piled them in roseate heaps along the fence rows and in the swamp.
So it was with us, and is with us still, over two hundred years and nine generations of the farm keeping us, and we believing that we keep the farm. But that is not the way it is in the real truth of it, for the earth holds us and not the other way. The whole great rolling earth holds us, or a rocky old farm down on Swago Crick.
Until I was sixteen years old, until the roads came, the farm was about all I knew: our green meadows and hilly pastures, our storied old men, the great rolling seasons of moon and sunlight, our limestone cliffs and trickling springs. It was about all I knew, and, except for my father and before him, the old Rebel Captain, all that any of us had even known: just the farm and our little village down at the crossroads, and the worn cowpaths winding the slopes; or we kids driving the cows home in the summer evenings; or the winter whiteness and stillness, Aunt Malindy’s “old woman in the sky” picking her geese, the “old blue misties” sweeping out of the north.
Some of our tales were old and old, going back into time itself, American time. Living so long there in the same field under the same gap in the mountain, we had seen, from our own ragged little edge of history, the tall shadows passing by. “Old Hickory” in his coach passed along our dug road one morning; General Lee one evening on his way to the Gauley rebel camps. Then, in 1863, a
s we watched from our cliff walls and scrub oak bushes, the great Yankee army passed on its way to the Battle of Droop: all day long the clank and spur and roll of their passage, 2,000 3,000, 4,000, hard, blue Yankees, their bayonet tips made bloody in the sunset.
Grandpa Tom, our “old one,” had gone with George Rogers Clark to Kaskaskia and had run the Falls of the Ohio under an eclipse of the sun. Uncle Bill went to Point Pleasant against old Cornstalk and his Ohio Shawnee; then Little Uncle John to the War of 1812; Captain Jim to the Virginia Rebels, his brother Al to the Yankees. My father, in 1906, sailed with Teddy Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet; then Cousin Paul and Cousin Coe “to make the world safe for Democracy.”
But before I grew up and went out into the world—and a bloody thing I found it—we were all at home there in our faded cottage in the meadow, all of us safe and warm. Sometimes now, a quiet sense comes to me, the cool mist blowing in my face as though I am walking through islands of fog and drifting downhill slowly southward until I feel the mountains behind my shoulder. Walking on, I can see the light in the “big room” window as I come to our cottage standing in the meadow under “Bridget’s” Mountain, as it always stands on the fore-edges of my memory, and the old farm where I ran the April fields and pastures to my great rock up in the woodland where the lavender hepaticas grew. Then I knew just the earth itself: the quiet measure of the seasons; the stars in the sky; the wheat field in August, golden: darkness and day; rain and sunlight; the primal certainty of spring. Then we were all there together, the years not yet come on us, these seventy-five years of war and money and roaring turnpikes and torrents of blood.
I know, deep down, that our one old farm is only a ragged symbol, a signet mark for all the others, the old and far older hard-scrabble mountain farms of Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia, all the briery fields scattered across the mountains south. And how the earth holds us is still a dark question. It is not the sucking deepness that draws us, for the earth is mother, protector, the home; but the oppressor too. It requires, sometimes, the very lifeblood of its own, and imprisons the flyaway dreams and bends the backs of men and women. Yet to love a familiar patch of earth is to know something beyond death, “westward from death,” as my father used to speak it.
We could sense, just beyond our broken-down line fences, the great reach of the American continent flowing outward. Because we stood so long in one place, our rocky old farm and the abundant earth of the continent were linked together in the long tides of the past. Because the land kept us, never budging from its rock-hold, we held to our pioneer ways the longest, the strongest; and we saw the passing of time from a place called solid, from our own slow, archean, and peculiar stance.
G.D.‘s Sea Chest
It seems the Swago Farm has always been there for me, and fragments of the stories drifting across my mind. How the stories first came to me I cannot answer, for they came in bits and pieces. But I know that I was always there in my small place in the circle and always listening, the scraps and fragments sinking down into my child-mind.
The Indian years were still close to us, and the two Indian graves still lay quiet in our Tommy woodland. The old Seneca Trail, running south from the Iroquois Nation, wound its way across our pastures, and the cows still followed it. It was the same deep-sunken trail that had once been used as an Indian treaty line, one of the long train of broken treaties, so that in those years half of the farm had been white land, the other half red.
So there were Indian stories: the time the big seven-foot Indian came to the Tommy cabin; the day the two Indians came to Aunt Malindy’s and ate her gravy and bread. Or the day the Bridger boys, John and Jim, were killed in the gap of the mountain owned by Mr. Auldridge, so that we always called it Bridget’s Mountain, and on summer mornings the turkey buzzards lingered over, floating down-drift on their black, silent wings.
“Save the Farm!” “Save the Farm!” The words ring like a bell up there on Bridget’s Mountain, ringing out generation after generation. For more than two hundred years, from 1769 to 1988, our menfolk have farmed the land, walked on it, known it down deep; and each man in his turn has tried to pass the land down religiously, or more than religiously, to the oldest son. Each generation in turn must “Save the Farm,” then after that it is up to the next man, or sometimes a woman, to take up the task.
First, Grandpa Tom, our first settler, saved the farm—took it, actually—from the Shawnee Indians in 1769, and then went off to the American Revolution to save it from George III. Grandpa Tom took up our land, and Uncle Dock said it was in the springtime, and the chimney stones of Tom’s cabin are still scattered over in our Tommy meadow in the thicket of wild plums.
I heard the stories again and again of Captain Jim, my grandfather, the verse-writing, hard-set Rebel soldier, who died right after I was born so we passed each other in the door, and who came back from Yankee prison to save the farm.
Captain Jim lay eighteen months in prison at Fort Delaware. They told how he promised himself if he ever got out alive, he would go home, clear the thorn patch, and build a new house under Bridger’s Gap. In prison, he wrote a little brown notebook of love poems and death poems and a long poem called “Virginia Land.” In 1865, when the Yankees set Captain Jim free, he walked back to Swago and set to.
Captain Jim built our white house and married Granny Fanny, and when he was fifty-four years old, my father was born. He was named for General George Patton (the grandfather of “Old Blood and Guts,” the World War II hero) and for Stephen A. Douglas, and he was called G.D. G.D. was the Captain’s only son, his only child, and the old man doted on the boy. As Granny Fanny told it, the Captain taught him to smoke a pipe while he was still a baby sucking on her breast, and pretty soon the old man taught him to chew and spit. He whittled him out a little wooden hayfork and taught the boy to read and write and speak orations, and he planned how G.D. would become a big lawyer and take over the farm.
But when G.D. was sixteen, he went off bumming freight trains into the Oklahoma Indian Territory. Styling himself “The Boy Orator of the Allegheny,” he had some handbills printed up and traveled over Oklahoma and Texas spouting orations and charging fifty cents a head. Once he orated to six Indians in their lodge house, giving them his best eagle-screaming rendition of “Webster’s Reply to Hayne.”
For a few years, G.D. would seem to settle down, work on the farm and do some schoolteaching, and then he would be off again. As the century turned, G.D. was studying law in Washington City, but he came back to Swago and married Mama. Before my older brother Ward was born, they moved into their own house up at Marlinton, the lumber-railroad boom town that was sprouting on the point of land between the river and Knapps Crick. It was there, in the raw, new lumber town, that G.D. began to practice law.
The great lumber boom was sweeping the Appalachians, and G.D. was elected prosecuting attorney, serving as a de facto sheriff, riding the log woods with a pistol in his pocket. But he had started drinking down in Washington City, and when he came to court drunk one day he was disbarred by the other lawyers and then by the state bar. One evening in 1906, G.D. took the train to Norfolk, enlisted in the navy, and went off with Teddy Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet.
When G.D. left that January evening on the “down train” for Norfolk, Mama held his promises that he would write, send money, and drink no more whiskey as long as he lived. But for Mama it was still dead winter, the house in town was under foreclosure, she still had little Ward, two years old, to carry on her hipbone, another child in her womb sac, and no roof to put over their heads. She thought of going to Captain’s Jim’s, but knowing she was not wanted, turned to her own father’s house on Dry Crick. They could not turn her away. But she kept thinking of Captain Jim, and in years after, when she spoke of him, she would smile.
Her stories, and many others, came to me of my grandfather, Captain Jim. He had seen the trumpeter swans passing over, and in 1830, the wild pigeons with their wings blotting out the sun. And t
hey told how he said he had lived to see his only son turned drunkard and Republican, gone off sailing with “that buck-toothed Roosevelt’s” navy, leaving the farm and all its hills and meadows to rot and die. The Captain watched the thorn bush taking the pasture, the fences leaning, the smokehouse falling down. At the last, he had to sell what he called his “woodland-up-the-hollow” to the loggers; and they came in, cut down his oak trees, and left behind them only the bleeding skid roads, the tangles of dying slash.
My mother had heard, through gossips and whisperings, that the bitter old Captain was planning to deed the farm to his nephew, Uncle Dock. So, as soon as my sister Elizabeth was born, Mama took the baby and little Ward and moved in with Captain Jim and Granny Fanny. She was coldly received, but she stayed on. Her name was Grace, and she had come to save the farm.
G.D. sailed around the world for four years. At last, in 1910, after Mama had sold her fleur-de-lis watch to send him train fare home, he came walking and whistling back over the meadows. He had a cannibal’s carved eating fork stashed away in his grip sack, the grip he always called his Sea Chest. He kept his Sea Chest beside his chair through nearly fifty years of farming, and bookkeeping, and writing, and teaching, and he could never get the sea out of him.
I never knew the young G.D. who took off for the navy, and I was always told that the man who came back to save the farm was a very different man. He always seemed to me as tough as a side of sole leather. He neither laughed nor cried; he always smoked his pipe. He hung it in the wry corner of his mouth and looked out at the world with cool, dark eyes. He had black hair and dark skin, high cheekbones and heavy shoulders. When I was a little girl, he would lift me on his big shoulders and call me Fatty Jake. I loved the stories he told, stories that became legends told up and down Swago Crick of far, far places nobody but G.D. had ever been.
G.D. told of the day they passed through the Straits of Magellan, February 1, 1908, where the Winds of the Williwaw blew screaming and the glacial fogs swept in. Or of the morning they sailed into Sidney Harbor in the old U.S.S. Glacier and down in her boiler room the temperature was 140 degrees. G.D. would tell again and again of the day, off of Tokyo, when a Japanese naval officer named Tojo came on board the Glacier and poked around as though he was looking for something or had something in mind.