Robert Morgan - Gap Creek: The Story Of A Marriage

GAP CREEK

ALSO BY ROBERT MORGAN

Fiction

The Blue Valleys

The Mountains Wont Remember Us

The Hinterlands

The Truest Pleasure

Poetry

Zirconia Poems

Red Owl

Land Diving

Trunk and Thicket

Groundwork

Bronze Age

At the Edge of the Orchard Country

Sigodlin

Green River: New and Selected Poems

Nonfiction

Good Measure: Essays, Interviews,

and Notes on Poetry

ROBERT MORGAN

a novel

Published by

ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL

Post Office Box 2225

Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

a division of

Workman Publishing

708 Broadway

New York, New York 10003

1999 by Robert Morgan. All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America.

Published simultaneously in Canada

by Thomas Allen & Son Limited.

Design by Anne Winslow.

This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. No reference to any real person is intended or should be inferred.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Morgan, Robert, 1944

Gap Creek : a novel / Robert Morgan.

p. cm.

ISBN 1-56512-242-9

I. Title.

PS3563.087147G36 1999

813'.54dc21 99-34995

CIP

New ISBN 1-56512-296-8

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

For my daughter Laurel

I would like to thank Shannon Ravenel and the staff at Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill for their crucial help in bringing this book to completion, and especially Duncan Murrell for his extraordinary persistence, tact, and insight.

GAP CREEK

I know about Masenier because I was there. I seen him die. We didnt tell anybody the truth because it seemed so shameful, the way he died. It was too awful to describe to other people. But I was there, even though I didnt want to be, and I seen it all.

Masenier was my little brother, my only brother, and us girls had spoiled him. If Masenier woke up in the middle of the night and wanted some hot cornbread one of us would get up and bake it. If Masenier wanted a pretty in the store in town wed carry a chicken down to one of the big houses in Flat Rock and sell it to buy him the pretty. Masenier got an egg every morning while the rest of us just had grits. If he wanted biscuits and molasses, Mama or one of us girls would bake them for him.

I thought Masenier was the cutest boy in the world. He had these blond curls that stood out all around his head, and his eyes was blue as the mountains in the far distance. He loved to sing and sometimes Papa would pick the banjo by the fire at night and us girls would sing ballads like In the Shadow of the Pines or The Two Sisters and Masenier would clap and sing along. We didnt have music that often and it was a special treat when Papa got down the banjo.

Now the year Im talking about was the year after Cold Friday, that day when the sun never did come out and it never warmed up. Cold Friday was the coldest day anybody had ever seen. It seemed like the end of the world, when the chickens never left the roost, and it put such a chill on everything well never forget that day. Papa took his coughing sickness then and it seemed like he never was well after that. But it was the year after Cold Friday when Masenier started acting poorly.

Masenier had always been such a healthy boy, even a little plump, from all the biscuits and molasses, and his cheeks was pink as wild roses. He had a pile of white sand out beside the house Papa had carried in the wagon from the creek. Masenier made roads and castles and all kinds of mountains and valleys in the sand. He even made him a church out of sticks and set it on a hill of sand, and he stuck little rocks around it to look like a graveyard. You might have knowed a boy that done that was marked in some way.

ALONG IN THE winter Masenier started to look peaked. He fell off a lot, and Mama thought it was because the cow was dry. So we borrowed milk from the Millers that lived further out the ridge. But the milk didnt seem to help Masenier. He got paler and he lost his baby fat.

What that boy needs is a tonic, Cora Miller said. And she mixed up a tincture of herbs and roots that she kept in a cupboard in her kitchen with corn liquor. Mama give Masenier a tablespoon of the tonic before every meal. The tonic would bring the glow back to his cheeks for a while. We thought he was getting better. And for Christmas he got four oranges and a poke of peppermint candy.

But it was the day after Christmas when he woke up with the pains. My sister Rosie heard him holler out and she went to his bed in the attic. My belly hurts, he said.

Have you got the colic? Rosie said.

Hurts bad, Masenier said.

Everybody knows what you take for the colic is pennyroyal tea, and Mama boiled some as soon as the stove was hot, even before she cooked any breakfast. Masenier sipped the tea, and it seemed to make him feel better, maybe because Mama put a little paregoric in the tea, the way you do for babies with the colic. Papa said, Too much store-bought candy will always give a body colic.

BUT AFTER THAT Masenier got the colic even when he didnt have any store-bought candy. After the Christmas candy was long gone he still had the terrible cramps and would wake up in the middle of the night crying. Mama would hold him in her lap and rock him by the fire. And Papa or one of us girls would hold him while Mama made pennyroyal tea. Then after he drunk the tea with some paregoric he would feel better and might even sleep a little.

That was a bad winter, not only because it was colder than usual, but because of the ice storms and the snows. It looked like the woods had been chopped down, there was so many trees broke by the ice. Sleet is hardest on pine trees, because so much ice gathers on their needles. I doubt if there was a pine tree standing whole on the mountain. And when it snowed it was a heavy wet snow that broke down more trees and made barns and sheds and even houses cave in. The church house at Poplar Springs fell down.

Because Papa had the cough, my sister Lou and me did the heavy work outside. We got in eggs and fed the stock and carried in wood and water from the spring. I hated how everybody expected me to do the outside work. If there was a heavy job it just fell naturally to me, and sometimes Lou, like it always had. The weather was bad so long we nearly run out of firewood. I took the axe into the woods and chopped up a blow-down tree. And then I hitched up the horse Sally to the sled and drug in a load. My hands liked to froze it was so wet and cold.

Julie can work like a man, Mama said when I brought the load of wood into the front room.

Somebodys got to work like a man, I said and dropped the logs on the edge of the hearth. My hands got rough from the cold and the hard work. I rubbed grease on them at night to soften the calluses and moisten the dry skin. I would have liked to keep my hands soft the way Rosie did hers.

DURING THE TERRIBLE winter when Papa took the chest consumption, we didnt hardly get off the mountain, and we almost run out of cornmeal. If Papa did the least little thing he would start coughing and get so weak he couldnt hardly set up. He had always been such a strong man before that it embarrassed him to be so helpless. Mama liked to say, Now you can do without a lot of things, but a family cant do without cornmeal. If you run out of meal you dont have any bread and you dont have any mush. And you dont have anything to fry fish in, or squirrels. When the meat runs out, and the taters runs out, the only thing that will keep you going is the cornbread. You can live a long time on bread and collard greens, if you have collard greens. And you can live a long time on bread alone if you have to, in spite of what the Bible says.