We drove across a ridge overlooking Beaver Hollow. I recognized Tilroy’s house and the barn in the back where Sen Budget shot the family mule.
“I didn’t know you lived near the Budgets growing up.”
“A few hollows over, thank goodness,” Pops said with a half smile.
We descended into a heavily wooded valley of even larger trees—old, majestic oaks, sycamores, and hickories—then forded a swollen stream that sometime past had been bridged, for the rottings of a wood foundation fell about both sides. The road flattened, following the valley floor deeper into the hollow. The mountain closed in until we were squeezed in a narrow cut no more than fifty feet across. Up ahead a huge sycamore had fallen across the road. “Looks like our Tramp is gonna start a few miles early,” Pops said and pulled right up to the tree, shut off the engine, and exited the truck. We followed. The constant rain had given the woods steaming, rain-forest air. We pulled our packs out of the back and affixed them. Pops took up an old burled and polished walking stick with intricate carvings on the handle. I asked him about it and he held it up to the light and smiled, regarding the stick as if fond reminiscences were stored somewhere in the wood. “My father took this out of the core of a lightning-struck tree. The heat from the lightning made it as strong as steel. Gave it to me on my thirteenth birthday a few years before he died. Now I use it to beat back bears.” He laughed and swung it like a baseball bat.
We followed the huge tree trunk to where we could slip under and over the spread of upper branches, then walked back up to the old road to begin the Tramp. Pops first, me, then Buzzy single file in one of the wheel ruts. The road curved around the steep side of a hill, then straightened out as the valley narrowed even more. A creek rushed down the middle, overflowing from the recent rains. As we rounded another sharp turn, two bus-size boulders bulged into either side of the road, leaving a gap just wide enough for a single car. “When I was a kid, I named these two boulders Ahab and Moby Dick.” He reached over and gave Ahab an affectionate pat. “They are my sentries.”
Once we were through Ahab and Moby Dick, the mountain walls gave way and the valley opened to a wide half-hourglass hollow, three hundred yards across and five hundred yards deep. A sheer rock wall eighty feet high at the far end with a full waterfall cascading to a broad pool on a rise. From there the water spilled down the hill and became the rushing creek we had crossed minutes before. The fields had gone fallow years ago, and saplings grew in them like giant corn.
The road hugged the edge of the valley and ended abruptly at a cul-de-sac of ruins. Straight ahead, a jumble of old logs from an ancient cabin splayed like pick-up sticks. To my right, a single cinder-block chimney competed with young trees for prominence. A thick oak door, weathered gray and long off its hinges, rested sideways against a rusted woodstove. Up the hill, several more foundations watched us through the underbrush.
But to my left, on the end of the slight ledge that led down to the fields and the creek, was a perfectly ordered stone-and-log cabin, preserved like a slip-covered antique.
It was small. A low roof sloped up slightly from a porch that ran along the entire front. Four thick knotted wood posts, polished from the years, held the porch ceiling upright. The door was solid and dark and cracked in places where the wood grain weakened—bright, modern lockage as out of place as chrome on a Model T. Two large windows on either side of the door traded sunlight for warmth in winter.
“Who lives here?” I asked.
“Nobody now,” Pops said. We stepped onto the porch, took off our packs, and laid them down with a thud. Some early fallen leaves collected in the corner. Pops pulled keys from his pocket and fiddled them until the correct one untangled. “This is where I was born,” he said and turned the key in the lock. “This is Jukes Hollow.” He pushed the door open and I stepped into another time.
The first room was the kitchen: sixties-era plates, cups, flatware, took dust in an oak cupboard against the far wall. Pine floor planks announced our every step. To my left, a large cast-iron cookstove sat in perfect repair waiting for a chance to fire again. The floor in front of it worn a half inch into itself. A small table with six chairs was pushed near the stove as if to covet its remaining warmth.
In the adjoining living room, a smaller woodstove sat against the wall in the space where most families now put televisions. Two chairs, separated by a simple table, faced the stove as if entertainment had been sought in the way that wood burns. The interior walls were whitewashed log, the thin paint giving the grain extra emphasis. An old stuffed bobcat head hung on the wall over an empty shelf.
At the back of the cabin were two bedrooms. The first was tiny, even smaller than my room at Chisold Street. I couldn’t imagine three boys sharing such a space. A miniature window cut into the logs let in a slash of the world. Triple bunk beds hewn from local oak attached to the walls like shelves.
The other bedroom was twice its size. It was empty except for a huge four-poster bed, stripped of its mattress. The wood was honey-colored hickory; its posts, like small trees, almost touched the ceiling. The headboard was intricately carved with a strong woman sidesaddle on a majestic plumed horse held by an attending young man. At the footboard, two broadswords crossed over a flying bird. An eagle or maybe a hawk.
“My father’s brother made that bed for him as a wedding present,” Pops said, standing behind me. “Copied the carving from a woodcut of Queen Victoria’s seal that a traveling stove salesman gave him. My mother wasn’t an ostentatious woman, but she loved that bed.” We stood there for a moment, regarding the workmanship. “Come on, I want to show you boys something,” he said.
We walked outside to the fields. Pops had cut the saplings back ten feet from the cabin and maintained a path through them to the stream. On the right were the ruins of an old barn; left was a collection of abandoned farm equipment—plows, harnesses, some hand tools—under a collapsed shed. A tractor wheel with three trees growing through it.
We stopped at a crumbled stone fence that long ago demarcated the crops from the cows. It was just noon and the sun had attained Brice Mountain and was shining brightly into us. With the sunlight and the waterfall and the steep rock walls, Jukes Hollow was one of the most beautiful places I had ever seen.
Pops put his foot up on a rock. “You know, my brothers and I couldn’t wait to leave this place. The Company offered free housing in town, so just about everyone left. Only my mother stayed—died in that cabin seven years ago.”
“Where is everybody now?” Buzzy asked.
“Spread out all over. Hersh and Katie Mae have four children; three are married with kids of their own. Patsy lives in Florida, Glenda near Pittsburgh, and Dibley lives in Lexington, runs an auto-glass business.”
“What about the fourth?” I asked.
“Den? We lost him in the Vietnam War,” Pops answered. “Let’s see, Jeb’s kids are all over the place too. He had seven and I couldn’t even begin to track them. Except Dealy, who runs the farm over by Big Spoon. I’ll take you there sometime—he has a boy about your age.”
We paused for a minute as packets of memories flooded back to him.
“Come on,” he finally said and stepped over the pile of stones. We continued down toward the creek, where thick flat rocks had been placed in the water for crossing purposes. Once on the other side, we walked toward the waterfall, where the ground rose slightly, bracing the sides of the pool, which gathered the water before running it down through the rest of the hollow. The waterfall cooled the air and the constant rushing sound made it easy to think.
Thirty yards back from the pool, at the start of the Brice Mountain incline, was a tiny cemetery. Twenty wooden posts outlined its authority, their connecting fence pieces long since lost. The grass in the cemetery was low-cut and weed-free, as if they knew not to bespoil such hallowed ground. The front headstones, overtaken by rich moss, jutted from the earth at odd angles. The slope of the hill made the other markers seem like seatbacks in a movie theater. Despite the lack of fencing, Pops and I walked through what used to be the entrance gate. Buzzy stayed a few feet outside the perimeter watching us.
I drifted among the headstones, working my way up the small hill, reading my history in the granite chiselings. Pops had told me all the stories, and finally, I was attaching something tangible to my ancestors.
George Cranmore Peebles, my great-great-great-grandfather, who first staked claim to Jukes Hollow with his wife, Carlotta, and his brother Morley in 1849, had left Pembroke in Wales two years earlier and after a stint on the docks in Baltimore, set off for the west country. They were buried in the near corner of the graveyard, marked by three flat pieces of jagged slate pounded into the ground, the crude inscriptions long since taken by the elements.
Sadie Peebles Kinneycut Johnson Jar Bean, one of George and Carlotta’s five children, who outlived four husbands (none of whom rated burial in Jukes Hollow) and eight children and finally died at eighty-three of an infected thumb she received from a dogwood splinter while chopping wood with a hand ax.
Bradley Wilson Peebles, Sadie’s little brother, who fought for the Confederacy in the last years of the war at the tender age of fourteen because some home guardsmen thought him fit and snatched poor Bradley from the hollow despite Carlotta’s attempts to hide him in the smokehouse. He returned at sixteen with killing eyes and sent himself off west without a word. He reappeared in Jukes Hollow eighteen years later, a German wife and a young son in tow. The boy had been born in a soddy during a scrap with a handful of renegade Kiowas. They named him Franklin Cranmore Peebles—Pops’ grandfather.
In the row behind was the stone of Oriel Peebles, Pops’ father. I lingered by his headstone and remembered the stories Pops had told me of my great-grandfather’s efforts to organize the mines and his murder at the hands of the Company’s detectives, on order from Bubba Boyd’s father. Next to him was Pops’ mother. A simple headstone as befit her nature:
EMILY LITTLETON PEEBLES
BORN AUGUST 26, 1894, DIED JUNE 1, 1978
Next to her was a small marker; light-green lichen obliterated some of the lettering.
HELEN BRAN EEBLES, BORN JAN 3, 914
DIED OF CONSUM FEB ARY 18, 1917
KATHER LI EBLES, BOR AY 22, 18
DIED MAY 23, 1918
WINNEFRED STON PEEBLES BO JANU 7, 1921
DI APRI 1, 1924
BEL DAUGHTERS OF EMIL AN ORIEL PEEBL
Pops was at the top edge of the cemetery, kneeling down, pulling young weeds from around a headstone, talking to someone in the air. I walked up behind him quietly.
“I brought Kevin up, like I said I would,” he whispered between the waterfall sounds. “I wanted to wait until the time was right.”
A crack of twig announced my presence. He stood with a handful of chickweed, letting most of it fall absently into the wind. The marker by his feet was clean and moss-free, the ground around it trim and perfect, like the yard at Chisold Street.
SARAH WINTHORPE PEEBLES
BORN APRIL 19, 1920
DIED IN LABOR DECEMBER 1, 1949
A VOICE LESS LOUD, THROUGH ITS JOYS AND FEARS