Pops knelt again and pulled at nonexistent weeds.
“She loved this place,” he said, looking up at the ridge above us where the trees were holding summer green. “Loved the way the waterfall had an answer for everything.” He stood and turned toward it. “We used to picnic on the other side there.” He pointed to a flat spot by the water where a magnolia shaded that part of the pool. “I must have played there a thousand times when I was growing up and thought nothing of it. Then she comes and makes it the most important place in the universe to me.”
We stood on the hill, Pops and me, looking over Jukes Hollow: the creek, the fields, the cabin, the rocks. I saw in my mind how it must have looked then. The barn and the other houses crowded around the circle. Children raised in a pack, infused with laughter and purpose and a desire to rise above.
And how it was now, empty and unused, the lives and laughter long moved on, leaving just remembrances and the roots attached to them. I started to understand why Pops could never sell Jukes Hollow. The idea of Bubba Boyd and his tractors filling everything in with Bridger Mountain overburden infuriated me. “How could they even think of destroying this place? I just don’t get it.”
“Men like Bubba Boyd think the earth owes them a living. They take whatever wealth they can from the mountains and move on. I actually feel sorry for him, I really do. He can’t for the life of him see the simple beauty in a waterfall or understand the importance of history and place. If I have one hope for you, Kevin, it’s that you never become one of those men.”
The mountains have their own memories.
Rooted in marrow rock, hard set to the crests, fused in the folds and braes where the white water races. Their earliest recollections manifested to primordial, wild and feral, then became tamed with the people. Cheek Mountain and the Pierce boys grappling and shredding each other over Docey Eberhild—she chose Strom, which made Quillar flee west; Goat Leg Hollow and Wilmer Gilvens, two months off a coffin ship, sinking cabin piers into her flat shoulder and the cabin shaping up week to week with a front-porch view of Indian Head; Corbin Hollow and Bertum Skill courting, then marrying a half-wild Melugeon girl named Hetta Goins despite banishment threats from his father; Sadler Mountain and Nevis Jensen teaching his son Jesper how to read the dullings for turkey sign on an autumn dawn. They all remember Bobby Clinch and the orphan bear cub he raised to adult on saved meat scraps and deer killings; and years later when Bobby came upon it over by Indian Head, the bear on hinds, taking in man scent, head cocked in recognition. All these old memories rooted in the earth, now pulled out and piled in cairns of spoil or pushed down the hollows to level the land.
Chapter 25
THE TWICE-TOOK MOUNTAINS
We ate cold ham sandwiches slathered with Audy Rae’s homemade mustard by the waterfall where Pops and Sarah Winthorpe used to picnic. “When I brought her up here, all my kin could do was gawp. It was like an alien goddess had landed in Jukes. She had this flowing chestnut hair halfway down her back.” He shook his head. “They had never seen anyone so beautiful. But they soon found out that her true beauty came from here,” he said and tapped at my heart.
Pops smiled at the recollection and folded the plastic sandwich baggies and put them in his pack and stood and slung it on his shoulders. Buzzy and I did the same. We were at the base of the sheer rock wall that ran the western end of the hollow. We walked over to the circle of ruins where the wall face eased and allowed for climbing.
“We’re gonna have to climb up to get to the trailhead. My brothers and I never got around to cutting stairs into the rock. There are some well-placed vines as ropes if needed. Follow me rock for rock, boys.” He reached and pulled himself up to the first rock, then put his foot into a crevice and pushed up to the next toehold, then again to the next one. I followed and Buzzy came after. About halfway up, ledges jutted out, which made the ascent much easier, like a set of steep basement steps.
Near the top he took his pack off and threw it over the edge of the wall, then jumped up and grabbed the root of a sapling that had grown out of the rock. He pulled himself up and over the edge. After a minute, Buzzy and I reached the final ledge. I looked down over the hollow, at Pops’ birth cabin, over at the cemetery, and back to Ahab and Moby Dick, faithfully guarding the entrance to Jukes Hollow. It was a hard life then, but the simple dignity with which they lived it made me proud. We took off our packs, threw them up to the ledge, then scrambled over the rimrock.
The bracing creek ran straight down the middle of a bowl-shaped valley that ascended to a peak eight hundred feet above us. A thin dirt and rock trail at creek side snaked up the mountain. We affixed our packs and followed Pops on the trail to the rushing water sounds. The pack was heavy on the incline and the straps dug into my shoulders. I could hear Buzzy huffing behind me. Pops’ gait was long and certain, and soon he was a hundred feet ahead, navigating the awkward course and jutting rocks with an ease and grace I didn’t know was in him. I looked back at Buzzy, red-faced and sweating. He was focused on his feet, watching one go in front of the other. “We gotta catch up.” I breathed and expanded my step to narrow the difference. Buzzy grunted and matched me. Pops had paused on a flat rock overlooking a three-stage waterfall, leaning on his walking stick, drinking from his canteen.
“This rock here marks the top of Jukes. It’s about a hundred seventy acres up either side of this bowl and fifty acres below the waterfall where the cabin is. Everything above us is Bridger Mountain, which is now owned by the Company. Their plan is to blow the top off the mountain and push everything into Jukes. That ain’t gonna happen, least as long as I have a breath in me.” He paused and looked over the beautiful hollow of his childhood. “My brother and I own Jukes together; when one of us goes, the other owns it outright. Hersh would sell out in a Memphis downbeat. Quite an incentive to stay healthy, don’t you think?”
“How come you can’t give your share to Mom?”
“I can if Hersh dies first. Like I said, the last living brother owns Jukes. Until then he and I have to agree on everything. That’s just the way my mother wanted it. Guess she figured decisions about the place were best made by the folks who grew up here. Wise woman.” He turned and headed up the trail, his walking stick working like a third leg, pushing off the dirt and stones to propel him forward. Soon he was a distant speck on the trail face.
Buzzy and I rested a moment more, then clambered after him. He continued to shrink in the distance despite our efforts to keep up. “Man, he’s haulin ass.”
“Come on,” I urged and double-timed it, grabbing the back of my pack to hoist the weight off my shoulders. We scampered up the steep trail, hunched over, me staring at my feet as they made like two horses in a neck-and-neck race. After a half hour, we reached the ridgetop. Pops was sitting under an ash tree with his hiking hat low over his face, sleeping. We threw our packs down, huffing and blowing.
“Lord help us, it’s as if you boys have never hiked up a mountain before,” he said without looking out from under his hat. We collapsed next to our packs, against the wide tree trunk. I looked over at Buzzy, who was breathing out of an O-shaped mouth.
“Why are you going so fast, Pops?”
“When you see Glaston, you’ll know. Besides, I gotta show up you striplings, don’t I?” He stood and sniffed at the mountain air, hands on hips. We were at the top of Six Hollow Ridge, which ran across the crest of Beaver, Pine, Jukes, Slow, and what was left of Corbin and Wilmer Hollows. We picked up our packs and headed north on an old logging road that ran the ridgetop. The route was truck wide and accorded easy passage across the rolling shoulder of mountain, giving good time for the next three miles over a series of minor hillocks and shallow dints. The trees were lush and large, with holly, mountain laurel, and dogwood filling in the forest floor. As we came over a gentle rise, the trees ended abruptly. What lay before us was a scene of unimaginable devastation.
We stood on the edge of a flat, gray moonscape two miles across and dotted with pooling water of a color unknown to the natural order of things—orange, red, purple, bright green. It looked like a rainbow had fallen out of the sky and each hue had gathered into its own pond. Pops stopped and leaned on his walking stick.
“We are at what used to be the top of Corbin Hollow.” Pops pointed to a slight indentation in the landscape between two gray plateaus. “They blew the tops off Indian Head on the left here and Sadler there in the middle and pushed all of it into Corbin. When they were done, they covered the whole area with that green spray-grass stuff that will grow anywhere. Last summer, when I hiked through here, grass was growing everywhere, even on the rock. It looked like a massive Chia Pet.”
Now it was nothing but gray and a hint of straw where the spray grass had died. “None of it took,” he added, though he didn’t need to.
From our vantage point two hundred feet above it all, we could see across the dead land to the far tree line. From here to there were three long flattop plateaus where Indian Head, Sadler, and Cheek Mountains had been. Between them, where the Company pushed the overburden, were shallow valleys filled up with the rock and soil taken from the mountains. A series of roads rutted over the flat tops and through the valley fill. Rock piles twenty feet high dotted the plateaus in between the rainbow ponds. And on the middle table, checked by a wide oval berm, was a lake brimming with black coal sludge—not normal black, but a darker, ominous alchemy of black that seemed to have been contrived by the devil himself.
The mine operation was completely barren of trees, grass, or any vegetation. The huge oaks and rich green of Jukes and the surrounding mountains made this place seem like a wholly different planet, one that had its normal color bled out.
In the valley beyond the far trees, I recognized the twisting road that ran through the middle of the Mitchell farm. The fields were empty now, and I traced the line up to the cul-de-sac. Two of the barns had been carted away, leaving flat concrete. The third was a pile of beams and boards splayed like pick-up sticks. The old Mitchell house was nothing but a single sidewall, chimney rising above the fist of brick like a middle finger raised to rebuke.
The trail from the woods disappeared, so we picked our way over rocks and gray mud down to a roadway of gravel and more mud. Huge tire tracks were filled with rainbow water from the recent rains. We followed the rutted way that ran on the valley fill around the curve of the first flattop. The road rose and merged with the plateau that had once been Indian Head. We walked among the rock piles—rock that had been hidden underground for millennia—now exposed and stacked like displaced corpses.
Pops’ face was a twist of anger. “Indian Head was not a large mountain, but notable for a huge rock formation at its summit. When you saw it from the south, it looked exactly like an Indian warrior in profile.” He turned halfway around to orient himself to the history. “It was about sixty feet high and just an amazing sight—you could see it for miles. Folks around here called the Indian face Red Cloud because the rocks had a reddish tint to them, but the legend goes back hundreds of years to the Shawnee who lived in these mountains before the white man. It was said that any brave who could scale the face would be able to steal some of the warrior spirit’s bravery and would be protected by the gods in battle. No one ever achieved it and many braves died trying, until a white hunter, captured by the Shawnee and sentenced to a torturous death by the Shawnee chief Blackfish, negotiated a reprieve if he could scale it. He did and was adopted by Blackfish himself as his son. The Shawnee called him Sheltowee, but we know him as Daniel Boone.
“Since then, generations of Missi County boys tried to prove their courage climbing up the face of Red Cloud—only thirteen actually made it.”
“Did you ever climb it?”
Pops smiled. “I did. But not until my third try.” He looked up at a place in the air where Red Cloud had been. “That’s a story for another day. Let’s get on down the road.” Pops moved out with dispatch, his pace quickening to escape the tortured landscape. We were able to keep pace on the flat land, down into a slight depression that was once Corbin Hollow. On the side of the track was the rusted boom of an abandoned dragline, its broken cable curled like a waiting snake.
The road thrust upward sharply to the next plateau. Pops’ pace gave him separation and he achieved the top a minute before us. He stood there on the edge and surveyed the rubble as Buzzy and I scrambled up the slope. “This used to be Sadler Mountain. In front of us was Wilmer Hollow, where the Kracken family lived.” He waved his hand at the filled-in valley below us. “Sold it all to the Company for thirty-five thousand dollars and moved to a trailer park somewhere in central Florida.” He shook his head at the inequity of the math.
“Kevin, I told you about the Sadler Mountain War, and, Buzzy, I know your grandfather has told you about it. My father and your grandfather led the efforts to unionize the mines in the thirties. Then Bubba Boyd’s father had my dad killed and your grandfather led a revolt against the Company. They were lifelong friends, my dad and your grandfather. He and about thirty miners holed up on this mountain for three months, launching a series of guerrilla raids against the Company. The Boyds imported ‘peace officers,’ who were nothing more than hired guns, and sent twenty up to root the miners out. Not a single one came back. Then they sent up sixty to try and flush em out; they retreated after a day. Your grandfather was a handful as a guerrilla fighter. He and his Sadler Mountain boys brought the mines to a standstill. Finally, Washington, D.C., sent down the federal marshals to get everything running again. The union prevailed, and life for the miners started getting better after that, thanks to your great-grandfather, Kevin, and Buzzy’s grandfather. They were true men—something for you both to live up to.”
“My grandaddy tole me stories. I always thought it was him tellin porky pies.”
“You need to pay attention to your grandfather and show him the respect he’s earned. Those stories he tells you are all true.”
“Yes, sir,” Buzzy said, chastened.
We walked up the fifteen-foot berm to the top of the slurry pond. It was the size of two football fields end to end. The first few inches of water were clear, casing the obsidian ooze like window glaze. And below it, the infinite black maw of slurry, murky and foul, as if everything malevolent in Medgar was spawn of this disconsolate brew. We stood on the edge, silently watching the span of black lap the berm top. Buzzy took up a softball rock and tossed it into the muck. It hung in the air for a moment, then hit the surface with a dull plonk, disappearing under the effluent. The lake surface smoothed itself, removing all evidence of disorder.
“Let’s get off this dump and into the trees. We can pick up the trail over that way.” Pops pointed with his walking stick and moved out. The top of the Sadler Mountain ruins were crisscrossed with ruts and berms, and it was a difficult hike to the edge of the trees. “It’s an old game trail that leads down into Prettyman Hollow, so it’s gonna be tough to spot.”
“What about that third mountain? What happened there?” I asked.
Pops looked sadly over to the gray scar that was once Cheek Mountain. “That’s where Paul Pierce grew up. Now you know why he tried so hard to shut Bubba Boyd down.”
“Why did he sell to Mr. Boyd in the first place?”
“He didn’t. Years ago his grandaddy sold the mineral rights on Cheek Mountain to William Beecher Boyd. Folks didn’t think much of it since coal was mined underground. But the law also allows companies with mineral rights to kick off the surface owners and dig at the coal from the top. So Bubba moved on in and just took the mountain. Paul had no legal way to stop him.”
“How much did Mr. Paul’s grandaddy sell the rights for?”
“Four hundred and seventy-five dollars.”