Light to the Hills

by Bonnie Blaylock

A person’s name carried everything. In closed rural communities like those in the Appalachian hills, a name was a placard identifying your people and your past and, more often than not, charting your future.

But the family name was the thing that clung, the thing that dragged behind a body on a string of tin cans, announcing who she was to those who knew—or knew of—her people, no matter how far she moved or how many times she took another name in marriage.

Books held secrets she wasn’t allowed to know.

He’d walked early, his pa had told him, because the world knew he was meant to make his own way sooner than most.

she was colder than a witch’s tit and twice as sour.

“Why, he’s so poor he can hardly pay attention!”

Keeping a cabin in the mountains didn’t much call for book knowledge. As long as you could cipher a few numbers to know your wages at the mine or the lumberyard, as long as you could make change at the store for supplies and maybe trade folks what you grew or made with your own hands, people got along all right.

All the rest was memory. Recipes, songs, nursery rhymes, family history, and knowledge of signs or tokens. It all came from words told over and over until they stuck fast in the head and heart and became easy as breathing.

Her small voice had mingled with the bees’ music like they’d made their own choir in the middle of a secret woodland church.

Worn-out was just a state of mind to the folks in this part of the country. Worn-out just meant it hadn’t fallen completely apart yet, so it still had some good use to it.

Nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking cheers.

He spoke of desperation, how desperate times don’t mark us as desperate people because we have hope.

Surely sometimes the Lord must look down with a headache and think we’re dumber than a sack of hammers.

A mama’s heart is a wonder, able to hold an endless measure of love, hope, sadness, and rage all at the same time.

Her mother, meanwhile, led a life of verbs—plant, mend, plow, sew, chop, carve, sharpen, weave, cook, knead, harvest, haul

a loose cow, a wayward hog, or a stray husband—things fences don’t tame

Words travel like dandelion seeds. There’s no controlling where they fly.”

Sometimes the good Lord sees fit to perch folks on the branches that require an extra measure of our grace. Sometimes those folks is us. Guess we all take turns.”

She remembered when it had all come together for her, in her father’s study, when letters made sounds and sounds made words, each one with a secret meaning that she had the power to understand. A curtain had parted, revealing a whole new way of seeing.

“Depends what you call a miracle, I s’pose. Way I see it, you can either live like nothing’s a miracle or like everything is. Either way, it’ll work out to be the truth. But one makes your boots step a lot lighter than t’other’n.”

A warm bath, a good cry, and a cup of tea: her mother used to say that was close as you could get to the Holy Trinity here on Earth.

That preacher, Amanda’s daddy, had said the Word became flesh and lived alongside of us. He’d meant Jesus, though Sass couldn’t figure exactly what sort of word Jesus might have been to begin with before God put skin on Him. Mercy, perhaps? Or maybe Forgive?