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East of Knoxville Tennessee the mountains start, small ridges and spines of the folded Appalachians that contort the outgoing roads to their liking. The first of these is Red Mountain; from the crest on a clear day you can see the cool blue line of the watershed like a distant promise.
In the relative cool of the timber stands, possum grapes and muscadine flourish with a cynical fecundity, and the floor of the forest—littered with old mossbacked logs, peopled with toadstools strange and solemn among the ferns and creepers and leaning to show their delicate livercolored gills—has about it a primordial quality, some steamy carboniferous swamp where ancient saurians lurk in feigned sleep.
They were rented to families of gaunt hollow-eyed and darkskinned people, not Mellungeons and not exactly anything else, who reproduced with such frightening prolificness that their entire lives appeared devoted to the production of the ragged line of scions which shoeless and tattered sat for hours at a time on the porch edges, themselves not unlike the victims of some terrible disaster, and stared out across the blighted land with expressions of neither hope nor wonder nor despair. They came and went, unencumbered as migratory birds, each succeeding family a replica of the one before and
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Dawn. Fields smoking where the mist shoaled, trees white as bone. The gray shrubbery hard-looking as metal in the morning wetness. Beads of water raced on the windscreen and he turned on the wipers, watched the arms descend in slow benediction, was mopping at the glass with the back of his hand when the right rear tire went out with a sudden hollow detonation and they flapped to a stop.
Low in the east a red moon was coming up through the clouds, a crooked smile, shard of shellrim pendant from some dark gypsy ear.
If I was a younger man, he told himself, I would move to them mountains. I would find me a clearwater branch and build me a log house with a fireplace. And my bees would make black mountain honey. And I wouldn’t care for no man.
In spring the mountain went violent green, billowing low under the sky. It never came slowly. One morning it would just suddenly be there and the air rank with the smell of it. The old man sniffed the rich earth odors, remembering other springs, other years. He wondered vaguely how people remembered smells … Not like something you see. He could still remember the odor of muskrat castor and he hadn’t smelled it for forty years. He could even remember the first time he had smelled that peculiar sweet odor; coming down Short Creek one morning a lot more years ago than forty, the cottonwoods white
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In the store the old men gathered, occupying for endless hours the creaking milkcases, speaking slowly and with conviction upon matters of profound inconsequence,
They sipped their wine with the solemnity of communicants, troglodytes gathered in some firelit cave. The lamp guttered in a draft of wind and their shadows, ponderous and bearlike upon the wall, weaved in unison.
