The Path Was Steep by Suzanne Pickett

Author:Suzanne Pickett [Pickett, Suzanne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Path Was Steep, Suzanne Pickett, NewSouth Books, Great Depression, West Virgninia, coal mining, biography, personal memoir, Appalachia, Appalachian Trail, Alabama
ISBN: 9781603063340
Publisher: NewSouth Inc.
Published: 2013-11-05T16:00:00+00:00

14

Score One for West Virginia!

Leaving the hills of Virginia, we traveled into the West Virginia mountains. Reaching the Jumps, we screeched around curves, clung to the walls whenever possible, dodged cars, heard the rattle of rocks and shale below, and finally reached comparative safety. Papa stuck his head and neck out the window and stared up and up at the black rocks and trees above, then far below to the chasms on the lower side of the road.

“Now, now—” he said, his hands waving. “I’ve seen them, and I still don’t believe.” Papa’s head nodded in rhythm to his hands.

“I told you, Papa.”

“You tried to tell me,” he corrected. “Nobody could really tell. The everlasting hills,” he said reverently now and then, but he caught his breath and his interest waned as we perched on the edge of chasms, slid, and missed other cars by inches.

“Hadn’t you better slow down, son?” For the first and perhaps the last time, Papa tried back-seat driving.

Out of his deep respect, David slowed.

Once Papa stuck his head all the way out the window to stare. A ladder was fastened to a jutting rock. At that moment, a man stopped hoeing a patch of corn and beans and began to descend.

“Climbing a ladder to plant corn,” Papa grieved for the man. “No mule could climb it. He must have dug the earth with a mattock.”

He didn’t talk so verbosely the rest of the way home, but all of his life he told people about the sky-grown corn. “He must gather it and let it roll to the bottom of the mountain,” he said.

As we veered around the curves of the Jumps, Papa’s hands, corded and brown, were too busy to talk. He clung to the door and the back seat of the car. “If snow were a foot deep,” he said when we finally crossed the Jumps and reached the safer roads that slid around curves towards Marytown, “I’d walk that road at midnight, the coldest night of the year, before I’d ride over it again.”

We reached home just before dark. Mr. and Mrs. Hauser had been notified; they waited in the yard for us. Karl staggered from the car; they left in a few minutes; and we made it into the house. David built a fire in the stove. I made coffee and took out what was left of the crackers and bread we’d brought from Morris. David gathered tomatoes; I sliced them and opened two cans of beans. We ate, wiped dust from hands and feet, and fell into bed.

Papa stayed with us a month and loved every minute of it. Incredulously, he walked through our garden, took a handful of dirt, and said, “If I had sixty acres of this soil back home, with our heat, and the rain you have here . . . If I had this soil . . .” He gazed in wonder at the black leaf mold, which had washed down from the mountains for countless centuries.

Beans were hanging thick in the garden.

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