The Mountain Doctor

I

June 1928
FROM early spring until late fall there are ‘workings’ in the mountains — communal gatherings at which everyone turns in to help his neighbor. There are workings for clearing a new field, workings for grubbing the ground, for foddering, for stringing beans, and at ‘hog-killin’ time.’ I went to one up on Jacob’s Run for helping a ‘widow woman.’
The men brought their mules and ploughed her steep cornfields, while in the cabin quilting frames were suspended from the ceiling for ‘we-all’ to work at. Some of the women prepared a bountiful dinner of stewed chicken, ‘hog-meat.,’ ‘taters,’ beans, corn bread, hot biscuits, pickled beets, canned huckleberries, delicious preserved apples, and apple layer cake. Coffee is drunk at all meals. Tea is unknown. We from the settlement ate at the first table with the men, while the mountain women served and switched boughs to brush away the flies. A woman rarely sits down with the men.
Later on there will be a working to hoe the corn. It has to be hoed three times, and on these occasions the whole family is pressed into service. If there is a nursing baby, it is deposited at the edge of the patch, with the ‘least ones’ to watch it. These cornfields last only a few years, for the soil is soon eroded from their steep sides. Then new areas have their trees girdled, and in time, if they do not fall, they are cut down and the stumps are burned. The burning stumps are picturesque on a dark night.
In some places the corn patches are made on slopes of forty-five to fifty-five degrees. That is ‘the pine-blank truth.’ Aunt Ellen, aged eighty, who had been hoeing in her cornfield high up on the mountain side, lost her balance one morning, rolled end over end to the bottom, and then walked a couple of miles to see me because she was ‘ feelin’ kinder puny.’ She said it was a wonder she ‘did n’t break,’ because she had ‘so little meat on her bones.’ I thought so too.
Every now and then a forest fire will devastate the whole side of a mountain. It is quite terrifying with its onward sweep and ominous dull roar. In the spring I had to circuit such a fire to reach one of my patients. The trail by which I went was so extremely rough that on the return trip, just at ‘the edge of night,’ I thought there would be less risk to go through the burned area. I did not know how Billy would react to the spectre trees still flickering with fire. At times he was doubtful, but with ears erect he gallantly ran the gauntlet; then, leaving fear behind, he took me home at his prettiest running walk.

II

Ever since the shock of my accident, more than a year ago, my heart rebels now and then. Late one afternoon I was resting to quiet its fibrillation when word came that a man had been injured up in the ‘log-wood,’ miles away, and that he was bleeding terribly. I jumped upon Billy, swinging the emergency bags over the saddle, and sallied forth.

The boy who brought the message had vanished. The afternoon was on the wane and a storm was brewing. The dusk settled quickly into darkness, broken by ominous flashes of lightning; then came a crackling thunderbolt, followed soon after by a downpour of rain. Drenched and wind-beaten, Billy and I rode on for an hour, occasional zigzags of lightning revealing that we were still on the trail, when suddenly the figure of a man jumped from behind a tree — not a bandit, but a messenger sent to intercept me in case I had started; ‘for,’ he said, ‘they heared you was bad off, and reckoned that you could n’t come nohow in this boatin’ rain.’ Then he told me that a stretcher had been improvised and the patient had been taken through the ravine below to the settlement.

Back again, down the slippery trail, Billy and I picked our hurried way — back to the office where the man had been brought. His companions had made a rough tourniquet, and nature was helping with clots. Far into the night the men, awe-struck, held flash lights and helped me in repairing the injuries.

We have had a lot of pneumonia, some of the cases desperate. One of these was a boy of seventeen, the apple of his mother’s eye, though eleven others shared her affection. I saw him one afternoon when he seemed to be holding his own fairly well, but before daylight the next morning I was summoned with the report that he was ‘gittin’ wusser.’

The mother met me outside the cabin, saying, ‘He’s past talkin’.’ Inside, I found all the family and some other kin gathered around his bed. The father, with a little old Bible on his knees, was sonorously quoting (for he could not read), ‘The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.’

The boy looked up and said to me in perfectly audible tones, ‘I’m aimin’ to die.’

‘But you are not dying,’ I said, for, feeling his pulse (and, later, taking his temperature), I found that the crisis had passed.

The family, at first skeptical of my reassurance, were finally convinced. ‘’T is the wall of God — he warn’t ready for judgment,’ said the mother.

III

January 1929
Christmas in the mountains is usually celebrated by ructions and shootings.
In some places Santa Claus is unknown, but he found his way into our settlement. For days before the twenty-fifth a crowd of children eagerly awaited the mail-laden mules at our recently installed post office, ready to ‘tote’ the settlement boxes up the hill. When they came, Jasper stirred excitement to fever pitch by shouting, ‘Thar’s dolls in that one. I heared ’em cry when I turned the box upside down.’
Later, when Santa gave out the presents, one little girl literally had her breath taken away when she saw the coveted doll held out to her; with a gasp she recovered herself and extended her arms for the cherished possession, and, hugging it tenaciously, looked tenderly down upon it, oblivious of observers. Another small girl, coming to the tree, was almost immediately summoned home by the death of her father; two hours later she returned in tears, a forlorn little creature fearing that she had missed the chance to get a doll — so natural!
Just beyond my window stands my own Christmas tree — a big pine with brilliant stars twinkling between its branches. We ourselves had the gift of a radio, the only one in these remote mountains. How cosy it made us feel, with the whining wind outside and the lovely strains of Heifetz’s violin within!
The great event of the season was our New Year’s party for the married women and those men who were home from logging. Aunt Sally Ann, who had heard of our good times, made up her mind not to miss the fun this year and, fearing a storm, came the day before. The steep sides of the two mountains that she had to cross were so slippery that no nag could have kept his legs under him, but after her eightytwo years of mountain life she was not to be daunted by such an obstacle. With a staff in her hand and determination in her soul, she footed the five miles of ups and downs. At the party no face reflected greater enjoyment than did her happy wrinkled one.
We served cocoa and doughnuts, having fried the latter in every available moment of our spare time, and had a

present for each guest — sewing bags or something equally useful for the women and ‘ pokes ’ of fruit for the men. A grand time we had with our games, ‘How Do You Like Your Neighbor?’ bringing out peals of laughter.
I find that Old Christmas, January 6, is the really significant Christmas here in the mountains. ‘When the cattle kneel and pray, and the elderberry blooms.’ The day is not marked by any demonstration, but is observed soberly, with a certain reverence and absence of revelry.
Soon after New Year’s, Aunt Mat and Lige came to supper one evening. Later we sat around the big open fire and toasted marshmallows while Aunt Mat told ‘true hant stories’ and Lige picked his banjo and drawled the quaint old ballads ‘Barbara Allen,’ ‘Little Mohee,’ and others.

IV

June 1929
On May 30 our Sunday meeting was held in the little burying ground next to us, where the briers had been mowed and the place tidied up for the occasion. Eliza arrived at the crack of dawn, announcing that, since it was a pretty day, the folks would be coming from all the creeks. And come they did, numbers of them in new attire, many in bright colors, but the older women mostly in black.
These religious meetings serve as social outlets for the people of all ages, from wrinkled grandmothers to the tiniest babies. We sat on the ground under the trees, and in the spaces between the graves. Granny Craig stationed herself beside a pail of water, where she could administer drinks and admonitions to the roaming children. Some mountain preachers work up the emotions of their audiences by gasping and groaning at intervals, but on this occasion the native preacher was content to dwell with much emphasis and a remarkable flow of words upon the wrath of God and the fiery fate awaiting sinners.
At the height of his eloquence, one young fellow who was wandering about in a new suit accidentally revealed a pistol between the tails of his coat. This was too much for some half-drunken men whom he encountered, and a tussle began, the Craigs and Hensleys taking sides. In the struggle that followed, the participants went rolling over and over down the slope. At that moment a child was brought, to me who had fallen down the hill and broken her arm. I started with her to the office, taking the shortest cut, and had lifted the child over a barbed-wire fence and was just hoisting myself over it when pistol shots resounded. The preacher exhorted the people to sit still and pay no heed to the work of the Devil, but the Devil won out, and a rapid disintegration of the audience led to a hasty benediction.
Occasionally we have meetings conducted by a little minister who foots his way over these mountains preaching that God is love. When spring comes, he baptizes his converts in a pool in the creek. It is really an impressive sight in its setting of tender green.
In the spring and fall we go on picnics whenever the opportunity offers itself. Our own household and the neighboring women, hard-worked as they are, enter whole-heartedly into the adventure. We went on such a jaunt only last week. The procession was headed by pretty Mrs. L. on a trim little ‘pieded’ horse, her broad hat flapping in the wind and an umbrella stuck under her arm. Then came handsome Beth T., bareheaded, sitting erect upon her high nag, right regally, like a Boadicea of old; next, little Nancy Ann and her young sister on a cantankerous mule, and so on — a file of fourteen, off to Picture Creek, where, when the water is low, the rocks show the imprint of fossil remains, rattlesnake rattles, lizards, and other strange indentations.
Tying our nags near the trail, we scrambled down the steep banks to the basin below. Many hands made quick fires, boiled coffee, and spread out the food that each had prepared and brought with her. Two of the men had come with us, and were the cause of much laughter when they were made to step lively in helping with these preparations, for men in the mountains are used to being waited upon. Everybody ‘liked it fine,’ and all agreed to go again.
The young people have parties in their cabins. They pull taffy, and, when ‘Paw’s’ religious views do not lead him to look upon dancing as the Devil’s pastime, the beds are put outside and the young crowd, with an occasional older person joining in, runs the set. We ourselves have had a social once a week. As a precaution, we ask the boys to give up their ’guns’ as they enter — which they do, though they probably have others secreted somewhere. If a boy is ‘talkin’ to’ (courting) a girl and another attempts to win her, there is sure to be trouble. Lately some rivalry has developed over a certain girl, and this, added to an already existing bad feeling about a still, made us feel a bit uneasy.
At our last social I noticed that one Martin after another got up and went out into the night. Mazie came to me, saying that we had better call off the party, for she thought the Craigs were planning to shoot up the place. As a matter of fact, the Craigs had men hidden outside, but the Martins had scented trouble and, in order to avoid it on our premises, had quietly slipped away one by one and gone home. The Craigs, however, had been drinking, and after they got on the road they let off steam by shooting wildly for the next half hour. Some of the Martin women, who had decided to spend the night with us, dropped to the floor when the shooting began so that they might not be seen through the windows.
In May we had a dental clinic. My own dentist from Louisville came to do some ‘pullin’ and fillin’.’ Then the Federal trachoma doctor arrived. And recently we have sent some cases of facial cancer to Louisville for radium treatment. One of these patients was a granny of eighty-three. As she was riding off on her mule, her son, aged sixty, put his hand on her arm and said, ‘Mammy, don’t go; I’m afeared for you,’ but her faith in us was strong enough to see her through. Another woman, however, backed out in favor of the charm doctor.

V

January 1930
Recently a messenger came to summon me down Greasy, which was on a rampage. In reaching the settlement, he had crossed two fords in safety, but midway in the third he and his mule were swept along by the current, and they barely escaped. Making land at last, he tied his mule to a tree and picked his way over the mountain on foot. In view of his experience, I decided to go on foot all the way myself, and he thought we might manage it. While I was getting my things together, we began talking about some recent, shootings.
‘Oh,’ said the man, ‘I’ve been indicted five times for willful murder myself.’
‘Good shot, are you?’ someone asked.
‘Got my man every time,’ was the reply.
On another occasion I asked a boy how long he had used a gun. ‘Disremember when I did n’t,’ he said. It is small wonder that the mountain men were picked marksmen during the war.
Several times as I have gone about over these hills my nostrils and a faint thread of smoke have indicated to me the presence of stills; but I resolved when I first came here that I would mind my own business, for if I did not I knew that I should certainly be escorted to the border. When I come across a man carrying a gun and having slung over his shoulders a bag which reveals the unmistakable outlines of Mason jars, he always says he is hunting squirrels — and so he is, as far as I am concerned.
Dave T. says he hates ‘to see the doctor ridin’ off to Cutback on a Sunday, for thar’s drinkin’ and shootin’, and I’m afeared a stray bullet might hit her.’ On the Sunday after Thanksgiving I had to make this trip, and from a ridge I saw a man shot to death. He was suspected of having told where a still was hidden. (He had n’t!) Now we are going to get a loom for his widow so that she can weave ‘kivers’ to support her little children. It is hard lines for a lone woman in the mountains. She has almost no opportunity to support herself except by grubbing the ground and hoeing corn for a neighbor. Becoming utterly discouraged at last, she remarries and starts her hard life over again. No old maids here and only occasional widows!
We are trying to do something for another widow whose husband was shot from behind a tree. When I inquired about the cause of the shooting, the answer was, ‘Oh, I reckon somebody tuk a notion to be shet of him.’ As a rule, mountain men do not shoot from behind trees; they blaze away squarely in the open. In recent years it has become a little more common to ‘put the law’ on offenders, but justice through the courts is slow and it is difficult to get an unbiased jury, as clan loyalty is ‘above the law,’ so a plaintiff sometimes reverts to the old mountain code and lakes the administration of justice into his own hands.

VI

One evening as I was sitting by my lamp I was startled by a shot at the side of the house. I wondered if anybody was ‘aimin’ to pick me off.’ It turned out, however, to be a mountain boy who, being drunk, had fallen by the wayside and, seeing my light, had tried to fire at it so that someone would come out and tell him the way. The incident is one of many which illustrate that logging in this region has brought in its wake much that is undesirable. Formerly the logging was supervised by three splendid mountain men who did their best to keep liquor from the employees and to weed out those who drank, but of late it has come under more lax supervision.

The logging will soon be finished, and I suppose many of the younger men will leave the mountains, for, having tasted of ready money, they will not be satisfied without it. Fortunately, the younger generation is not all of this type by any means. A small group of boys and girls from this vicinity, after surviving the fifth grade and mastering the sixth, entered Pine Mountain School and then went on to Berea College. Among them are two — a boy and a girl — who are planning to matriculate in the Louisville Medical School. In due time they will return to the mountains from whence they came and minister to their own people.

Material conditions hereabout have changed greatly within the last few years. B, L., one of our neighbors, may be cited as a case in point. Whether he came by the wherewithal from moonshine or from selling live stock, he has put it to good use, for a real house now stands where, when I first came, I attended a confinement in a cabin that was little better than a mere shed. I shall never forget that night. At dawn, in wandered cats, dogs, chickens, guinea hens, and pigs. I was able to shoo out all of them but one old razorback; he defied me, and I fired at him everything flingable, including my leather puttees and both of my shoes. In a lucky moment I got the door shut, but he used his snout as a battering ram and pounded it open again just as some neighboring women came to prepare breakfast.

A local man tells me that for every still which flourished in these parts before the war there are now ten. This may be an exaggeration, but there are certainly many more. They pay! The Federal officers sometimes line up as many as twenty culprits at a swoop. The sentences are surely strange. A man may get only two years for killing another, while a boy I know was given five years for being caught going over the mountain with a load of moonshine. This boy was let out on parole pending his trial so that he could help with the crops. His mother remarked plaintively, ‘He’s such a good boy. I’m afeared he ’ll git a pen sentence. But,’ she added brightly, ‘I’ve heared that they feed ’em good and larn ’em to do somethin’.’

Incidentally, the boy married during his parole, and departed to serve his sentence feeling that he was a victim of circumstances. From his point of view, he had done no wrong, morally, in violating what he considered an unjust law. Had not his ancestors made moonshine — ‘clean moonshine’ — for generations?

Recently I came across a woman and four little children working in a small patch, miles from any neighbor. She was wearily digging ‘taters.’ She was young and pretty, but she was downand-out and very sad. She said she was all alone with her ‘young-uns,’her husband being in jail for two years for running a still. She did not know how she could ‘keep goin’,’ but she ‘reckoned ’ she would try. She had a mule, had done her own ploughing in the spring, and had made a ‘crap’ of corn and a garden.

Later the same day I met another woman with ‘a mess of young-uns’ tagging on behind her. Her husband, too, was in the penitentiary. She was returning from an old mine where she had salvaged a bag of coal. Seeing an enormous pistol in her belt, I exclaimed, ‘Why do you wear that?’ She replied, ‘’Cause Jed Tate comes to my place and talks brutish,’ and with eyes blazing she added, ‘I kin use hit, too.’ Jed Tate is not a mountain man, but an outsider who has wandered in with the logging company.

I almost wish these husbands might be like the father of a boy who, when he was asked, ‘Is your pap still in jail?’ replied, ‘Law, no; he’s so mean they jest won’t keep him in jail, but turn him out so’s they can have some peace and satisfaction.’

VII

A year ago last fall, when I returned to the mountains from a vacation, I saw at once that something had happened to Billy. There was a large lump on one of his legs, and a stiff ride made him short of breath. Evidently his heart had been strained. Someone must have ridden him cruelly, but nobody confessed to having done it. I had left strict orders that no one but two people whom I designated was to ride him during the summer, and then only to the school and back.

Some months later I gave up riding him, hoping that he would improve. At first he looked so astonished to see me going off on Bess, the nurse’s horse, that I just had to jump down and give him a pat and a lump of sugar. On almost my last ride with Billy we were going along a narrow trail on the side of a ridge when we suddenly came to a place where the passage was blocked by a landslide. There was no room on the edge of the cliff for me to dismount, and how could Billy turn? Without waiting for me to decide, Billy as usual met the situation and somehow pirouetted around. A man who was watching us from below said that one of his legs slipped, but he carried me back to safety — gay, wise Billy.

I finally discovered that during my absence Billy had been lent to an absolutely irresponsible boy, who had raced him through the mountains all night long in search of someone who was supposed to be lost, and from what I hear he was not ridden single, either. All the following year he slowly but steadily failed, and upon coming back this afternoon I found that he was dead — my beloved horse and faithful companion through all these years. The last time I had him out in the sun he put his head over and rested it on my shoulder, as if to say, ‘ I ’ll carry you no more, old pal.’ He was known hither and yon, and I have been surprised these last few weeks at the number of people who, in passing, have stopped to inquire how he was, ‘the knowingest horse on all the creeks’ and ‘the feistiest horse I ever did see.’

Billy’s work is done, and before long my strenuous activities may come to an end; but it will be with a tugging at the heart that I shall leave this country where life has been so real in its ruggedness and simplicity.

(The End)