At 2:17 that afternoon, Betty Whitman was nursing her thirteen-month-old son. She sat rocking gently, dreamily reading of Jean Harlow in a movie magazine. She jerked and gasped when the baby bit her. He had teethed early and it was happening too often. She promised herself this was the last breast-feeding and went back to her magazine.
The second time he bit her she cried out. She pulled his mouth away and watched the blood gush down her side. She put the baby on the floor and stood up. She took three steps with her hand clutched to her breast and fainted. The baby looked at her a moment and began toddling toward her.
Mavis Sizemore was a slatternly woman of indeterminate age who managed a tenuous existence by washing and ironing for other people. Her small house, connected to the town by a narrow foot bridge across Indian Creek, was as weary and woebegone as she. The back yard contained a small vegetable garden, an outhouse, a pen of disreputable-looking chickens, two scrawny pigs and several clothes lines partially filled with drying clothes. Two black cast-iron washpots sat on kindling fires, each nearly filled with boiling water. Into one Mavis poured a can of lye and a syrup pail of cracklings left over from lard-making. She stirred the mixture with a wooden paddle and then wiped at her pewter-colored, sparrow's nest hair with the back of her hand.
She moved wearily to a galvanized washtub and drew soapy clothes from it, scrubbed them on a rub board and then transferred them to the other boiling pot. She punched at them with a cut-off broom handle, long ago bleached white and fuzzy, to make sure they were submerged. She left the clothes to boil and returned to the first pot, testing the contents with a chicken feather. The feather emerged blackened and curled. She added more cracklings and again stirred the thickening mixture. Her face was red and sweaty from the heat and her hands were mottled from too much lye soap and stained with bluing.
Mavis had faulty genes and in her hazy lifetime had produced eight stillbirths and Danny. She had never been married. Danny shuffled across the footbridge and came around the side of the house still lovingly engrossed with his quarter.
Her suet-colored lips began moving, making sounds at Danny. He heard them vaguely, but they meant nothing. He had long ago stopped trying to make sense of the sounds or of the woman. This was only where he went when he was sleepy or hungry. She knocked the quarter from his hand and slapped his face.
Her flesh was like putty and tasted of soap.
Not far from Asheville, North Carolina, an unpaved road leaves the state highway and wanders upward into the Blue Ridge. The road follows the path of least resistance; around hillsides of rhododendron; over ridges of white pine, yellow pine and spruce; through valleys of hemlock, laurel and dogwood. For the most part it follows Indian Creek, a wild mountain stream, which eventually flows into the French Broad. It crosses the stream numerous times on trestle bridges of ancient timber, and then will stray away when the path of least resistance leads elsewhere.
The road passes through a few scattered villages and skirts an occasional farm or logging camp. There is less and less traffic as it penetrates deeper into the mountains. Those who live there have little reason to leave, and outsiders have even less reason to enter. The road rejoins Indian Creek near the logging town of Utley and becomes even more tentative as it passes through the village.
From there it rises sharply for some twenty miles to pass, with the creek, through a gap in the mountain called Morgan's Cleft. The pass and the village beyond were named for Cleatus Morgan, leader of the original settlers in the high valley. Once through the gap, the road and the stream straighten and follow the approximate center of the wide valley to the township.
Past the Church of the Nazarene, the road dwindles to little more than a pair of wheel ruts separated by grass and wild flowers. It divides many times along the fifteen-mile length of the valley; each division ending at a lonely farm.
The Colonials who settled here had intended to go on to Tennessee but found themselves at a dead end. After a brief consultation with the other families, Cleatus Morgan decided this rich and fertile valley, though practically insulated from the outside world, was a definite windfall. So they settled in and prospered by their own standards. Indian Creek, which ran pure and bright and teemed with fish, provided power for a gristmill; the valley and surrounding heights were thick with Virginia deer, wild turkeys, dove and quail. Little was needed from the outside.
Orvie Morgan, direct descendant of Cleatus Morgan and heir to the choicest farm in the valley, drove toward town with his five-year-old son at his side. The shiny black Model A Ford, one of only five automobiles in the valley—not counting the Mercantile's Model T truck—clattered and bounced in the wheel ruts. The tufted tops of the wild grasses in the center flicked against the axles with small unheard sounds. The time was 2:17 p.m. on Thursday afternoon.
Little Cleatus Morgan, this generation's proud bearer of the ancestral name, took his father's arm in his small hands.^ Orvie turned his head and smiled fondly at his son. The smile became a grimace of consternation when Little Cleatus's tiny sharp teeth sank in. Orvie's arm was hard muscled but the bite still brought blood.
Orvie pushed the child away with a sharp, puzzled exclamation. Little Cleatus returned with single-minded ferocity and clamped his teeth on his father's shoulder. Orvie twisted in the seat to disengage the child. His foot pressed harder on the accelerator. The narrow tire on the front wheel struck a stone in the rut and cut sharply into the high grass. The car careened through a low growth of dogwood, flushing a flock of doves which filled the air with gray blurs and whistling wings.
Orvie pinioned his son to the seat with his bleeding arm and fought the steering wheel with one hand. But it was too late. The left front wheel spun on air. The car tipped over with maddening slowness, and slid down the embankment on its roof. The glass shattered in the windshield. The car tipped again, rolled onto its wheels, then toppled once more to land upside down in Indian Creek.
Orvie's head twisted loosely with the movement of the water, his hair flowing like dark sea grass. Red flumes stretched farther and farther, leaving his head, shoulder and arm and exiting through the empty windshield frame.
Little Cleatus fought like a trapped rat, tearing at his father's arm, clawing with his fingernails. Bubbles oozed from his nostrils and from between his clenched teeth. But he could not break Orvie's protective grip. Orvie drowned and, with love, took his would-be murderer with him.
Meridee Callahan put her hands to the small of her back and stretched. The nagging ache under her fingers eased slightly but resumed when she relaxed. She sighed and looked at her swollen abdomen. Only one more month, she thought and smiled. "I can take it if you can/' she said out loud and patted her stomach.
She smoothed the chenille bedspread where she had taken a nap and looked at the clock. It was almost two and she had a lot of work still undone. Robbie had wanted old Ludie Morgan to help her out now that her time was drawing close. But, as much as Meridee hated to admit it, she simply didn't get along with her Grand-aunt Ludie. The old woman meant well, she supposed, but she was bossy, meddling, gossipy, righteous and had enough superstitions to do the whole valley.
Meridee lifted the cuptowel and checked the bread she had put on the back of the Sunshine stove to rise. She nodded with satisfaction. She opened the door of the firebox and stirred the coals, added shavings and kindling, let it catch, and added wood. She moved the bread pans to the kitchen cabinet away from the heat. She took a mixing bowl and a pan of string beans she had picked that morning and went to sit in the shade on the front porch.