The Path Was Steep (14 page)

The thought woke me, and I concentrated on driving and clung to the middle of the road. When a car showed its lights, I inched to the right of the white line and blessed the mastermind that had conceived it and the engineers and workmen that had painted it in the exact center of the road. Faith and prayer brought us safely past the oncoming car; then it was back to the middle of the road as we traveled onward.

Thunderbolt, sluggish but game, toiled bravely. The sleepers sighed or snored softly. A moist wind chilled my cheek. Were the girls cold? I had put light sweaters on them. Thunderbolt’s roar became the hum of bees. I jumped, woke, and searched for my lifeline. There it was—dangerously to the right! A car approached, blew his horn, then swerved to the left to miss us. In his lights, I saw how near we had come to driving into a chasm at the left.

Fright kept me awake for a time; then drowsiness fell again. I suffered at the wheel and thought in anger of those who snored away in the back. Little did they care what happened. I couldn’t drive anyhow and was half asleep myself. My eyes just wouldn’t stay open. We were entering Knoxville, a city famous for its narrow, crooked streets. Our money was almost gone. We couldn’t stay on the road much longer. With grim determination to get home, I drove into Knoxville.

The wicked, white fog changed to black; then the blast of a horn woke me. I’d stopped in the middle of the street. A bus, too wide to pass, blew his horn profanely. I started the motor, shot into low gear, and darted to the right.

The bus gave a last angry blast as he passed me, and I saw an arrow pointing the other way to Bristol. “I’ve taken the wrong road,” I wept. In my drugged state, I forgot that I’d never learned to back the car. I threw the lever into reverse, backed an inch, killed the motor as another bus passed. Thunderbolt bucked and jolted, but somehow I turned around in the middle of that narrow street, inching forward, then backward, and we drove on toward Bristol.

To stay awake, I began to slap my face—a stinging blow that would wake me for a moment. “Sue,” Papa chuckled, “if you need a whipping, I’ll give you a good one.”

“Huh? What?” David woke and sat up. “You driving?” he cocked a dazed eye at me. “Don’t you know you’ll kill us all? Where are we?”

“A few miles past Knoxville.”

“You drove through Knoxville! Are you crazy!”

“Just sleepy,” I said, too tired to fight. I pulled over, stopped Thunderbolt, and changed places with David. Karl and the girls slept heavily. Papa nodded. With David under the wheel now, I slept, too.

It was foggy daylight when we stopped at a service station. “I want to eat,” Davene announced.

“I’m hungry.” Sharon stared at donuts in the window of a small cafe. We crawled stiffly from the car, stretched our legs, went to the rest room, then to breakfast. The children, too hungry to talk, ate bacon and eggs and swigged coffee almost thick with cream and sugar. A donut each finished off their meal.

Back in the car we piled. Karl, awake now and certainly sober, drove again. David and the girls settled comfortably and slept as if they’d never heard of strong coffee. A cold wind chilled us.

Karl roared along at seventy miles an hour.

“I’m cold.” Sharon woke and began to cry.

“I’m freezing.” Davene accompanied her.

Karl didn’t lessen his speed as he pulled down his curtain. It stuck and he looked to see what was wrong. Alerted to danger as the car slowed, David woke. “Slow down!” he said. “Are you crazy? Slow down!”

But he was too late.

The road, newly built, was eleven feet high. A row of houses ran along below the built-up highway. Thunderbolt swerved, sprang forward, and was airborne for a moment.

“Keep this car in the road!” David yelled, uselessly.

Karl, unfortunately, was too frightened to even try to steer the car. His hands had frozen to the wheel. Thunderbolt touched earth the way he had headed and bolted down the eleven-foot drop.

Both of my hands automatically held the girls, one on either side of me, and I was helpless when it came to myself. My head hit the back of the front seat again and again as the car lurched and thumped down the steep side of the roadbed.

After David’s shout, none of us spoke. We were too busy and too frightened. There was only the jolting, rending noise the car made and the thump of my head against the back of the seat. Rending, crashing sounds came amid the squawk of chickens, and finally the car halted.

I looked to see that the girls were all right; then, my strength gone, I leaned weakly against the back seat, with closed eyes.

“Mother’s dead!” Sharon tried to pry my eyelids open.

“I’m all right, darling,” I managed to whisper, and opened my eyes. It took a great effort. Then as strength returned, I examined Sharon and Davene more carefully. They didn’t have a scratch or a bruise. But a goose egg as large as the one given me by the flowerbox was on my forehead. One thing was sure, if the old head held out, the girls would always be all right. True, I was young and perhaps a little bit stupid, but instinct as old as Mother Eve guided me, made me forget injury to myself and hold onto my babies.

All of us were dazed for a few minutes. People crowded around the car and looked at us anxiously. Someone opened the back door, someone else opened the front door on the other side, and we were helped out of the car. David examined the damage to car and to property. How we escaped with so little injury, none of us could understand. There had certainly been terrific force to stop the car. Two oak fence posts had been uprooted, two small oak trees were severed, and two hens had been killed. The car rested an inch from the pillar of the house. That close we had been to possible death.

“Oh, we killed your chickens.” I wept from relief, in a sort of daze. “We’ll pay for them.”

“I don’t want pay. You are all alive, thank God!” a tall man said. He was the owner of house, chickens, posts, and trees, we learned.

“But we have damaged your property,” David said.

“Don’t mind that! No one was killed!” The man began to weep.

“They built that road too high,” a woman told us. “Lots of people have had accidents. He ran off and . . .”

Except for my head bump, all of us were all right, but the car was a total wreck, it seemed. It would never, never run again. We were more than a hundred miles from home, almost broke, and certainly could not pay for a bus ride.

David and everyone examined the car. “It is ruined. We’ll never get it up that bank,” Karl said.

“Looks like you are right, son,” Papa agreed.

The left fender and left bumper were so badly bent that the tire could not move, even if the motor would run. David walked around it several times, bent, examined fender and bumper. “Do you have any iron tools?” he asked the man.

“A crowbar and a few other things.”

“We can straighten the fender and the bumper,” David announced.

“But that fender is strong!” Karl said. “Look what it did—broke two oak posts and cut down two small oak trees.”

“We can straighten them enough so that the car will run,” David insisted. When the man brought the crowbar, David’s muscles plus his strong willpower did the trick. He did straighten the bumper and the fender, enough to give room for the tire to move. Thank goodness, for due to their strength, nothing else—neither tires, doors, nor even the sides of the car—had been damaged.

And what a car Thunderbolt was! David started the motor; it bellowed and roared proudly. He backed, turned until he faced the highway, then decided it was better to try to go up at the angle we had come down—not straight up, but veering a little, crawling up the side to the road—but this was too much even for Thunderbolt. He just couldn’t make it up that steep hill.

“Not another car would go through what this one did and even start,” Papa said.

“If some of you will push,” David turned to the men who had gathered.

About six of them put their hands and shoulders to the rear of the car. Thunderbolt growled, struggled, and slowly climbed that high roadbed until he was safely on the highway.

We waved to the good people below and were off. Coming to a filling station, we stopped for gas. David’s pocket was almost empty, but I found some change, enough to buy all of us a Coke. “I’ll pay for them,” Papa insisted.

“No, Papa. We pay,” I said, so firmly that he knew I meant what I said.

David whispered to me, “We don’t have enough to buy gasoline to go the long way home.”

“So?” I said and began to shake once more. I knew the alternative.

“We’ll have to take the Jumps again,” David stated.

I had promised myself that never, so long as I lived, would I ride over that road again—that I would walk before enduring that. But I knew that the six of us couldn’t walk more than a hundred miles. We didn’t even tell Karl and the children. No need to try to tell Papa. No one could tell about that road. You had to ride over it yourself to understand.

David’s face was grim as we entered the car and headed once more for “the worst road in the United States.”

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. We’d planted McCaslins, even better than Kentucky Wonders, we thought. Papa asked to gather the beans, refused to take a basket, but stacked them across his arm like firewood. “A foot long,” he marveled, “and as thick as my thumbs.” Along with his corn patch tale, Papa told of our beans.

We pointed out other glories of West Virginia: dark hemlocks, apples growing wild, mountains full of wild flowers. “Isn’t it beautiful?” I’d ask.

“Yes, but take Alabama now . . .” Loyally, he always found something better at home.

“Nights are so hot at home and so cool here,” I’d say just to hear his defense.

Papa’s fidelity never wavered. “Well, now, takes heat to ripen watermelons.” That silenced me for a time. David’s melons, planted so hopefully, never did ripen to the point of sweetness.

“We sleep under blankets all summer,” David stated.

“I’d rather sleep without cover.” Papa was undaunted.

At twilight the second night, we all sat on the porch. I took sweaters for the girls and put on a coat.

“Better get your coat,” David advised Papa.

“A coat? Why, it is almost this cool at home,” Papa said, ever loyal. We talked; Papa chewed his tobacco, David smoked his handmade cigarettes. Chill crept down from the mountains. Papa talked bravely on.

The thermometer took another drop.

At last, Papa slipped into the house and returned wearing his coat. “It is just a little cool,” he admitted.

Score one for West Virginia!

Davene, in Papa’s lap, nodded her head and flourished her hands in exact imitation of his. But this wasn’t enough like her idol. “Papa,” she said, “you got another chew of that tobacco?”

Papa met people and talked to everyone. Religion, Alabama, politics, Alabama. An ardent Democrat, Papa seemed to think he’d invented the blaze that was Roosevelt. Yet he was a little kinder to Hoover than most people. “We’ve had Depressions before,” he said. “Panics, we called them. Things will get better.”

He loved the mountaineers, and they, usually suspicious of “furriners,” loved him in return. Men loved Papa. Women too, especially women, and he had an eye for a pretty face until the day he died.

Papa liked his whiskey, too. As a child it had always been in his home. Before the mad cry that brought on Prohibition, most homes kept a bottle of the “medicine,” and hot toddies were not immoral. Even my sainted grandmother, as already mentioned, took her hot toddy daily. “I love the taste of whiskey,” she’d say. But her religion prevented her taking more than the one teaspoonful daily.