White Oak Flats Read online

  WHITE OAK FLATS

  Richard Hood

  Copyright © 2021 by Richard Hood

  All rights reserved. No part of the book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

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  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Cover design by Zach McCain

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  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  White Oak Flats

  About the Author

  Books by the Author

  Preview from Roughhouse by Jeffery Hess

  Preview from I Play One on TV by Alan Orloff

  Preview from Moonlight Sonata by Vincent Zandri

  For Stoney…

  Old-Time Mountain Song

  There’s a place in Tennessee, just across the line,

  No one ever goes up there, it’s too rough a climb,

  You won’t find the name or place wrote on any map,

  Folks down here ’round Shelton’s Trace calls it White Oak Flats.

  Hazel Taylor was my wife, and I loved her so,

  We was married on Shelton’s Trace, fifteen years ago,

  Now I lie here all alone, wonderin’ on the past,

  Wonderin’ why she left our home to go to White Oak Flats.

  I don’t know how he looked at her, I don’t know what he said,

  I don’t know what he could have done, to turn poor Hazel’s head,

  Never in her darkest hour, could she imagine that,

  She’d agree to go with him, up to White Oak Flats.

  I can see the rocky trail up the mountain side,

  I can see poor Hazel, now, lying by his side,

  Folks down here still talks about how it come to pass,

  Nothing but the silence now, up on White Oak Flats.

  PROLOGUE

  Andrew Kayer

  There is a story about the bright wounds of youth and the dim regrets of age. It is about an extraordinary child fearing the old woman she may become and a dying old woman trying to understand the child she once was. It is a story, too, of one moment’s decision to pick up and walk away. And it is about the flashes of violence and the long aching losses leading up to and away from that decision. And of the place, embraced and spurned, in youth and age, and a lifetime of justifying, questioning, measuring, reworking.

  It is a story I found, and, like all true stories, as confused and uncertain as life itself. And yet, it is an arranged and composed tale handed to me by the old woman herself. A series of journal entries, but not left in order, as they were originally written. Rearranged, reordered, rebound, and passed on to me with hardly a word of introduction: “Here, take, read. This is my life.”

  And why me? To be brought into the life of a lonely woman who sits each day in the sun room of a Chicago nursing home, writing. Who has lived in Chicago for almost seventy years, but who seems to exist entirely apart, in a misty land of deep rocky hollows. Yes. I have to take a place within this narrative as well, because, like all listeners—readers—of stories, I have become both character and collaborator myself. And I don’t know whether I became agent or object of the story, whether I am finally the main character or whether I was a mere operative, a scene-shifter, who had to exist in order for the story to play its way out.

  As I write this, I begin to feel her intonation, her inflections, speaking out of the words on the page, as if this were already her memoir we were reading. Because her voice speaks out of my own writing now, now that she has written her last sentence. Sentenced or reprieved herself. Or myself.

  Because this is a story about guilt, too. Although the guilt seems difficult to place. It swells around and seeps into each character, a pool of complicity. Perhaps as much as anything else, this is a story about the spreading wake we throw out with every decision, every speech, every mere gesture. And about the fine and the evil people who inhabit each of us, tumbling and pushing and wrestling for advantage.

  What am I hoping from passing this along? Well I don’t know. I suppose I feel there is something to be learned from watching heroic people who fail. That is, after all, the soul of tragedy, isn’t it? And this may be a tragedy. Mythic. Or it may be an enormous exercise in self-justification. Or neither. It may be merely a record of the everyday storms and stupidities of living. Or of trying to write what you live. Or of trying to attribute meaning, or of trying to pass it—something—along, out of a dark mountainous place inside us all, back and forth, among us all.

  There are some things you need to know to make sense of the record I give to you. First, the majority of the narrative occurs as journal entries written by Hazel Taylor, born Hazel Tighrow, in 1905, in Maddy Creek, on Shelton’s Trace, North Carolina. Who disappeared suddenly and without notice from that community in her twenty-second year. Who appeared to me, some seventy years later, in a nursing home in Chicago. And who, after precious little communication between us, began handing me packages of dense, evocative, writing. Narratives spread back and forth across a seventy-year gap, but focused, insistently, on that single night of her twenty-second year, when she turned back the covers, arose and walked out of her home, marriage, community, to escape the very self she was becoming.

  In fact, there are two discontinuous journals involved. One is the journal kept by Hazel as a girl and young woman, a record that begins on the day of her mother’s death, in 1917, and ends just after Hazel has made her disappearance, in 1927. The second journal was begun many years later, by the elderly Hazel, perhaps in anticipation of death, or in response to the kind of insistent call of memory that comes upon the very old. This latter record was begun in 1996, a few months prior to my meeting her, and it continued until the summer of 1998.

  But I cannot present these writings as either complete or distinct narratives. This is because Hazel herself thinned the earlier journal, like a forester making a partial cut in a stand of cove hardwoods, and then edited and inter-leaved the more recent writings with what she kept from the earlier record. True to the beliefs Hazel had about how the story must be passed on, I have retained the pages in the order she constructed.

  Meanwhile, true to Hazel’s example, I have interspersed the other narratives: collected transcriptions of interviews I taped in a single visit to Shelton’s Trace when, spurred by the vision of an intelligent and passionate young woman, I went in search of this place, and found the husband and one or two other survivors. Although these interviews were all made at the very end of my association with Hazel, they take a place—or places—in the overall volume very similar to Hazel’s own commentary. And so I have put them where I thought they fit, according to Hazel’s own rubric.

  Finally, I have added my own voice, as sparingly as possible, in order to provide a context and perspective on the final period of Hazel’s writing, and because she added some important words during our own conversations that serve as commentary of sorts to what she put on paper. These, too, I have arranged as counterpoints to the journal entries, rather than as appendices or introductions to the entire record.

  In presenting these pieces thus arranged, I hope to give you a fuller sense of the complexity of both Hazel and her story. This is important to me because I care so deeply
for Hazel. More, in this America, where we struggle so hard to recreate values, communities, ideals that never existed in the first place, Hazel’s story—of a real person with extraordinary sensibilities, from a very real, but vanished place—can tell us all something about ourselves as well as the people and places we have made and lost.

  As for Hazel’s place, like her journal, it has two distinct embodiments in this story. The second, current version is of little significance here except to mark the disappearance of the first. I speak here, of course, of a cultural, social disappearance, since the place maintains the same geology, and most of the same flora and fauna. Today, a major portion of the area is owned by the United States Department of Agriculture and makes up a relatively obscure section of the Pisgah National Forest. Whole belts of farmland, entire communities, have reverted to what we today call “the wild.” Wandering near the land that Hazel and George once farmed in overalls and brogans, you will find no cultivated ground. Nor will you hear any banjos. You are far more likely to encounter a fleece-covered vacationer pitching a three-hundred-dollar tent than to see anyone whose ancestors grew up in these deep dark hollows, clearing and farming land that a more fastidious—or a weaker—person would shun. Today, swarms of wealthy Americans attempt to escape from the intolerable, aseptic prosperity they thought they wanted, and to which they have sacrificed time, sensibility, and most of their passionate, fleshly human contacts. They flee to the mountains in a grotesque reversal of Hazel’s flight from them. And they find only themselves: identical middling-wealthy outfitter’s models, squatting in scattered campsites all through these mountains, forlornly cooking freeze-dried delicacies over high tech, lightweight backpacker’s stoves, and cursing each other for spoiling the quiet and the solitude.

  Meanwhile, the dark, balsam-spattered mountains loom over them, eternal and patient. The wind roars through the last of the old hardwoods, with a sound it has made forever, a deep, rounded throb that can only be matched by the huge booming roar of the most abysmal sea, torturing itself with its own power. The bobcat, wary and smart, makes its groaning cough. The bear snuffs in her den.

  The place Hazel knew was more populous than it is today, and yet much closer to the earth, the bobcat, and the wind.

  Focal point of Hazel’s story is one locale, stretched over the southernmost end of Lynco Ridge, a long, narrow serpent of a mountain that runs some twenty miles, northeast-to-southwest, from Southwest Virginia, though the point of East Tennessee, and across the sloping and bulging western boundary of North Carolina, and which provides the source for a fast mountain stream around which Hazel and her kith and kin gathered to live and to farm. The high, bald ridge-butt was known locally as White Oak Flats, though you can’t find that name in registry or map. The same locals believed that the Flats were actually in Tennessee, “just across the line,” but, in fact, the state line turns at this end of the ridge and runs due north-south, bisecting flats and ridge almost perfectly.

  In truth, before the disappearance of Hazel Taylor, White Oak Flats couldn’t be called a place, at all—not so much a reality in space as an idea, the endpoint of space or the headpoint of the unfamiliar, an indication of beyond. A measure of straying. Folks would gesture to it, verbally, as a general indication of the place where nobody goes. It served to enclose the usual, and to mark the outlandish: “I trailed that there bobcat clear up to White Oak Flats,” or “You can look from here to White Oak Flats and you ain’t a’going to find no damn bear.”

  The wide, slowly curved spur of the Flats narrows on its northern end and snakes away as a long, spiny ridge—unusual in itself in this country of close-packed knobs and coves. Coming along the narrow back of Lynco Ridge from the north, you would find the trail dropping to the west, to skirt the final extending crag. And then you would find the trail rising up, opening out, and giving way to a stretch of high bald plateau, enclosed by blackberry and hawthorn. The blunt, three-sided, south butt-end of the ridge leading down from the Flats is uniformly steep, and completely overgrown by scrub second growth—locust, sassafras, blackberry and laurel—wherever the rhododendron hells haven’t yet completed what will one day be total conquest of these slopes. The sole means of access to White Oak Flats is either along the ridge from the north, or up a rocky, declivitous trail that half borders and half partakes of the rushing, perpetually frigid waters of what becomes a big, whitewatered mountain stream, known simply as “the Creek,” that, lower down, will empty into the larger Laurel Creek. At the confluence of these two watercourses is the small, brushchoked island called Possy’s Camp.

  The presence of the Creek explains the presence of Shelton’s Trace, a centuries-old community stretched along a series of natural granite terraces stepping the stream down through three narrow cataracts, known respectively as High Creek, “Maddy” Creek, and Low Creek. Three pools, or “beds,” of water subsequent to each stretch of waterfall have deposited centuries of loam about them, just rich and substantial enough to support a series of tenuous farmsteads, where, eked out by hunting and a little fishing, the people of the community raised their generations of large, hard-working, thoroughly interbred families. Here they cleared, set out, suckered, cured and graded yearly patches of tobacco, meanwhile courting, marrying, breeding, fighting, and establishing fierce connections among three or four family lines: Sheltons, Taylors, Tighrows, Shorts, Blakenships.

  This is the land of fiddle and banjo. Before the New Deal and the TVA, there was virtually no electricity or running water or regular medical care. Disease and death were never far away and hard, scrabbling work was the only answer to the insistent call of hunger and cold. Today, people look upon that time and that place as though it were an embodiment of simple, homespun peace. This stereotype is as far from the truth as it can be. And Hazel, whose life is neither simple nor peaceful, and who defies every image we have of the “mountain woman,” may, in some extraordinary way, represent the enormous range of conflicts, tensions, abstractions, and real, gritty facts abiding in this dark time and place.

  This sketch will, I hope, give you enough of a broad-stroke representation upon which Hazel can make her more detailed marks. Listen to her.

  PART ONE

  I.

  JOURNAL OF HAZEL TAYLOR May 10, 1996

  I have to write about these things, because, long ago, I was involved in the killings, and the disappearances. And I have never determined who was perpetrator, who was victim…or at whom to point the accusing finger. So I suppose I have to start with me. I will try to write about this, and I will bring-out some writing I did back during the time. And perhaps I—or we—can come to some decisions.

  But there is no real way to begin this, because there’s no starting point to anything, no point where I have instantly become the self I believe myself to be today. Shuttered away in my past are those processes and progressions that have accumulated to become today and that we try in vain to pinpoint as turnings, or revelations, or what the poet calls them: sudden rightnesses. They aren’t there. Nothing is sudden and certainly nothing is right, everything is only what it has become while it’s on the way to becoming something else. No I, no just now, no summing up. Can’t be done.

  And still we sit and attempt the telling. I suppose that’s the human thing, the attempt at telling, the pretence of moment, even when it’s the very telling that exposes the illusion. It wasn’t like that at all. However you try…

  They used to put coal cinders on the asphalt road at the head of the holler, leading into town. I can see one as I remember it: a hard blueblack, glossy in semicircle, in oily purplish, its other half rough and misshapen, and unreflecting, like a glassy marble half covered in burnt caramel, except hard, hard as the marble. Actually, this, too, is impossible to describe, since I have to tell you about two things: the marble and the caramel, and the cinder isn’t like that at all. It would not be what it was without the both: a blueblack glassysmooth sphere would no more remind me of a cinder than would a rough, lavalike
whole. One thing, indescribable.

  They would dump these cinders in the narrow road every now and again, and spread them out as a surface for folks to drive on. When they did that, the coal oil smell would suffuse the air. And without your knowing it, through the slow summer, the smell and the cinders themselves would gradually disappear, until, by autumn, you couldn’t see any on the road. There were always a few along the side. You could always find a few. But only those out of all those piles of cinders dumped and distributed, inches thick, just a few months ago.

  Whenever they first spread the cinders, you couldn’t walk on the road. The sharp, hard edges would bruise and skin your bare feet. So you had to walk on the side, in the greens and sedge, where, once in awhile, you’d “tromp up a cinder,” as Georgie said, and feel the deep bruise set into the bottom of your foot. But later those cinders had melted down, or spread out, or whatever miracle had slowly transformed them without your knowing it. And now you walked on the cool, smooth road again.

  Or if there are important moments, they’re not the ones we name in our tellings. More likely, they’re moments of emptiness. I remember lying in the grass on the open side of Timb’s Hill, after walking up the Creek from Badie’s. And I cherish that lying in the grass. And luxuriating in that feel of tiredness and energy, another contrary, the sun warm in cool air, you know what I mean, fresh breeze on my face but my overalls hot where my thighs pressed them. You know what I mean. Some kids playing ball on a field on down below the curve of hill, the slow swing of bat and, later, the chunk of sound, and the high, thin voices that made my patch of grass on the hillside seem even stiller. Emptier.