I
Granpap accrued to me along with a farm in the Unakas. When I learned
that my inheritance lay, or rather rose, in the Unakas, it at once
passed from prose to poetry. My hundred hills became tipped with
song, bloom calling to bloom from Three Pine Point to Sunrise Spur,
and Blackcap answering from his hemlock shroud with a melodious shake
that did no harm to his hidden acres of anemone and trillium. The
laurel, polished as by the glance of a god, drew a richer green from
its storehouse across a paltry breadth of sky, in the sun. The great
chestnuts leafily defied the blight that was creeping to their hearts.
And where the gray rocks pushed through the living emerald of the
mountain walls, they too seemed listeningly alive, as if in wait for
the key-word that would swing them open on Persia magnificent; though
they needed to borrow no glamour of age from any part of the world.
Unakas! Spenser, under English beeches, rustled his threefold coverlet
of centuries, and began another dream--dream of a region that was old
to God before Helvellyn rose or the Himalayas shone as the planet’s
crest.
In the wake of a Muse so sure of foot, I entered my forest a little
stumblingly. The first cabin was Granpap Merlin’s. His welcoming
“Howdy” only slightly interrupted his dinner of corn-pone and pickled
beans. But Poesy kept at my ear, swiftly picturing me fields like
blowing seas; gallant stalks with waving green arms, and tassels
flowing, silver, gold, and rose, in the breath of July dawns. With a
thrust into memory, she brought up a rock maize-mill of my childhood,
left by the Indians in an abandoned cave; and chanted the one magic
line of Lanier’s poem. As for beans, I had seen them in blossom, hiding
their pinkness under round, hugging leaves, and not even their passage
through a brine barrel could convert them into mere pabulum. It was a
fitting meal for a mountain seer.
“Did you grow the corn that made the meal that made that pone?” I
asked, building Jack’s house in the excitement of getting back to the
land.
“It growed itself. I planted it.”
“And you ploughed the field that grew the corn, and so forth?”
“My mule, Tim, ploughed it. I ploughed Tim.”
His face, like the broken corner of a boulder, did not tell me whether
he was simply, or contemptuously, laconical.
“This seems rather high for corn land,” I said, in the tone of
ownership. He must at least know that I had read the Farmers’ Bulletins.
“Wait till you see it growin’. The corn gets so onhandy big and shady
in Hawk Wing Cove, you can see the lightnin’-bugs in thar by daylight.
But ’tain’t easy ploughin’. Twenty-five acres of straight up and down.”
“Oh, I’ve heard of that cove. From the head of it one can see seven
curves of the river.”
“If you look from the door thar, you can see the top of the ridge
’tween them two peaks.”