Hill Towns Read online

  ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

  HILL TOWNS

  This book is in memory of my father,

  MARVIN RIVERS,

  who would have loved a Tuscan odyssey; and for Cliff and Cynthia, who did.

  “Only the very young can live in Eden. Innocence prolonged ignores experience; knowledge denied becomes a stone in the head.”

  ANDREW LYTLE

  “I remember Rome chiefly as the place where Zelda and I had an appalling squabble.”

  SCOTT FITZGERALD, LETTER, 1922

  Contents

  ONE

  WHEN I WAS FIVE YEARS OLD I MADE A COLDLY…

  TWO

  I MARRIED HIM ON THE AFTERNOON OF MY GRADUATION FROM…

  THREE

  “THERE ARE THESE BANDS OF GYPSY CHILDREN, REALLY SMALL KIDS…

  FOUR

  EVEN BEFORE WE LEFT—WEEKS BEFORE, IN FACT—THE WORLD…

  FIVE

  THAT NIGHT I GOT DRUNK WITH SAM FORREST. IF IT…

  SIX

  ON MY FIRST MORNING IN ROME I SLEPT LATE. IT…

  SEVEN

  WE MET SAM THE NEXT MORNING IN THE PIAZZA NAVONA…

  EIGHT

  WE CAME INTO VENICE AT DAWN, BUT AS SAM HAD…

  NINE

  WE MET AT FLORIAN’S THE NEXT MORNING FOR CAPPUCCINO AND…

  TEN

  THERE WAS A NOTE. I PICKED IT UP FROM AMID…

  ELEVEN

  HE CAUGHT A COLD. OF COURSE HE DID. JOE, WHO…

  TWELVE

  THEY LEFT EARLY THE NEXT MORNING FOR SIENA, ADA AT…

  THIRTEEN

  YOLANDA SENT ME THE OLD WAY. IT TOOK MUCH LONGER…

  FOURTEEN

  WE NEVER DID EAT DINNER. I THINK I KNEW WHEN…

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PRAISE

  BOOKS BY ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  1

  WHEN I WAS FIVE YEARS OLD I MADE A COLDLY DESPERATE decision to live forever in a town on a hill, and so I have, from that terrible night in June until this one, thirty-seven years and one month later. If it has been bad for me, as many people these days seem to be telling me, I can only consider that anything else at all would have been worse.

  “They never saw it coming; they didn’t know what hit them,” everybody said after my parents were struck and killed by a speeding truck on the old chain bridge over Tolliver’s Creek. After that, I knew as simply and unalterably as a child knows anything that staying alive meant always being able to see what was coming. Always knowing what might hit you. So when my father’s parents, kind and substantial Virginians from the Tidewater who might have given me every advantage, made to take me home with them after the funeral, I simply screamed and screamed until, in despair, they left me behind with my mother’s eccentric people, who lived on the top of the mountain where my parents had died. I had great affection for my Virginia grandparents and little for the erratic, reclusive Cashes, who were strange even in that hill country, where strangeness is king, but the ramshackle, overgrown Cash house commanded the Blue Ridge foothills in all directions. From there I would always know what was coming. From there I would see it long before it saw me.

  I could not have explained this at age five, of course; I have only recently become fully aware of it. Then, I only knew that on the mountain I was safe and off it I was not. Everything in my small being strained after my grandmother and grandfather Compton as they drove away from the sly, sunless home of my Cash grandparents in their sedate old Chrysler that sunny afternoon; I felt as if sunlight and laughter and gentleness and childhood itself were rolling away with them. But the new flatland fear was stronger. When I turned my face into the sagging lap of my grandmother Cash, she thought I wept in sorrow for my parents and said for the first of a thousand times, “That’s all right. You done right. You stay here with your own kind. Your mama wouldn’t be lyin’ there in her grave if she’d of stayed with her own kind.”

  But I’m not your kind, I remember thinking as clearly as spring water. I don’t need you. It’s your house I need. It’s this mountain.

  It was, I realize, an extraordinary insight for a small child. And it did not surface again for more than thirty years. Still, the power of it served. It held me on the Mountain through everything that came afterward, all those years that seem in retrospect to have been lived in a kind of green darkness, until I met Joe Gaillard in my senior year at Trinity College and the last lingering darkness took fire into light.

  When I told him about my parents’ death—and I remember it was long after I met him, only days before he proposed to me—he cried. I stared at him doubtfully; no one had ever cried upon hearing the manner of their deaths, and some few laughed outright, nervous, swiftly stifled laughter. Even I had not cried after that first obliterating grief. I was not too young to perceive that they had somehow simply died of ludicrousness. I learned early to parrot laughter along with the children at Montview Day School, where my Compton grandparents’ absentee largesse sent me, when they taunted me with it: “Cat’s mama and daddy fucked themselves to death!” “Hey, Cat! Wanna go out and hump on the bridge?”

  Later, when I began to perceive the dim shape of their meaning, I stopped laughing and began fighting. By the time I was ten, I was on the brink of being expelled for aggression. Time and Cora Pierce’s influence put a stop to that, but I still hear the laughter sometimes, in the long nights on the Mountain.

  “I’m lucky you weren’t a serial murderer or a Republican,” I told Joe later. “I’d have married you anyway. It’s pretty obvious I would have married the first man who didn’t wince and grin a shit-faced grin and say, ‘Well, at least they died happy.’”

  “I wasn’t crying for them; they probably did die happy, at that,” he said. “I was crying for you. Nobody should laugh at a child’s grief. Nobody. Ever.”

  “Well, it wasn’t at my grief, exactly,” I said. “It’s just—you can see why it’s funny, in an awful sort of way, can’t you? I mean, there they were out on that bridge, just going to town, and here comes this chicken truck—”

  “Nobody,” Joe said fiercely. “Never. Not under any circumstance. Jesus Christ, when I think what that laughter must have taught you about the world—”

  “It taught me never to screw on bridges,” I said, and he did laugh then, the exuberant, froggy laugh that always made people’s lips tug up involuntarily at the corners. I knew he was laughing largely because I wanted him to. Joe was a lovely man then, in the supple greenness of his twenties.

  My father was a tall fair boy who came to Trinity College because his father and grandfather had come before him; and before them his great-grandfather Cornelius Compton, an Episcopal bishop of modest fame in the South, had helped to found the university. There had been Comptons at Trinity since the beginning. The theological seminary, Compton Hall, bore their name, and young Corny Compton IV from the Tidewater was destined to take his place in the southern Episcopal hierarchy of the last half of the twentieth century. He had, everyone assured his proud parents, a real passion for the ministry.

  Instead he met my mother in the village at the start of his senior year, in our lone dry cleaning establishment. She had come down from the Cashes’ old home, hidden away on the very top of Morgan’s Mountain, to make a little money and see a little life, and all his fine passion fled the church in a rush and poured into her. Literally, probably. They were married by the New Year, and I appeared in the earliest days of May. I was a quiet child who absorbed a great deal of grown-up talk, and while I was still small I came to know that my mother and father had done it practically the day they met and whenever afterward they could, and I was lucky they stopped doing it long enough to marry and give me a name. I knew wha
t “it” was, too, vaguely; I heard them so often in the night and sometimes in the daytime, whispering and laughing and then breathing in that sharp, short way, and finally moaning and shouting aloud, that I ceased to be curious about what actually transpired and never even bothered to spy on them. I suppose I assumed that everybody’s parents were the same. It did not bother me at all; I truly believe they loved each other profoundly as well as lusted after each other, and much of that love overflowed onto me. We were a happy little family, even though both sets of my grandparents predicted nothing for us but ruin.

  If they had lived there probably would have been more children. Despite my mother’s assiduous use of the pill, the law of averages would have undoubtedly caught up with them sooner or later. My father barely managed to graduate from Trinity between bouts in bed; as one of my Cash aunts observed, “His brains must of leaked out, his fly was unzipped so often.” His grades were flaccid and his ambition flown, and after commencement he simply stayed on in Montview and got a job at the hardware store. The same aunt said he took it because it was the only thing he could find where he could come home and bang my mother at lunchtime. I don’t believe that aunt ever married.

  By the time I was five my parents had still not let up much and were becoming adventurous in their choices of arenas. I was now old enough to lift from sleep and bundle into the back seat of their old Nash, and they would range the mountain on moonlit nights, laughing and fondling each other, my mother reaching back to check on my blankets and send me back into sleep with a pat, and when they found a spot that was inviting, and later one that demanded a certain amount of daring, they simply stopped the Nash, made sure I was asleep, and got out and did it under the cold smile of the moon. I think they were probably becoming a little jaded, a little flown with the sheer audacity of the spots they chose, by the time they died. The old chain-hung bridge over Tolliver’s Creek was daunting even in daylight; it hung a good fifty feet in midair over the white-rushing water below, with space above and below and all around it. I hated it even before that night.

  But it must have swayed gently and irresistibly before them in its frail emptiness that June night, because they parked the Nash on the far side, off on the ferny verge, and left me sleeping in it, and went onto the middle of the bridge and took off their clothes and began to make love, and it was during their final blinded and deafened transports of that love that Leon Crouch, drunk in his father’s chicken truck, caromed onto the bridge and smashed them off it and onto the granite rapids below. If they weren’t dead when they went off, they most surely were as soon as they hit. It was a closed-casket funeral, a disgrace nearly tantamount to the manner of their death in the Cash family.

  I did not hear the truck coming. I did not hear it hit them. I only heard, an instant later, the squall of brakes and Leon Crouch shouting over and over, “Holy shit! Oh, holy shitfire Jesus Lord!”

  And then, when he found me in the back seat of the Nash, “Goddamn those trashy fuckers! Right in front of their baby!”

  It was as good an epitaph as any for Rosellen and Cornelius Compton in the eyes of the Mountain, and it was most assuredly the start of a consensus. After that, most of the tears shed for them were, at least in part, tears of embarrassed laughter. Only mine and perhaps my grandparents’ were pure, and even mine were inward.

  Trinity College crowns the flat summit of Morgan’s Mountain in south Tennessee like a mortarboard or a forage cap, or perhaps a bishop’s miter, apt similes all. It was born just after the Civil War (referred to on the Mountain as the War for Southern Independence) expressly to serve the southern dioceses of the Episcopal Church in the Christian education of its young gentlemen. It was modeled, as perfectly as human frailty allowed, after the venerable Anglican colleges of England and held together during its hardscrabble early years by the unspent passion of a great many unemployed Confederate officers. Many southern bishops blessed it, and not a few came to teach there. Several still do. Widows of Confederate officers or Episcopal clergymen were its first housemothers. Early on, it became an indulgent little joke that “Trinity” in the college’s case referred to God the Father, God the Son, and General Robert E. Lee.

  Succeeding generations of Trinitarians have found no cause to scuttle the joke. God the Father and God the Son are still manifestly present in the mellow gray dimness of All Souls Chapel and Compton Seminary, and General Lee’s portrait, flanked by draped Confederate flags and crossed dress sabers, still hangs in Commons.

  The education presided over by these eminences is unalterably classical liberal arts and generally first rate in spite of it, and for that reason many undergraduates are now drawn from all parts of the country and even the world. Very few these days come to be molded by God and Robert E. Lee for life and service in the vanished world of the Christian gentlemen’s South, and many new students come up the Mountain for the first time prepared to jeer. Even those of us whose permanent world it is often laugh at Trinity’s sheer hubris of intent and tradition; the “Trinity experience” no longer fits one to live anywhere but Trinity, it’s often said at faculty doings on the Mountain.

  But those who remain do not wish to leave. And the young who enter laughing and stay to graduate almost always go out into the world off the Mountain taking with them the swish of invisible academic gowns and a set of near-chivalric values. There is enormous power in these old gray stones, cloistered away up here on Morgan’s Mountain. They bend reality and stop time. I do not wonder that Trinity produces so few successful junk bond salesmen and politicians. The daily subliminal infusions of honor are an effective lifelong purgative for a great many contemporary ambitions. I sometimes imagine that the last sound new graduates hear as they roll out under the stone arch that marks the southern-most boundary of the Domain, as we call it, is the triumphant laughter of long-dead bishops and generals.

  Much of Trinity’s power lies in its sheer beauty. The Mountain and the village of Montview are almost phantasmagorical in their loveliness. There are to me no mountains on earth so beautiful as these. They are among the oldest in the world smoothed now to the curves of a sleeping woman’s body. They roll across the middle South in symmetrical soft, misted waves. Morgan’s Mountain sits a little apart from the rest, a last convulsion that marks the dying of the Appalachian chain. And green: green everywhere, always, all the greens of the entire earth, each to its own season. The top of Morgan’s Mountain is a globe of pure green swimming suspended in the thin, clear blue air of the southern highlands. It comes eventually to be the only air where permanent Trinitarians can thrive. We are unfit, I have always thought, to breathe other richer, ranker air for long.

  That dreaming old beauty is the snare, of course. Those who do not need it do not stay. A high percentage of freshmen and sophomores do not return. Some flunk out, but many simply bolt back to the rich, comforting stench of the world. Those who stay need bells in their ears, and plainsong, and countless angels dancing always on the heads of pins. And after all, the world is lucky that relatively few do stay; what would we do with all those elite young philosopher princelings if their numbers were legion? Where would we fit all those languorous, learned young Anglophiles?

  But the ones who do stay…ah the old mossy stones and the flying dark gowns and the ranked pennons in chapel looking for all the world like medieval banners, and the slow turn of the burnished seasons in the great hardwood forest, and the mists of autumn and the white snowfall of spring dogwoods and the world spread out at one’s feet all around off the Mountain, and the bitter-sweet smoke of wood fires and the drunkenness of poetry and mathematics and the flow of bourbon and the night music of concerts and dances through new green leaves, and the delicately bawdy laughter of young girls and the sheen of their flesh and hair, and the special trembling awareness of cold dew and dawn breaking on monumental hangovers after you have talked all night of wonderful or terrible things and sung many songs and perhaps made out by the lake or on the Steep: these things are golden barbs in the fles
h and will hold always. Trinity is eccentric and elitist and chauvinistic and innocent and arrogant and very, very particular, and it claims its own like a great gray raptor.

  My grandfather Cash was a janitor there.

  “What did that feel like?” Joe asked me when he learned that one grandfather used to clean the structure that bore the other’s name. Not for long; Papaw Cash refused to enter Compton Seminary with his mops and brooms once the Compton of it entered his family. Everyone at Trinity understood.

  Joe was powerfully attracted to my family’s bizarre history. He found none of it amusing and all of it profound. Joe was a born teacher of literature.

  “It’s pure American tragedy,” he said, over and over. “It’s all of folklore and literature, really: the Montagues and the Capulets, the Medicis, most of Faulkner—”

  “And the Hatfields and the McCoys, maybe?” I said. “Or the Jukes and the Kallikaks?”

  I was in his senior Southern Literature seminar that winter. It was how we met. I knew he knew the story of my provenance on the Mountain before he knew me; everyone at Trinity did. I had stopped minding long before. Such was Trinity’s ecclesiastical, liberal-arts predilection for wounded birds and fascination with its own redolently Gothic milieu that I was a campus favorite from the days I used to come to work with my grandfather Cash and sit docilely on the steps of whatever structure he was cleaning, Mamaw Cash being practically certifiable by then. Somehow I never felt an outsider in the Domain. Everyone knew and felt sorry for me, the strange little hybrid of gown and town. And I suppose I was an appealing child; I heard it often. I was slight and grave and long-limbed, with a cap of curls like a little Greek boy’s, only fair, and fine thin features. I looked for all the world like my father and still do, save for the very dark eyes that were my mother’s. Except for the fine dry lines around my eyes and mouth, I could pass now for a rather androgynous late teen. My father had the same look in the photographs taken just before he died, and it is there in the portrait of my great-grandfather Compton, in the seminary. Unworldly and dreaming, patrician as an overbred collie. It has, I think, served all us Comptons well, even my poor father. It both enabled and excused him a great deal.