Читать книгу Quilly Hall - Benjamin W. Farley - Страница 5

Actually, her name was “Quelle.” Tall and enchanting, she still gazes down from her marble-top pedestal to savor the silence that hovers in the shadows of the hallway. I use the present tense, because I inherited the statue from my grandmother. Quilly’s serene countenance effuses an immeasurable calm. Time after time, it has buoyed me from childhood to this very day. Quilly’s braids are drawn back in a golden bun against the back of her neck, each braid interlaced with a delicate thread of green ribbon. Strands of dark honey streak her hair. On her right hip, she cradles a wide-mouth–cinnamon-faded jug, and in her left hand she tilts a second, filling a birdbath with imaginary water. Two scruffy pigeons balance themselves on the lip of the fountain; one is drinking, while the other stares up at Quelle. A brown apron covers Quilly’s gossamer dress and modest curves. The statue’s inner material is of plaster of Paris that sometimes leaks through, leaving white deposits that flake off. An ivory cast defines her slender face; all else is glazed in bronze and green. Her precise age remains a mystery, although my grandmother insisted that my grandfather purchased it for her at the Chicago World Fair. But that would have been in 1897. And why would my grandfather have gone to Chicago? To our family’s knowledge, he never left Virginia and rarely spent more than two nights away from home. So there has always existed this mystery about “Quilly,” or “Quelle,” which is her name in German and which means “source,” or “fountain.”

The name “Quilly Hall” derived from my grandfather Edmonds. In a rare moment of uncharacteristic frustration, he reportedly blurted out: “O Hell! Why does everything have to take place in Quilly’s hall? Why can’t we just serve them on the porch?” He was referring to the icy mint juleps that were being prepared for a cadre of his in-town friends. The name stuck, and after that everyone began calling the place, “Quilly Hall.” Before that, the home place was simply known as “the Edmonds House.” Built in the late 1790s, it stands today, with its gray-and-white slab limestone exterior gleaming in the sunlight, where from its grassy knoll it overlooks the road that leads from the mountains westward into nearby Abingdon.

My grandmother—Virginia Katherine Edmonds—relished our family’s history, and as a small boy of six, I would rock beside her in the living room and listen. “It was a wilderness, Tommy, without roads, or inns. The Indians were gone. Only occasional raiding parties made it into Virginia. The Nations of the Iroquois had driven out the Cherokee and Shawnee. Then came Daniel Boone and those valiant men, like your great-great grandfather. Here they came, journeying into this vast domain of forests and saltlicks! Of game and a soil blessed with the rich silicates that still raise our crops taller than we are! Oh, Tommy! Think of it! How it must have blazed in their eyes and set their hearts to palpitating just to see it!” She loved hyperbole, extravagant and exaggerated expressions, and words like “palpitating” and “silicates,” exact assignations when describing objects or events.

Grandmother’s father had fought with units assigned to defend Chattanooga and Tennessee. According to her, he received wounds both at Chickamauga and “in the field in front of Atlanta,” as the last extant roll call describes it. I have never been able to trace all of his company’s movements, although my grandmother and her sister-in-law, my Aunt Viola, provided many first-hand details from tidbits the old veteran dropped from time to time. His name was Howard Campbell Lorran, a private of Company A 63rd Regiment, CSA. Unlike my paternal grandfather and his father, my great-grandfather Lorran’s grave lies along the Middle Fork of the Holston River, and not in town. I must have been four or five, when one cold January day my grandmother, mother, Uncle Everett, Pearl, and I rode in a wagon to visit his grave. We had to take the wagon, as the road was impassable by car. The journey also had to be undertaken when the road’s clay ruts were frozen, or had turned an iron-hard red.

My grandmother had packed a large picnic basket of fried chicken, pinto beans, biscuits, a cake of butter, and a jar of strawberry jelly. She wanted to visit her brother, Jim Lorran, and his wife, Viola, since the graveyard was on their property. “They’re very poor,” she explained. “I always take food when I visit them. Our whole family was poor, and I would be too, if it weren’t for your grandfather.”

“Mama, we’ve heard all this before,” Uncle Everett interrupted. Uncle Everett was driving the wagon. His tall lean figure bent forward as he held the reins. His face and hands were tanned by nature’s elements, his eyebrows thick and black like his hair, and with eyes “that could pierce right through a board,” as Grandmother put it.

“I know, but I want Tommy to hear it as often as possible.

“Tommy, your ancestors, the Edmonds were very wealthy. And Holman, your grandfather, would come over the mountains to visit us, since we lived on one of his farms. We were poor, Tommy. Your grandfather felt sorry for us. He loved Howard, my father. Your grandfather was only a child when the War broke out. His father had fought in many skirmishes, too, but never with General Lee, or Stonewall Jackson. He commanded a home guard when the Yankees burned Abingdon. He never forgave them for setting fire to the courthouse, or for throwing a torch into his father’s house in town. If it hadn’t been for his mother, who picked it up and threw it back out, the house would have burned to the ground. He took a gunshot wound to his breast, defending a barricade on Main Street. He died in 1894 but managed to hold on to most of his father’s farms and businesses. He did lose a mine in Saltville, a sawmill around Damascus, and one in the mountains, near Whitetop.

“Your grandfather Holman was thirty-one when I first met him. I must have been fifteen. There he came, riding up on his big sorrel mare, as handsome as could be. His black wavy hair flopped in his face. His saddle was of the finest leather, his boots dark brown. He was wearing his father’s Confederate jacket, complete with the bullet hole, with gold braid on the sleeves, adorned with bright shiny brass buttons. He carried a holstered revolver and a rifle in a sling, where he could wrest it out at a moment’s notice.”

“Did he shoot people with it?” I asked.

“He should have,” Uncle Everett offered. “The banks in town foreclosed on one of his farms. And he knew the bas . . . , ” he glanced toward me and smiled, “the man that did it.”

“Everett, please! Don’t teach the boy bad words. I want at least one Edmonds to grow up with dignity.”

“Like you, Mama?” he smiled.

“Everett!” objected my mother. “Mama Edmond’s right. Tommy has a chance to become somebody. Can’t you leave it at that?” My mother had long red curly hair, and strands of it poked out around her scarf. Petite in size and stature, she looked like a panda, wrapped in her white scarf and black coat. Her rosy cheeks appeared enflamed from the cold.

Uncle Everett turned about and stared hard at my mother; then he turned back, and, with a flick of the reins, slapped the hindquarters of the big horse that was pulling the wagon. Sally immediately picked up her gait.

I don’t remember the drift of the remainder of the conversation, just my mother’s look when Uncle Everett stared at her. I was seated between her and my grandmother. Pearl rode on the front seat with Uncle Everett. Pearl was tall, big-boned, with black hair plaited in a single long pigtail. It flopped along the back of her neck, on the outside of her denim jacket. Uncle Everett began to reach over and rub Pearl’s thigh. As I reflect on the event, I think he was only teasing her, but it resulted in a swift comment from my grandmother.

“The family flaw!“ she grumbled, as she put her right arm around me and squeezed me against her black woolen coat. Its stiff collar cut into my lips.

The ride to Uncle Jim’s farm and my great-grandfather’s grave seemed to take forever. The road climbed for a long while up and up through the Knobs. It wound its way from cove to cove, through stands of pine, poplar, and hickories, and past huge black oaks, yellow birches, and milk-gray beech trees. Suddenly, Uncle Everett slowed the wagon and reached for a shotgun under the seat. He guided the wagon to one side and pulled back lightly on the reins. “Whoa, Sally,” he whispered. The wagon came to a stop, to the sound of a slight jangle of harness.

“Shhh!” Pearl added. “A turkey in the road.”

I leapt like a cork popping out of a bottle when the gun discharged. Everyone laughed. But he bagged the turkey. Pearl retrieved the big bird and flung it up in the rear of the wagon. It was a plump hen, with shiny black feathers and gray warts about its comb.

Uncle Jim’s place, or my grandmother’s home place, finally came into view as the wagon descended the road. You could see a glint of the Holston in the distance and hear its rolling murmur from the hill. As a child, I recall no memorable reaction to the cabin, but it was a log structure, with an upstairs room under a tin roof. I just remember the old couple coming to the door, Pearl carrying in the turkey, the warmth of the fireplace, and quilts stacked everywhere. We ate the lunch we had brought; then, while my grandmother and mother sat about the fire with the gaunt couple, Uncle Everett, Pearl, and I climbed a hill through bramble and broom sedge to an overgrown gravesite. Wooden slabs marked each grave, save for one in the middle that was of stone. I must have played around in the cold, while Uncle Everett and Pearl cleared brush and thorns from the graves. My grandmother and everyone else finally came up the hill and stood about the markers for a while. There were tears in my grandmother’s eyes. With quiet solemnity, she bent down and touched her father’s headstone.

Moments after that, it began to snow. Tiny frozen flakes whirled in the raw wind. Light and small, they made a faint, crackling sound as they swirled about us and settled in the tufts of the broom sedge.

“Lord, we’d best get out of here!” grunted Pearl, wrapping her arms about herself and clapping her hands to keep warm.

It flurried all the way home, and we arrived in a hovering dark. I remained on the wagon with Uncle Everett and stayed with him until we had driven the wagon into its shed, unhitched Sally, led her to the barn, and brushed her down. Uncle Everett guided her toward her stall. I fetched four large ears of corn and fed them to her—one ear at a time. Before we left, Uncle Everett pitched several forkfuls of hay into her stall and patted her rump. “Never neglect your horse, Tommy. She’s a good one, if I say so myself.” He rumpled my hair with his hard hands and held my right hand as we walked back to the house.