Читать книгу Other Voices, Other Towns: The Traveler's Story - Caleb Pirtle III - Страница 9

The Blessing of Bessie

Somewhere on the outskirts of

Asheville, North Carolina

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The Scene: Asheville is the crown jewel of the Blue Ridge Parkway, a scenic ribbon of pavement that twists and turns its way through the glorious highlands of North Carolina. The little city, rising up from a timbered bowl in the mountains, even has its own American-styled castle, the imposing Biltmore House and Gardens – a 250-room French Chateau that George Washington Vanderbilt completed in 1895. With its size and necessities of invention, the estate staggers the imagination.

The Sights: Wedged on the western facing slope of Sunset Mountain is the Grove Park Inn, fashioned with great wooden beams and an even greater assortment of rock walls. Down its hallways have walked such noted dignitaries as Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Woodrow Wilson, William Howard Taft, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight David Eisenhower, Harry Houdini, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Enrico Caruso, and William Jennings Bryan. The riches necessary to build the stunning inn were earned through the sales of Grove’s Chill Tonic, which fought malaria, had quite a kick, would have probably been outlawed during prohibition, and outsold the country’s leading cola.

The Setting: Within Ashville and the surrounding high country rest the quaint Southern homes of such literary giants as Carl Sandburg and Thomas Wolfe, and hidden away in the back country resides the dignity of mankind.

The Story: Aunt Bessie Whisenhunt, tucked away like an antique quilt in a little cabin on the backside of civilization, was a wrinkled reflection of Southern womanhood. She was tough, but mostly gentle. Everyone who knew her loved her, and for eighty-six years she had been the matriarch of the mountains, a woman alone and undaunted, whose cabin nestled at the far end of a one-lane road somewhere beyond the last bend in a dirt road from Asheville.

Aunt Bessie was hard and lean. She never went hungry as long as her rifle was loaded and the Good Lord allowed rain to touch her garden. She ate the vegetables she could and gave away the ones she couldn’t.

She was small, shrunken with age, and her bones ached when a winter chill found its way to the hollow. But she chopped her own wood and let the heat from a fireplace chase the dull ache from her joints.

Aunt Bessie did not depend on anyone else for her meager existence. Not even the Great Depression had bothered her. She had been practicing for hard times long before they ever climbed down to her little corner of the earth, or so she said.

She laughed a lot, especially when there was nothing else to do, and there was seldom anything else to do in the deep and lingering shadows of Appalachia, where self-reliance was a religion and every day was the Sabbath.

A bitter winter, in the eighty-sixth year of her life, descended without mercy upon the mountainsides and worked its way into the hollow like bad news on the poison tongue of the town gossip.

The snow kept falling for days, then weeks. A wet, heavy sheeting of ice paralyzed the mountains and crippled the roads.

Everyone who knew Aunt Bessie worried about her. She was so alone and so isolated. Surely she would freeze or starve before the spring thaw. She was too old to cut wood. It was too cold to cut wood. And Aunt Bessie, after all, didn’t get around the way she used to. She could count on arthritis showing up even when no one or nothing else bothered to come to her home.

Frantically, the Red Cross in Asheville hauled out a bulldozer, and a work crew, armed with groceries, began slowly cutting their way through a crease in the mountains, digging out snow banks and inching their way - an icicle at a time - toward Aunt Bessie’s cabin.

There was only a faint curl of hickory smoke rising above a rock chimney to guide them, and finally the smoke faded into the low-hanging clouds of a sky turned blizzard white.

Darkness had begun to reclaim the hollow by the time the bulldozer broke past the last bank of wet, heavy snow that surrounded the cabin. The supervisor jumped up onto a rotting wood porch and kept pounding his fist against Aunt Bessie’s door.

Nothing.

No answer.

Nothing but the sound of a man’s hand slamming against a plank of aging wood.

Cold.

And brittle.

The darkness was a silent night.

All was calm.

Nothing was bright.

Heavy clouds had yanked a splintered moon from the skies. Stars were only a distant rumor, an unconfirmed one.

Maybe they were too late. Maybe they had never had a chance of reaching her on time.

The supervisor stepped back and took a deep breath. Quietly, the door eased open, and a splinter of lantern light spilled apologetically into the black corners of a chilled woodland. The supervisor grinned politely and awkwardly when he looked down and saw the wrinkled reflection of Southern womanhood as it touched her face, and he felt the heat of dying wood in the fireplace as it apologetically met the frost of the night air.

“Howdy, ma ‘am,” he said. “We’re from the Red Cross.”

The laughter abruptly departed Aunt Bessie’s eyes and was replaced with a sad and worried frown. She turned with trembling hands and reached for her purse that lay on a marble topped table beside the door.

“Well, boys,” she said grimly, “I’m afraid I won’t be able to help you much this year. It’s been a right hard winter.”