Chapter II

I stood on the doorstep one morning, balancing destiny. Should I take the downward road to the post-office, and thereby connect with the distant maelstrom called progress, or should I choose the upward trail to the still crests of content?

Serena, happening designedly by, saved me the wrench of decision.

“If you want any strawberries this year,” she said, “you’d better go before the Mossy Creek folks have rumpaged over Old Cloud field. They slip up from the west side an’ don’t leave a berry for manners. I’m goin’ now. I always go once.”

I provided buckets and cups, as expected, and we started. The high ridge field where the berries rambled had its name from an Indian, Old Cloud, who, it was said, had lived there behind the cloud that always rested on the ridge before so many of the peaks had been stripped of their pine and poplar and balsam that had held the clouds entangled and the sky so close. After it had passed to the settlers it had taken forty years of ignorant and monotonous tillage to reduce the rich soil to a half-wild pasture enjoying the freedom of exhaustion.

I had been under roof for three days, and the spring air produced the usual inebriation. Several times I left Serena far behind, but she always caught up, and we reached the top of the ridge together. Here, panting, I dropped to a bed of cinquefoil, while Serena stood unheated and smiling.

“Did you ever run, Serena?” I asked.

“I always take the gait I can keep,” she said, her glance already roving the ground for berries. “The other side o’ that gully’s red with ’em. We’ve got ahead o’ Mossy Creek this time.”

I was looking at the world which the lifted horizon had given me. North by east the Great Smokies drew their lilac-blue veil over impenetrable wildernesses of laurel. I could see the round dome of Clingman, and turned quickly from the onslaught of a remembered day when my body was wrapped in the odor of its fir-trees and its heathery mosses cooled my feet. South lay the Nantahalas, source of clear waters. West--but what were names before that array of peaks like characters in creation’s alphabet, whose key was kept in another star? They rose in every form, curved, swaying, rounded, a loaf, a spear, shadowed and unshadowed, their splotches of green, gold, and hemlock-black flowing into blue, where distance balked the eyes and imagination stepped the crests alone. It seemed easier to follow than to stay behind with feet clinging to earth. Affinity lay with the sky.

Serena was steadily picking berries.

“But, Serena,” I called, “just see!”

“I come here once a year,” she said, standing up, “an’ I never take my look till I’ve filled my bucket.” And she was on her knees again.

Rebuke number two, I thought, and set to work. Avoiding Serena’s discovered province, I crossed to the next dip of the slope, and there the field was covered with morning-glories, still radiantly open. All hues were there, from the purple of night to snow without tint, and the clusters of berries under them seemed in sanctuary. I plucked them away, feeling like a ravager of shrines. A breeze flowed over the field, and every color quivered dazzlingly. It was plainly a protest. I gave up my robberies and passed to another part of the field, where rapine seemed legitimate. Here the rank grass of yesteryears was deeply rooted and matted, and I sank adventurously in the tripping tangles. The slope was steeper, too, and I slipped, slid, and stumbled from patch to patch before theft was well begun, losing half my captures in the struggle. It was tinglingly arduous, however, and I continued a happy game of profit and loss until I scrambled from a gully into whose depths I had followed my rolling bucket, and confronted Serena. She looked as if she had coolly swum the lake of color behind us; but her fresh apron was unstained, while mine was a splash of coral. I advised her to return. The picking was better above.

“I know it is,” she answered, “but them mornin’-glories keep me fluttery, lookin’ at me all the time. I got to fill my bucket _first_. I promised Len all he could eat in a pie, an’ it takes a big one fer ten of us. Granpap’s stayin’ at our house now. But we’d better move furder over, out o’ this soddy grass. They’s rattlers here.”

With her word we saw him. He was partly coiled not more than three feet from Serena’s undulating gingham. The black diamonds shining on his amber skin assured me of his variety--the kind that, as natives tell me, Indians will not kill because “he gives a man a chance.” Certainly he was giving us a chance. His eyes seemed half-shut, but not sleepy, as if he did not need his full power of vision to comprehend our insignificant world. His poised head was motionless. Only his tail quivered, not yet erected for his gentlemanly warning. He glistened with newness, and was evidently a youngish snake, with dreams of knighthood still unbattered. His parents had bequeathed him none of the hatred that belongs to a defeated race. Serena seemed as motionless as he. I took her hand, drawing her a few paces back, and we stood watching. Sir Rattle slowly uncoiled, quivered throughout his variegated length, and moved indifferently from us, disappearing in the clumps of grass.

“Well,” said a pale Serena, “I feel like I did after I was baptized. The preacher, he was old man Diller, put his hand on my shoulder an’ said, ‘Love the Lord, my sister’; but I was so full o’ lovin’ everything and everybody I couldn’t think about the Lord. Do you reckon snakes have brothers and sisters that they know about? Think o’ that feller throwin’ away sech a chance to git even!” She could not stop talking any more than I could begin. “Let’s get to the top o’ the field where it’s cooler. It’s got so hot I’m afeard a shower’s comin’.”

By the time we reached the top we knew that the shower was to be a heavy one. There was a cave over the ridge on the Mossy Creek side, where we could take shelter. But we would wait a little for what the heavens could show us. The doors of the sky were to be thrown open. There would be no reservation of magic. Earth knew it by the quick wind that pressed every grass-blade to the ground and made the strawberry-blossoms look like little white, whipped flags; and by the grove of tall, young poplars that bent like maidens, their interlaced branches resting, a silver roof, on their curved shoulders. The lightning rippled, and earth was a golden rose spreading her mountain petals. It was the signal for the assembling of the dragons. They came swelling from the west, pulling one great paw after another from behind the walls of distance and puffing black breath half across the sky. The lightning again, and this time earth was a golden butterfly under the paws of the dragons. Then the conflict began, the beasts mingled, and the sound of their bones massively breaking struck and shook the ground under our feet. A gray sea rose vertically on the horizon and marched upon us. We fled, blinded, to the cave, tearing off our aprons to protect our buckets.

Even here Serena did not pant or gasp.

“How dry it is!” she said, examining the berries. “They’re not hurt. My, you didn’t cap yourn!”

“But I’d never fill my bucket if I stopped to cap them.”

“You don’t stop. You leave the cap on the vine. It’s as quick done as not. Now it’ll take you longer to cap than it did to pick. O’ course you didn’t know. Some folks knows one thing and some another,” she added kindly. “Ain’t it a thick rain? But we got a good place. Some say this cave’s ha’nted, an’ won’t come anigh it. Uncle Sim Goforth died here, but he was a good man an’ wouldn’t harm nobody if he did come back.”

“How did he happen to die here?”

“They killed him. It was in time o’ the war way back. Folks are better now. They say they’re doin’ awful over the sea, but they’d never be so mean as they were to Uncle Sim. He hid here, an’ brought his wife an’ childern. But they found him.”

“Was he a Unionist or Confederate?”

“I never could make out ’tween ’em. The Unionists, they wanted to free the black people, but the Unionists here in the mountains didn’t favor ’em. So I never could git it clear. Anyway, Uncle Sim was a good man. I’ve heard granpap tell about him many a night. The men, when they found him, cut down a tree an’ hewed out some puncheons fer a coffin, an’ made Uncle Sim sit on it an’ play his fiddle. He could play the best that ever was, an’ they say he played up fine that night. They kept him playin’ till near daylight; then they shot him, an’ his wife an’ childern lookin’ right on. I used to cry, hearin’ granpap tell it, out in Madison, but it don’t make me feel bad now, ’cause I know folks are better than what they were them days.”

Such naïveté was possible in the period of our national innocence, before “the boys” began to drift back home with certain truths on their tongue.

“Looky! the rain’s stopped quicker’n it come. We can go right back, fer the ridge dreens off soon as the water strikes it. Ain’t it cool, an’ the air like gold!”

She tried to catch a handful of it to show me its quality. We went back, and in a minute, as she said, our buckets were full, though we lost a few seconds while I learned of Serena how to cap and pick at the same time. Then we started along the ridge to the gap where we had entered the field. Walking back, I lingered to pluck a giant white trillium that shone from the fringe of wood. No loss to the forest; there were thousands more lighting up the cove farther down. As I came out of the wood, the air over the field seemed visibly to precipitate some of its gold. A swarm--no, the word is too heavy for anything so delicately bodied--a band of butterflies, moving in a slow wave over the ridge, had at that moment broken into myriads of distinct flakes--a shattered blaze. Nearer, their gold became tinily specked, and showed flashes and fringes of pearl; the silver-bordered fritillaries, perhaps, or some kin of theirs. I started to call Serena, but paused softly, for she was gazing over the mountains, having her “look.” I was left to the butterflies. Were they as unconscious of their grubby origin as they seemed, holding no memory of a life bounded by a sassafras twig, or of the cove behind us where a violet leaf may have been both food and heaven?

The butterfly ought to be the symbol on every Christian’s flag. It is the perfect pietist. Its confidence in the Infinite is as patent as its wings. Serena, amid that airy fluttering, seemed, in her own shining way, the sovereign of the band. Deep as piety was her trust in the morrow. Food would come to her, raiment would be found.

The butterflies floated past, becoming a dim, coppery tremble in the shade of the valley. Serena was still gazing in the distance. At last I said that we must be going; Len was expecting his pie.

“These berries ain’t goin’ into a pie,” she answered. “They’re worth more than a pie’ll come to. They’re goin’ into jam.”

Was Serena taking forethought? No; I could trust her lighted face and wet eyes. She was still piously improvident.