Christy Read online

  Christy by Catherine Marshall

  Published by Evergreen Farm an imprint of Gilead Publishing, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49546

  www.gileadpublishing.com/evergreenfarm

  ISBN: 978-1-68370-1262 (paper)

  ISBN: 978-1-68370-1279 (eBook)

  Christy

  Copyright © 1967 Catherine Marshall LeSourd

  Copyright Renewed © 1995 Marshall-LeSourd LLC

  Copyright © 2017 Marshall-LeSourd LLC

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage and retrieval system without prior written permission from the publisher.

  Published in the United States by Gilead Publishing, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to actual people, organizations, and/or events is purely coincidental.

  Adaptations from the tales “Old Dry Frye,” pages 99–105, and “Tall Cornstalk,” pages 198–210, from Grandfather Tales by Richard Chase, published by Houghton Mifflin Company, used by permission of the publisher. Excerpts from the songs “Blackjack Davy” and “The Ballad of Montcalm and Wolfe” from Songs and Ballads of the Eastern Seaboard by Frank W. Warner, published by Southern Press, used by permission of Frank M. Warner. Excerpts from the songs “Earl Brand” and “The Green Bed” from English Folk Songs of the Southern Appalachians by Cecil Sharp, published by Oxford University Press, used by permission of the publisher. Excerpts from the song “Under the Yum Yum Tree,” used by permission of Harry Von Tilzer Music Publishing Company. Excerpts from the song “Oh! You Beautiful Doll,” copyright 1911 by Remick Music Corporation, used by permission. Excerpts from the song “Shady Grove,” copyright 1952 by Jean Ritchie & George Pickow, used by permission of Geordie Music Publishing, Inc. Excerpts from the hymns “Soon We’ll Cross the Border Line,” “Gathering Buds,” “I’m Ready to Go,” “I’ll Sail Away,” and “We’ll Meet Our Mother” from the collection Gospel Joy, published by James D. Vaughan Music Publishers, used by permission of Tennessee Music and Printing Company. Excerpts from the hymn “Be Not Dismayed” from The Methodist Hymnal (1966) used by permission of the Methodist Publishing House.

  Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are taken from The Holy Bible, King James Version.

  Cover designed by Larry Taylor

  Interior by Beth Shagene

  To Leonora

  I wish to thank many friends in East Tennessee whose courtesy in answering questions and whose hospitality and cooperation have been unfailing, especially Miss Mary Ruble and Mrs. Opal Myers; to express my gratitude to ­Elizabeth Sherrill for valuable editorial suggestions; to Alma Deane ­MacConomy for help with research; to Dr. William R. Felts of Washington, D.C., for information on medical details; to Eleanor Armstrong for suggestions regarding schoolteaching; to Emma B. Mulrean, my patient and capable secretary; to my family who have borne with Christy for nine years, and especially to my husband, Leonard LeSourd, whose support and help have been unflagging.

  Christy Rudd Huddleston, a nineteen-year-old girl.

  Her father, mother, and brother George.

  Alice Henderson, a Quaker mission worker from Ardmore, Pennsylvania.

  David Grantland, the young minister.

  Ida Grantland, the spinster sister of David.

  Dr. Neil MacNeill (Doc), the physician of the Cove.

  Jeb Spencer, a ballad-singing mountain man.

  Fairlight Spencer, his wife.

  Their children: John, Zady, Clara, Lulu, and Little Guy.

  Bob Allen, keeper of the mill by Blackberry Creek.

  Mary Allen, his superstitious wife.

  Their children: Rob, Festus, Creed, Della May, Nuda, Little Burl.

  Ault Allen, Bob’s older brother, head of the clan.

  John Holcombe, another mountain man.

  Elizabeth Holcomb, his wife.

  Their children: Arrowood, Lizette, John, Sam Houston, baby girl.

  Uncle Bogg McHone, the county squire, humorist of Cutter Gap, teller of tall tales.

  Tom McHone, one of Uncle Bogg’s grown sons.

  Opal McHone, Tom’s wife.

  Their children: Isaak, Toot, Vincent.

  Nathan O’Teale, rough highlander.

  Swannie O’Teale, his wife.

  Their children: Wilmer, son; Smith; Orter Ball; Mountie; George; Thomas; Mary.

  Ozias Holt, the host of the “Working.”

  Rebecca Holt, his wife.

  Their children: Wraight, Zacharias, Becky, Will, Dicle, Larmie, Jake, Vella.

  Bird’s-Eye Taylor, feuder and blockader.

  Lundy Taylor, his seventeen-year-old swarthy son.

  Kyle Coburn, mountain man.

  Lety Coburn, his wife.

  Their daughter Bessie, thirteen.

  Duggin Morrison, glum mountaineer, and his wife.

  Mrs. Morrison’s daughter, Ruby Mae, red-haired girl who lives at the mission house.

  The Beck Family, whose cabin is close to the Big Mud Hole.

  Their children: Will, Clarabelle, Rorex, Wanda, Ann, Joshua Bean.

  Aunt Polly Teague, ninety-two, oldest woman in the Cove.

  Lenore Teague, Aunt Polly’s daughter-in-law.

  Granny Barclay, midwife of Cutter Gap.

  Liz Ann Robertson, married at fourteen.

  Mr. Hazen Smith, wealthy Knoxville businessman.

  Mrs. Toliver and Mrs. Browning, ladies at the University Club, Knoxville.

  Gentry Long, United States marshal.

  Javis MacDonald, the train conductor.

  Mrs. Tatum, the boarding-house lady.

  Ben Pentland, the mailman.

  It takes courage to leave all that is familiar and enter someone else’s world.

  It takes hope to meet the challenges of a task greater than one’s self.

  It takes faith to walk through the darkest times and to believe in the power of the light.

  Leonora Haseltine Whitaker Wood, our grandmother, took that step at 19 years old and forever changed her life, and by so doing, the lives of countless others.

  Christy is a fictional tale based on the life of Leonora Wood who left her North Carolina family home to teach poverty-stricken children in the mountains of Tennessee. It is the story of a proud, fierce, and lyrical people tucked away in a remote section of the Smoky Mountains in the early 1900s. Yet this story is every bit as relevant today as it was a century ago.

  It is the story of a young woman who yearns to make a difference. And it is the timeless tale of how in the experience of giving to others, she finds herself the recipient of so much more. Challenges are met. Understanding comes. Faith is revealed. And yes, lives are changed. Not just those she was eager to serve, but her own life as well.

  We grew up with these stories told around the table at Evergreen Farm, the final home of Leonora Wood. We listened as Catherine and her husband, Len LeSourd hashed out characters and dialogue. We lived both with the real people and the fictional characters. They became part of our family tapestry.

  We have been entrusted with this beloved American novel and are grateful to introduce you, or perhaps reintroduce you, to Christy. This is the story of our grandmother, written by her daughter, and woven together with insights from the faith-filled lives of both of these extraordinary women.

  The story of Christy ultimately presents this challenge: Do I have the courage, the hope and the faith to step into my future—no matter where in this world that takes me? May the story of Christy inspire you to make a difference in another’s life, whether near or far, and to know the depths of God’s love for yo
u in the midst of it all.

  The Marshall and LeSourd Families

  Down in the valley,

  the valley so low

  Hang your head over,

  hear the wind blow.

  Hear the wind blow, love,

  hear the wind blow;

  Hang your head over,

  hear the wind blow.

  On that November afternoon when I first saw Cutter Gap, the crumbling chimney of Alice Henderson’s cabin stood stark against the sky, blackened by the flames that had consumed the house. The encroaching field grass and duckweed and pennyroyal had all but obliterated even the outline of the foundations.

  But the old mission house was still there, high on its rise of ground with the mountain towering behind it. Once painted a proud white, the building was gray and sagging, the front porch gone, the screening of the kitchen porch rusted and flapping. There were no other buildings left: the church-­schoolhouse had long since been moved to another location; David Grantland’s bunkhouse had been demolished.

  Nonetheless, I was standing on the spot which I had always longed to see—the site of the adventures recounted so vividly by my parents during all my growing-up years. In a sense, I had lived through those experiences too. Mother stood beside me looking at the house, silent, lost in the thoughts that were pulling her back forty-six years to the last time she had seen the Cove.

  The years had brought changes. Two World Wars had reached deep into the mountains to snatch away Cutter Gap men. Those who had returned had brought back some of the world outside: brought-on clothes; canned food; soda pop; autos; battery radios over which blared hillbilly music and soap operas; and latterly, television and consolidated schools. Appalachia’s economic problem had never been solved, so, in a variety of ways, the Federal Government had stepped in. On July 11, 1936, President Franklin Roosevelt, by Presidential proclamation, had incorporated the towering scenery of Cutter Gap into the Cherokee National Forest; then on September 2, 1940, the President had personally dedicated 460,000 acres of the North Carolina–Tennessee Appalachians into the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Most of the families who lived in either the Forest or the Park had—eagerly or reluctantly—sold their small land holdings to the United States Government. By the time I saw the Cove, cabin after cabin stood vacant. Forest rangers and tourists roamed the Gap. The black bear and the white-tailed deer, the raccoon and the bobcat, the red fox and the wild boar were returning to the forests.

  But mother was surprised to find that certain things had not changed. Though some of the main routes through the mountains were now well-­engineered highways, the way into Cutter Gap was noted on the map as “a poor motor road” and then “a trail,” actually almost inaccessible. It was Hugette Lee and his wife Mary who met us in Lyleton and in their old sedan, led us toward the Cove. They and their three boys lived in what had been the old mission house, and they had invited us to be their guests for the night.

  The twelve miles from Lyleton to El Pano were a good enough turnpike, but soon after we had left El Pano behind, mother was exclaiming, “Why, imagine this road still not being paved! It’s as bad as ever!” She was right. The low-slung modern car in which we were following the Lees was sinking almost to its floorboard in the ruts.

  We came to an especially deep and wide rut. “Catherine! The Mud Hole! It’s the Old Mud Hole! It’s still here. It just isn’t possible!” Mother sounded as if she mistrusted her own eyes. “Well then, maybe there aren’t as many changes as I had thought.”

  With each mile, the scenery was more rugged, the road more ­impossible. We drove for an hour at a crawling pace sometimes with the car’s right wheels on the rim of the narrow track.

  I was relieved when Mr. Lee led us into the yard of a cabin and motioned for us to stop. He came striding back to us. “Think you’d best leave your car here overnight.” His grin was sheepish. “Yours would never make it from here on. You’ll see what I mean.” He held out his hand for my keys. “Let me transfer your bags to my jitney.”

  Then in the Lees’ car we jerked and slithered along the washboard of a trail, sometimes bumping so outrageously that our heads struck the car roof. There were washouts and gulleys, and twice we had to ford a tumbling mountain stream. Mary and mother kept up a lively conversation, for mother was full of questions: “What finally happened to the McHones?” . . . “When did Miss Alice’s cabin burn?” . . . “Did they ever know the cause of the fire?” . . . “How many of my pupils from Cutter Gap did Hazen Smith finally send out of the Cove to school?” . . . “What year was it that the mission closed?” . . . “Where did they move the church-schoolhouse?”

  In between mother’s questions, Mary volunteered, “I teach fourth grade in the new consolidated school. It’s so hard getting in and out of the Cove that I have to get up at four each morning to make it.”

  Finally, the car bumped over frozen ruts into the edge of the mission yard and stopped. John and Bob and Toe, all towheads, came to greet us (rather grave children, I thought). And mother stood and looked—and looked—trying to see everything at once.

  And then she was inside the house, exploring from room to room, I close beside her, as interested in her reactions as in the house itself. Yes, the dining room was still much the same—tan tongue-and-groove walls—only now there was a mail-order stove (providing the only heat in the house) with a pipe through the ceiling. There was still no running water. The old telephone was in its place on the wall in the back hall. “Remember my telling you about our first conversation over it?” mother asked. “Hilarious! That Little Burl . . .” Yes, I remembered.

  She stopped in the parlor doorway, her face aglow. “The Lyon and Healy! Imagine!” The huge concert grand piano still stood there, only now a winter’s supply of pumpkins and squash and gourds was piled on top and the ivory was missing from most of the keys.

  In the front bedroom upstairs to which Mr. Lee carried our overnight cases, there were fluffy clean curtains at the windows. “How did they know,” Mother puzzled, “that this was once my room?”

  Since there was some daylight left, she was eager for more reconnoitering. “Catherine, would you walk down the road with me? I want to find out if—well, a lot of things.”

  As we walked along, I saw that the path by the Branch in front of the mission house was still the same, just as my parents had described it. I sensed excitement rising in mother as the years fell away. She was the nineteen-year-old Christy again, exploring this same road wearing the shoes she had bought at the Bon Marché in Asheville. “Ice-pick toes,” David Grantland had teasingly called them. Yes, the O’Teale’s tobacco barn to the left of the road was there. Just around the bend would be their cabin.

  Presently we were standing at the edge of the yard she knew so well. No one was around. It was like walking into an empty stage setting or into one’s own dream. The clumps of old English boxwood in the yard were surrounded by rusty tin cans, rotting tires, pieces of twisted metal, old newspapers. As we walked up the creaking wooden stairs at one end of the porch, I almost caught my heel in a rotting board. The front door was standing ajar, sagging, half off its hinges.

  We stood in the doorway giving our eyes time to adjust to the darkness inside. Deserted. Everyone gone. Where had they gone? It was as if the cabin had been evacuated hurriedly, because the floor was awash with a veritable snowstorm of slips of paper. I stooped, picked up one of the slips, looked at it and handed it to mother. It was the receipt of a week’s pay from a cotton mill in South Carolina. Curious now, I retrieved other slips and small envelopes. They were all from the same mill, weekly pay envelopes: 250-14-9097—Smith O’Teale . . . 279-12-8078—Orter O’Teale . . . 246-10-3078—Mountie O’Teale . . . Mountie. I remembered. The little girl who had giggled, “See my buttons! See my pretty buttons!” The new teacher Christy, my mother, had given her love, had given her life.

  Mother shook her head in disbelief at the dates on the envelopes. “They’re so many years back,” she said. “The ch
ildren must have left the mountains to work in a mill. And they sent most of their pay home.” I watched her turning the slips of paper over and over in her hands as if trying to make them speak to her.

  “How could I ever forget,” she recalled, “that first evening when I saw the epileptic boy here? Right there, in that pen in the corner. I lost my supper that first night after I had seen this cabin. It was Miss Alice whose cool hands and warm heart comforted me.”

  “Miss Alice . . .” Mother’s expressive blue eyes held a faraway look. “Strange that after all these years, the memory of her is still warm and alive. I suppose because a personality like hers can never die.”

  I thought of Alice Henderson as she had been described to me—tall, blonde, patrician, with that certain sparkle. Her basic beliefs had been as settled and sure as the nineteen-year-old Christy’s had been unsure. Yet always there had been Miss Alice’s eagerly grasping mind, ready for new adventures of heart or spirit. The Quaker lady had been at the center of all the drama that had been acted out on this gigantic stage, with these mountains—blue and mauve and purple, brooding and unchanging—as the backdrop.

  It was at that moment, standing there in the O’Teale cabin thinking of Alice Henderson, that I got my first clear glimpse of the book I had always wanted to write about the mountains, my mountains. For these were the hills of home; I had been born among mountains like these. All my life the wind-swept heights had fascinated me—and challenged me—and steadied me.

  As if reading my thoughts, mother said shyly, “The story aches to be told, Catherine. The secrets of the human spirit that Alice Henderson knew, the wisdom that she shared is needed by so many today. And the mountain people, my friends—Fairlight and Opal, Jeb Spencer and Aunt Polly Teague, Ruby Mae and Little Burl, my schoolchildren—I want people to know them as they really were. But Catherine, I’m not the one to put it on paper. You know, sometimes the dreams of the parents must be fulfilled in the children.”

  And suddenly, I understood how the story should be written—through mother’s eyes, as I had seen it all along. Only—from the beginning, my imagination had taken hold of the true incidents and had begun shaping them so that now, after so many years, I myself scarcely knew where truth stopped and fiction began. Therefore, though so much of the story really happened, I would set it down in the form of fiction.