Maryhill

Maryhill

By

Sandy Grissom

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 by S.K.G. Haag

Cover image by: Derek Harper a used under Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike 2.0 Generic License

Chapter One

It always baffled James Culligan at the difference a couple of miles could make in people’s minds. James’ people were called hill people. They’d lived on the mountain for generations. In truth, it wasn’t more than a foothill but as long as James could remember, it was called the mountain. Its actual name was Maryhill so he allowed it made some sense for the outsiders, that is the valley people to call it a hill. When his Scotch-Irish ancestors settled and began farming the land, though, it had to seem like a mountain to them. The people called it the mountain ever since. The didn’t often refer to it as Maryhill, it was simply ‘the mountain’

To the north of the mountain a ways out on the plains was a city called Brownville. To the south another similar yet a bit smaller city resided called Harrington. Harrington was even farter away from the mountain than Brownville. On the east of the mountain lay a valley with a small town called Rogers; on the west another called Henryville. While Rogers and Henryville were small, Brownville and Harrington were large, cities really though not nearly as large as Roanoke, a good two days away by foot. A body could get lost in Roanoke.

The big cites, James had heard were impersonal. The towns like Rogers, where James went to school, were not impersonal. They were instead at open discord with the mountain folk. James had to allow they didn’t understand his way of life. Yet they didn’t try to either. Then, too, his people having lived alone on the mountain many years before the cities and towns sprang up so near to it. The solitude had caused the hill people to band tightly together so that they had little or no trust of the outsiders.

Indeed the McAuliffe family had only recently become more trusted on the mountain. Most of the mountain was settled by the Scotch-Irish as a group back in 1710. The McAuliffe’s originally came to the mountain as the Gruber family. They were German and not like the families on the hill. They didn’t arrive until almost forty years after the Scotch-Irish so it was understandable they still weren’t quite accepted there. Of course, that wasn’t as obvious to outsiders anymore since there weren’t any Gruber’s left on the hill. The original folk had intermarried with hill families and the owners of the land were now McAuliffe’s, a McAuliffe boy having scandalously married a Gruber girl some generations back.

Of course they were still pig farmers while the rest of the hill folk raised vegetables and an occasional cow for beef. Chickens to be sure. But never horrible stinky pigs. If their mountain had been in the Appalachia chain proper, James supposed such a marriage might not have happened. They would have had closer Scotch-Irish for neighbors to choose a wife from.

This hill, though, was separate unto itself as though God set it out alone for some purpose known only to Him. In settling here, the families separated themselves though not entirely from those other families living in the Appalachia hills but certainly from those in the valleys or the cities.

It happened that an occasional visitor from the chain came onto the mountain for one reason or another. At times they caught the eye of a pretty girl and because of her stayed on James’ mountain. So it was that the twenty original families that settled on the hill weren’t completely isolated from the other Scotch-Irish who had settled in the mountains two hundred years earlier.

Visits happened between those now married couple’s families so that bonds formed or were renewed across the hills. Songs were shared at such times since music was so important to the mountain folk. Those other hill folks were trusted because they were people who came to the hills at the same time and from the same place and had a similar upbringing and way of living.

It was the unrelated outsiders that weren’t trusted or wanted on the hill. They only caused grief in their attempts to tell the hill people how to live. Mountain folk were too self reliant to accept such ‘advice’. They’d settled where they had for the very reason that they wanted to continue the way of life they brought with them and were happy living.

James supposed the difference in how Maryhill was referred to originated from the very differences the hill dwellers had from those who lived in the valleys below. People from the two cities didn’t seem to care quite as much but those who lived in the two valleys to the east and west of the mountain cared a great deal about their differences. It was those valley people in particular who called them hill people.

They used the otherwise harmless word as a way to set James’ people apart. As if using the word mountain would make the people that lived up there feel lofty about their selves instead of lower than the speakers, the way the valley people obviously wanted hill people to feel.

Not that it would have taken much to show the difference between the two peoples. Growing up with completely different values and philosophies, a word James learned in school, a vast chasm, another fancy word used to simply mean a gorge, existed between the two groups.

It might have begun with the land itself for the hill country was a sight to behold. Something was going on there all the time. A five minute walk from the house, a person would find squirrels and rabbits cavorting in the natural and unsettled woods. A person might spy a deer or at least the tracks of one. Other wild creatures and a great variety of colorful and not so colorful birds lived near to the homes of the hill people.

The land was beautiful both in summer and winter. In summer, it was green and lush. The beauty of the mornings was almost impossible to describe. A person had to experience the feeling it gave one when the sun slowly crept onto and then moved slowly over the mountain. It was as if each place the sun touched woke up, came alive. Like a promise that was fulfilled day after day.

The farms gave off smells of vegetables growing and simply good clean dirt. When a busy day ended, a boy could lie out on a pallet on the ground and watch the stars. He was at perfect peace as he fell asleep there, safe as he could be.

The hill people were surely connected to the land. They built their homes and farmland around the natural beauty that existed there while the valley people tore the land up to build their homes, as if what God had created wasn’t good enough for them.

Those who lived on the mountain were contented and needed little else, certainly not the valley or the manmade things it contained to keep them that way. In so many ways, the hill people lived simpler, easier lives than those in the valleys below. They expected little from life yet appreciated what they did receive with true gratefulness. They worked hard with little or no machinery to aid them in the effort. But if life was hard, it was also quite rewarding.

Hill people learned early in life that the important thing was not the obtaining of things, it was people. They treasured their family and friendships. They honored others and would never overstep someone else’s personal boundaries unless expressly invited to do so. Even so, they were close enough to many of their neighbors to be able to speak truthfully into their lives when they were asked for help or advice.

James imagined it had to do with the values they were raised with, very different from those in the valleys below. Hill people had come to Appalachia, indeed to America, to find freedom to live as they chose. It was why the hills of Appalachia were so appealing to them. It gave the families seclusion to be who they were. They brought with them a strong work ethic, the faith they were grounded in and a striving to live a life of character. The only book truly important to a mountain dweller was the holy Word of God for they were brought up with a deep devotion to their creator. Not a home on the hill was without a family Bible. It was not so much so off the mountain.

To a hill person, the valley was vapid and desolate. James would walk to the edge of the hill and look down into the village below and shake his head in confusion. He saw the houses down there, most of them all lined up in neat rows, each one much like the next with very little to show the personalities of those who lived there. Neatly cared for yards with trimmed bushes were common. All of it sterile and boring to James’ way of thinking.

The porches were clean and bare, as if in fear that a rocking chair might be stolen if left out there overnight. The structures more often than not appeared to be vacant. At midmorning from the place where James stood, the town looked to be a deserted wasteland. The houses showed no sign of life at all as if the entire town had simply packed up and moved away. It was all so lifeless and to James meaningless.

Families living on the mountain didn’t have empty porches. Homemade wooden chairs and rockers sat in various places along the front porches of their houses. A small table here and there resided near a grouping of chairs where the folk could set their coffee cups in the morning or tea or maybe lemonade glasses in the hot afternoon sun. The porches weren’t for show. They were used as if they were simply another room in the house. Kids fooled around on their front porches, them being their very own playgrounds.

There were side or back porches on the mountain houses, too, but they were used for work. The weekly washing was done on that porch, chickens were plucked there, muddy clothes and boots were dropped out there so as not to track up the clean house. The back porch was a work porch and so it was used mainly during the day while the front porch was a welcoming one for visitors or for kid’s play during the light. Then it became relaxation for the adults in the evening hours after a hard day’s work.

If a person strolled by such a place, you might find a churn being pumped up and down to make butter on one end of the porch and a squeeze box pushing out music on the other end. In between, family members would rock with closed eyes, resting from the day’s work but mostly simply enjoying the peace that the music and the mountain gave to them. They understood that such times as those were a gift and they used the dusk as it came upon them to appreciate it as such.

In the valley below, family members all seemed to go off in separate direction as if they simply shared a house but didn’t really care all that much for one another. People lived together in the hills. They worked, played, laughed, loved and cried together. They were truly close knit families. They didn’t live to work like those in the valleys seemed to do; they worked so that they could really live.

James saw all that but didn’t totally recognize it, certainly didn’t understand it. He was keenly aware of the ridicule the town kids made of the hill kids, however. They pointed to their homemade clothes and laughed. They teased them about shoes that were too big for their feet or had holes in the bottom. They snickered at the lunches the hill kids brought to school. Though in truth they were tastier and more nutritious than the thin lunch meat sandwiches the valley kids ate.

James blamed the kids’ attitude on their parents. The adults in the valley not only allowed the scorn, they joined right in with the kids. James guessed that was the reason the school bus that picked up the hill kids and took them down to the valley school ran its route the way it did. The parents probably liked it that way. It was one more way to put the hill kids ‘in their place’.

The route the bus took ran up one side of the hill along the road that circled half the mountain and picked up the kids on James’s side to take them down into the school in Rogers. Kids living on the back side of the hill were similarly bussed down to a valley school in Henryville. The bus James rode picked up all the hill kids and then moved back down into the valley where the driver drove around town picking up the valley kids. The method still gave the valley kids plenty of time to ridicule the hill kids as the bus made its way toward the school.

That was on the morning run. On the way home, the driver reversed the direction he delivered the kids. He dropped off the valley kids first. It seemed to James that the process was done so that the valley kids wouldn’t have to spend any more time than absolutely necessary with the hill kids.

It might also be that the valley parents knew that both route schedules created problems for the hill people. Perhaps the adults even enjoyed the perceived control they felt it gave