I was outside, with the bottle and guitar. There was nary cloud in the sky, and the moon shone down like a ball of white fire.
The cabin was dark inside now, and I could see by the moon that it was a ruined wreck. The roof fallen in, the window broken, the logs rotten-you"d swear n.o.body had set foot there for fifty years back. But inside, Jeremiah Donovant and Lute Meechum were together at last, and peaceful. So peaceful most folks would think they were dead and gone.
On along the trail that was now so clear, I found a tree that looked hollow. Down in its dark inside I put the bottle, and left it there.
It seemed to me I ought to be shaky and scared, but I wasn"t. I felt right good. That dumb supper, now-the way I"d heard it said, sometimes a dumb supper calls up things that oughtn"t be there; but now I"d seen a dead haunt, setting a dumb supper to tole a living man to her. And it wasn"t bad. It wasn"t wrong. They were happy about it, I knew that.
Walking in the bright moonlight, I began to strum my guitar, and, gentlemen, the song I sang is really an old song:
Beauty, strength, youth, are flowers and fading seen- Duty, faith, love, are roots and ever green . . . .
The Little Black Train
Manly Wade Wellman
There in the High Fork country, with peaks saw-toothing into the sky and hollows diving away down and trees thicketed every which way, you"d think human foot had never stepped. Walking the trail between high pines, I touched my guitar"s silver strings for company of the sound. But then a man squandered into sight around a bend-young-like, red-faced, baldy-headed. Gentlemen, he was as drunk as a hoot. I gave him good evening.
"Can you play that thing?" he gobbled at me and, second grab of his shaky hand, he got hold of my hickory shirt sleeve. "Come to the party, friend. Our fiddle band, last moment, they got scared out. We got just only a mouth-harp to play for us."
"What way was the fiddle band scared?" I asked him to tell.
"Party"s at Miss Donie Carawan"s," he said, without replying me. "Bobbycue pig and chicken, bar"l of good stump-hole whisky."
"Listen," I said, "ever hear tell of the man invited a stranger fiddler, he turned out to be Satan?"
"Shoo," he snickered, "Satan plays the fiddle, you play the guitar. I don"t pay your guitar no worry.
What"s your name, friend?"
"John. What"s yours?"
But he"d started up a narrow, grown-over, snaky-turny path you"d not notice. I reckoned the party"d be at a house, where I could sleep the night that was coming, so I followed. He nearly fell back top of me, he was so stone drunk, but we got to a notch on the ridge, and the far side was a valley of trees, dark and secret looking. Going down, I began to hear loud laughing talk. Finally we reached a yard at the bottom. There was a house there, and it looked like enough men and women to swing a primary election.
They whooped at us, so loud it rang my ears. The drunk man waved both his hands. "This here"s my friend John," he bawled out, "and he"s a-going to play us some music!"
They whooped louder at that, and easiest thing for me to do was start picking "h.e.l.l Broke Loose in Georgia"; and, gentlemen, right away they danced up a storm.
Wild-like, they whipped and whirled. Most of them were young folks dressed their best. One side, a great big man called the dance, but you couldn"t much hear him, everybody laughed and hollered so loud.
It got in my mind that children laugh and yell thataway, pa.s.sing an old burying-ground where ghosts could be. It was the way they might be trying to dance down the nervouses; I jumped myself, between picks, when something started moaning beside me. But it was just a middling-old fellow with a thin face, playing his mouth-harp along with my guitar.
I looked to the house-it was new and wide and solid, with white-washed clay c.h.i.n.king between the squared logs of it. Through a dog-trot from front to back I saw clear down valley, west to where the sunball dropped red toward a far string of mountains. The valley-bottom"s trees were s.p.a.ced out with a kind of path or road, the whole length. The house windows began to light up as I played. Somebody was putting a match to lamps, against the night"s fall.
End of the tune, everybody clapped me loud and long. "More! More!" they hollered, bunched among the yard trees, still fighting their nervouses.
"Friends," I managed to be heard, "let me make my manners to the one who"s giving this party."
"Hi, Miss Donie!" yelled out the drunk man. "Come meet John!"
From the house she walked through the crowded-around folks, stepping so proud she looked taller than she was. A right much stripy skirt swished to her high heels; but she hadn"t such a much dress above, and none at all on her round arms and shoulders. The b.u.t.ter yellow of her hair must have come from a bottle, and the doll pink of her face from a box. She smiled up to me, and her perfume tingled my nose. Behind her followed that big dance-caller, with his dead black hair and wide teeth, and his heavy hands swinging like balance weights.
"Glad you came, John," she said, deep in her round throat.
I looked at her robin-egg blue eyes and her b.u.t.ter hair and her red mouth and her bare pink shoulders.
She was maybe 35, maybe 40, maybe more and not looking it. "Proud to be here," I said, my politest.
"Is this a birthday, Miss Donie Carawan?"
Folks fell quiet, swapping looks. An open cooking fire blazed up as the night sneaked in. Donie Carawan laughed deep.
"Birthday of a curse," and she widened her blue eyes. "End of the curse, too, I reckon. All tonight."
Some mouths came open, but didn"t let words out. I reckoned that whatever had scared out the fiddle band was nothing usual. She held out a slim hand, with green-stoned rings on it.
"Come eat and drink, John," she bade me.
"Thanks," I said, for I hadn"t eaten ary mouthful since crack of day.
Off she led me, her fingers pressing mine, her eye-corners watching me. The big dance-caller glittered a glare after us. He was purely jealoused up that she"d made me so welcome. Two dark-faced old men stood at an iron rack over a pit of coals, where lay two halves of a slow-cooking hog. One old man dipped a stick with a rag ball into a kettle of sauce and painted it over the brown roast meat. From a big pot of fat over yet another fire, an old woman forked hush-puppies into pans set ready on a plank table.
"Line up!" called Donie Carawan out, like a bugle. They lined up, talking and hollering again, smiles back on their faces. It was some way like dreams you have, folks carrying on loud and excited, and something bad coming on to happen.
Donie Carawan put her bare arm through my blue-sleeved elbow while an old man sliced chunks of barbecued hog on paper plates for us. The old woman forked on a hush-puppy and a big hobby of cole slaw. Eating, I wondered how they made the barbecue sauce-wondered, too, if all these folks really wanted to be here for what Donie Carawan called the birthday of a curse.
"John," she said, the way you"d think she read what I wondered, "don"t they say a witch"s curse can"t work on a pure heart?"
"They say that," I agreed her, and she laughed her laugh. The big dance-caller and the skinny mouth-harp man looked up from their barbecue. "An old witch cursed me for guilty twenty years back,"
said Donie Carawan. "The law said I was innocent. Who was right?"
"Don"t know how to answer that," I had to say, and again she laughed, and bit into her hush-puppy.
"Look around you, John" she said. "This house is my house, and this valley is my valley, and these folks are my friends, come to help me pleasure myself."
Again I reckoned, she"s the only one here that"s pleasured, maybe not even her.
"Law me," she laughed, "it"s rough on a few folks, holding their breath all these years to see the curse light on me. Since it wouldn"t light, I figured how to shoo it away." Her blue eyes looked up. "But what are you doing around High Fork, John?"
The dance-caller listened, and the thin mouth-harp man. "Just pa.s.sing through," I said. "Looking for songs. I heard about a High Fork song, something about a little black train."
Silence quick stretched all around, the way you"d think I"d been impolite. Yet again she broke the silence with a laugh.
"Why," she said, "I"ve known that song as long as I"ve known about the curse, near to. Want me to sing it for you?"
Folks were watching, and, "Please, ma"am," I asked her.
She sang, there in the yellow lamplight and red firelight, among the shady-shadowy trees and the mountain dark, without ary slice of moon overhead. Her voice was a good voice. I put down my plate and, a line or two along, I made out to follow her with the guitar.
I heard a voice of warning, A message from on high, "Go put your house in order For thou shalt surely die.
Tell all your friends a long farewell And get your business right- The little black train is rolling in To call for you tonight."
"Miss Donie, that"s a tuneful thing," I said. "Sounds right like a train rolling."
"My voice isn"t high enough to sound the whistle part," she smiled at me, red-mouthed.
"I might could do that," said the mouth-harp man, coming close and speaking soft. And folks were craning at us, looking sick, embarra.s.sed, purely distasted. I began to wonder why I shouldn"t have given a name to that black train song.
But then rose up a big holler near the house, where a barrel was set. The drunk man that"d fetched me was yelling mad at another man near-about as drunk, and they were trying to grab a drinking gourd from each other. Two-three other men on each side hoorawed them on to squabble more.
"Jeth!" called Donie Carawan to the big dance-caller. "Let"s stop that before they spill the whisky, Jeth."
Jeth and she headed for the bunch by the barrel, and everybody else was crowding to watch.
"John," said a quiet somebody-the mouth-harp man, with firelight showing lines in his thin face, salty gray in his hair. "What you really doing here?"
"Watching," I said, while big Jeth hauled those two drunk men off from each other, and Donie Carawan scolded them. "And listening," I said. "Wanting to know what way the black train song fits in with this party and the tale about the curse. You know about it?"
"I know," he said.
We carried our food out of the firelight. Folks were crowding to the barrel, laughing and yelling.
"Donie Carawan was to marry Trevis Jones," the mouth-harp man told me. "He owned the High Fork Railroad to freight the timber from this valley. He"d a lavish of money, is how he got to marry her. But,"
and he swallowed hard, "another young fellow loved her. Cobb Richardson, who ran Trevis Jones"s train on the High Fork Railroad. And he killed Trevis Jones."
"For love?" I asked.
"Folks reckoned that Donie Carawan decided against Trevis and love-talked Cobb into the killing; for Trevis had made a will and heired her all his money and property-the railroad and all. But Cobb made confession. Said Donie had no part in it. The law let her go, and killed Cobb in the electric chair, down at the state capital.
"I declare to never," I said.
"Fact. And Cobb"s mother-Mrs. Amanda Richardson-spoke the curse."
"Oh," I said, "is she the witch that-"
"She was no witch," he broke me off, "but she cursed Donie Carawan, that the train that Cobb had engine-drove, and Trevis had heired to her, would be her death and destruction. Donie laughed. You"ve heard her laugh. And folks started the song, the black train song.
"Who made it?" I asked him.
"Reckon I did," he said, looking long at me. He waited to let me feel that news. Then he said, "Maybe it was the song decided Donie Carawan to deal with the Hickory River Railroad, agreeing for an income of money not to run the High Fork train no more."
I"d finished my barbecue. I could have had more; but I didn"t feel like it. "I see," I told him. "She reckoned that if no train ran on the High Fork tracks, it couldn"t be her death and destruction."
He and I put our paper plates on one of the fires. I didn"t look at the other folks, but it seemed to me they were quieting their laughing and talking as the night got darker.
"Only thing is," the mouth-harp man went on, "folks say the train runs on that track. Or it did. A black train runs some nights at midnight, they say, and when it runs a sinner dies."
"You ever see it run?"
"No, John, but I"ve sure G.o.d heard it. And only Donie Carawan laughs about it."
She laughed right then, joking the two men who"d feathered up to fight. Ary man"s neck craned at her, and women looked the way you"d figure they didn"t relish that. My neck craned some, itself.
"Twenty years back, the height of her bloom," said the mouth-harp man, "law me, you"d never call to look at anything else."
"What does she mean, no more curse?"
"She made another deal, John. She sold off the rails of the High Fork Road, that"s stood idle for twenty years. Today the last of them was torn up and carried off. Meanwhile, she"s had this house built, across where the right of way used to be. Looky yonder, through the dog-trot. That"s where the road ran."
So it was the old road bed made that dark dip amongst the trees. Just now it didn"t look so wide a dip.
"No rails," he said. "She figures no black train at midnight. Folks came at her invite-some because they rent her land, some because they owe her money, and some-men folks-because they"ll do ary thing she bids them."
"And she never married?" I asked.
"If she done that, she"d lose the money and land she heired from Trevis Jones. It was in his will. She just takes men without marrying, one and then another. I"ve known men kill themselves because she"d put her heart back in her pocket on them. Lately, it"s been big Jeth. She acts tonight like pick-herself a new beau lover."
She walked back through the lamplight and firelight. "John," she said, "these folks want to dance again."
What I played them was "Many Thousands Gone," with the mouth-harp to help, and they danced and stomped the way you"d think it was a many thousands dancing. In its thick, Donie Carawan promenaded left and right and do-si-doed with a fair-haired young fellow, and Jeth the dance-caller looked pickle-sour. When I"d done, Donie Carawan came swishing back.
"Let the mouth-harp Play," she said, and dance with me."
"Can"t dance no shakes," I told her. "Just now, I"d relish to practice the black train song."
Her blue eyes crinkled. "All right. Play, and I"ll sing."
She did. The mouth-harp man blew whistle-moanings to my guitar, and folks listened, goggling like frogs.
A bold young man kept mocking, Cared not for the warning word, When the wild and lonely whistle Of the little black train he heard.
"Have mercy, Lord, forgive me!