Old Nathan, Second Edition, page 21
Ellie gripped his hands firmly. “Take me along,” she said.
“I ain’t Cull Ransden!” Old Nathan shouted as he drew himself away. What he wanted to do. . . .
“I know who you are,” Ellie said. She stepped close but did not touch him. “I know ye treated me decent whin others, they didn’t. D’ye think I kin stay hereabouts, sir? Or thet I want to?”
Old Nathan turned away. There was a rifle on the pegs over the fireboard; his own. His mule gave its familiar brassy whinny from the shed, though there was no certain meaning in the sound.
Sarah Ransden en’ her son ’ud be set up right purty, what with the two farms—
Or three, ifen Ellie wint off with the man who wore her husband’s shape.
“I ain’t special t’ the beasts no more,” he said musingly. “Reckon hit’s better I try my possibles t’ git along with men now, anyways.”
He looked at the young woman. “I reckon if I warn’t all et up with bitterness whin I come back from King’s Mountain,” he added, “I might hev thunk a man could be ez good a frind thin a cat. A man er a woman.”
“I packed a budget,” Ellie said. “Hit seemed t’ me thet ye’d feel thet way whin ye come around.”
She looked out the window. The sun was already high in the sky. “We kin wait till ye’re stronger . . . ?” she said.
“Sooner we’re away, the better,” Old Nathan replied. The pain in his head was passing as he moved; and for the rest of his body—he hadn’t felt so good in fifty years. . . .
Ellie handed him a sheepskin coat, cracked at the seams but warm enough to serve until his youthful strength earned him better. Soon—
He frowned, then took Ellie by both shoulders and held her until she met his eyes. “Thar’s no more magic, girl,” he said. “I’m a man en no more. I want ye t’ understand thet.”
She hefted the bundle of household essentials she had prepared. “Thet’s what I wish fer,” she said. “A man as treats me decint.”
They walked outside into bright brilliant sunlight reflecting from the snow. Old Nathan left the cabin door open. Sarah could deal with the place whenever she chose; Sarah Ransden and the son who now kept her company. . . .
He saddled and bridled the mule, then rubbed its muzzle. The beast gave a snort of satisfaction and made a playful attempt to bite him.
“Git on up,” Old Nathan said to the girl. “I reckon I’ll walk.”
He hefted the rifle he had leaned against the sidelogs of the shed, then crooked it into his left arm. He glanced to see that Ellie was in the saddle, then made a cautious pass through the air with his free hand.
Nothing happened. Old Nathan sighed and said, “Gee up, mule. We’ve got a passel uv country t’ ride through afore we find airy place thet wants t’ see us.”
“We’ll be all right,” Ellie said.
She looked back once from the road. In the shadow of the shed, there was a faint glimmer as of fairy lights . . . but very faint, and the young couple had many miles yet to ride.
Afterword
OLD NATHAN is a book I wrote for myself. There’ve been books that didn’t do as well as I’d hoped (The Sea Hag is a striking example), but I think Old Nathan is the only one I wrote in the certain knowledge that it wasn’t going to make a lot of money for anybody.
Jim Baen did me a favor by publishing Old Nathan because he knew it was important to me. This is an example of why I work for friends. Sure, it’s business; but if that was all it was, I could’ve stayed a lawyer. (Though Jim assured me that he didn’t lose money on the book, just the profit that he’d have expected on a new David Drake title.)
The arc of five stories take place in 1830 in what’s now Lewis County, Tennessee. The lead character, Old Nathan, is a cunning man–a hedge wizard. I consciously modeled him on John the Balladeer, to my mind the most evocative of the many characters created by my friend Manly Wade Wellman.
I wrote the first two stories in the series in May, 1986, the month after Manly died… and that’s why the book was important to me.
The stories are Appalachian versions of classic English folktales. In this I was guided by The Jack Tales by Richard Chase (whom the Wellmans knew and intensely disliked, by the by), though in form mine are as realistic as I could make tales of haunts, witches, and the mouth of Hell.
I wrote the pieces in dialect, following texts by a number of contemporary writers (in particular Mrs. Trollope) and in the full knowledge that this wasn’t going to be a good thing for general comprehension and wide readership. I was doing the stories for myself and for Manly; I decided to do them right. (This is one of the few times I’ve consciously written something in a less commercial fashion than I could. There are many things that I don’t try because it’d turn my stomach to do so, but under normal circumstances I pride myself on clean, clear prose.)
The Central Tennessee setting came about because my parents retired to a tract in the hills above Hohenwald, Tennessee, and I visited them there. Though the town itself is fairly flat, the region to the north and east (in the direction of the GM plant at Spring Hill) is as I’ve described it in these stories.
Old Nathan was from its inception an episodic novel, not a collection of stories like (for example) Hammer’s Slammers. I wrote only The Bull and The Fool in 1986, but I plotted all five stories at the same time. There was no real market for them. My friend Stu Schiff published the first two in his little magazine Whispers and in one of his Doubleday anthologies of the same title; but I had debts to pay and only a limited amount of time to spend grieving for a friend. I went on to other projects.
Then in 1990 my friend Jim Baen, for reasons that boiled down to the fact of our long friendship, offered to publish the book at an advance that wouldn’t hurt either of us. I gleefully wrote the other three stories.
The cover, by the way, was a painting that Kentuckian Larry Elmore had done for his own reasons. It had appeared as the cover of a gaming magazine and as a limited-edition print before it went on Old Nathan. I have had very few covers–maybe only one, that of Lacey and His Friends–which more perfectly capture the feel and setting of the work within.
There are lots of ways to judge the success of a book. By the measure of my own personal satisfaction, Old Nathan and Redliners are the books of mine that rank highest.
–Dave Drake
David Drake, Old Nathan, Second Edition
