Sitting Up with the Dead, page 9
These are the very conditions that create the parochial knots of family and geography that, for good or ill, are the wells from which traditional tellers haul up their tales, still dripping with the rich, distinctive murk of the Southern soul. Shucking corn, keeping the kids quiet, entertaining neighbors: whatever the incentives that brought stories to their lives, these Southern Druids — minus the face paint, though not beyond the occasional hurled curses — learned their art the old way, mouth-to-ear. They first heard most of the tales they now tell themselves, or like Vickie, learned telling techniques and then applied them to stories of their own. Some tell family tales, or personal anecdotes. Others tell legends, or trickster tales, like Akbar’s story of Brer Rabbit, or even “jokelore,” which is Colonel Rods stock-in-trade. Many tell folktales; a few, the most isolated tellers, furthest from outside influences, tell very old folktales. And then there is Ray Hicks. Ray tells Jack Tales.
When I woke up in Asheville, I knew I was within an hour or two of Ray Hicks’s home. This was so exciting that I splurged on biscuits and sausage gravy for breakfast (one of the perks of lodging well), nodding between bites as an old man told me how he’d worked in the dairy up at the Vanderbilt Estate when he was a boy. His job was to jump off the milk wagon and run bottles to customers’ houses, racing to catch up with the horse if he’d had a big delivery. Now the dairy is a winery: most people prefer Chardonnay to milkshakes these days, though I doubt Ray Hicks would endorse the change.
In 1983 the National Endowment for the Arts made Ray a National Heritage Fellow — a very grandiose title for a man who probably couldn’t care less. I had book-learned a few things about ol’ Ray, as people called him, although I had never met him. He is nearly eighty; he stands seven feet tall; he rarely leaves his Appalachian home on Beech Mountain, in a remote corner of the Blue Ridge; he speaks with a vestigial accent that, according to a New Yorker profile “preserves Chaucerian and Elizabethan locutions” and the stories he tells are his birthright, the current expression of an oral family tradition that in this country, at least, goes back to around 1760, when a certain David Hicks, Sr., arrived in America from an unknown village in Somerset, England.
I had read that Ray is “the patriarch, the classic American storyteller.” I’d read, too, that once when his truck broke down and he’d been unable to pay for repairs, he’d prayed to Jesus for help, and that night an illuminated map of an internal combustion engine had appeared on his bedroom wall. He fixed the truck easily the next day. Isolated up on his four-thousand-foot-high mountain, Ray was to Anglo-American storytelling what Picasso was to visual art: a master, a genius to whom narrative digression came as naturally as shopping lists do to people with empty cupboards. I’d further read that Ray was on record as claiming that he learned everything he knew from his alter ego, Jack.
You know Jack too, and so do I: “Jack and the Beanstalk” and “Jack the Giant-Killer” are two of his better-known exploits. Jack is the hero of a cycle of English wondertales so ancient that they were already part of the folk-culture when first set into rhyme in the 1400s. Several centuries later, Jack emigrated to the New World with David Hicks, Sr., and became a Southern mountain lad. Meanwhile, back in Britain, even though the giant never got the best of him, nineteenth-century editors did, and trapped Jack in bowdlerized children’s stories, which is how most Americans now know him as well. Most, that is, but for the descendants of David Hicks, Sr., of Beech Mountain, North Carolina. On their summer porches and beside their winter fires, they kept alive a Jack meant for the adult world; a young man who through cleverness, a little magic, and sheer good luck outwits throughout all eternity his dastardly brothers Will and Tom, various supernatural adversaries, and most of the hurdles life throws in his way.
The partnership of an elderly American mountain man and a figment of the imagination of medieval English peasants (“my best friend,” as Ray calls Jack), is based on a good-hearted nose-thumbing at five centuries and the Atlantic Ocean. I can open a book and read the words of Jack’s contemporary, Geoffrey Chaucer, but we are not intimates; Chaucer is dead, so he can’t be my friend. Jack, on the other hand, has been an immortal lodger with the Hicks clan, living alongside each generation. Ray has said, “I’m Jack. Everybody can be Jack. Jack ain’t dead. He’s a-livin’ … Like I tell ’em sometimes … I ain’t everything Jack has done in the tales, but still I’ve been Jack in a lot of ways. It takes Jack to live. Now I wouldn’t have been livin’, probably, if I’d not been Jack’s friend.”
My compatriots may enjoy freefalling into an unseen future, but the invisible world I perversely cherish is the one that has passed. I want to fall backward, not forward. That vanished world — still invisible to the eyes, but accessible to the ears — lives on in Ray’s stories, by grace of a marriage of New World and Old that is far more genuine than the uneasy union of European plunder and American folly at the Biltmore Estate.
I wanted very badly to find Ray Hicks.
In the words of someone else who must also have been searching for ol’ Ray, “Easier said than done.” I looked up “Hicks” in the phonebook and found two listings under “Hicks, Orville” in the Banner Elk area, which is the town closest to Beech Mountain. I had heard Ray had a younger cousin named Orville, who was also a storyteller, so that was promising. I rang both numbers: no answer. There was nothing else to do but try my luck in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
I followed the highway as far as I could, then started sidewinding up into the foothills. The temperature dropped twenty-five degrees in half an hour. Sham “Trading Posts” by the roadside sold souvenirs and apple butter for cash; the only trading they were doing these days was on a two-hundred-year-old memory of the area — a stone’s throw from the Tennessee line — as the Wild Frontier. However hokey, their presence conjured vague thoughts of Daniel Boone, the eighteenth-century pioneer, woodsman, sometime Indian captive, and habitual poor speller (carving on a tree in these parts “D. Boone cilled a bar”), for whom a nearby town was named. Boone’s homespun swashbuckling — the story of his rescuing his young daughter from the Shawnee Indians made its way into James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans — coupled with Ray’s legendary inaccessibility (folklorist Joseph Daniel Sobol described fans “making the pilgrimage up the rocky road to Ray’s house, their ears popping and their cars’ suspensions rattling”), kindled a belief that I really was entering something very like wilderness.
Thick fog settled as I drove higher, and when it lifted I found myself in Blowing Rock, North Carolina. Volvos and BMWs jockeyed for position on streets lined in cafes and galleries. I saw a restaurant called Cheeseburgers in Paradise. There were antiques and estate jewelry shops and potters’ studios, and the mild smiles of well-dressed tourists resigned to “having a nice time.” This wasn’t Ray’s world, it was a twee tourist town. Winter population: 1200. Summer population: 6000. I felt like a cartoon character whose thought balloon had just been exploded. Matters didn’t improve in Boone, but merely slipped down the commercial scale from The Wine and Cheese Shop to the Hillbilly Trading Post. The mountains weren’t distant, now, as they had been yesterday; I was among them, like an insect buried in thick carpet, with knobby green mounds on all sides. Whenever there was a straightaway, it was cluttered either with kitsch — old motels, miniature golf courses, and places where families with children young enough to be stupendously gullible could “pan for mountain gemstones” — or slick purveyors of outdoor recreation.
Banner Elk was given over to the latter. In fact, it looked like an Olympic village set on a small plateau, ringed by mountains and scattered with hiking shops, ski shops, fishing gear stores, and white-water rafting centers. On top of Beech Mountain, Ray’s fabled Olympian home, reached only by turning my car wheels inside out on a road so steeply interlaced that its design would have made an Irish monk proud, I did not find Ray whittling on his porch, but a resort village of prefab condominium units.
This was heartbreaking. Maybe Ray had moved into a condo. I berated myself for turning him into a kind of holy hick; he was as entitled to wall-to-wall carpeting and air-conditioned clubhouses as the rest of us. Still, it was with no mean measure of desperation that I corraled a cop in the parking lot of a trendy toy store and asked about Ray.
“Oh, you’re looking for Ray-the-Storyteller.” I was as relieved as I have ever been: at least she’d heard of him. “He gives out Beech Mountain as his address, but that’s really not it.” She then gave me excruciating directions to the Mast General Store in Valle Crucis, about twenty minutes away. “They’ll know how to find Ray there.”
*
“Ray who?”
My heart sank. Pretty college students on summer vacation were weighing bags of day-glo penny candy — sassafras drops, Gummi strawberries, candy buttons, clove puffs, and Charleston Chews — for tourists’ children. No one knew Ray.
“You might want to try up at the Mast Store,” one finally suggested.
“I thought this was the Mast Store.”
“No, this is the Mast Annex. Store’s half a mile up the road.”
I sighed loudly enough for people to stare. My guidebook called Valle Crucis (which means Vale of the Cross and is pronounced Valley Cruise by the locals), “an offbeat settlement” on a “pretty back road.” This was true enough. Despite the penny candy, the detritus of tourism had remained on the highway, leaving handkerchief-size fields and pastures nestled between the switchbacks. One, indeed, cupped the Mast Store, a rambling, sagging thing of many rooflines that looked like a brontosaurus constructed out of white clapboard. An ancient Esso gasoline sign hung out front, and an American flag flew from the roof. The Mast family had been selling everything from bowler hats to chicken feed and live chickens there since 1883.
Now it was stocked with useful stuff for modern life, though ancient advertising posters still hawked turn-of-the-last-century goods. There was a hardy smell of dust, canvas, fertilizer, and coffee. In the center of the main room sat a wood-burning stove surrounded by rockers: a central focus even in the middle of summer. An old man with a gourd-shaped head, huge eyes and no teeth rocked by himself next to a checkerboard; the red squares were set with Coca-Cola caps, the black ones with silver-and-black, twist-off beer tops. I took the facing chair and asked if he knew Ray Hicks.
“Yeah, I know ol’ Ray. He been down here a timer two. Sittin jus’ whar ye are now. Wha ye lookin’ fer ’im? Ye kin t’ol Ray?”
I explained that I was an admirer, and he gave me a loose collection of directions to Ray’s house. At first, I was relieved to hear that Ray did indeed live “way back deep in th’mount’n” — so no condo for the Hicks clan, I thought triumphantly — then, an instant later, decided that this was more bad news than good. I would never find him now. I was silently weighing my chances when the old man said, “Ole Ray’s as tail’s that big ole stove.”
“No.”
“Yes, ma’am, he is.” He added that he’d personally been coming to the Mast Store since he was six years old, and it hadn’t changed at all but for the stock. The Masts used to sell pig feed and grain, but now the farmers were all gone. Then he leaned over and whispered conspiratorially, “Upstars wus the funeral parlor. That’s a-whar they kept th’caskets, up thar. They feed ye all ye’r life, then they dress ye up and pack ye off.” After that, he stretched himself and got up to take his leave, bowing and saying his mother was waiting for him at home. I must have looked incredulous, because he added, “She’s eighty-four, but I look older. Ye’r not too big, but she’s half ye’r size, and still a whip’snapper. She makes th’ony canned green beans I kin eat.”
Another two hours of searching turned up wave after green wave of mountain ridges, each skirted by precipitous valleys fast now falling into shadow, but no Ray Hicks. Another young cop told me, “Yeah, I seen him on TV tellin’ his old-timey mountain stories, but I don’t know where he lives.” I finally gave up, returned to Boone, and checked into the Franklin Court Motel. One whole side of my room was covered in a wallpaper mural of birch trees in autumn, which struggled to a bitter draw with the floral-print bedspreads and knotty pine paneling. When I went out to dinner, I discovered that members of a beefy motorcycle gang had occupied the rooms on either side of mine. I would have despaired then, except that my final, halfhearted effort to reach Orville was successful: he would be happy to meet me the next day at the Blowing Rock Recycling Plant, where he works. I could barely understand his accent, but I thought we had made a date to meet at noon.
It was ten past twelve: twenty minutes at the recycling plant, and no sign of Orville. That morning, someone had told me he plays Santa Claus in the Blowing Rock schools each Christmas, and that I couldn’t miss him. But I was; each minute that passed I was missing Orville. Just as I’d christened the phrase “The Hicks Hex” in my notebook, a truck pulled up. The driver worked at the plant, but had never heard of Orville Hicks. “Why don’t you try the Dumpsters just up the road,” he suggested kindly. “Maybe that’s where he’s at.”
I sped up the highway then literally ran, backpack filled with tape recorder, notebooks, pens, and corn muffins bouncing wildly on my back, into a bivouac of big metal Dumpsters. I kept on running until the sight of Orville stopped me cold. From pictures I knew Ray was tall, gaunt, and clean-shaven; Orville wasn’t exactly short, but he was bearded and stout. I thought he looked like a great, ambling composite of all the earth’s creatures, plants and animals alike. The bib of his denim overalls, incongruously graced by a gold watch chain, bulged with a belly big and round enough to take on a life of its own, like he had a young piglet hidden in there. His head supported two landmarks: a Carolina Tractor baseball cap and a curly, graying shrub of a full beard grown right up to his laugh lines. Between the beard and cap smiled the face of a brawny elf, nostrils arched with mischief, very blue eyes glimmering beneath bushy brows. The easy good humor that spilled from this man salved my immediate fear that he was consciously parodying himself.
“I reckon you want t’hear a sto-ry,” he said cheerfully. I assured him I did.
“Well come ’round here to ma lyin’ bench.” Gesturing with the antenna of his mobile phone, Orville indicated a salvaged plank pushed up against a chain-link fence, next to one of the Dumpsters. Peeling paint and decomposing plastic littered the ground like eternal snowflakes. Maybe because it was a recycling dump, there was no smell. We settled in and Orville said, “Oright, I’m a-gonna tell you ’bout this boy named Jack, okay?”
The good luck of this made my palms ache with pleasure. “Did you learn this one from your cousin Ray?” I asked.
“No ma’am, from ma’ mama. I had six brothers and four sisters. I’m th’ youngest. See, in th’ evenin’-time, sto-rytellin’ was part of our growin’ up. Mama, she would holler at us, ‘You young ’uns wanta hear a tale? Then come on in th’ house,’ and we’d go in th’ house and sit down thar and do chores while mama’d tell the tales.” Orville stopped and expertly spat tobacco juice at the dumpster. “We’d break beans, er shell peas, er bunch galax. And we’d set thar and do th’ work, and mama’d tell us these Jack tales. And that’s how I learned ’em, by listenin’ to mama up thar on Beech Mountain. This here one’s called ‘Jack and the Varmints.’ ”
Orville made a noise in his throat like children do when they’re imitating a machine gun, except that he was smiling. It was an extraordinary chuckle, half pure joy, half rhythmic device.
JACK AND THE VARMINTS
Now Jack, he lived waaaay back up in th’ mountains thar with his mama, and they got up one morning, and went to get something to eat, and looked, but didn’t have a bite to eat in the house. Didn’t have nuthin’. And Jack’s mama said, “Son, you gonna have to go out and find some work. If’n you don’t, we gonna starve to death.”
Well, Jack, he didn’t like to work too good, if he could get by with it. But he finally headed down th’ road lookin’ for work. Well, Jack got down th’ road a little piece, and found an old board layin’ beside th’ road that come off an old wagon. Well Jack got his old pocketknife out of his pocket, and got to whittlin’ on that board. Walking down th’ road, he wasn’t carin’ where he’s going, er if he found work er not. Got down th’ road a little piece and Jack looked and he’d chewed down a big old round paddle outta that board. Well, Jack put his knife in his pocket and got that old paddle, walking down th’ road with it, swinging it this way and that way. Wasn’t long before he come by a mud hole [pronounced hough]. Jack got to lookin’, and there was a big bunch a flies flyin’ around that mud hough. After a while the flies lit on th’ mud hough, and Jack snuck up on th’ mud hough with that paddle, and he come down in that mud hough, ka-wham! Right in th’ mud hough with th’ paddle he went. And he picked up th’ paddle and looked under it, and he’d killed seven flies! [Orville chuckled.]
Well, Jack thought he’d done something big.
“Excuse me, can I put this in here?” A man held pieces of an old kitchen chair for Orville to inspect before he tossed them in the Dumpster. Orville looked them over and thought he could do something with them, and stockpiled them at our feet.
“I’m a salvager,” he said, a little sheepishly.
So Jack went on down the road and he come to the blacksmith shop. He went in ’ar and he got that blacksmith to make him a belt [pronounced bey-alt]. And Jack put that belt on, and that belt, it read, “Big Man Jack Killed Seven at a Whack.” Gosh, Jack went down the road with that belt on feelin’ big [pronounced beeg].
