The mans name was Clarence Dickason, originally from Big Stone Gap, Virginia. He was a fifty-two year old with skin as black as his grandmothers, a woman born into Virginia slavery. Like her, he sang while he worked. Hed been doing a good deal of it in recent weeks, raising a small house before he framed the two-seater latrine quarters. On this May evening, he was expecting his wife and children to join him from down the mountain, in Bluefield, after some time of living apart. He put his hammer in a toolbox sitting atop a rough-cut sawhorse. Through the nails still in his teeth, he sang, Well, lovers is you right? Oh, yes we right. Bluefield women read and write, Keystone women bite and fight, carry to the mountain boys, carry to the mountain.
Clarence Dickason was sharp-eyed still, despite his years of hard-living. But he did not detect the man above him, flat-bellied on the ridges edge. The figure was thin and long. He wore nothing on his callused feet. The mans beard mixed with ground cover as if he had grown into it. Had he been standing upright, the beard would reach his belly. His hair was to his shoulders. Matted. The wrinkles surrounding his eyes were many and deep. Like those on his forehead, they recessed and housed the kind of dirt that cannot be washed away.
As the sun dropped behind the poplar trees circling the bald, it shone on the mountain mans face. Lit him up. He squinted, the only movement hed made in an hours time, and as he breathed in the evening air through his mouth, the sunlight reflected momentarily off the gold inside.
The thatched hut was on a mountain stairstep. It was the lee side of a steep ridge, three-thousand feet in the air. Weather tended to move west to east, and this kept the whole place relatively free from the worst storms could offer. The huts doorway faced southeast to let in morning sun. It didnt take long to heat. There was enough room to stand or lie down inside, little else. Insulation was thick, half a foot of leaves, ferns, and mosses packed and mortar-solid. A bedding of cattail and grass took up most of the floor, while the pointed ceiling housed a storage space. In it was a rolled-up thatched blanket for winter, alongside a rotting backpack full of a mans tools for sustenance. A door plug constructed of bark slabs leaned against a wall.
The fire pit was six paces from the door, the mountain stream fifty.
Between them, feet braced under a thick, hillside root, the mountain man counted out his sit-ups. Sixty-four, sixty-five, sixty-six, sixty-seven. Hed taken to inclined sit-ups when flat became too easy. Each morning he completed a hundred. Then the same for push-ups. Then jumping jacks. Best he could figure, he averaged seven miles daily of running in temperate months, all on incline, all barefoot until the cold came.
His clothes were sewn-together pieces of former clothes. Hed strung belts of vine and leather. On the belts were loops for carrying knives of both the steel-forged and bone variety. Pouches held greenbrier berries and ginseng tubers and ramps, the latter of which he ate five a day, most times raw, for he was convinced of their power to keep him young. His pores sweated their stink. The man ate grasshoppers and slugs and katydids.
When he hit one hundred, he sat, his feet still wedged under tree root. Please dont be fearful, he said aloud. I make my home in these parts. My name is Chicopee. Hed forgotten some things and remembered others, like the fake name hed once heard. My name is Chicopee, he said again. He was rehearsing speech for a time when he might introduce himself to the new neighbors down the mountain, the first human beings hed set eyes on in twenty-four years.
Chicopee, he said again. Then he pulled his feet from under the root, somersaulted backwards down the hill twice, sprung himself upright and began to run. His skin was tough, a tanned hide with muscles rolling and clenching underneath, hard as the bones they rode. While he ran, he sang, Bluefield women read and write, Keystone women bite and fight, carry to the mountain boys, carry to the mountain.
The dug-up dead mans harmonica had not touched lips since 1902. Chicopee had stared at the small instrument by firelight for the first two years on the mountain. But hed never put it to his mouth in those early days. Hed read its intricate engraving aloud. Marine Band. M. Hohner. No. 1896. Tarnished brass on pearwood, a beautiful little mouth harp. It was only when hed started having conversations aloud with himself that he played it. You got gold teeth now, Chicopee, hed said on a cold October night in 1925. Cant no infections bust through solid gold. And so hed started playing. In a year, he cupped that harmonica to his face as if it was another extension of his hand. As if, like his teeth, it was made from the earths most valued currency. His tongue hit those ten holes serpent-quick. He blew hard and soft and medium, shook twenty reeds side to side until they howled and moaned almost to breaking. It became his four inch path to salvation, to avoiding hysteria nightly.
Now he only played on occasion. When something threatened the peace hed finally come to. A brewing storm. Two or more days of rain. Neighbors.
He played every song hed ever heard, in one version or another. Most oft-played were two songs. Down by the Ohio, was one. Though he couldnt know it through the confusion that stirred his brain, he played this song because a woman walked the earth, one whod kissed him and sang in his ear. One named Clarissa. The other tune was I Wont Stop Praying, and again, though he couldnt place its origin any longer, it somehow told him that a friend might still live and breathe. A friend with a mama who sang for the sins of all men. A friend named Arly Jr.
As May turned to June, Chicopee blew a new tune. Hed heard his new neighbor sing it, a song about women and places hed not thought of in years. Places like Bluefield and Keystone, Mercer and McDowell. Coalfield towns like the one he came from. Railroad towns. Hed heard a human voice other than his own down in that grass bald, and it got him to thinking. Out there all those years, until hed heard the song of Clarence Dickason, until hed seen the man building an outhouse, hed almost come to accept that hed made all of it up. That all those blurry memories of a rotten-toothed childhood were the mind tricks of a man whod lived always and only among trees and turtles and deer and mud, a man touched in the head. None of that other had ever existed, save in dreams. People and coal tipples and trains and sling-shots and rifle sights and mules and outhouses and the nether-regions of women and snakes and tongue-talkers and Model T Fords. These were made up things.
As May turned to June, Chicopee blew a new tune. Hed heard his new neighbor sing it, a song about women and places hed not thought of in years. Places like Bluefield and Keystone, Mercer and McDowell. Coalfield towns like the one he came from. Railroad towns. Hed heard a human voice other than his own down in that grass bald, and it got him to thinking. Out there all those years, until hed heard the song of Clarence Dickason, until hed seen the man building an outhouse, hed almost come to accept that hed made all of it up. That all those blurry memories of a rotten-toothed childhood were the mind tricks of a man whod lived always and only among trees and turtles and deer and mud, a man touched in the head. None of that other had ever existed, save in dreams. People and coal tipples and trains and sling-shots and rifle sights and mules and outhouses and the nether-regions of women and snakes and tongue-talkers and Model T Fords. These were made up things.
But here was a harmonica. And here was a flask with a gun inside. And here was a memory of a woman named Widow, saying, Keep this here flask on you. Its a magical flask. A never-ending flask. As much as you sip its shine, it will refill and keep you in peace. And he had sipped. And it had refilled, like magic. Its contents kept him going. And on its silver surface, and on the bark-stripped sides of a shagbark hickory tree when flask space was used up, hed notched the days and weeks and months and years since coming here to the mountaintop. Those notches totaled 9,069 days. 1,295 weeks. 298 months. After a while, he forgot what they stood for, those little etches. His pen knife dulled and the tip broke off from etching times passage. So, he began to sharpen the little pecker bones he cut from raccoons hed tracked and trapped. Their hides made winter hats, their ribs wind-chimes. And their rock-sharpened peckers, the etchers of time.
Tonight, he etched another line on the tree next to his fire. It was June 1st, 1946. He looked up at all the little notches. The fire made the time-marks wobble and dance. Please dont be fearful, the mountain man said aloud to the tree. My name is Chicopee.
Then, as he sometimes did, he got out the derringer flask. He practiced, again and again, the fluid, complicated motions of retrieving the gun inside. The trip latch was greased with milkweed oil. He could draw the hidden weapon in four seconds.
That night, he checked his supply of.22 shells. Still two boxes. He loaded the gun and did what he needed to stay sharp-eyed.
The acorn didnt have a chance. Even at night, even thrown twenty feet into the air, he could line up his shot and put a hole through it. Magnified. Microscopic.
SEVENTEEN. They Would Stare
By mid-June, it was hot enough to wash in the mountain stream. Chicopee stripped naked, shoved an acorn up each nosehole, and laid down in the clear, moving water. He held a tree root in his fist to keep himself steady against the current. His feet pointed upstream, his head down, so that his beard washed back over his face. He raked through it with the fingers of his free hand. When he stood up afterwards, he wrung out his hair and beard. Then he did a little drip-dry dance, still naked, to help along the sun streaks hitting him through tree cover.
In the storage space of the upper hut, he dug out a pair of slacks and a shirt that had remained intact. The shirt was a yellowed white and the slacks were black. Tucked in, bearded, and barefoot, he looked like an actor in a stage play, a caricature of the Hatfields and McCoys.