Farewell, I'm Bound to Leave You

  It is a strange story of the most ordinary happenings and it might be difficult to understand why my mother and grandmother returned to it so often, sometimes touching it only lightly but at other times piercing it deeply, like hummingbirds at the blossoms of a trumpet vine. I think its attraction for them lay in the figure of Barcroft, the celebrated musicologist and folklorist. He was striking and romantic, and I believe he captivated their hearts, although my mother was only eight years old at the time and my grandmother a proud matron in her fortieth year with two children living and one dead.

  I also think they liked to tell it because it showed the kind of people we were in our mountains, the way we would like for others to know us, and because it was a story that celebrated their friends the Laffertys, a family I knew only by reputation. Perhaps there were other reasons, too. Stories have a hundred motives and a thousand sources, some as recognizable as tiger lilies, some as hidden as secret mountaintop springs.

  At any rate, I hear it in my own memory as a kind of music, its themes rendered in the measured tones of my grandmother—like a viola singing—and accompanied by the clear pipings of my mother, remembering herself as an awestruck child—the warbling of clarinet arpeggios. Dr. Holme Barcroft’s story is present as a grave cello ostinato that in the end takes the dominant melody. It is this music I would like to render here, as if I put supporting chords to stave paper. The fourth voice is my own as I try to harmonize the sounds in my head. Together we are a quartet: soprano, alto, tenor, baritone.

  * * *

  We were appointed by the superintendent of county schools (my grandmother might say) to serve Dr. Holme Barcroft as a guide around our region as he searched for songs and tales and sayings. These things he would put into books so that all the world could read and know us the way we lived in the coves and on the sides of the hazy hills. They would learn from his books that we were people like other people, wise and foolish, brave and frightened, saintly and unholy and ordinary. The only thing we mountain folk lacked was riches, and it may be that our poverty only displayed our other qualities in a sharper light.

  Of course, there are degrees of poverty, just as there are degrees of wealth. No one had ever called the Laffertys poor. It’s doubtful that they heaped great stores of money in bank vaults, but then, they never owed a dime, either—and that was a situation hard to avoid in the hungry years. It would be mistaken to imagine that money or the lack of it would make much difference to them; this was a family that brimmed over with happiness come drought or flood, come frost or fire. They had a talent for happiness the way some folks have a talent for fine embroidery or for putting up strawberry preserves that shine in the jar with the light of rubies.

  The father and mother were named Quigley and Qualley (my mother might say) and there were nine or ten or maybe an even dozen children. “Whippets” was what their parents called them, and it was impossible to get an accurate count because they wouldn’t stay put long enough, swarming here and yonder like ants streaming out of a hill someone had poured boiling water into. And how would you ever sort them out from their cousins and friends who flocked to the Lafferty farm like it was a candy store? There didn’t seem to be much need for an exact count anyhow; the younguns could look well enough after themselves and after one another. Each of them had a sense of where all the others were at any time and what they would be doing.

  Even their mother hardly fretted about them. Truth was, it seemed that as soon as Qualley could get one of her whippets weaned she’d just set it on the floor and off it would toddle like a windup toy. Then every now and then she’d have a look to see if all its teeth were coming in straight or if its eyes were crossed or if it was putting off till December snows the wearing of shoes. As for keeping them scrubbed and brushed and polished—well, she’d trained the oldest girl and oldest boy and she didn’t expect to be birthing any whippets too dull-witted to learn from their siblings. Once a year Quigley would drive over to Braceboro and come back with a tub of clothes as big as a cotton bale—all sizes and genders mixed together. He dumped it out on the wide front porch of the house and let them divide among themselves. It was a puzzle and a scramble and to watch the spectacle left Quigley laughing till his eyes teared.

  The accepted wisdom is that if a man has got a pretty fair amount of farmland—the Laffertys laid claim to about seven hundred acres, counting the wooded hillsides and ridge tops—then he needs a good-sized family to till and harvest. But it may be that what Quigley and Qualley were after was their own square dance troupe. Because that was the one and only sure way to get most of the Laffertys in one place: strike up with the fiddle and the banjo and throw a handful of cornmeal on the polished floor so that the tall and limber Lafferty girls could glide across it like muskrats in a twilit pond going from bank to weedy bank.

  Square dancing was the Lafferty passion; any of them would rather clog than hunt or fish or eat or go courting. After they achieved a certain age the whippets were called whippets no longer; the boys were titled “buck-os” and the girls “ladymisses,” and as they climbed into their later teens the ladymisses were as spry and nimble as weasels when they danced and the buck-os’ clogging was as thunderous as a turkey shoot. It gave Quigley such pleasure to see them in their turns that you feared he might roll out of his skin. “Look at her go, look at her go!” he would cry out. “Ain’t she the proudest beauty? Look at her chin raised high and her shoulders rared back. Oh me oh my, what a heartacher. She’ll make the preachers bust the Commandments.” He’d be talking about a whippet not more than five years old and not much taller than the knee of the brother she was dancing with.

  Because all the Lafferty younguns turned out tall and blond and lissom and strong. That was a wonder nigh unnatural because both Quigley and Qualley were short. Somebody once called them “the Button Couple” because they both had smooth bodies with button faces and in the faces small shiny eyes like shirt-cuff buttons. And Quigley had a nose like the red button the miller mashes to stop his grain crusher. Here were the mother and daddy short and squat and their children tall around them; it looked like a couple of toadstools had spawned a crop of mullein. Those younguns had just the kind of build that square dancing requires, lean and smooth and limber as willow withes.

  Quigley was a caller, acknowledged to be the best in Hardison County, which means the best in the whole wide world, and he played the fiddle. He wasn’t the best fiddle in the county because there was never anything but dancing in his head and whenever someone asked him to play a slow and mournful ballad like “The Triplett Tragedy” or “Down in the Valley,” he might not get half through a second chorus before he would begin picking up the measure, and what had started out as a doleful, sad song ended up as “Billy in the Lowlands.”

  Just to give you an idea how strong the current of his passion ran (my grandmother and mother might say): One time they lost their closest neighbor and Qualley’s bosom friend, Aunt Una Mae Stanton, who got blood poisoning from a pigsty nail and suffered to death. Qualley had stayed by her every minute and Quigley had done what little a man can do in the circumstances, but when she passed on, he was at a complete loss. He broached it to Preacher Sam Gwynn that since they were going to have the funeral and there would be a big crowd anyway, mightn’t they honor the memory of the dear departed with a square dance?

  But they wouldn’t let him hold that dance and it is doubtful that Quigley ever understood why. It would seem as natural to him as weeping at a funeral. More natural, perhaps, given his character and the way he knew Aunt Una Mae.

  Well, anyhow …

  Holme Barcroft had heard about Quigley and the fashion in which he called a dance and that was exactly the kind of thing he took pains to write up in his books, so we were sent to fetch him down to the Lafferty place. Dr. Barcroft drove down in an old Model T he had borrowed from the school superintendent and pulled it underneath the big turkey oak in the front yard. We sat beside him in the front seat to show him the way. The family knew who
was coming, of course, and we didn’t get the truck doors open before whippets and ladymisses and buck-os sprang out from every corner of the farm and mobbed us over.

  As soon as Holme Barcroft stepped off the running board, the tallest Lafferty boy strode into his light and said, “Dr. Barcroft, we are proud to have you here, but we have heard that Scotchmen all wore skirts. We were looking forward to seeing you in the female getup.”

  In that voice that was as clear and crisp as the blue of his eyes, Holme Barcroft said, “Young man, a Scotsman never wears a skirt. He may well wear a kilt, but it’s nothing like a skirt.”

  “What exactly is the difference?”

  “The difference is one that some fine, handsome laddie buck will break you a nose or a tooth for failing to understand.” Then he reached over and squeezed the Lafferty bicep and said, “But I don’t believe you’d run away from a tussle, would you?”

  The buck-o grinned and blushed and retreated.

  One of the whippets said, “You don’t talk like I thought you would. You sound more like an Englishman than a Scotchman.”

  “Have you met and talked to an Englishman?” Dr. Barcroft asked.

  “No, sir,” she said. “But I saw a Negro one time. Me and Toodie both did. He was dark all over, except his hands were white.”

  “Perhaps he was an Englishman. There are many Englishmen of color. Did you talk to him?”

  But shyness had overcome her and Birdie Lafferty giggled and reddened and ran to hide behind a sister’s gingham skirt.

  There looked to be no end of these encounters and the three of us had not yet traveled six feet from the Model T. We could see Quigley and Qualley waiting for us up on the porch, grinning as proud as trophy fishermen, but how would we ever wade through this thicket of offspring to get there? Finally one of the ladymisses parted a way for us and we passed through a line of whippets who plucked at Dr. Barcroft’s woolen trousers.

  On the porch we got a warm reception and then Quigley made a grave and formal introduction of Dr. Barcroft. The younguns looked him up and down, and there was a lot of looking because the Scot stood six foot six in his black rubber boots. With his hair gone bright silver now and his bushy eyebrows frosty, he was truly distinguished-looking, and in his ruddy face those cool blue eyes were cold fire asparkle. A man meeting Dr. Barcroft for the first time would square his shoulders and draw himself up to his full height, and Quigley did so now, but maybe only Qualley would notice he’d become taller by a fraction of a cubit.

  “Well, sir, Dr. Barcroft,” he said. “We’re mighty pleased to have you here. We’ve never met anybody that came across the seas. When you were in our parts before, you didn’t stop in with us, and that was a disappointment.”

  “Mr. Lafferty, it has been two decades since I was last here. Wouldn’t you have been rather young?”

  “I meant my daddy, Dr. Barcroft. He was a man proud of his dancing and calling and his fiddle and his table. He wanted mighty bad to show off to a person from a foreign land.”

  “I regret the missed opportunity,” the Scotsman replied. “I learned last time that there is such a wealth of folkways here in your beautiful hills that it would require an army of scholars many years to record even the smallest amount.”

  It was not apparent that Quigley understood the gist of this speech, but he had a ready answer for almost every conundrum. “Let’s go in and set and have a cup of coffee and a piece of Qualley’s vinegar pie. Dinner ain’t quite ready yet, but maybe that’ll hold us through the hour.”

  Dr. Barcroft showed some surprise at this suggestion, the hour being only 10:30 in the morning. But he graciously acquiesced and we went inside. Three whippets stood watching us from the porch, excited faces pressed against the door screens.

  It was a fresh May morning and all the doors and windows were open, yet the house was full of kitchen smells. Qualley was never one to let down her side and she kept as toothsome and plenteous a table as had any Lafferty spouse of past generations. Ordinarily she would not have cooked a full meal at noontime. It was the custom for only one or two fresh dishes to be offered at that hour. The table was always filled with bowls and platters: Stewed corn and tomatoes, boiled greens of various sorts, cold country ham, green beans, pickled beets, and other viands waited under the shroud of a clean white tablecloth for a hungering whippet to come by and take a spoonful or a handful or a plateful. Busy at so many tasks in so many different corners of the farm, the Laffertys could not easily dine together at midday, so each came by the table to graze at convenience, stopping by the kitchen for a cup of sweet coffee as thick as asphalt and maybe bringing in a plate to chat there with Qualley and an industrious ladymiss or two as they were preparing supper. Supper was the major meal of the day and quite a bounteous affair.

  But today they were entertaining a foreigner. Dr. Barcroft wasn’t really a stranger—Laffertys never met strangers—but they wanted to put on for him the best they knew how. So the diminutive farmer and the towering professor strolled through the kitchen, each gathering a slab of vinegar pie and a cup of coffee, then went out onto the back porch, leaving the womenfolk behind to stir at the wood range and clatter at the counters. There they ate their pie in silence and leaned back in the rocking chairs to sip from the tinware mugs. Quigley produced a cold briar pipe to suck on.

  He was considering his first question with all the care of a man judging the worth of a salable heifer. Yet it was simple enough when he uttered it at last: “How many younguns do you have, Dr. Barcroft?”

  “I’ve always lived a bachelor, Mr. Lafferty, and I do desire you to call me by my first name, Holme.”

  “You never have been married? How old might you be, I wonder.”

  “I have looked upon this earth for sixty-five summers, Mr. Lafferty.”

  “Sixty-five years and never been married.” This information plunged Quigley into such a thoughtful long silence, his organs of speech seemed to have been affected. “Now what manner of life is that like, if you don’t mind my asking? I know a number of widowers, but the only other bachelors I know are kind of runty and sour. You don’t appear to be of the bachelor make, if you take my meaning, Dr. Barcroft.”

  “It is my lot in life to travel extensively, Mr. Lafferty. In eastern and middle Europe, in the loneliest corners of Wales and Ireland, across the Rocky Mountains of your own great nation. I was never able to see how I could keep a family together under the circumstances or how I could expect a woman to share such hardships and dangers. I do wish you would call me Holme, though, as all my friends do.”

  “It’s hard for me to think how a man might live that way. I’ve got so used to being fenced around with kinfolks, I’d feel undressed without them.”

  “My life is sometimes a lonely one, but I made up my mind to it a long time ago. When I return to Glasgow, I do enjoy the company of my nieces and nephews. My sister has two boys and two girls.”

  “That’s good,” Quigley said, but it was clear that he considered this arrangement makeshift and that he began to see some disadvantages in being a foreigner. “How is it you come to know Annie Barbara Sorrells in our part of the world?”

  “One of her teachers many years ago recommended her to me as someone who came from mountain stock and knew the old ways and those families who still lived in the old style. But I needed someone with enough formal education to help me take notes and keep records. She was an excellent choice.”

  “And you’re interested in writing down on paper the old ways and styles?”

  “Yes, sir, I am. Everywhere I go.”

  “I’m afraid you’ll find us an ignorant crowd, Dr. Barcroft. All we mostly know around here is what we learned from our elders or on our own. But everybody of age in the Lafferty family can read and write and cipher. I hope you’ll set that down in your book.”

  Not the richest bribe would ever get the name Holme out of Quigley’s mouth; he took too fine a pleasure in calling his friend Dr. It was such a source of pride to him th
at he sucked at his pipe stem a little more sharply and rocked a little harder each time he spoke the title.

  “I’ll certainly write it down,” the Scotsman said.

  Quigley questioned the professor about his travels and we were then gratified by descriptions of the Urals and the Andes, the wheaten plains of Canada, the sweltering jungles of the Yucatán, the bustle of London, and the drolleries of Paris. We heard about people who made music with wire prongs and the bones of jackals and by slapping their cheeks and chests and thighs. We learned that Dr. Barcroft had eaten locusts, snakes, monkey brains, green lizards, and fish eggs, yet hungered for nothing so keenly as for oatmeal and liver boiled up together in the intestines of a fat sheep. We listened to accounts of travel by llama, yak, Arabian pony, dogsled, burro, steamboat, raft, airplane, and balloon and gave our entranced attention to tales of peril from Mongols, Arabs, Tartars, thuggees, Jivaro, cutthroats and thieves, renegade soldiers, and jealous husbands. He had escaped death and usually injury from pistol, knife, machete, the noose and the branding iron, the injured tiger and the untamable bronco, snakebite, malaria, blood infection, and unsanitary whiskey. Dr. Barcroft had met the great of the world and the obscure, the prized and the despised; he had dined with satraps and with peasants, with scientists and poets and drunkards, had eaten off silver and gold and tortoiseshell and banana leaf. He had heard and recorded on paper or wax cylinder or magnetic wire or simply in his memory, which was as indelible as cut granite, the songs of coal miners, flatboat men, railroad firemen and switchboard operators, furnace stokers and cattle drovers, hoboes and hangmen, housewives and hackabouts, scullery maids, roughnecks, banjo pickers, zither players, Jew’s harp masters, fiddlers, sawyers, coopers, roofers, tailors, bootleggers, jailbirds, murderers, constables, sheriffs, Negroes, painters, well diggers, priests and preachers of every denomination, of every religion and condition, narrow and sober as coffins in aspect or with painted faces and trailing scarlet feathers.