Farewell, I'm Bound to Leave You
The next dance was familiar to Dr. Barcroft; “Lady Walpole’s Reel” was traditional in his homeland. He was interested to note that these Carolina mountain folk omitted the boisterous kissing the Scots insisted upon, although the custom was remembered in Quigley’s call.
“Ladies to the right and gents by their side
Balance off now and kiss the bride.”
The music had achieved a sparkling pace and Quigley was adding pert furbelows and lacy flourishes to the melody line. The other instruments kept up with him bar for bar and the rhythm guitar began to rush, standing on the front edge of the beat, urging Quigley on and pushing the dancers a little harder, ever a little harder.
After this reel there was the briefest of pauses and Dr. Barcroft, feeling a need for refreshment, squeezed down the steps behind the musicians and went out on the porch to investigate the feast on the cluttered tables. As he had expected, there was a cornucopia of food and drink almost forbidding in its plenitude: cold meats of all sorts and corn bread and wheat bread and butters and cheeses and canned vegetables and preserves and jellies and jams and comfits and candies and crisp hand pies and amber pies of dried apples latticed like fishermen’s nets, ciders hard and sweet, and cool perry and sweet cherry wine. He took up a hand pie of veal and potato and stood in a corner, where a squint-eyed farmer passed him a jug and he tilted it to taste the first American corn whiskey he’d drunk in twenty years. It was as oily and sugar-edged and heated as he recalled and it brought back memories in a sudden freshet, memories he pushed to the back of his mind to sort and savor at a later hour.
Distance seemed not to lessen the volume of the music. It was as distinct and driving out here in the cottony dark as it had been inside on the stairwell, and Dr. Barcroft heard the sound of whippets dancing in the grass. He could hear, too, he thought, the sounds of buck-os and ladymisses beginning to spark and fondle yonder in the farther dark and the merry whispers and giggles of whippets looking on, discovering how life and love were performed, how couples came together and apart. The ladymisses’ hair was tumbled on their off-the-shoulder ruffles and their eyes were bright with happy desires and their mouths warm with kisses fleeting or fervid.
It seemed to the professor that he floated more than walked, that he drifted down the steps, past the couples holding hands and the wide-eyed whippets shuffling their feet and the farmers in rolled white shirtsleeves smoking slow roll-your-owns, and into the yard. There he felt about him a pulsing of desire so strong, the treetops seemed to bend with it, but then he realized it was the Maytime night breeze growing in force. Yet in the air, desire was as easy and affable and palpable as the wind, and when now someone turned off the electric lights in the house and left only the glow of the oil lamps to illuminate both inside and outside, he heard around him breaths caught back, sighs and whispers and whimpers, and saw, it seemed, only pieces of young bodies, a finger caressing the peach-flesh cheek of a girl, arms around necks and shoulders, the flash of ankle, knee, and thigh, and he thought of the springtime rituals of tribes and nations perched on every prominence and snugged in every pocket of the globe. The lamplit dancers inside the house spun dizzily past the windows like the fantasy angels of carousels and their eyes seemed as fixed as those painted eyes. The music was “Old Joe Clark.” Grab your partner and promenade, someday we’ll dance at the throne of God.
Dr. Barcroft stepped out into the center of the yard, retreating from the spell of the shadow of the great oak tree, and became aware of a strange powdery light sprinkled on the tops of the mountains on every side. The sound of Quigley’s fiddle was in the air all around; it seemed to swoop and climb like black moths in the dark, a note here and there glowing like a firefly, glissando figures sizzling past like shooting stars. Something was about to happen—he could feel it on his skin—something large was preparing to take place.
The sky kept growing lighter, the starlight was washing away; the moon, he thought, must be coming up.
“Gents go forward to a left-hand star
And think upon whose sons you are
Turn that star the other way
Until you’ve said your final say.”
The light was grainy, dusty; it looked like the Milky Way had spread from the top of the sky all down the west, and the tented shapes of the mountains were huge and satin black against it, and the ridgeline trees made a filigree of onyx. The wind had increased but had not cooled; the promise of full summer was in it. And when Dr. Barcroft turned from the west to look again at the house, he was hardly surprised to see that it had begun to turn like a wheel upon a vertical axle as the silhouettes of the dancers raced past window after window. It was as if their dancing, the female slide and shuffle, the masculine drum and thunder, propelled the house behind them; it had become a merry-go-round, turning steadily and stately as the music went just a little bit faster, just a little more, and he could tell there were furies in it, whirlwinds and cyclones and hurricanes that Quigley’s fiddle barely held in check, that his calling could barely control. When a woman holds a man’s heart fast, will he stay with her until the last: Swing your corner and come around a man only needs six foot of ground. He thought he saw the left-hand corner of the house heave into sight and was waiting to see the back porch turn frontwise toward him, knowing there would be dancing and sparking and feasting on that side of the house, too, when quite suddenly the thing that had been going to take place did so.
The moon: The moon rose all at once, as if it had escaped the mountains, as if there had been a force in those hilltops that held it back, restrained it until it bounded away from them and rose like a hot-air balloon, as silent as that and as awing, and it was the hugest moon this doctor of music had ever seen or imagined, so huge and close, it seemed to spread a perfume in the air, the scent of frost on new-mown grass, the smell of the cold, rough linen sheets you crawled into on a deep winter night with the moonlight pouring onto the bed, a smell almost odorless, like the smell of porcelain plates taken from the dark cupboard shelf. Leave your partner but come back soon there’ll be love in the springtime moon swing the ladymiss on your right there’ll be moon till the sky goes white.
* * *
“Lord have mercy,” my mother said. “I don’t remember he told us all that. Of course, I was only eight and wouldn’t understand. But I’m grown up now and I still don’t understand.”
“I can’t tell it the way he did,” my grandmother said. “All his thought and all his feelings were far beyond me. I have tried to remember the best I could. He got all excited in talking, you know, and almost drove us off the road up there at Betsey’s Gap. I could just picture us tumbling to death down the mountainside.”
“I don’t remember that, either,” my mother said.
“He had a way of talking that was full of strange words and lilts and sometimes he made you feel you were inside his head and could see and feel things the way he did. He would have made a grand preacher but had no calling, as he once told me with some sadness.”
“There was something magic about that night, though,” my mother said. “Do you remember how I told you the music had called ghosts out of their graves? They came to dance, strange silent people of long ago.”
“I remember how you thought so.”
“And you said—”
“I told you it was the family that liked to come to dance parties in old-time clothes, of which they had a great store. It was just their way to do so. Maybe they honored their departed that way, I don’t know. Dillards, that’s who they were.”
“It was strange to me, but I wasn’t frightened.”
“No. You were always a brave one.… And then it started to get light with morning coming on.”
* * *
It was only a hint of sun, the east going platinum gray just above the apple orchard with its greening leaves, but it was enough for the music to start to mute, for the moon to lose some of the lightning hue of its silver, to become a listener rather than a dancer and to recede from th
e valley, slowly diminishing in size till it found its way, now small and secondary, back to its usual orbit.
Dr. Barcroft stopped spinning, too, and steadied himself and looked, to see that the house was motionless as any stone and Quigley and the boys had subsided into a waltz, “The Silver Lake Waltz,” taken at a dreamy slow tempo. It was full of the sweet and sad.
Ladies go in and gents outside for you’re going home with your own dear bride. Go out to the porch for one last drink for now is always later than you think.
He shook his head, the tall professor, and suddenly felt himself as sober as a bucket of well water as he watched the guests pack up and make ready to depart. He would go in now and talk to dancers and musicians and make notes in his neat little black leather notebook. He would drink coffee and perform his manners to Qualley and Quigley and get all fixed to drive with Annie Barbara and Cora Sorrells back over the mountain through Betsey’s Gap. Yet he found it hard to let go so easily the dance and the music and the moonlight and he asked himself, as he had asked before in a score of nations and after a thousand feasts and ceremonies, What exactly happened here and how did it all go away so quickly?
* * *
“Well, I’ll say again, I didn’t understand and still don’t,” my grandmother said.
“I don’t either,” my mother said. “A man like Dr. Barcroft, how could we understand? But we were proud of his notice and wanted to be in the books he wrote. You have to realize, Jess, that a lot of people looked down on us, saying we were ignorant hillbillies and other things they ought to be ashamed of saying. Fancy people that lived in expensive places. So if our works and days got written up in his books that were read and admired all over the world—well, why shouldn’t we take a mite of pride?”
“I believe us to be as upright as anyone in the nation,” my grandmother said. “Only we hold to some of the old ways.”
“Not all of us,” my mother said. “My husband likes the new ways. But you know what? There was one thing about Dr. Barcroft that reminds me of Joe Robert. It’s the way he talked about the moon, like it was as dear to him as someplace he might have lived. What is it about men that they can’t keep their hands off the moon? Joe Robert told me he thinks men will travel to the moon someday.”
“I think so, too,” I said.
They looked at me for a long, strange moment and then my grandmother said, “Well, if you and your daddy are going to the moon, you had better take plenty to eat. It looks to me like slim pickings up there.”
THE VOICES
10:17 4:44 8:20 1:28
The clocks were as crazy as ever, yet there we sat, my father and I, patient before that cold wood heater, watching the wild hands as if they might point to the true time if only we mustered the courage to wait them out. But the wind was too mischievous in their works. The minutes and seconds got lost among the years and dropped away to wander eternity.
Outside this too-large house, the wind would rise to a fury and then subside, no more predictable than the times the clocks were telling. To the window behind our chairs it brought weathers of every sort—drought and tempest, spring rain and early snow, Sahara-like sunshine and melancholy fog. This old house had always stood steady before, but now the time this wind had so distressed was rocking the structure with dread power. We could feel the foundations clinging to the ground with desperate fingertips.
“All right,” I said. “Now I’m scared. Pretty much scared, I’ll tell you.”
“I can’t blame you, Jess,” my father said. “I’m scared pretty tight myself. It’s a good thing we let your sister sleep over at the Williams place tonight. We didn’t think she should be here, your mother and I. Mitzi’s too young to understand.”
“I don’t understand, either.”
“Neither do I,” he said. “I know that the way time and space and matter are built together makes death inevitable. But I don’t understand.”
“Maybe they’re built wrong,” I said. “Maybe it was a bad plan to begin with.”
“Maybe so. Have you got a better one?”
“It’s too hard on Mother.”
“Yes,” he said.
“It is just too hard. I can tell. I can hear them talking together or thinking together all the way from the bedroom.”
“Yes. So can I.”
I hung my head and closed my eyes to hear.
* * *
And so farewell I’m bound to leave you, All away you rolling river, I’ll be gone when dawn is breaking.
O Mama, don’t say so. Not this dawn or the next or the next. It is too soon for you to go.
I wish that song would quit me. I am trying to think of Jesus, but that old song is in the way. I do not wish to think of Frawley Harper in this fateful hour. I must think of Jesus or of Frank, my husband. I have been mostly good with my thoughts, but now I can’t.
You mustn’t blame yourself, Mama. Thoughts come and go—you can’t help that.
I need to be steadier in mind. If I am steady, Jesus will come to me.
O Mama.
“Now they are thinking or saying the same thing,” I told my father. “Sometimes they split off from one another like a little creek up high in the mountains that will divide around a big rock and then come back to meet itself.”
“Yes,” he said.
“I don’t understand how we can hear them all the way down that dark hall with the doors shut.”
“We can’t hear them,” he said. “We only know what they are thinking or saying. We are not hearing with our ears.”
“How, then?”
“It is the way of families,” he said. “But only at special times.”
“What kind of special?”
“Hard, mostly,” he said.
“I still don’t understand.”
“Be quiet and I will tell you something,” he said. “Not long from now there will come an icy cold into this room. There will be a darkness like we were trapped inside a vein of coal. I want you to be brave and show me what you are made of, and I will try to be brave, too. Then it will pass off like a slow and painful eclipse of the sun and moon and stars. It will be terrible. But we must overmaster it. So hang on tight, Jess. It is coming soon.”
“It is already here,” I said. “It is in the hallway, making the darkness darker. And it is already cold in here and getting colder. It is just outside the door, ready to come in. Don’t you feel how close it is?”
“Yes,” he said.
Then the shadow was upon us and within us and was as bad as he said it would be. I don’t know how many eternities we suffered there, my father and I, but they were motionless with despair. Yet the shadow lightened a little at last; the windows went quiet with predawn light. We knew that the final thing my grandmother said or thought was, Farewell, daughter, it is Jesus at last, and that the final thing my mother said or thought was, Don’t leave me alone in this world without you. And then there was light enough in our front room to read the clocks. My grandfather’s watch in its case read 12:12 and the other three said 5:11. Time had started up again, but I could tell my father was right: It would be a different kind of time we had to live in now; it would not be steady in the least and the winds would be cold in our faces against us all the way.
“Cora is trying to come down the hallway,” my father said. “But it is dark and she can’t find the switch and she is frightened. If you and I don’t go to meet her halfway, she may not make it back to us. Are you ready to go with me into that dark hallway and bring your mother back here into the light?”
“No, I am not ready,” I said. “But I’ll go with you anyhow.”
“Good,” he said. “She’s going to need us.”
“We’re going to need her, too,” I said.
Books by Fred Chappell
NOVELS
It Is Time, Lord
The Inkling
Dagon
The Gaudy Place
I Am One of You Forever
Brighten the Corner Where You Are
SHORT STORIES
Moments of Light
More Shapes Than One
POETRY
The World Between the Eyes
River
The Man Twice Married to Fire
Bloodfire
Awakening to Music
Wind Mountain
Earthsleep
Driftlake: A Lieder Cycle
Midquest
Castle Tzingal
Source
First and Last Words
Spring Garden: New and Selected Poems
ANTHOLOGIES
The Fred Chappell Reader
ESSAYS
Plow Naked
Praise for Farewell, I’m Bound to Leave You
“Funny, brooding, romantic and heroic.… A genuine patience distinguishes Chappell from the vast herd of writers—especially Southern writers—who mistake languid melancholy for lyricism. He writes with a feel for emotional timing that is as acute as his sense of style.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Mr. Chappell … draw[s] upon a rich tale-telling skill to bring into merry remembrance the stories of those who themselves stand soberly at the still point of the turning Earth, where time and the timeless intersect.”
—James E. Person, The Washington Times
“Enchanted and enchanting.… This book deserves to be read, and taught, and loved.”
—Beth Gutcheon, San Jose Mercury News
“Chappell writes with a poet’s love of language.… [H]e remains an industrious chronicler of the changing South, evoking a nostalgia for the past and a recognition of the present with the same keen-eyed clarity.”
—Greg Johnson, The Atlanta Journal/Constitution
“Chappell is a true poet, and his language has the authentic frisky lilt of fiddles at a barn dance.”
—Robert Taylor, The Boston Globe
“Busy, satisfying, and wholesome: Chappell casts a sharp eye upon a very rich landscape and gives us a portrait as poignant as it is clear.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Chappell’s new novel is pure mountain moonshine: an instant and total intoxication.… Farewell, I’m Bound to Leave You bears Chappell’s inimitable stamp: irresistible homespun stories well stocked with humor, pathos, poetic lyricism, and compassionate wisdom.”