Blue Ridge Bobby

Blue Ridge Bobby

The door opened and Johnson Gibbs stood solidly in it. His blue eyes were very bright. There was full sunlight now and it made a burning glare on the snow. Against this harsh light Johnson’s figure loomed black, black as velvet, blackly burning, and his voice sounded deep and hollow:

     “Well, Jess, are you one of us or not?”
     —Fred Chappell, I Am One of You Forever

 

The day after my grandfather Bobby died, I drove with my sister from Charleston, South Carolina to Bakersville, North Carolina, a town of not-quite-500 along the Tennessee border. We stopped for food in Asheville, parking by a bank of purple asters. I threw open the car door to catch that first mouthful of mountain air. It tasted as sweet and clean as the water in the creek on Bobby’s property. I had made this trip many times. Season after season, I had seen mountains appear like great blue shadows in the distance, my anticipation rising as they came close enough for me to see the trees that covered them. That feeling was the same when I was four as when I was twenty-four. The nearer the mountains were to me, the nearer I was to my grandparents. There had been twenty-six years of trips to the mountains, and Bobby had been at the end of all of them. This time he wasn’t, and never would be again.

Bobby had spent the last weeks of his life consolidating the family land in Bakersville, getting it all in his and MeMe’s names so that it would be with their children and grandchildren forever. Already, the pressure was on: which one of us would choose to build a home and make a life in the mountains; who would carry on Bobby’s passion and give meaning to his final act? None of us grandchildren had such a plan.

I found it all depressing beyond belief. For one thing, Bobby bought a big piece of the land from a stingy nephew who charged him far more than what the land was worth—I’m told. MeMe claims that being treated so poorly by a family member drove Bobby’s stress levels up and played no small part in that final heart attack. She was furious when said nephew came by the trailer to say he sure was sorry to hear about Bob.

When it was him who caused it to come about, my mom said when she told the story, clucking her tongue and taking up the Appalachian-speak of her childhood, as she always does when her mind or body are in the mountains. It didn’t seem to occur to her that there may have been a more nuanced version of the story than the one she’d heard. In the same way that some people are straight-ticket voters, Mom always sides with her parents. Before Bobby died, Mom had been threatening not to vote in the upcoming presidential election, which was still months away. She wanted Hillary Clinton to win, but didn’t think she could vote for her, “on account of how it would upset Daddy.”

Bobby was a Trump supporter, to my great bitterness. My family took his final political affiliation as an example of how Fox News has taken advantage of the elderly. “I don’t know how someone as smart as Bobby could be taken in by all that,” my sister Shayna would say, “but you just think about how much he cares about environmental preservation and you know he doesn’t actually side with Trump. And you see how he was with his neighbors getting deported.”

I did see. Bobby and MeMe were very close with a family of immigrants from Mexico who lived next door to them, and they remained in touch after the family moved to Florida. There, they were caught without papers. Bobby wrote a letter on their behalf to the immigration judge, and he told Mom to write one too. (She did.) “If his neighbors had been from the Middle East,” Shayna said, “it would have been the same.”

Would it have, though? In my experience, Bobby was selectively prejudiced. He was educated about the history of Cherokee people in the area of North Carolina where he lived, and neither he nor my mom minced words about how cruel and unjust white people had been toward them in the 1800s, when we displaced Indigenous people from their homelands in the Southeast to current-day Oklahoma, killing thousands along the way. Bobby, a union-man, was a long-time Democrat (since FDR) until Obama won the Democratic primary in 2008. At that point, his views took a hairpin turn. I’d love to attribute the change in Bobby’s political affiliation to anything other than Obama being Black, but to do so seems absurd.

On one visit, I saw a magazine on the trunk next to his sofa, whose cover had a particularly nasty and ghoulish caricature of Obama. I didn’t say anything: MeMe begged us not to talk politics with Bobby, because of his heart. When my sister and I tried, it never went well for us. Bobby died at age eighty-nine, and maybe I should account for some level of mental frailty in my estimation of him. But he seemed sharp until the very end, and I couldn’t find it in me to absolve him for what he’d believed.

The night we arrived, I stood with my brother Evans on the gravel driveway across the street from our grandparents’ trailer. To the left, we could see the land Bobby had grown up on, and directly to the right was the land our grandmother MeMe had grown up on, where, as a child, Bobby would take food from his family to hers during the Great Depression. By starlight, Evans and I could see the garden from which we’d both had the best food of our lives: butter beans or crowder peas with thick chunks of sliced tomato and cornbread on the side, green beans cooked with just a little sugar, salt, and canola oil, watermelon that had gone straight from the garden to a bucket of cold water, then to a stepping stone to be sliced open and eaten only yards from where it was harvested.

“I think she hasn’t had enough watermelon,” Bobby said one time with a little grin, speaking both to and about me. I was fourteen, crying inconsolably on an occasion when my parents wouldn’t let me have my way. At the time, it came across as good-natured teasing, but in retrospect, I think he was actually trying to problem-solve: when it came to relationships, food was Bobby’s main currency.

This is my first memory of my grandparents, from when I was three or four: They came to visit and MeMe grabbed me up in her arms with a flurry of excited exclamations. Then she turned a black garbage bag upside-down, dumping its contents. It was full of things she’d collected for me at yard sales: VHS tapes, ruffled play-clothes. Bobby stood in the corner of our kitchen with his hand on his hips, an almost bashful smile, and a box of sweet potatoes. Bobby was one of eighteen children. Mom figures that his mother ladling food onto his plate was the closest he ever got, as a child, to individual attention.

I sometimes feel guilty that my connection with Bobby wasn’t more profound when he was living, but then I remind myself how much I tried. We had both tried, and in that trying had found some true understanding of each other despite our dissonance. I started the tradition of exchanging letters with Bobby. At fourteen, I knew somehow how much that would mean to him, and I also knew that the letters must be addressed just to him, and not also to my grandmother, with whom I’ve always had an easy and close relationship. And Bobby was one of the first people to say I was a writer, and maybe the most persistent.

Behind our grandparents’ garden, Evans and I could see a wooded mountain, where, just a few months before his death, Bobby had found a marble he’d lost as a child. In my mind, Bobby was like the God of the Psalms, to whom a thousand years are like a day. My brother-in-law Travis tells the story of a time they were fishing together, back in 2014, and Bobby pointed out a rock in the middle of the creek.

“I was standing on that rock when I caught the prettiest rainbow trout. It weighed three and a half pounds. I had to fight it for ten minutes.” Bobby went on to describe the test of the line and the bait he used.

Travis said, “When was that? Last week?”

Bobby said, in his usual slow, matter-of-fact way, “No, that was in the spring of 1947.”

I tried to fish with Bobby once as a child. I was enthusiastic about the trip until Bobby pulled the first brim out of the water. The sight of its thrashing, bloody body tore my heart open, and I ran crying toward my mom. It was similar to the reaction Evans had when Bobby took him to help clean a deer he had killed. As Mom tells the story, Evans returned from the mountain with his face white and sad.

“He’ll never be a hunter,” Bobby said. “But that’s okay.” I never heard Bobby express tenderness toward animals, but he seemed to understand it. When I became a vegetarian, Mom worried that I’d offend him by not eating his venison, but Bobby approved of my choice as “healthy.”

The thought of fishing still makes me sad, but I have always been secretly content that other members of my family have no compunction against it, because that was a way for them to bond with Bobby. The fishing contingent of our clan always came back from day trips with an air of returning from a longer adventure, relaxed and in high spirits and seeming to have a secret between them. Evans has memories of fishing with Bobby that span from his childhood to adulthood, and I was sure they were on his mind now.

“And then what happened?” Evans said, apropos of nothing, a little sorrow in his laugh. I smiled but was at a loss for what to say back to him. Perhaps that was fitting. “And then what happened?” was Bobby’s catchphrase, one that always stumped me.

“Hello,” I would say, answering the phone at my parents’ house as a child.

“And then what happened?” Bobby would say, and I would have no idea how to respond.

I’m not a person who is often at a loss for what to say, but I was usually at a loss for what to say to Bobby. It felt like he sabotaged every attempt I made at finding common ground. We both liked to read, so I gave him books and inscribed them thoughtfully. He never read them. Once, he shuffled cards and told me a poker-story from his army days. I told him I loved cards, and asked if he’d teach me how to play poker. He said No: poker was sinful. I said we didn’t have to play with money. Still, No.

Eventually, I ran out of material. Perhaps he gave up on me too, for near the end, he quit trying to give me a history lecture on World War II every time we were together. One of my final memories of Bobby—on a visit I made just a few months before he died— is of us sitting on his sofa and holding hands in silence.

More than anything, I wish Bobby and MeMe had spent their money—which they made through good stock investments and many years of extreme frugality—on themselves. My family would encourage them to get a house or cabin of their own, but they never did. “Your mother comes from a line of long-lived women,” Bobby would say to my mom. “I want her to be taken care of when I’m gone.” Sometimes my grandparents went without things they needed, senselessly. My sister bought my grandparents a car, once, when she deemed the one they had too dangerous to drive. Bobby appreciated it, but hinted that he would have preferred Shayna invest in some property he had his eye on.

There was a part of me that was frustrated with Bobby for all the effort and money he’d poured into the land at the end of his life. If he’d wanted to do something for his grandchildren, couldn’t he have asked us what it was he’d wanted? Couldn’t he have looked at and listened to our lives and guessed it wasn’t that? The main gifts I wanted from him are the qualities I seek in other relationships: respect, emotional intimacy. But if Bobby was going to show his love with money, he might have put that money toward time together. Or he might have seen that four out of five of us grandchildren could have used money on hand: not for luxury, but to relieve real pressing need and anxiety. At the least, he could have simply refrained from buying that land, saved us from responsibility.

I was surprised at how much Bobby’s death shook me. Standing with my brother that night, I felt like a visitor in a place where I had always taken my belonging for granted. One of my ties to this land was gone, and so I felt I belonged to it, and even to the Earth, a little less. I felt this in my body—a physical lightness that made me aware of my mortality in a way I hadn’t been before.

MeMe periodically tells me that she wants Psalm 90:10 read at her funeral. The length of our days is seventy years—or eighty, if we have the strength; yet their span is but trouble, and sorrow, for they quickly pass, and we fly away. MeMe’s life has been fraught with trouble and sorrow: from her hungry childhood, when her mother would step back from the table after a bite or two so her children could eat, to her teenage years when she was thrown out of her house after telling her mother she was pregnant, to her adulthood, when she cared for her mother in her old age and watched as most of her siblings and all of her children (with the exception of my mom) were pulled into a vortex of drugs, alcohol, paranoia, dysfunction, and despair. When she was young, MeMe would look at the magazines and think about how her life was going to be different than what she saw around her.

Now, she won’t leave the mountains, or even her crumbling trailer, because it is where she feels close to Bobby. That means that her old age has offered her no respite from the tragedies of her family and community, which keep unfolding. In recent years, her niece’s husband hanged himself about a mile from where MeMe lives, and the drug-dependent niece was arrested for trapping and mistreating her mother in the worst case of elderly abuse on file in North Carolina. That niece’s sister, Carly, calls MeMe every few months asking for help with a bill, and MeMe tells her to come on down, she’s happy to help. MeMe says she doesn’t mind helping because Carly is trying. Carly’s son has stolen ginseng from MeMe’s property on multiple occasions, and has served jail time after MeMe reported him. I have heard MeMe on the phone arranging a court date regarding that great-nephew just moments after she’s been on the phone with his mother, saying, “I can help with that. I’ll be around all day today. See you then. I love you too.”

Once, we passed by Carly’s house on the way home from an errand, and I wondered if the thin young man climbing out of the car in her yard, wearing a ball cap and a frown, could be the cousin of mine who had caused so much trouble.

“There’s the thief,” MeMe said, as one might point out their local hardware store.

I always latched on to the “trouble and sorrow” part of that Bible verse because I assumed those were the words that resonated with MeMe. But after Bobby died, I found myself thinking and we fly away. I wondered if MeMe had felt this way as she had seen so many of her people and now her husband go: as if gravity was loosening its hold her, as though she could almost float, as though flying away would become inevitable.

At Bobby’s funeral, the preacher read from the first chapter of Genesis:

“And God said, ‘Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the vault of the sky… Let the lands produce living creatures according to their kinds: the livestock, the creatures that move along the ground, and the wild animals.’” My sister, often composed to the point of seeming stern, stood up after the reading with her lips trembling. Then she gave a perfect speech. She’d recently been to an environmentalists’ conference where everyone was asked to reflect on, then share, their most profound moment in nature. Her fellow attendees spoke of visiting national parks, camping in Patagonia, sailing remote parts of the earth. My sister said her most profound experience in nature had been walking through the woods with her grandfather—seeing the connection he had with the land after over eighty years spent on it, hearing bits of what he’d learned from decades of watching closely.

Once, she told us, they came across a dead tree lying on their path. Bobby taught my sister how trees continue to give to the land after they die, putting nutrients in the soil, providing food and haven for creatures. Shayna told us that Bobby’s death was a little like that, for we would continue to benefit from the lessons he’d given and the life he had led.

Then the preacher spoke with an enormous amount of warmth—about the time Bobby had taken him on a treacherous hike deep into the woods, with no apparent purpose except the promise of a “picnic lunch,” which turned out to not to be MeMe’s cooking, but ramps and sardines. We hadn’t finished laughing about that before he told us about the time Bobby had called him and said, “Bert’s just made one of her apple stack cakes. She’ll be gone this week, so you should come over every night and eat a little with me.” The preacher came over immediately, and Bobby pulled the cake out of the refrigerator only to drop the whole thing on the floor. He literally cried before deciding they should pick it up and eat it anyway.

At my mother’s request, the preacher also noted that Bobby was “an environmentalist before being green was cool.” I doubted that being green was cool yet in this rural Baptist church, in a county where Trump-Pence signs littered the otherwise gorgeous roadsides. I wasn’t sure, though, for both the church and community surprised me in the aftermath of Bobby’s death, in the best ways. There was a woman in her forties, named Jackie, who kept us fed that week, and came over every day to help with whatever needed doing. Her sons came home from college to be at Bobby’s funeral, which was incredibly moving to me, and even more-so when I saw how sad they genuinely were.

Are all these nice people going to vote for Trump? I kept wondering. I answered myself: Probably…so, does that mean they’re not actually nice? It was like a koan: I couldn’t shake a sense of the question’s significance, but it was a puzzle without a solution. The people of the area display so many qualities I deeply respect and strive, but struggle, to enact in my own life. They express a depth of warmth and kindness with strangers that most of us save for our friends. They have the peace and patience to simply sit and “be” as well as to do, and a seemingly unwavering attention to the joys and needs of the present moment. Admiring the people of Bakersville as I do, my instinct is to blame the politics of the region on something outside of their control: a lack of education, perhaps? But maybe that would be patronizing. I never read Hillbilly Elegy, but Mom did because I gave it to her. She hated it (before hating it was cool). God save me from sounding like J.D. Vance.

MeMe said, when she learned Jackie’s sons were coming to the funeral, “Those boys took Bobby on a fishing trip with some of their friends last summer and when he came back, he had a big old smile on his face and said it was about the most fun he’d ever had. He said those boys were climbing trees and jumping in the water and all sorts of things.” I talked about the same trip to one of those boys—Colton—later. Colton was about eight-feet tall and gigantic all-around, including his lion’s mane of red hair.

He stood next to me at dusk and said with fervor, “I loved your grandfather. My friends loved him too.” He caught my eyes, clapped his hands together, then looked at the sky and said softly, “We’ll miss him so much.” He said it in the same tone that many people used that week when talking to me, including the preacher, as he’d whispered to me that he wasn’t supposed to have favorite parishioners, but he just couldn’t help it with Bob. They spoke as if their affection for and understanding of Bobby, though great, must be only a window into my own. Meanwhile, I lapped their stories up like a thirsty dog, for I was the one in need of a window.

After the funeral service, we went across the street to the cemetery, and Bobby was given the given the military burial he’d wanted. My sweet nephew, Jase, who was about eight at the time, gasped and jumped in my lap when they shot the first round of blanks, and I squeezed his thin, trembling body a little closer to mine. Past the soldiers shooting blanks, I could see the marble statue of Jesus I’d played under as a kid.

Every year, my family had come here in June for the Appalachian tradition of Decoration, a day when you and your children come back from wherever you’ve been scattered to picnic with your family and lay flowers on the graves at your home cemetery. Mom remembers both of her grandmothers being giddily excited when Decoration came around. They were some of the ones who hadn’t scattered. Excited for the homecomings of old friends and old flames, they’d have new dresses ready weeks ahead of time. Mom always feels the need to explain the mountain ways to me. She’s heard outsiders to the area say condescending things about mountain folks. She’s always done her best to make sure I don’t think of her homeland and the people she grew up around as backwards.

Specifically, she’d say she hoped I didn’t think of Decoration as “morbid.” I never did. Decoration felt like Easter. I loved everything about it: the potato salad and the smell of fresh-cut grass and lilies, the trouble my great-aunt Berm and Mom went to as they arranged the flowers, even the ones they were putting on the graves of strangers, the way Berm’s granddaughter Brittany and I wandered aimlessly from one headstone to another, pausing with the butterflies, or rolled down the cemetery’s hill for hours, because no one was in anything resembling a hurry.

On the day of Bobby’s funeral, Brittany had to scurry back to Tennessee. Her toddler needed a nap.

“He’s gettin’ fussy,” she said, heaving her son up on her hip with one arm and hugging me with the other. We’d barely gotten to talk.

But I spoke to other relatives I hadn’t met before.

One of Bobby’s nephews—not the bad one, I hoped—introduced himself to me. Laughing, he told me about a time when he and his cousins had gone on a several-day hunting trip with Bobby. On the last morning, they woke up early, eager to go home. Bobby hadn’t had the success on that trip he had wanted to, and told his nephews he was going to go for one more quick ramble while they packed up camp. Hours passed, and at first the nephews were angry. Then they were worried. They thought he’d been killed.

“He wasn’t in trouble,” I said, thinking of how stubborn and single-minded Bobby had been. If he’d gone into the woods for venison, he wouldn’t have emerged without it.

“Right,” the nephew said. “And at last, we saw him coming over the hill with a huge buck on his shoulders. I’m talkin’ massive. We were all mad at him for a second. But when we heard how far he’d lugged that thing, we laughed our asses off.”

I laughed too. Bobby was a small man. His strength and dexterity, especially in his old age, shocked everybody. In 2013, I took my boyfriend (now husband) Dan to meet Bobby for the first time. Dan gasped when he saw Bobby start to climb the log steps of the Roan Mountain State Park alone. He ran up behind Bobby and took his arm.

By the time of our last walk with Bobby—about a month before his death—Dan knew better. My parents, my brother, Dan and I fell behind Bobby and let him lead the way, hiking up the steep mountains of his property, clearing wild tangles of trees and brush to make paths where there were none, finding his way back to where he’d started when the rest of us were lost.

I cherish the thought of both of those days with Bobby, especially the walk on the Roan. As we hiked, Bobby told Dan his favorite memory of me. I was a little girl, and the two of us were hiking with Mom on that very mountain. I remember it—the open sky, the way the sunshine and the breeze rippled between us and through the flame azaleas, giving motion to their splendid color. It seemed the mountain had no end. I kept running up and down the path, breathing in the smells of wet logs, iron, blossoms and mountain mud, feasting my eyes, and reveling in the spaciousness of it all.

“This must be what heaven feels like,” I said again and again. I meant it. And even though I was only seven, I remember being surprised at myself for saying that, for being capable of feeling such ecstasy there. Before, when I’d imagined heaven, I’d always seen the ocean, dreamt of being near it, or better yet, in it, forever. Having grown up in South Carolina’s lowcountry, salt water was all things to me: mystery and magic, source of healing, inspiration, and fun.

Mom always lamented that her three children loved the sea more than the mountains. It was one of the many things she felt she’d conceded by raising us where her husband was born instead of where she was born: the possibility that we even could feel her connection to Appalachia. But I’ve gotten glimpses of how she feels: on that day when I was seven, and again at Bobby’s funeral. I can recall those days with visceral clarity, and feel in my body the unique ways my life could be rich and full, if I chose to live in North Carolina.

Science tells me that all of us are connected to each other, but I think I would feel it more, if I was always running into family or someone who knew my family. Faith tells me that I belong to this earth, but I’d know it better if I walked in the woods more, and stopped to drink the good water from the creek. If I lived in those mountains, I’d have autumn leaves and apple orchards. I’d have snow at Christmas, and the fearful-cold Toe River on hot summer days. If I lived in those mountains, I’d learn to play the fiddle, or either I’d dance to fiddle music every chance I got. To say No to something is not to be blind to its worth.

The summer after Bobby died, I moved to San Antonio, Texas to be with Dan. It was where he’d started his career, and for the time, he was tied there. We got engaged, then married. I taught fifth-and-sixth graders for a bit, and found myself ill-suited for it. Dan looked for new work, and was offered a remote job. That was our chance. We could go anywhere we wanted.

In the summer of 2018, we moved to San Diego.

“I don’t know why none of my children have any interest in the land,” Mom said mournfully on a car ride. This was in the summer of 2019, on a visit to my parents in South Carolina. On that car ride with my parents, the topic of discussion was that none of the grandchildren had so much as made a move to build a vacation home in the mountains, an interesting expectation to put on Dan and me, given that we don’t own a primary home.

“You say that like attachment to the land is a moral virtue,” I said.

“I was raised to believe it is,” Mom said. “When Gone with the Wind came out, Daddy took me to the movies because he wanted me to see that scene.” I knew which scene she was talking about: the one where Gerald O’Hara admonishes his daughter and sets her up for twelve years of misplaced gumption. When I watched the movie as a kid and as a teen, Mom would pause her house chores to rush into the room when it came on.

Do you mean to tell me, Katie Scarlett O’Hara, that Tara, that land doesn’t mean anything to you? Why, land is the only thing in the world worth workin’ for, worth fightin’ for, worth dyin’ for, because it’s the only thing that lasts….And, to anyone with a drop of Irish blood in them, the land they live on is like their mother….It will come to you, this love of the land.

“I know, I know,” I said. “And that quote is just gut-wrenching, disgusting, and frankly ludicrous in context of a story where people are fighting and dying to stop the torture and enslavement of fellow humans.”

I first read Gone with the Wind when I was eight. When my sister and brother had Black friends over to the house, Mom would tell me not to read the book in front of them. Beyond that, she and Dad never talked to me about anything that was wrong with the story. Even as a third-grader, though, I should have seen the problems better than I did: Rhett killing a Black man as a minor plot point in which he’s represented as a chivalrous rascal; Ashley casually joining the KKK; Rhett raping and impregnating Scarlett in an iconic scene that’s supposed to be sexy; the way us readers are made to feel as though Scarlett screwed up their love, when Rhett was the one that hit her with enough force to knock her down a flight of stairs.

On that car ride, Mom sighed as though it was a real disappointment to have such a block-headed daughter, one who can only see things as black-and-white.

“I suppose it’s a generational thing,” she said.

Perhaps I should have stepped in then and told her what our land means to me. But I latched on to the dig at my generation, mainly because it was nonsensical. In my travels, I have met many people my mom’s age who have been wanderers all their lives and are proud of it, as though it is proof that their courageous, lotus blossom souls can bloom in whatever mud they’re planted. I secretly roll my eyes at them: I’m a wanderer, too, by choice, and might always be, but it’s stupid to act superior about it. Wandering is just a choice to go wide instead of deep.

“Hey now,” I said. “Dan’s parents are your age, and neither of them lives in the town they grew up in.” Like her father might have done, Mom ignored me.

“Young people these days just don’t have the connection to the land that we do,” she said. “Explain it to her, Doug.”

Dad, who lives in a home that has been in his family for 250 years, thought very hard before he said, with force behind each word, “It’s like your identity is tied up in the land. You’re connected when you’re walking in a place all your people have walked, and your ancestors have lived. And if you choose to leave that place, it’s like you’re losing yourself.”

When I spoke again, though, I genuinely wasn’t meaning to contradict Dad, whose point I had taken. I suppose I was just trying to show that my temporary choices also came from a soulful rather than shallow place.

I said, “When I travel, I feel more and more a part of the big picture, more a part of everything that is. That makes me feel profoundly connected.”

“That’s two different things,” Dad said.

“Sure,” I said. “It’s two different sentiments, but you can make room for both. Augustine said the world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page.”

“And Faulkner said his own postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that he would never live long enough to exhaust it,” Dad said. I might have said that even Faulkner made it out to California, to try his hand at screenwriting, and though he referred to Los Angeles as “the plastic asshole of the world,” he was also intensely critical of the South. But Dad’s tone was hurt.

“I’m not saying that Early Branch or any other place is lacking interest or richness,” I said. I’m saying every place has its own qualities that are worth ‘writing about’ or at least experiencing.”

“I guess I didn’t explain it well enough,” Dad said. He seemed sad and frustrated, and I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t promise him I’d ever move back. I had fallen in love with a man whose pride in the cool caves and scorching deserts of South Texas mirrored the attachment I felt to South Carolina’s marshlands and Spanish moss. I’d grown fond of Texas while I lived there, but I never loved it, and I doubted that Dan could come to love South Carolina or North Carolina in the way I did. It was better, I figured, to live in a place we were both drawn to.

On the other hand, I wasn’t sure my journey would feel complete if all that swimming downstream didn’t take me back to Carolina. I realized that, actually, in Texas, on a camping trip with friends. It was a cold night, and we were sitting by the river, passing a flashlight around and reading poetry aloud. Our friend Joe introduced one poem by saying its writer had spent years traveling from place to place looking to live somewhere suitable to his health. Finally, he’d given up on his pursuit, and settled in Samoa, where he wrote the words that would go on his tombstone.

Nothing would do but to share that poem with my parents. I read it aloud to them right before I moved to California. In doing so, I thought I was expressing what I felt too vulnerable to say directly: I hope I’ll come back one day, for good. My voice cracked and I started weeping as I read the second stanza.

This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be.
Home is the sailor, home from the sea
And the hunter home from the hill.

“Robert Louis Stevenson,” my dad said, sounding bored.

“We know that poem,” Mom said, in a tone that suggested there was nothing special about it. My parents both looked at me inquisitively for a moment. Their faces seemed to ask what all the fuss was about. In the end, they decided the answer was nothing, and looked away.

After Bobby’s burial, my brother-in-law scanned the ground for blanks and tucked them into his pocket. Later that week, he dropped them in one of the rivers Bobby had fished at as a child and later as an old man, with Travis and Jase. I went too, and my desire to do that surprised me, since I have always associated fishing and guns with needless violence. Perhaps I just wanted to connect with Bobby and his memory in any way I could.

Or perhaps I was able that day to connect with Bobby in a way I hadn’t before—to ponder his views on fishing and hunting (take what you need from the earth; nourish yourself, but be reverent about it and don’t waste a thing), to reflect on the military burial and Bobby’s pride in his service, which he must have viewed as a mark of courage and loyalty, and to not hide from myself how many things about the Lily Branch Baptist Church I like: its gray stone walls and the spacious feeling the high rafters give the small chapel; the simple, unpretentious approach to spirituality; the way the church ladies made a feast for the family and served it to us before the service; the way the preacher had spent hours of leisure at Bobby’s side.

It’s not that I was ignorant before of Bobby’s views on politics, on guns, on eating animals, or that I changed my own after he was gone. Rather, after he went, I was better able to accept his feelings with equanimity instead of pushing them from my mind, trying to form a distance between my views and the ones of my family.

To Bobby, socialism was a dirty word—but it is leaning into that word that has helped me make peace with his memory, to see him as one of the ones I’m fighting for, and not against. I can hardly imagine a person more different from me than Bobby, and yet the world I imagine is one that would treat him better than the one in which he grew up: one in which neither he nor his family would ever have scrambled for survival, one in which he might have been nurtured in spirit as well as body, one in which his love of learning and sharing knowledge might have flourished.

I don’t know what I am going to do with the mountain land that comes to me. Selling the land for profit seems wrong, but so does hoarding it. I’ve thought about founding a refugee camp, or perhaps a retreat for artists and writers. Lately, it has occurred to me that perhaps I have a responsibility to give the land back to the descendants of displaced Cherokee people. If I shared these plans with Mom or MeMe, they might see them as a betrayal, if only because all of those options are far from what Bobby or they would have envisioned. In their minds, the love of our land hasn’t come to me yet.

Dan and I vacationed in the Grand Tetons in July of 2019. I had an appreciation for the white, jagged mountains there, and the pines that dotted them, but the feeling of awe everyone else expressed evaded me. When we visited MeMe a few weeks later that August, though, I felt that same deep sense of reverence and amazement that I had as a little girl for the beauty on the Roan. I felt full that week—inexpressibly happy, almost at peace.

It reminded me of being eight years old. Then, a two-week summer trip to the mountains came to a close, and I found that I couldn’t stand the thought of leaving MeMe. So, Mom and Dad went home and I stayed another month or so.

MeMe asked me, apparently, what I wanted to do during the visit, and she swears I responded, “Something with stitchery.” However it came about, she made an incredible quilt, while I looked over her shoulder and played with thimbles and pieces of fabric. I have the quilt still. It has a row representing each of the grandchildren and our interests at the time. (My row has doll clothes, a cat, and a book.) When we weren’t at her sewing machine or the Mountain Piecemakers Quilt Guild, MeMe and I were in her kitchen making biscuits and jam and chocolate meringue, cracking open dusty jars of spicy tomato juice she’d put away, or on the porch, keeping company with the fireflies, unzipping and breaking green beans into a pail. We’d stay up late at night, watching Gilligan’s Island and Three’s Company, which she seemed to find as hilarious as I did, except when there was a raunchy scene.

MeMe doesn’t have the energy for most of those things anymore, and Nick at Nite isn’t what it used to be. But
what I’ve always loved most about time with MeMe is the conversation. She has a fresh, pithy take on everything, and an offbeat sense of humor.

During that 2019 visit, while I choked on a large piece of watermelon, MeMe looked on with her arms crossed and said, in a tone that conveyed equal parts shock, pity and disapproval, “Why, it put the whole thing in its mouth!”

“Huh! I wonder why it did that,” Dan said. He crossed his arms too, and nearly died laughing.

“I don’t know,” MeMe said, as I put one of the regurgitated pieces of melon back in my mouth and chewed it up. “It must not be very smart.”

When this greatness passes from the Earth, I will miss her terribly. I can already anticipate the things I may do to feel closer to her: perhaps I’ll try my hand at growing food and flowers; maybe I’ll learn to can or find some small way to take up the art of stitchery. I’ll hang up her drawings in my home. But I know I’ll feel nearest to her when I go to the mountains, and that is something I’ll do again and again, as long as I’m alive.

When I was a child, I felt like I had a place in the mountains of North Carolina, but after that 2019 trip I began to think they had a place in me. That feeling had grown in me like a seed for a few years, and seemed to ripen that summer. It seemed I finally had the devotion to the area that Bobby always wanted me to have, a joyful love that turned out to be a natural extension—or dimension—of myself.

Those Blue Ridge mountains are often purple up close, and being old and worn down, they have a softer look to them than the mountains of the west. The trees have my attention now: the beeches with their pale, scarred trunks, the sugar maples whose intricate leaves become yellow and spotted in autumn, smelling of wet earth, but staying sturdy under my feet; the modest buckeyes, and the dogwoods, whose tiny, perfect blossoms make me think of dryads, the convergence of another world with our own.

And of course, there are the massive Carolina Hemlocks. Those are the ones that line and shelter the wooded path that leads to a local swimming hole and throw dark shadows on the water. I love how the trees in the area crowd up against each other and overlap their branches. They make for a sense of impenetrable mystery, tangled as they are with moss and fern. I wonder if these trees will one day exert the same pull on me the ocean does—an aching feeling when I am away. I wonder if the sadness I feel now, when I leave, shows me they already do. ■

Caroline McTeer is a writer of fiction and nonfiction, a thirty-one- year-old breast cancer survivor, a four on the Enneagram, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, a runner, and a lover of television and travel. She has been published in The Bitter Southerner, Sojourners, and elsewhere.

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