Chapter One

When Peter Brissy bought the side of Turret Mountain some sixty years ago, he had pretty much his own choice of boundaries. And he had wanted his land to reach as far as the east slope because along that slope for a mile or more lay a cascading of stone. White, gleaming, jagged stone.

He could see as far as the stone and no further. So he had bought, and now his farm land, some clear and some forested, lay from the top most stone of the cascade to the pine darkened valley below.

Peter Brissy had been in his twenties then, made of the same material as the mountain, staunch and rugged.

First off he had mixed himself a mess of whitewash, then, stepping off his line, he washed a tree bole now and then. He began at the foot of the slope and worked along the bottom flat and up the west slope. When he had come to the summit of the cascade he set down his pail of whitewash and wiped his hands upon the seat of his pants.

Next Peter had taken his new ax, shiny, and keen as a hound dog for his breakfast, and he laid low a great many of the oak and pine, together with wild cherry and maple.

It had taken him nearly a year to build the road from the valley to where his house would stand; but it was a good road, with a stone base and stretches of log cleating.

Peter had driven his bride Selma, over the newly finished road in the light wagon to the big clearing.

Selma had cried because the road was so beautiful and Peter, big mountain lummox, had not understood her tears and so she had cried the harder. He had showed her, aside from the foundation of the big square house, the barn site and the spring, over which he would build the milk house. He had promised to make a heavy white trough to hold her milk crocks, neat and cold, in the spring water.

All this, Peter explained, would take him near another year and would she consider coming from her father's house in the valley and live in a one room cabin if he would be hasty and put one together.

Selma had considered that and so they had moved their belongings to the little shed-like place and set up housekeeping.

Selma's father had helped him make it snug and warm for winter and fitten for a woman to abide in. And she had cried again, this time over the cupboards built in the kitchen end, and over the poster bed stead Peter had turned upon his father's foot lathe, and again over the rich dark walnut stain he had made for the inside of the cabin.

But Peter was used to women's ways by now and her tears bothered him not at all. He had a new philosophy which was developed with his marriage and he reasoned that if God almighty had made women so crosswise that the cried when they were happy, then who was he, Peter Brissy, to question?

Things were as he had promised Selma and the house had been built and the barn, and in time, the wagon shed and milk house. The first winter Peter spent his spare time from feeding and clearing walks through the snow, in carving white wood butter bowls and a fancy mold in which Selma made out the little pats of yellow butter. He carved stirring spoons and a pin of maple wood with which to roll pie dough. He pegged together two maple crickets and waxed them with wax from the bees at his father's place. Winter evenings sometimes he and Selma would sit upon these low stools before their fire. Their faces would turn spotted from the heat and Selma would lay her skirts clear up to her knees, toasting her woolen covered legs.

And the evening which would seem late because of its early beginning, would pass. Together they slept. Patterns made by the low fire spread themselves out uncertainly here and there upon the low brown ceiling.

Years followed years like beads upon a rosary.

Close the end now, Peter might have looked backward thus: The year we moved into the shed house. The next year when we moved into the big house, and the next when James Benjamin, named for his grandfather Shelton, was born. The year the big west field was cleared, the next when Waite, the second son, was born.

Some years were... just years. Peter could not recall anything in particular, and then there was the year Carlotta was born.

And the year Carlotta had died. Her death, needless and shocking, had struck silver through Peter's hair and had broken her mother's heart.

Carlotta had been a bright dart of a child. That morning she had gone to the sow's pen with Peter and stood upon the bottom plank with her eyes which were the color of flax flowers, peering between the top planks, the while she had chattered in her gay little way.

Suddenly Carlotta's voice had stopped, and Peter, looking up from the slop he was pouring, had seen that her feet had slipped from the plank.

She had poked her head, with its starched blue sunbonnet, through the space between the fencing, and now she hung there helpless.

Peter's tongue had turned to stone as he released her limp form and his feet, too, had turned to stone as he neared the kitchen where Selma was busy with the breakfast dishes.

........ It had thawed him a little to have Selma say she did not hold the accident against him.

That had been more than fifty years ago now, and Selma still kept the little sunbonnet laid away in the top drawer of the highboy. Always when Peter came across the bonnet he would remember the shocked look up Carlotta's face as she dangled from the fence boards. And it had taken Peter a long time to reconcile himself.

So he had grown old and no longer wanted to tussle with his steep flung acres of clearing, nor the tall wind bent timbers that hemmed them in. He split his farm, as he said, plumb in the middle sideways. He gave the bottom part to James Benjamin whose name had been shortened to JaBen. To Waite he deeded the upper place.

Waite and Elsie had lived with Peter and Selma and would always do so. They were childless and Elsie turned her thwarted womanhood upon her husband's mother and upon old Peter Brissy whom she spoiled shamefully and satisfyingly.

Peter had helped JaBen build himself a good house down on the valley road. After the building was done Pa helped the boys lay a fence of rails on the exact line that he, himself, stepped off.

When they had laid the fence as far as the road which ran from the valley bed to the homestead, they stopped and set a stout gatepost. Opposite this post, across the narrow road, the set another post then they left Pa with the building of a gate while JaBen and Waite continued around the mountain with the rails.

Pa had ordered paint from the mailorder catalog, a surprising bright blue paint, and had painted the gate.

Upon the topmost board he had lettered in white paint "Upper Brissy Place". The gate stood open as he lettered, then he swung it to and made lettering on the other side... "Lower Brissy Place."

With the drying of the paint there were two farms upon the fertile but stony unrelenting slope of Turret, where before there had been but one.

Chapter Two

Because the furrows were laid from east to west, the field looked, from the east end, where Waite stood leaning against his plow handle, a little like a partly opened fan. The late evening sun filled the long black furrows and gathered them together at the west end.

JaBen's boys had been following the plow for the last hour. They each carried a tin can into which they dropped fat, white grubs picked from the new-turned clods.

"Pa promised us we could go a-fishin' tomorry." They told Waite, and he kept a disapproving silence, thinking that JaBen was too easy with the boys, letting them idle around fishing when there was corn planting on hand. Waite and Elsie were child-less, and he did not understand nor hold with such slackness.

Directly the two big horses were loosed from the plow, and with reins slackened, Waite followed them into the barn-lot. Pa was there and he helped Waite with the feeding and rubbing down. Pa admitted he was too old to be a-following of the plow, but he would not relinquish the care of the barn and his share of the horses.

"Air we ready to start a-plantin' now, son?" Pa made to ask, from beneath the flank of big Dan.

"We air, Pa, and I don't ap-preciate JaBen a-lettin' the boys idle around fishin' tomorry." Waite's voice was tired and peevish. "I meant they should drop whilst JaBen and me covered."

"Tut now, I'll drop for you and Marcie can drop fer Ben." Pa was making peace for the boys, remembering how he had loved to fish and how it weren't the boys' fault that corn planting and fishing fell on the same day. What Waite didn't understand, Pa thought, humorously, was that fish that air a-rarin' to be caught just naturally got to be caught.

As Pa and Waite finishedj the barn work and went toward the house, they looked down upon JaBen's house where the blue smoke of the supper fire drifted up, up and away into nothing. Waitej wished mightily that he had a boy to scold over fishing. Maybe he'd scold only a little and let him go after all.

They went into the kitchen where their own supper waited....... and night came from somewhere back of the sunset, settling with a gentle wash of dark in the valley below Turret; ascending slowly until only the faint dark outline of the forest top showed where the mountain ended and the sky began.

...............

Down at the lower place, JaBen sat with his feet in a foot-tub of water, warm and soothing to his feet, tired from the rough ground. He had rolled his overalls high upon his legs and given himself up to the comfort of the kitchen rocker. The while he soothed his feet, JaBen cultured his mind. He held upon his knees a copy of a book he had gotten from the mail-order house. The name of the book was "How to Speak Correct English."

Generally the Brissey men had been contented with what learning they could reasonably expect, but not so JaBen. In his own words, JaBen wanted to make something of hisself.

The light from the lamp fought back the darkness that entered at the open door and scarcely made enough light for him to read by, but he knew the pages so well now that a glance at the larger type was all he needed. For a year he had had the book and during that time he had struggled with his missing g's and his heritage of ain's. He had struggled with his having's, and with his alien weres. Before the inky newness had been worn from his book, JaBen had known it to be his romance, the answer to something that somehow he had missed in his youth.

Dimity indulged JaBen his whim for learning, but she would have none of it for herdelf. This evening she sat near the kitchen table, a bit of rug in her lap. ...

JaBen was tired and the hot foot bath made him sleepy. He nodded and the book closed itself upon his knees. Dimity brought him a coarse sacking towel and gently prodded him awake.

"Get yore feet outen there, JaBen, I declar' I'd rather clar up this mess myself than have you a-trampin' about the kitchen in yore bare feet and a-carryin' the dirt into the bed."

"You-all can just dry my feet whilst yore at it," JaBen said, teasing, and Dimity threw him a scornful look.

JaBen would go to bed now and maybe he'd lie a bit and dream about his raspberries. All day long he'd worked among them, and as he'd worked he had put two and two together and they had made exactly four. And he'd put four and four together and they had made exactly eight. His passion for raspberry growing had leaped within his exalted heart and he had hurried into the house to find Dimity. He had explained to her that a fortune could be made a-growing raspberries if only a fellow used good judgment in letting the old canes breed and bring up a mess of little ones. Just so many little ones, tho, the judgment coming in knowing when to take the grubbing hoe to them. He had explained how he'd only had twenty feet of canes last year and this year he'd dug the new growth and set twenty more. Last year's canes were white with blossom now, and he was certain Dimity would admire having the crop for jelly.

But JaBen's enthusiasm had cooled a little under the placid gaze of Dimity as she pointed out the fact that frost had laid low and blackened the strawberry patch two years and running and she was in no mood to set more plants to waste.......

JaBen was asleep the moment his head lay upon the pillow and he relaxed noisily upon the straw-filled tick that made his bed. Dreams of raspberries, tall silvery, rose-caned raspberries floated thru his head, along with dreams of the morrow, which was Saturday and the beginning of corn-planting.

Chapter Three

The pale Sabbath sun came through the stained glass window church on the Valley road. It came thru and struck at the hats of the women seated in the right hand pews and came no further than the aisle. Stopping there it made a kaledioscope of the faintly colored, faintly outlined reflection of the Christ on the window. Pa Brissy sat on the very end of the Brissy pew and regarded the reflection with appreciative eyes. The preacher's words thundered above him and around him, but he minded the words not at all. Pa had long ago acquired his own ideas of religion, and anything the preacher was saying probably only verified his own beliefs. Occasionally he looked toward the pulpit, however, nodding approval, and now and then he looked about the congregation with a manner of saying he'd told them so!

Mostly Pa studied the reflection upon the unpolished floor boards. He humored his imagination until he could make out the lamb, a little to the right of the lamb there was the staff and then the feet of Christ under His bright blue robe. Pa looked up at the window and smiled satisfiedly into Christ's eyes. The sun rose higher, the lamb on the floor grew more squat, the staff shortened, and only a little of the robe remained. But Christ's feet were plainer now, and Pa wondered how he could have walked so far in the frail and shallow sandals. He recalled reading how He had gone about in so many towns and upon mountains and thru valleys. Pa grew indignant, why, his own heavy boots would have been sorely put to it to have withstood the wear!

"Them things ain't no pertection to a man's feet," he scolded to ma in a whisper and she nodded and frowned in disapproval, not knowing whose feet he meant but reasoning that Pa was right.

Pa often fussed with God over trivial things and he meant to look up in the Scripture when he got home, and see for himself just how far Christ had made out to walk in those sandals, and he's kinda take God to task for allowing it.

Now the closing hymn was being sung and Pa rose stiffly to his feet, with Ma beside him, sharing a hymn book between them. The both scorned looking at the words for they knew every one of them, as they would have said, from their hearts. All the Brissys stood in their pew together. Next to Pa and ma stood JaBen and Dimity. Then came Waite and Elsie and JaBen's children, Benjy, eighteen, Marcia, who was two years younger, and last Thurlow, who was twelve.

After services there was handshaking and talk and inviting to dinner. There was exchanging of sympathies and much tongue-clucking over seemingly unheard of happenings. The men spoke of corn-planting and wheat and the favorableness of the weather. By now someone had bustled the preacher off to dinner. Those whose crops had been good the last years drove away in shiny new cars. Others less favored drove in cars of tall, thin, tin, and there were a few cars of heavy faded elegance, having an air about them of once having belonged to town folks.

The Brissy cars were of neither of these, but were a little lower than the tall tin ones, and a little higher than the new low ones, and a great deal lighter than the heavy elegant ones. Pa's car was square, and rusty black, with inside niceties, such as a bud vase where water had dried, and dried again. And it had big, fist-sized balls of silk cord nailed securely, which were used by Ma and Elsie to ease the bumps down the Valley road. JaBen's car was of the same goggle lighted vintage, but confined its inside splendor to ratty grey plush. The drove homeward now, as they did all other Sundays, Waite driving Pa's car ahead and JaBen following.

When they reached the farm road and JaBen's house, Waite stopped and asked which one was a-going up to have dinner as he did all the other Sundays, but JaBens', piling out at their own gate, returned the invitation which probably neither of the others heard. Anyway, Ma and Elsie had their dinner all ready at the upper place, as did Dimity at the lower......

April was deluged with rain, cold and chill, and the new leaves of the sycamore cupped upward like small umbrellas turned inside out, holding jewels of water upon their fuzzy sides. The pussy-willows, growing along the creek below JaBen's, poked out little gray heads along the brown winter branches, and stayed on with the cold and the wet. The kitchen gardens were flattened as tho the soil had never been stirred.

The Brissy's were used to fighting with nature, and so even tho spring did not come except on the calendars in the kitchens, the knew and accepted the season for what it was, and questioned not its lateness, nor its wanton stealing from the mountain's short summer.

Now May had come and gone, and June was about to be dumped into the Valley. There had been much trading back and forth at the two farms-- trading of boys for horses, JaBen having two of the former and none of the latter. Trading of seed corn and seed potatoes, and of Marcie to help Ma and Elsie, and of Elsie to help Dimity. And of tomato plants for cabbage. They forgot quickly that the spring had been long and tantalizing, beginning in March with cold bright days, and with winds high and ruthless, blowing night clouds about the evening sky and piling them upon the face of the white moon above Turret. Warm days had come to stay the season out, and warm like evenings, with frogs making great to-do in the creek. In Dimity's and Elsie's gardens, rows of lacy carrot and red-veined beet leaves came into being. White and yellow onion sets which had been washed top-side down, were straightened and covered again. Lettuce beds were re-made and fat white beans were put into the ground, to reappear amusingly, a few days later borne upon the wings of the bean sprouts.

They each had set their broody hens and dozens of yellow and black balls popped out from the breast feathers of their mothers. The balls, miraculously, had feet and tiny yellow bills attached...

From the kitchen window Dimity could see the sweet potato field. The ground had been ridged and today the men folks were setting the plants that had been raised in the big hot-bed at the upper place. Dimity could see the mens' backs as they humped along the ridges here and there, like rounded weathered stones that might have been left in the field and plowed about. Marcie and Thurlow were carrying water from the creek and pouring it into holes for the plants. Now and then Dimity caught a glimpse of Marcie's red cotton skirt, brown legs and bare feet beneath it. Later Marcie would come a-mincing across the yard, making out she had lady feet and that the grass was tickling her toes. Dimity would likely laugh at her and remark, "Yore feet air as tough as them pads on Thrasher's toes."

Then Marcie would dip from the sun warmed-rain barrel and wash her feet, a-sitting on the back steps..........

Late summer came and made a batik of the mountainside, dipping the fields into rich, deep dyes of the earth; making gold of the ripening wheat and silvering the pale green of the buckwheat, while the red clover became a rippling stream urged on by the hot winds. Later the clover fell beneath the clack! clack! of the mowing machine where it lay still upon the breast of the earth, curing to a terrible-like sweetness. The wheat bent on heavy heads and waited cutting.

The Brissey women canned the vegetables of the fields and gardens, greedily, for they knew the shortness of the summer and how frost sometimes nipped the corn and tomatoes even as they were hurried from the field. The yellow balls that had been the chicks were now domineck pullets, and white pullets, with here and there are quarrelsome rooster. Sometimes they stalked Dimity's garden, which was unfenced and open, and pecked the ripening tomatoes or craned thier necks and jumped to reach the ears of sweet corn. She or Marcie would come to the door of the kitchen and flounce their aprons toward the garden. The pullets would scurry into the barn-lot but nearly always a rooster would lag behind the others, throwing sassiness toward the kitchen door, poised to run unbravely should a stone or sun-burnt potato be hurled at him.

Few flowers grew in the short season on Turret, but in the farm-yards there were shurbs- lilac mock-orange and clovebush. Bulb flowers they grew, and chrysanthemums. Asters, given a good start in the sunny west window in the dining room, would bloom hurriedly in late summer, unfazed by the first light frosts. Ma Brissy cared not if she had not other than her chrysanthemums. Ma, with her shortening life, Ma was seventy-six, shortened her words accordingly. The chrysanthemums had long been 'santhemums, nor did they mind nor cease their blooming. The flung themselves against the west side of the house and along the white paling fence, and each fall burst into a veritable mess of brown little buttons and shaggy yellow heads. Ma thought she'd had some pink ones somewhere along the way, but nature had, unbeknownst to Ma, gathered the pink ones back into the yellows, gradually, so that even Ma who loved them, knew not whence the pink ones went. Now and then she dug into them, scolding that they were hogs, and sometimes she threw them head and tail over the fence where they were wont to turn reproachful yellow glances at her as she passed. Directly she as bound to notice that they had taken root and were growing in spite of her, remaining 'santhemums to the end of time.....

In the midst of the heavy cultivating Pa lost a horse. All evening Pa had noticed Big Dan and Job had been stamping their feet and snorting. Then he was awakened near midnight, thinking he'd best call Waite.

"Get up, son, I think they be trouble in the barn." Pa shook Waite. Going back to his room Pa dressed and with Waite, hurried to the barn.

"Hold that latern high, Pa." Waite called from the stalls.

"What air happened?" Excitedly.

"The thing that air happened air too bad to talk about." Pa, peering of the manger, saw poor Job lying upon the floor of his stall. Pa could never abide the sight of a horse, down, and now he spoke to Waite sharply.

"Wal, do something, don't stand there a-starin' at a helpless horse!"

"Now, Pa, don't be hasty. Big Dan has done kicked the gizzard outen Job, and there ain't no hurry." Waite was unruffled.

Pa brought his latern closer- Waite was right.

..................

They buried poor Job the next morning, while the cultivating stood still. They'd dug him a hole in the soft earth of the west field. Pa declared, grumpily, to hide his feelings, that this was a tarnation bad time to lose a horse. Marcie stood by her grandpa and tearfully threw a few zinnias onto the filling earth. Then Pa scurried off to the barn and left Waite and JaBen to finish.

Pa wondered if Big Dan had had to pull more than his share of the plow yesterday. Maybe it wasn't just yesterday, but a lot of yesterdays piling upon each other until Big Dan's patience had burst in a mighty flash of iron-bound kicking. Possibly the racket he'd made infuriated him more and more. Possibly, too, he hadn't meant to kill old Job, only frighten him a little. But by then he had grown into a tall white fury, a plow horse no longer, too strong for a plow horse and only a little tamed.

Pa had stood away from Dan, but now he gave in, allowing Dan to nuzzle his hand a little.

"It ware right mean 'o you, Dan, and I reckon you know Ma and me can't scarcely buy no other horse right now, 'specially when we ware a-fixin' to help JaBen send Benjy to the Sannytarium at Far Mountain."

Pa thought Big Dan trembled, crying a little.