The Hills of Home Read online

  The children were all grown and gone and did not know what was happening here, and he did not tell them when they called and his wife did not write of these things in her letters, but told them about the cats and the chickens and the garden.

  Well, he was not going to be sad about it. Not this morning. They could come and get the house and everything in it and he would still have this, all this, the morning, the few cows, the mule, his health, a wife who loved him.

  There were others worse off, he told himself.

  He walked back up to the house, wading through the field now so that his pants legs soaked up the dew and his stride left a swath through the pasture that was like a trail. When he looked back, he could see the path he had taken and he had to shade his eyes from the sun.

  But he could see it all and he felt good about it. He felt better about it than he ever had. The land was sweeter, the morning brighter, because he could look at it as something that could never be taken away from him. He was part of it and it was part of him and it was like a song you learned and never forgot. You could hum it whenever you wanted to and you could sing the words and the song and the words were part of you and could not be taken away.

  That was the way it was with him that day. He was not in mourning, but in the farm's morning and he would always have this in his heart, as part of him. The sheriff could not repossess it or sell it off, and the bank could not write it away on papers and stamp it into oblivion.

  This was all his and it would always be his because it had become him. There was soil under his fingernails and it would never go away, could not be washed away nor dug out.

  He turned away from the sun and sloshed through the high wet grasses and as he neared the gate, he saw his wife step onto the front porch and wipe the wood slats of the swing. She waved to him and he waved in reply.

  The sun was warm on the back of his neck and now he could smell the coffee and his stomach churned with hunger.

  It was all his, he knew, this life, the land, all that he had done and made, and built and grown.

  It would be his--forever.

  The Bottle Shop

  THE OLD man looked up at me from over his bifocals that hung precariously from his nose. His wizened face seemed shrunk to his skull, the skin cracked with the desiccated rivulets of age lines, but his crystal blue eyes sparkled with youth. He wore a green eyeshade, faded purple shirt, elastic armbands on the sleeves, a vest that showed signs of moth larvae having fed on the cloth, and loose gray trousers that must have been cut from a fairly expensive bolt.

  His shop bristled with a clutter of objects, artifacts, actually, that seemed more appropriate to the last century than this one. Certainly there was nothing in there of this present era, yet the sign outside had not proclaimed the proprietor to be a dealer in antiques. In fact, the sign outside appeared quite modern, freshly painted in the latest Branson vogue.

  THE BOTTLE SHOP, the sign read.

  Amos B. Abernathy, Proprietor

  The fogged windows had not allowed me to see inside. I stood in the doorway and wondered why I had never seen the shop before. It was right there on West Highway 76, crammed in between music shows and motels, go-cart rides and water slides. All of the other establishments were familiar to me, but not this one.

  Curious, I went on inside. The man seated at the ancient roll-top desk had to be Amos B. Abernathy. Good name. Uncommon in this day and age.

  There wasn't a bottle in sight, oddly enough.

  Just Abernathy, peering at me through those tiny lenses.

  "Is this an antique shop?" I asked.

  "No, sirree," said Abernathy. "Everything's brand spanking new."

  I looked around more carefully. Were these replicas? The items on sale did look new, yet they appeared to have been manufactured more than a hundred years ago. The brass shone, the wood gleamed, the pewter looked freshly cast.

  Eccentric old coot, I thought. "Your sign says Bottle Shop."

  "Yes, sirree, sir," cackled the old gentleman. "Right this way."

  He stood up and I noticed he was wearing spats. He had been writing in a ledger with a turkey quill pen. Puzzled, I followed him through a curtain at the back of the store. There almost seemed to be an atmospheric change between the two locations.

  We seemed to step into a strange world of shifting light, wispy, uncertain colors, and a heady stream of exotic aromas.

  The long shelves attached to the walls of the storeroom were lined with rows of various sized bottles which were filled with unknown substances.

  "These are my bottles," said Abernathy.

  "They all seem to be filled with something."

  "Indeed they are." The faint trace of a smile flickered at the corners of the old man's mouth.

  "What's in them?" I asked.

  "Would you like to see?" He took a gallon bottle off the top shelf. The glass was clear and I could see a swirling mass inside. He handed it to me, somewhat gingerly. I held it close and looked inside.

  Clouds, small and full, floated in a blue sea of miniature sky. It looked like the sky over Table Rock Lake. Mesmerized, I seemed to be able to smell the cedars and oaks, the fresh lake air, although the bottle was tightly closed.

  "What is it?" I asked. "It looks like..."

  "Like the sky," he said. "Here's another." I set the first bottle down and took the other one from him.

  The bottle was pure blue inside, flawless cobalt, but the mass seemed to be moving as though a wind were stirring within. Looking into its depths, I felt as though I were lying on a high treeless hill looking up at a summer sky. I looked at all of the other bottles. They were many-hued, orderly, beautiful in their neat rows on the shelves. Each one seemed to contain some different vision of the Ozarks sky. Now I could isolate the fragrances in the room. There was the faint scent of honeysuckle and morning glories, the smell of the lake before the sun has warmed its waters, the crisp aroma of roses, the winey scent of daffodils, the musty tang of deep-woods cedars wafting on an afternoon breeze.

  Fascinated, I looked at each bottle as the old man stood silently by, watching me.

  There was one bottle with ribbons of clouds colored gold by the setting sun. There was another with high thin altocumulus stretched all through the container. In still another, I saw silvery cirrocumulus lit by dazzling sunbeams. Each one seemed to contain a special part of our sky here in the Ozarks hills, a miniature fragment of the heavens. A chill crept up my arm, the hairs on the back of my neck rose prickly as a spider's thread.

  There was more.

  Some bottles contained sections of a mighty river, whitecapped and frothy over the rapids, serene and motionless on wide bends. It seemed I saw wild trout leaping in one bottle, a flock of geese rise off the miniature surface of another. One bottle had what appeared to be a spring bubbling up from a deep cavern, spilling over flat stones, into a woodland brook. My heart caught in my throat to see those wondrous, unexplainable things.

  "I don't understand," I said, turning to the man at my side.

  "Relics," he said. "For those who have forgotten what it's like to see blue sky, wild water and sun. Look at this one."

  He handed me a bottle that radiated a pure bronze light at the very bottom, then turned the color of peach in the middle and shimmered golden at the top.

  "Sunrise over the White River," he said. "The old White River, before it was dammed up, tamed."

  "Incredible."

  "These are very valuable bottles, my friend," said the man, his voice a serious rasp in his throat. "They are worth a great deal. In fact, they are as precious as life itself."

  "You mean these represent atmospheres that we no longer have on earth?"

  "Yes. The pure air, the clean water, is all gone. This is the last place in the world where people can see the sky and taste the air. Do you understand?"

  "Yes," I said. "I think I do. It's been some time since I've been to the big cities, but it was very hard to breathe there. May I buy a bottle or two? For souv
enirs?"

  "Oh, no. They're not for sale, my friend. They're not for sale at all. You see, this is a museum, this bottle shop. This is where all of the beautiful vapors of this planet, the last airs and humours of life on earth are stored."

  "But, it's not all gone. Not yet," I insisted.

  "Isn't it?"

  He led me back into the other room before I could say any more. He ushered me straight out the front door, back onto West Highway 76. I stepped into a sunny world that was every bit like a magnification of the substances inside the bottles.

  Dazed, I walked to my car, got in. I drove to the park on Table Rock, near the dam, to the place where the pretty girls go in summer, where the boys bring their boom boxes and frisbees, where children fly kites and swim by the shore. The lake was dancing like a blue mirror. There was laughter. A few clouds floated cottony over the hills. The sky was a piercing cobalt.

  The old geezer was crazy, I thought to myself.

  Later, I drove back down West 76, stopped and parked the car. I looked for the sign that read "The Bottle Shop."

  It wasn't there.

  Instead, there was only a vacant building, ramshackle and weatherworn. I walked up and down the boulevard a long time before I gave up and went home.

  It felt good to walk through our woods, to look out at Bull Shoals Lake from our back porch. The air was clean and fresh. The sky was clear.

  What a wonderful time and place to be alive in, I thought.

  It was good to breathe deep of the good air and to look up at the sky.

  Taking a Walk

  I HAVE BEEN down through the woods again on a rain-sodden day. There was a sound, through the trees, like a mighty river roaring. The wind was up, booming this illusion through the hollow, as if the earth here was shaped like a huge sea shell that magnified certain vibrations in the ear; the blood coursing through veins, the throb of the heart muscle, the silence itself.

  What is here for me among these newly leafed-out May trees? My boots sink into the mud-sog, touch hard stone. It seems so desolate here, so bereft of life. As if the hanging-on winter had stopped the breathing of creatures, imprisoned them in some kind of hibernative somnolence long after the sun finally found its way through the clouds.

  There is something here. There is life. Some of it invisible. In the wind, a pulse, a scent, a hint of deer bedded down, squirrels in their dens, quail under brush, in soft wallows. Rabbits hiding in stony crevices, noses twitching, whiskers quivering.

  How do we find such places as these? Why do we come here, stay? There are other places; maybe places just as good.

  Somewhere, here in these thickening woods, there are answers. It is enough now to stop and touch a tree. There is energy in its trunk, in the tactile sensation of its rough bark. There is a message in the pattern its limbs form against the sky. Shapes, outlines, patterns, frames. Something to sketch in thoughts that crowd the mind, some good empty spaces to search through for whatever may be found: answers, perhaps; meaning.

  Stopping here, I am conscious that something is breathing in these woods besides myself. The trees breathe, of course. Oxygen is poison to them, so they expel it, as I expel carbon dioxide. One's waste is another's need. The rocks are alive, too, formed of the same star-dust as everything else on this planet, the fine silt of long-ago explosions when there was only Void. And now I sense the rocks and trees, myself, pulsing with the same vital rhythm that courses through the entire universe.

  I think of Gustav Mahler and the sobbing plod of percussive patterns forming a backdrop to the brassy, soaring horns, the strings all fighting for a foothold in the Fifth Symphony. Here, in the apparent silence, I hear the bugling of ancient hunting horns in a sylvan glen; the distant baying of hounds on an English moor.

  It is so solemn here that music rises up out of the morning dankness, some of it soft and slow, some bright allegro.

  Back up the hill, at the house, I can hear the wind chimes on the front porch, delicately melodic. Man-made, these pipe-bells seem oddly apropos here, faintly Oriental. They make clear pure sounds like fine crystal struck with a silversmith's hammer.

  I walk on, out of earshot, beyond the reach of the wind chimes, deeper into the woods, beyond the gurgling, rainy weather creek. A friend tells me there ought to be morels up in the hardwoods, or in the cedar stands where the grass grows a thin carpet in cool shadows. But, I have been to these places and the wild mushrooms still elude me. There is something mystical about these little fungus creatures. Someday, maybe my timing will be right. Maybe I'll find a sackful. I looked early this year, and late, and while I saw a few edible varieties, they either grew too high on trees, or were too few to bother with, singles, no bigger than marbles.

  The walk is rugged, takes me in no particular direction. I get my second wind and there is Bull Shoals beyond this meager creek that flows so seldom. I cross over again, climb the steep slope to a grove that has been partially cleared by woodcutters. There is a seeping spring here, and more grass growing under cedars. Not a morel to be seen. But, I can hear the squirrels now, and a bob white quail piping in a neighbor's meadow. There are deer rubs on a sapling or two. There is life all around me, in me.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, who saw very deeply into things, once wrote that "the first care of a man settling in the country should be to open the face of the earth to himself by a little knowledge of Nature, or a great deal, if he can; of birds, plants, rocks, astronomy; in short, the art of taking a walk."

  Well, I have taken a walk, and I have opened up the face of the earth. Some of it, anyway. There was a moment or two back there when I felt I could have stayed forever in the woods. Now, breathless, back at the house, I look at the front porch, see the wind chimes tink, hear again the faint music. I am glad the house is here, in this good place.

  I am glad the woods are out there and that I can walk them in my search for a little knowledge of Nature.

  Twilight

  FROM THIS hill above the hollow we have a private view of a constantly changing painting. This painting is not a canvas, but is composed of a minuscule portion of the Ozarks. There are far bluffs standing majestic above the tamed river that is now Bull Shoals Lake. There are two ridges converging on the lake, and the lake curves into infinity. The lake, in its day-life, assumes many colors and builds the fog-clouds that hide its long-kept secrets.

  There is a dusk here like no other.

  The lake accepts it and reflects its strange light like a mirror of time, like the surface impression of eternity. Now that the boats and fishermen have gone, now that the wind is down, it seems to be fashioned of bright metal for a moment as the last glow of sun limns the high ridges.

  In a while, the lake will be hammered into dull pewter, the last image of this corner of earth to give up its light. Yet now the lake is fair of face, tranquil in its many depths, calm and confident of its own existence, its special swirl of timeless electrons.

  The dusk begins building its shapes, its shadows, even as the last light hangs on, as the sun glides to a point between two peaks where it will blaze brilliantly one last time this day.

  The deer move from the bedding grounds now, to the hardwoods. The crackle of snapped twigs reveals their movement above the hidden creek below our back porch. A whippoorwill tunes up, its fluting trills muffled by the leafed-out trees. A neighbor's rooster crows in the distance, its disembodied voice echoing along the hollow. A thousand frog voices punctuate the echoes with an amphibian suddenness, a startling sound that carries over miles and centuries of water and earth. In the deeps, the fish swim like metal beings, silent, invisible.

  Over the hills, acres of trees bleed olive-drab shadows from one last shot of sun. The lake is now a shimmering swirl of colors. On the porch here, a final bounce of light before fingers of dark touch, take hold. In the brush, a squirrel scurries to the safety of an oak before the night predators prowl and float. There is a quietness now, of life, of death.

  Twilight comes on fast. The world seems to s
ettle as if for sleep. The contours of the land blur and gentle as though a hand has smoothed the earth. The lake takes on the shadows of the bluffs. The trees draw back from the retreating light, graying with sudden age. The woods are full of whispers.

  Dimness and susurrus, the frogs suddenly still, the littoral life quiet for a moment as the sun finally falls away this day. You can hear your heart beat, your own breathing, feel your pulse swell with the tide of deeper things beyond this moment.

  In the backwash of this silence, an emptiness and a fullness: vestigial memories like the pages of bibles, the incomprehensible markings on scrolls and clay tablets, the scent of earthen jars, glimpses of cave paintings, inklings of far space, and mysterious beginnings.

  Now that the twilight is here, I can understand some places I have been, some awesome sunsets I have lived through: west Texas jackrabbits romping through backlit evenings in dusty sage landscapes turning orange, catching fire; stripe-breasted Chukars whirling over rugged desert hills; owls floating off the carrier-decks of trees; doves landing in a whistle of wings on trembling tree branches; ducks falling into a pond like autumn leaves.

  This is a good time to be alive. This is a good place to see and feel the night coming on. You can walk here without fear. In the big cities where the false lights come on automatically, your throat tightens, your stomach knots up, and you pull the curtains to shut out the nameless dread that rises up from the concrete, crackles in neon tubes like the frail bodies of electrocuted insects.