Manly Wade Wellman - John the Balladeer 01 Read online

  The Old Gods Awaken

  by

  Manley Wade Wellman

  Great perils have this beauty, that they bring to light the fraternity of strangers.

  -Victor Hugo

  Contents

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  I

  Things started that morning in the third week in June, when Mr. Creed Forshay left out of his cabin and headed up the struggling trail on the steep side of Wolter Mountain, to check on the flow of water from the spring that fed to the pipes for his place.

  It was a rare, bright day, Mr. Creed allowed to himself. Summer was a-climbing over spring here in the mountains. Mr. Creed was a middling tall, chunky-made fellow, with bushy gray hair and a square face chopped with strong lines. He was dressed more or less usual, jeans pants stuck into high laced boots and a blue hickory work shirt with a bag of roll-your-own tobacco in the pocket, and his black old umbrella hat that had cost him maybe thirty dollars some years back. He wasn't young any more, but a good sight short of being old. He was a good farmer and a good hunter and all sorts of a good man.

  He tromped across the hollow where his fish pond twinkled, a-looking up to sloping, terraced fields of corn and vegetables and to an apple orchard and nice stands of pine beyond. Forshays had owned that land all the way back to the first settlement times, in or around the year the Revolutionary War was fought to its end. And it might could be that Mr. Creed Forshay and his big son Luke worked it as well as air Forshay known to history. Loving that land helped a right much. Both Mr. Creed and Luke had been away in their times. Mr. Creed served in the Navy when he was young, had been a machinist who came back able to string his own rural electrification wires and lay his pipes to carry the spring water. And Luke had gone to Shenstone College, a-working his way through Shenstone College with good history and English grades and a-playing a patch of football. But both were there at their own place that June, because they didn't much care to be air other place else on this earth.

  Above and ahead of Mr. Creed jumped up Wolter Mountain, all the great big high humps and bunches of it, grown over with trees of air kind you could call for. Under his boots, the trail went a-shammocking up the steep, woodsy face, tight and narrow as a lap of cord. The mountain kept it narrow from side to side. Going up, you moved close against the face to your right, and to your left there dropped down what might could be the death of you if you set a foot out of place.

  But his cleated soles knew the way, from years of it. He tramped that way toward where he was headed, taking his usual care at the narrow-rough places. He made note of vines and trees, he relished the flowers. He saw purple wake-robin, blue spiderwort, little rosy bits on the twisted-stem. Where leaf rot made it rich under a clump of hickory, yellow trout lilies; under some pines, pouchy pink moccasin flower and three-bird orchids, red and white with a white gape like the mouths of baby birds. The pale blooms were gone off the serviceberry and the dogwood, but he spied a tuft of late windflower, white with its tad of pink. The branches of a gum showed shaggy with the close bunches of witches'-broom. Folks said that grew where someone had been murdered. If witches'-broom grew air place murder had happened round Wolter Mountain, there'd be a sight of it no matter where you roamed.

  A-clambering, Mr. Creed couldn't see all the way to the top of that winding, snaking trail with the steep rocks and thick-growing plants to the one side and a long, long jump down on the other. But he'd clambered it so often he could tell air turn and jog of it, and he well knew what was up above. That was where it came to a flat amongst taller heights and hikes, and there flowed the spring. The trail, as his own feet had more or less driven it out, went between the cliff and a patch of rocks to the spring. He came on up that-a-way, out from between two pines, to where he could see the flat as always. Only today there was something different.

  A couple of men were there ahead of him. He knew them by sight.

  They were brothers, Brummitt and Hooper Voth, and round about six weeks back they'd taken the old Gibb place. That was the mountaintop piece of foresty flat and slope that right here bordered the Forshay land.

  You'd better know something about the Gibb place and the Gibb family. Those Gibbs had found their way in, like the Forshays, in that first old time of settlement From the first they'd been a right odd lot Even amongst mountain-dwelling people, who've got a fair gift of minding their own business, the Gibb crowd had held off from neighbors, generation after generation. The last one of them all had been old Jonathan Gibb, who'd nair married, nair farmed, who hadn't even grown him a garden. For money to live on, he'd raised hogs on the acorns and chestnuts from his trees, and he'd blockaded fair to middling good whiskey. He'd remarked, the few times he talked to somebody, that if you tried to plow a furrow on his place, the rain and thunder and lightning came down. Nor would he allow one tree on his place to be cut. Back when the timber companies worked Wolter Mountain, he'd prowled round under his pine and oak woods with a shotgun, to run off air soul a-coming there with an axe.

  Lately he'd died, maybe from sickness or old age, nobody knew what. He nair left chick nor child, brother nor cousin, to heir his property. But it had come up at the county seat that he'd made a written deal that the land would go after he died to the Voth brothers.

  The Voths had turned out to be as standoffish as air Gibb in history. They stayed to themselves. They went to Sky Notch, the closest town, only to shop supplies and pick up mail. Mr. Creed had run into them there a couple of times, and when he'd passed them the time of day, why, they'd just nodded to him without a-passing it back. The line of the Jonathan Gibb property they'd taken ran just at the foot of a grassy slope. On that slope had long ago been laid out a sort of figure of stones. This side of the slope ran a flat patch, mostly rocks, funny-looking rocks, to the side of Mr. Creed's trail.

  Just now, when Mr. Creed got there that morning, the two Voth brothers were a-busying themselves with a posthole digger and some locust stakes, a-putting in a line of posts for a fence, right up against the edge of that very trail of Mr. Creed's.

  "Hidy," Mr. Creed hailed them, quiet and cool. "Do youins have any objection to telling me why you're out here today, a-fencing off a chunk of my land?"

  They wheeled on their feet to look at him. It was the closest he'd stood to them so far. Brummitt Voth was tall and lean and looked maybe a little small bit elegant, with a checked vest on over his black shirt and an expensive white hat

  "Your land, sir?" he repeated to Mr. Creed, in his voice that had a sort of salt-and-pepper touch of the English accent. "Your land?" he said. "According to the records at the courthouse, it's our land."

  "What records are them, and in what courthouse do you say they are?" Mr. Creed inquired him, still quiet about it.

  "I refer to the county courthouse, in the office of the register of deeds," said Brummitt Voth. "The original grant, as kept there, describes the line between the properties as running along the separating trail."

  Mr. Creed stared from one Voth to the other. "That there description harks back near about two hundred years," he told them, his voice getting deeper. "In them old days, the trail run the far side of this here stony patch youins want to take over."

  He motioned with his broad hand to the patch he called his. It was maybe an acre and a half, a flat piece in that little fold of Wolter Mountain, and it looked about halfway pa
ved with the funny-looking rocks. Some of those rocks had some way the look of faces if you looked hard; deep eyes and stubby noses and big wide mouths, the sort of face a monkey shows you.

  "The official description of the grant definitely states the trail as the boundary," put in Hooper Voth, the other brother. He was as heavy-built as Mr. Creed, though not so hard-packed in the build. His face had a thin yellowy mustache, and his tongue wetted his lower lip when he talked. "In any case," he went on to say, "I can't imagine why you'd care. You don't farm this particular ground It shouldn't be of any value to you."

  He squinted his eye over that, and it was pale like his brother Brummitt's eye, at one of the rocks that had a monkey look.

  "Long ago, the trail run up yonder, above this here patch." Mr. Creed pointed to show where. "I made this here new trail myself, trod it out with my own feet. I get back and forth on it to my spring, what I get my water from." Up ahead, past the Brummitts, the spring poured out of a high face of rock into a scooped-out basin, to make a flow through wire netting into the plastic pipe.

  "But the description of the land calls the trail the line of demarcation," said Hooper Voth again, a-hooking a meaty thumb in his broad belt. There just might could have been a gun in his pants pocket right below that point.

  "No, sir," said Mr. Creed, his voice getting hot at last. "Youins got your holdings figured dead wrong, gentlemen. Ill be obliged if you just take down them posts, and do it right now while I'm here a-watching."

  "The post stay where they are, Mr. Forshay," said Brummitt Voth, and he moved to stand close to his brother. The two of them ranged like that, the tall one and the meaty one, beside the tree stakes they'd already put in the ground. Mr. Creed studied them up and down, thinking whether he might could be able to handle both of them at once if they quarreled.

  "I suggest that we be rational," said Brummitt Voth. "You may go to court if you wish, Mr. Forshay. And when the judge consults the original grants of these lands, you can hear him tell you that we have the rights by which we stand here."

  "Devil be damned!" came out Mr. Creed at them, loud and mad. "You two should ought to take a good look at me before you try to shove me off my own ground that's been in the Forshay family since two hundred years back about. I'm a-telling you one more time, get off my place."

  "We stay on our own place," said Brummitt Voth, and "Yes," said Hooper Voth, "we stay here."

  "Then stay here till I get back, you two devil-damned outlander thieves," Mr. Creed hollered them. "I'm a-going now, and when you see me again I won't be alone against the two of you. My son Luke knows the law, and he knows how to deal with somebody a-trying to take the law into his own hands. You wait here for us to go deeper into the matter."

  When he'd said that, he swung round and headed off again, the way he'd come. As he went, he could feel the prod of their tin-colored eyes in his back, like the muzzles of pointing guns.

  He slammed down that chancy trail, near about too fast for careful safety. He was so pure down mad, he never took the time to feel scared that one of the Voths might out with a gun and open up on him. Not that Mr. Creed was much of a one to get scared easy. He'd seen too much of life, in different places, to feel that a scared fellow prospers on this earth.

  He got down to the lower ground and came a-hurrying along past his fish pond toward his square-logged, shake-roofed cabin.

  There on the door-log sat his long tall son Luke with his banjo, and I myself was a-sitting there beside Luke. I had my silver-strung guitar. The two of us were a-working out some breaks on a duet of "Laurel Lonesome."

  "I vow, Papa, you look more or less ready to bite somebody in two," said Luke, getting up. He was round about twenty-seven years old. His fair hair was long and wavy, and he was strong in his bones and muscles, but built rangy where his father was built stocky.

  "This is my friend John, Papa," said Luke. "I met up with him last Saturday at that singing in Sky Notch, and I invited him to come over and stay with us a week."

  II

  The way I've just been a-telling, Mr. Creed was powerful mad at what had gone with the Voths, but nair in his life did he forget his manners with somebody he reckoned was worth a show of them. I'd stood up, too, and Mr. Creed shoved out his hand to me. It was as big and broad as mine, and had a good grip to it when we shook.

  "I'm proud to know you, John, and right happy that Luke bid you come stay a spell," he said. "I've heard tell of you from the Obray Ramseys in Madison, and the Herrons up in the Rebel Creek neighborhood, and Preacher Frank Ricks. They allow that, since Mr. Bascom Lamar Lunsford went to his rest, you're likely to know more of the old-timey songs than air soul left on Earth."

  "People are mostly kind about listening to me," I said.

  He gave a glance to where I'd put down my silver-strung guitar. "Later on, when maybe I've got rid of a thing I'm a-studying to do just now, you'll up and pick and sing for us."

  "I'll do that thing, sir," I promised him. "And Luke can help me out on the banjo, he relishes to learn sweet music."

  "But I want to ask what made you mad, Papa," Luke put in a word. "I can't figure who in these parts would be witless enough to go foul of you."

  "You got it right, son," said Mr. Creed to him. 'I've been made pure down mad by them low-flung Voth brothers, up yonder at the old Gibb place on Welter."

  With that, he filled us both in on what had taken place with him up the trail to his spring, how the Voths had as good as vowed him they'd take that piece of rocky ground up yonder. Hearing him, I gathered that the Voths might could turn out mean.

  "They didn't ask me, they told me," Mr. Creed finished up. "I'm honest to say, if they'd acted the man with me and not the damn dog - if they'd asked me nice could they have it, I just likely would have give it to them free, for neighborly good will. But the chance of that happening is gone and past. Come on, Luke, you and me's a-going back and make them haul up them stakes with their backteeth. John, if you'd excuse us for maybe an hour of time -"

  "Let's have John come along with us," said Luke, with a scowl like his daddy's. "I know he acts like a more or less peaceable sort of fellow, Papa; but here and there the talk is, when somebody started something, John finished it up for him."

  Mr. Creed gave me a studying look. "You're a stranger within our gates," he said after a second, "but if you'll be with us in this, maybe help us out with the knowledge I hear tell you have, I'll be pleased."

  "So will I be pleased, sir," I said back to him.

  Luke and I set our instruments inside the door. Mr. Creed went to his rack of guns and chose out a good old deer rifle, German by the look. Luke slid a snubby-nosed pistol into the pocket of his jeans pants. They offered me my choice of guns, but I thanked them kindly and said I'd better do without. Then all three of us headed for the trail up to the spring.

  I've got to say right out, I more or less enjoyed that walk up the mountain. Sure enough, it was a trail as lean as a whip and as steep as a bear slide, but I was like the Forshays, brought up to run mountain ridges and shelves.

  I did all right, though a couple of times I hung to vines or branches. "Looky yonder," I said to Mr. Creed, maybe to get him into less of a black state of mind. "Mushrooms-good eating."

  "I wouldn't touch them toadstools," he said. "Air time I look at one, it's like as if I see a toad a-sitting on it"

  His mood was staying black.

  Luke went up ahead, and he came to the top. He gave a little low whoop, and waved to us. We caught up with him.

  “I don't see those fence stakes," said Luke.

  And there wasn't a single stake by the rocky patch. A-coming to the trailside to look, I saw holes where they'd been.

  "Shoo," sniffed Mr. Creed, "they must have thought better of taking the law into their own hands. They pulled them stakes up when I said I'd go fetch Luke to argue about it."

  Luke went on farther, to where the spring was. I stood and gave a gaze up to the stone-set figure on the slope beyond the patch th
e Voths had decided not to fence in after all.

  It was something to see. Big stones, boulders you might say, had been fetched together to make the outline. I should reckon it would be forty feet up and down the slope and twenty from side to side, a chunky body of bunched stones and a head on top, and short legs and long arms a-hanging down. Those stones were bigger than the monkey-faced ones in the patch the quarrel had been about. Without having aught of a way to be sure, I made a guess that some stones in that figure were tons heavy. And they must have been carried long ways from yonder here and there, especially to get them in the right shapes, chunky ones to lay close together for the body part, lean ones end to end for arms and legs.

  "Just what's it meant to be, Mr. Creed?" I inquired him.

  "Some sort of man shape, I reckon," he said.

  "A right peculiar man shape," I had to say back "Look how it humps in the shoulders, and the head seems like as if it snouts out. And those arms and legs aren't rightly man arms and legs. It could stand up and put its hands to the ground, like what they call an orangutan."

  "Rangatang," he tried to repeat after me. "Nobody knows much about it, away off from everywhere and older than the oldest. My first folks here allowed the Indians told them it was here before the Indians remembered. Only, who'd be here to shape it up before the Indians? They were the first people here, I done heard science men say."

  "I've been told a couple of tales about an older kind of folks than the Indians," I said, looking at the rocks.

  "That fits the thing the Indians said, what time they'd talk to a white settler," said Mr. Creed, nodding his head. "Whatever built it, it must have been something besides just the foxes and frogs round about here."

  "I know an Indian over Sky Notch way," I said. "Reuben Manco. He might could have something to say about it. Those are sure enough big old rocks."

  "Some of them must be six or eight feet long, they'd weigh like a house, near about," he said, spitting on the ground. "It wonders you how folks could get them dragged round up here into the shape of that there thing. They didn't have no machines back then - not even horses, I've heard say."