Harriette Simpson held a number of jobs on the way to becoming the writer Harriette Arnow, but she had never wanted tobeanything else. In 1934, she decided it was time to get serious about her writing and set out on a five-year plan to get something published. If she didn’t succeed, she told herself she would do something else. As a writer, she followed only one rule: “I let myself try numberless pages or so of this and that, but if I do five I will have to finish it.”¹

Within the first two years of her experiment,...

Back of Superintendent Russell’s shoulder Court House Square lay, dusty yellow in the July sunshine, deserted on this week day morning save for one tall man dressed in faded blue shirt and overalls. Unconscious of being watched, the man stood and slowly cut a small golden muskmelon into neat cubes which he conveyed to this mouth with the blade of the jackknife used in the cutting. Louisa Sheridan watched the blue flash of the knife blade in the sunlight, saw the red-gold gleam of the man’s whiskers, and tried not to think it a picture she saw, but a man...

She stood and looked after him a moment, and wondered if she would ever see him again. She hoped so. His words puzzled, but did not frighten her. She could teach there, just as some man or woman had taught in Canebrake before her, and another would teach after.

Inside the restaurant a tall boy clumsily frying hamburgers for three teamsters in overalls answered all her questions. Yes, there was a bus leaving in half an hour; yes, her supplies would be safe on the sidewalk; sure, he could sell her a ticket to High Rock, but he would have...

Two log houses, one large and old, the other small and new, a tall barefooted boy, and a red cow with a too-prominent backbone were the only signs of civilization encountered on the way. The mules’ shadows stretched ever farther before them, and Louisa, giving up all hope of dinner, consoled her outraged stomach with thoughts of supper, when it reminded her with a thrust of gnawing that she had not eaten since morning. It now seemed that countless ridges with their pines and twisting roads of red and yellow sand lay behind her, shutting the world as she had...

She was back in Lexington lying on the lawn behind her aunt’s house. There were rocks in the grass, and she had chosen two to sleep on. Somewhere her cousin screamed “Teacher” at her in a tone of derision and she sat up. Daylight had come, and Corie stood at the foot of the stairs calling to her.

She pushed hair out of her eyes and tried to remember everything at once. She was a school teacher now, boarding at Lee Buck Cal’s, and today was the first day of school. She shivered, for the early morning air was cold....

Saturday morning while the dawn was yet changing from blue to gray, Louisa was awakened by Rie’s cry of, “He’s a comin’, Teacher. He’s a comin’. Where is hit now?”

She remembered and aroused herself sufficiently to point to the mantel where lay two letters she had written the evening before. Rie caught up the letters, and ran downstairs. Louisa, fully awake now, jumped out of bed and reached the window in time to see Rie dash across the yard, calling as she ran, “Don’t let him git by, Pete.”

Pete stood in the middle of the road and watched...

Louisa let this new life of teaching, a work which she enjoyed at times in spite of herself, and watching the people she lived with take up the most of her time and thought so that on the whole she was fairly happy. In her thoughts she still saw her role among these people as that of a bystander and nothing more. She did not want it to be anything else. When ugly, painful things such as Aunt Elgie’s insanity and Chris’s danger and trouble came into her mind she always—sometimes without success—immediately tried to put them away...

Noon recess was almost over. Rie had returned from her play and now leaned in one of the school house windows and sniffed the hot quick August wind that had been sweeping steadily down the valley since early morning. “Teacher, I do hope ye cut lang’ige an’ g’ogerphy short,” she said to Louisa, who leaned from another window and tried to see if the sow-hog just going under the floor had eight or nine red and white pigs.

“I cut school so short now it’s a wonder your father doesn’t say something,” Louisa told her.

“My ole pop is th’...

Louisa worried and wondered a little for a short time after her encounter with Chris in the cave. She wanted to know if Lee Buck, and Corie, and Haze knew that Teacher understood now what Lee Buck did with his corn. Corie talked to her more; simple talk such as one woman would have with another, and not that of an ignorant landlady for a learned school teacher she stood a little in awe of. Corie’s friendliness sometimes led her to think that the woman knew and trusted her the more. She wanted to ask Chris about the other members...

It was September and near the last of summer. Rain, as if in warning of the winter snow and cold to come, had fallen steadily all day out of an evey gray sky. In one day the earth seemed to have slipped from summer into fall, and now instead of being blue and green and yellow with sky and leaves and goldenrod as yesterday, was all over an even gray with the poplar leaves shining white-gray and the pine needles dark and blurred with rain.

Rie and Pete and Teacher made the school, and shut the door against the rainy...

It was late October and the mornings were cold. The corn was shocked now, or standing like top-heavy skeletons, stripped of its blades and holding its ears for future gathering. The yard was a blanket of little green and yellow apple leaves, and on the hill road beech and maple leaves made a pleasant rustling as one walked to school. Teacher’s desk was always covered with wild grapes and hickory nuts, and the children talked importantly of fodder pulling and cane stripping.

For a week the weather held, still days of blue clean air filled with the slow drift of...

Rie was remarkably adept in the hill business of starting in any given direction and arriving at a given point by way of going round a hill or over a ridge, and so led them to the cane field in a surprisingly short time. They went down the ridge by a way different from that which they had come, skirted two hillsides, and came to a thicket of maple and beech trees on the sunny slope of an old pasture.

“Thar they be,” Rie said.

Louisa looked below her through the trees and saw the drama of molasses making in...

“I cain’t make out what she’s wantin’,” Chris said. “Beetle, you’ve plum spoiled mine an’ Teacher’s checker game.”

Louisa hurried from the kitchen into the big house with the lamp in one hand and a piece of corn bread and molasses in the other. “Here, Beetie, try some nice bread. Hungry, Beetie?”

Beetle quieted her wailing long enough to stare scornfully at the bread and wave a small fist dangerously near the lamp, and then butted her head against Chris’s shoulder, stiffened her whole body, and once more gave herself up to angry howling. Chris walked the floor and frowned...

The color had died from the hills, and by the church house door the yellow poplar leaves no longer fell in slow loops of gold. The days were near their shortest now, and the sun, when it shone at all, came late to Cal Valley and left early, leaving long periods of cold blue twilight morning and evening. On the short rainy days the hills were pine-gray walls supporting a gray fog roof of slow-moving cloud, and at night the slow drip of the fall rain on the roof boards made a sad tune, unlike the hard lively patter of...

No child in Cal Valley had ever seen a Christmas Tree or knew a Christmas song. A few of the more enlightened families such as the Cals let their children hang up stockings, and these would be filled with hard candy and choice home-grown apples saved for the event. Christmas in the valley had never been a day of great importance. In most homes Christmas dinner was like any other dinner, and if any one celebrated at all it would be the men, who by drinking more than common and firing long salutes from their shot-guns and pistols made the...

Each day the children had more to tell of the Christmas preparations going forward in their homes, and Teacher was gay again and helped in the planning. No plum puddings or fruit cakes here, but homely things: dried apple pies, molasses cakes and cookies, souse meat, sausage, and pumpkin butter were the most common of their delicacies. The more affluent such as the Cals and Pomps might use sugar to cook with, but others were more often restricted in their choice of a sweetening, being limited chiefly to molasses and honey.

Corie, it appeared, was striving to outdo every woman...

Samanthetie came to school again one day not long after the New Year. She slipped through the door during early noon recess while the other children were all away, for no matter what the weather might be Rie and Pete went home at noon. Sometimes if the school were small as on that day, they took all its members home with them, where they were welcomed by Corie to pickles and fodder beans or cows peas and corn bread. A light snow was falling and Samanthetie, her head bare and her body wrapped in an old jumper, shivered soundlessly by...

“Ye won’t be fergittin’ now, Teacher,” Rie said.

“I’ll remember,” Louisa told her.

“We’uns are goin’ tu eat supper at yer place,” Mable said to Rie. “Mom had Pop kill a yearlin’ special so’s we could bring up beef.”

“I think Pomps an’ Lucy Dykes aim tu come early, too. Rans he’ll be late with th’ mail, but he’ll git thar in time fer th’ fiddlin’.”

Lander and Royal and Clyde Meece came in from a long chase after the hogs.

“Too bad ye cain’t come tu our music party an’ all,” Rie said to Clyde.

Mable pulled her cousin’s...

She walked slowly up through the corn rows and Chris and Lee Buck and Haze waved to her from the woods above the garden. They with Moll were snaking down a great oak back-log for the fireplace tonight. Their voices, raised in friendly argument over the relative merits of Moll and Kate, came clearly through the sharp still air. Lee Buck sat sideways on the mule and laughed and held his hands wide apart to show the thickness of the log Kate had pulled, while Haze leaned against a maple sapling and said, “Ye’re fergittin’ tu say thar wuz snow...

The clear cold did not long continue. On Tuesday of the next week a warm wind came out of the southwest, and by night time rain was falling; a steady downpour that would raise the creeks and keep all but the Cal children away from school, and make a heavy thunder on the roof boards all night long and maybe for days. That night after supper, Louisa sat a long time in the loft room crouched above her small fireplace where now and then drops fell into the flame and were gone with a little hissing, and listened to the...

She was in the big house again. The fire shadows still danced and died, and the dog lay as he had lain before, his nose sideways on one black paw. It seemed such a long time since she had come down the stairs and across the room. She had not known then. Yet the pattern of moonlight from the back window where the firelight did not shine, still fell crookedly over one wooden bedpost and on to Rie’s hair. Corie took Chris’s new blue mackinaw, a present from his mother at Christmas, and put it about Teacher’s shoulders.

“I’m not...

Friday in the morning of the last day of school. Three days since Chris was shot. Last night she had gone to see him for the first time. Corie and Lee Buck and Haze had tended him, and would not let her go. She had wanted to. Yesterday morning she had made Corie promise to take her as soon as the night fell, and the children were asleep.

Rie and Pete had looked troubled when their mother told them Wednesday at breakfast that Chris was hiding out and would not be home for a while—maybe for a long while....