Christy

Prologue

On that November afternoon when I frst saw Cutter Gap, the crumbling chimney of Alice Henderson's cabin stood stark against the sky, blackened by the fames that had consumed the house. The encroaching weeds; Geld grass and chickweed and penny-royal had all but obliterated even the outline of the foundations.
The old mission house was still there, high on its rise of ground, with the mountain towering behind it. Once painted a proud white, it was gray and sagging, the front porch gone. There were no other buildings left at the mission. The church-schoolhouse
had long since been moved to another location; David Grantland's cabin had been demolished.
Nonetheless, I was standing with my mother on the spot I had always longed to seethe site of the adventures recounted so vividly by my parents during my growing-up years. These years had brought changes to Cutter Cap: "brought-on" clothes, canned food, autos, radios over which blared hillbilly music. But many of Appalachia's economic problems had never been solved, so the federal government had stepped in. In 1906, the towering scenery of Cutter Cap was incorporated into the Cherokee National Forest, and the families who lived there sold their small holdings to the government. By the time I saw the Cove, cabin after cabin stood vacant. Forest rangers and tourists roamed the Cap, and bear and deer, raccoon and bobcat, for and wild boar were returning to these Tennessee forests.
But mother was surprised to find that certain things had not changed. The way in, for instance, was still a bumpy trail with washouts and gullies and fords over a tumbling mountain stream. When the car finally stopped in the mission yard, mother got out and stood and looked-and looked-trying to see everything at once, A young family now lived in what had been the old mission house, and they had invited us to stay for the night.
We explored room after room. The dining room was still much the same, mother said-tan tongue-and-groove walls-only now there was a mail-order stove (providing the only heat in the house) with a pipe through the ceiling, We found that there was still no running water and the old telephone was in its place on the wall, "Remember my telling you about bringing the wires in?" mother asked. Yes, I remembered.
She stopped in the parlor doorway, her face aglow, "The Lyon
and Healy! Imagine!" The huge grand piano still stood there,though the ivory was missing from most of the keys.
We were given the front bedroom upstairs. There were Auffy clean curtains at the windows. "How did they know," mother said, "that this was once my room?" She was eager for more reconnoitering, *Catherine, would you walk down the road with me?"she said eagerly. "I want to find out if-well, a lot of things.
As we walked along, I sensed excitement rising in her. She was the nineteen-year-old Christy Huddleston again, exploring this same road wearing the shoes she had bought at the Bon Marché in Asheville, ("Ice-pick toes," David Grantland had teasingly called them.)
Presently we were standing by the OTeale cabin she knew so well. No one was around. It was like walking into an empty stage setting or into one's own dream. Clumps of old English borwood in the yard were surrounded by rotting tires, pieces of twisted metal, old newspapers. We walked up the creaking stairs at one end of the porch and stood in the doorway. Everyone was gone, and on the floor was a snowstorm of slips of paper-receipts for pay from a South Carolina cotton mill. Mother shook her head in disbelief at the dates. "They're so many years back," she said. "The children must have left the mountains to work in a mill and sent most of their pay home." I watched her turning the slips of paper over and over in her hands as if trying to make them speak to her. She said, "I lost my supper that first night after I had seen the half-witted epileptic boy who lived here. It was Miss Alice who comforted me. Miss Alice.." Mother's blue eyes held a faraway look.
I thought of tall, blonde, patrician Alice Henderson as she had been described to me. In spite of her eager, adventurous mind. Her religious beliefs had been as settled as the nineteen-year-old Christy's had been unsure. She had been at the center of all the
drama that had been acted out on this gigantic stage, with the brooding, unchanging mountains as the backdrop.
It was then that I got my first clear glimpse of the book I had always wanted to write about the mountains-my mountains. For I had been born among mountains like these. All of my life the windswept heights had challenged me-and steadied me. As if reading my thoughts, mother said shyly, "The story aches to be told, Catherine. The secrets of the human spirit that Alice Henderson knew are needed today. And my mountain friends-I want people to know them as they really were."
And suddenly, I understood how the story should be written-through mother's eyes, as I had seen it all along. Only-from the beginning, my imagination had taken hold of the true incidentsand had shaped them so that now I scarcely knew where truth stopped and fiction began. Therefore, though so much of the story really happened, I would set it down in the form of fiction. As much as she could tell me, I would write. I said to her now, "I've never understood why your parents let you come here.
She laughed softly. "Oh, teaching in a mission school sounded so safe; and Dr. Ferrand was so solid, so reliable. Father was certain he could entrust me to Dr. Ferrand."