Part 18 (1/2)
”I know it too, John!”
”Me! Me too!”
”All right then, why don't you children join in and help me sing it?”
Go tell it on the mountain, Tell it on the hills and everywhere, Go tell it on the mountain That Jesus Christ was born!
Old Devlins Was A-Waiting
All day I'd climbed through mountain country. Past Rebel Creek I'd climbed, and through Lost Cove, and up and down the slopes of Crouch and Hog Ham and Skeleton Ridge, and finally as the sun hunted the world's edge, I looked over a high saddleback and down on Flornoy College.
Flornoy's up in the hills, plain and poor, but it does good teaching. Country boys who mightn't get past common school else can come and work off the most part of their board and keep and learning. I saw a couple of brick buildings, a row of cottages, and barns for the college farm in the bottom below, with then a paved road to Hilberstown maybe eight, nine miles down valley. Climbing down was another sight farther, and longer work than you'd think, and when I got to the level it was past sundown and the night showed its stars to me.
Coming into the back of the college grounds, I saw a light somewhere this side of the buildings, and then I heard two voices quarreling at each other.
”You leave my lantern be,” bade one voice, deep and hacked.
”I wasn't going to blow it out, Moon-Eye,” the other voice laughed, but sharp and mean. ”I just joggled up against it.”
”Look out I don't joggle up against you, Rixon Pengraft.”
”Maybe you're bigger than I am, but there's such a thing as the difference between a big man and a little one.”
Then I was close and saw them, and they saw me. Scholars at Flornoy, I reckoned by the light of the old lantern one of them toted. He was tall, taller than I am, with broad, hunched shoulders, and in the lantern-s.h.i.+ne his face looked good in a long, big-nosed way. The other fellow was plumpy-soft, and smoked a cigar that made an orangey coal in the night.
The cigar-smoking one turned toward where I came along with my silver-strung guitar in one hand and my possible-sack in the other.
”What you doing around here,” he said to me. Didn't ask it, said it.
”I'm looking for Professor Deal,” I replied him. ”Any objections?”
He grinned his teeth white around the cigar. The lantern-s.h.i.+ne flickered on them. ”None I know of. Go on looking.”
He turned and moved off in the night. The fellow with the lantern watched him go, then spoke to me.
”I'll take you to Professor Deal's. My name's Anderson Newlands. Folks call me Moon-Eye.”
”Folks call me John,” I said. ”What does Moon-Eye mean?”
He smiled, tight, over the lantern glow. ”It's hard for me to see in the night-time, John. I was in the Korean war, I got wounded and had a fever, and my eyes began to trouble me. They're getting better, but I need a lantern any night but when it's full moon.”
We walked along. ”Was that Rixon Pengraft fellow trying to give you a hard time?” I asked.
”Trying, maybe. He-well, he wants something I'm not really keeping away from him, he just thinks I am.”
That's all Moon-Eye Newlands said about it, and I didn't inquire him what he meant. He went on: ”I don't want any fuss with Rixon, but if he's bound to have one with me-” Again he stopped his talk.
”Yonder's Professor Deal's house, the one with the porch. I'm due there some later tonight, after supper.”
He headed off with his lantern, toward the brick building where the scholars slept. On the porch, Professor Deal came out and made me welcome. He's president of Flornoy, strong-built, middling tall, with white hair and a round hard chin like a water-washed rock.
”Haven't seen you since the State Fair,” he boomed out, loud enough to talk to the seventy, eighty Flornoy scholars all at once. ”Come in the house, John, Mrs. Deal's nearly ready with supper. I want you to meet Dr. McCoy.”
I came inside and rested my guitar and possible-sack by the door. ”Is he a medicine doctor or a teacher doctor?” I asked.
”She's a lady. Dr. Anda Lee McCoy. She observes how people think and how far they see.”
”An eye-doctor?”
”Call her an inner-eye doctor, John. She studies what those Duke University people call ESP-extra-sensory perception.”
I'd heard of that. A fellow named Rhine says folks can some way tell what other folks think to themselves. He tells it that everybody reads minds a little bit, and some folks read them a right much.
Might be you've seen his cards, marked five ways-square, cross, circle, star, wavy lines. Take five of each of those cards and you've got a pack of twenty-five. Somebody shuffles them like for a game and looks at them, one after another. Then somebody else, who can't see the cards, in the next room maybe, tries to guess what's on them. Ordinary chance is for one right guess out of five. But, here and there, it gets called another sight oftener.
”Some old mountain folks would name that witch-stuff,” I said to Professor Deal.
”Hypnotism was called witch-craft, until it was shown to be true science,” he said back. ”Or telling what dreams mean, until Dr. Freud overseas made it scientific. ESP might be a recognized science some day.”
”You hold with it, do you, Professor?”
”I hold with anything that's proven,” he said. ”I'm not sure about ESP yet. Here's Mrs. Deal.”
She's a comfortable, clever lady, as white-haired as he is. While I made my manners, Dr. Anda Lee McCoy came from the back of the house.
”Are you the ballad-singer?” she asked me.
I'd expected no doctor lady as young as Dr. Anda Lee McCoy, nor as pretty-looking. She was small and slim, but there was enough of her. She stood straight and wore good city clothes, and had lots of yellow hair and a round happy face and straight-looking blue eyes.
”Professor Deal bade me come see him,” I said. ”He couldn't get Mr. Bascom Lamar Lunsford to decide something or other about folk songs and tales.”
”I'm glad you've come,” she welcomed me.
Turned out Dr. McCoy knew Mr. Bascom Lamar Lunsford and thought well of him. Professor Deal had asked for him first, but Mr. Bascom was in Was.h.i.+ngton, making records of his songs for the Library of Congress. Some folks can't vote which they'd rather hear, Mr. Bascom's five-string banjo or my guitar; but he sure enough knows more old time songs than I do. A few more.
Mrs. Deal went to the kitchen to see was supper near about cooked. We others sat down in the front room. Dr. McCoy asked me to sing something, so I got my guitar and gave her ”s.h.i.+ver in the Pines.”
”Pretty,” she praised. ”Do you know a song about killing a captain at a lonesome river ford?”
I thought. ”Some of it, maybe. It's a Virginia song, I think. You relish that song, Doctor?”
”I wasn't thinking of my own taste. A student here-a man named Anderson Newlands-doesn't like it at all.”
Mrs. Deal called us to supper, and while we ate, Dr. McCoy talked.