the few who dared battle their way in and stake claim to soil where only the courageous dared walk. In places, the mountains shut out the sky, and the pathways leading into the dark woodlands seldom found their way back out.
“Have you ever been lost back in this country?” I asked.
Lem Ownby glanced out across a fine purple mist that rolled atop the highlands. I knew it was purple. Lem had no idea. Lem had been blind for decades. He grinned, and said, “No, I don’t guess I’ve ever been lost. But I have been powerfully misplaced from time to time.”
The mountains themselves are ancient, the oldest landmarks on the face of the earth, having watched over Appalachia for two hundred million years, give or take a millennium or two. In 1940 the Great Smokies became a national park, and most families had to give up their raw acreage and move out. A few were allowed to stay. No others would ever homestead those mountains again. All of the original setters were gone.
Save one.
Lem Ownby was the last man on the mountain.
His grandfather had defied the mountains in search of gold, and his parents fought their way into the solemn refuge of the Smokies during the War Between the States.
They brought with them all they needed: a gun for hunting, a broad axe to cut the logs for a home, and a froe to slice the shingles that became a roof. Their philosophy had been a simple one: “If you can’t buy it, make it. And if you can’t make it, just do without it.”
In 1902, at the age of thirteen, Lem Ownby, swinging an axe as tall as he was, worked with his father to build the cabin that now sheltered him.
“It’s just back of beyond,” said the old man. He grinned a tired grin. “It was so far back in the woods, we had to go toward town to hunt.”
The Ownby family had neighbors up on Meigs Mountain and over on Blanket Mountain, where a bright red blanket had been hung atop a rusty wire to designate the official county line. It was seldom seen by anyone who didn’t belong in the high country.
“We did have an educated man come in here one time,” Lem remembered, “but he almost starved to death. He wouldn’t have made it if we hadn’t felt sorry for him and fed him. He was a college man.”
Lem Ownby rubbed his chin and leaned back on the old rocking chair beneath the picture on the wall, the faded photograph with images of a smiling mother and bearded father.
Maybe she was smiling because, in those days, old women knew how to get rid of worrisome warts without going to the doctor, which was good since there were a lot more warts than doctors back in those hard-rock Smoky Mountains.
“Just steal a dishrag,” she had told Lem, “then rub it over the warts. Hide it under a rock and never go back. When the dishrag rots, the warts will go away.”
The warts left. And, after a while, so did all traces of humanity. Only the chimney above Lem Ownby’s cabin mixed its ashen smoke with the blue mist of the mountains.
When the mountain farm boys stumbled awkwardly across the threshold of puberty, they diligently searched the corncribs from barn to barn. When someone found a red ear in the pile, he would have the pleasure and sinful distinction of being able to kiss the girl of his choice, provided he could talk her into such a provocative deed.
“We couldn’t be choosey about the girls,” Lem said.
“Why not?”
“There weren’t many of them.”
“How did you find a wife?” I asked.
“We took whatever was available.”
“And what if you married the wrong girl?”
“My daddy always said, ‘You’ve burnt a blister, now sit on it.’”
The mountains bred strong, self-reliant individuals. Lem Ownby called them stubborn. They were his neighbors, and they had been gone so long he sometimes wondered if he had ever really known them at all.
He remembered the day Ephraim Ogle and John Hampton went up the mountain together to bring down an old mule for plowing. “He’s stubborn and wild,” Ephraim said. “There can’t nobody ride him.”
`John Hampton snorted. He gritted his teeth and rubbed his hands on the back of his overalls. He spit once, then twice. “There ain’t never been a mule I can’t ride,” he said.
John Hampton mounted. The mule ambled slowly, even leisurely, on down the dirt road. John smiled. Nothing to it. He could ride anything. At the mud hole, the mule balked.
He laid his ears back, peeled his eyes, stopped, dug in his heels, and would not take another step. John Hampton yelled. Then he pleaded. Finally he kicked the mule in the ribs. A moment later, he was pulling himself, head first, out of the mud hole.
Ephraim ambled over and said loudly, “He threw you, didn’t he?”
John Hampton shrugged and wiped the mud from his eyes. “Well, he sorta did, and he sorta didn’t,” John replied. “I was aiming on getting off anyway.”
Down in the valley was the dastardly Ephraim Bales. He could hoe corn all day long, some said, without ever standing on Tennessee soil. Ephraim Bales would simply walk across the rocks, find a pile of loose dirt, press a corn kernel into the earth, then step on to the next stone. His was a hard life. But then, it was never easy living in a two-room cabin with a wife, nine children, and a mother-in-law. Ephraim Bales was known as the meanest man in the valley. He had his reasons. He was feared. He was cursed. Men rode miles out of their way to keep from passing his cabin.
No one mourned him when he died. Ephraim Bales was buried in the rich sod of his own backyard, and no one came to the funeral. The pews were as empty as his life had been. On Monday, Bales had stalked off into the woods and cut down a chestnut tree, then hauled it by mule to a sawmill. “Cut it up in planks,” he ordered.
He stacked the planks, threw them in the back of his wagon, and brought them home. “When I die,” he told his wife, “make my casket out of them chestnut planks.”
“Why?”
“So when I go through hell,” he said, “I can go through hell a-cracking.”
“God always did say he was gonna make the devil suffer,” Lem Ownby said as he rocked beside the potbellied stove, beneath a clock that no longer ticked. “He did. He sent Ephraim Bales to old Lucifer.”
As a boy, Lem Ownby made a stab at attending the one-room schoolhouse up on Meigs Mountain. “Mostly it was walking in the front door and out the back one,” he recalled. Crops stood in his way. So did the family chores. “It was hard to read books when you’re going hungry,” Lem said. “What I tried to do was keep from going hungry.”
He headed out into the Smokies and gathered a mess of greens: lamb’s tongue, old field mustard, field cress, crow’s foot plant, and poke shoots. He shrugged, “Daddy always said that if it don’t kill a cow, then it won’t kill us.” The garden was a struggle, and Lem Ownby could not recall any day he had been without a mule and a hoe. “Mostly we raised rocks,” he said. The Ownby family dug up potatoes in the spring and managed
