Three decades ago an eerie novel of time and the mountains dropped silently from a small press in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. It was Lewis W. Green’s AND SCATTER THE PROUD. Around such works cults form: like Hesse’s  STEPPENWOLF or Melville’s MOBY-DICK. Some scholars find it useful to see  Latter-day Saints founder Joseph Smith’s works as related classics of American imaginative literature. 

Green’s magic mountain is Big Lonesome. He sketches that brooding, fictional Appalachian peak using eyes, ears, emotions and tribulations of six strangers whose lives bring them via the Blue Ridge Parkway to the mountain and to one another. Thornton Wilder did much the same in THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY. Why, Wilder’s friar asked, did God will precisely those people to fall to their deaths from the strongest rope bridge in Spanish America? Similarly, Lewis Green’s characters grope for meaning in a chilling  January encounter high up the Parkway.

Big Lonesome affects different folks differently. If you live near the mountain, stay put. If you do not live on it, move there. If you were born there and moved away, come back and live out your days. But if your relation to the mountain is fleeting or superficial, it may bite you.

Clemmons Jenkins, born in the 1890s, is the last of his long line of Appalachian mountain men. As a teenager, he began nine years in prison for killing a man who insulted him in the commercial hamlet of Shingletown (population 172). Paroled, Clemmons returns by train from Raleigh to Asheville and then walks home. Later he weds flatlander Martha McGuire who is in Shingletown for her health. She is conventionally Christian. If Clemmons has a religion, it is mighty sketchy. It does, however, lead him to repent the killing which took away his freedom. When his wife dies, he honors her request to be buried higher up their mountain.  During a brief winter thaw he digs her grave and then moves her coffin there along a portion of Blue Ridge Parkway built on land he sold long ago to the government. He then waits for death, convinced that life’s meaning will finally  be known in an after-life.

Clemmons Jenkins’s friend is Park Ranger Orton Jackson. Orton grew up east of the mountains and moved there after service in World War II. Through drinking their moonshine, Jackson slowly makes himself acceptable to the old-timers. They include Ben Kirk,  mentor of the novel’s hero. In Shingletown there is also the proprietor of Bushkin’s General Merchandise Store. Bushkin had been born and raised in Big Lonesome’s Birdwing Range and talks the mountain talk. He won Clemmons Jenkins’s parole and introduced  him to his future wife. Bushkin sells his store and moves back to the Birdwing to end his days.

The main characters dominate the second part of AND SCATTER THE PROUD. The first half introduces men and women tangential to Big Lonesome.  They all happen to come to the Blue Ridge Parkway on the same late January night. All meet Clemmons Jackson, his horse, his wagon and his wife’s white casket. Each takes from the apparition a personal meaning. For most the meanings are horrible.

Houston Conard is a country boy who makes himself somebody in  Asheville. Once “a centaur among men,” Houston’s rutting days are well behind him when pious Evalina Simpson seduces him. At his request, Evalina drives the roaring drunk high up the parkway. She declares that she is ending the affair. He beats her. They make wild love in the car. They then see man, horse and coffin. In terror Houston races over a cliff to his death. Evalina loses her mind.

Three men drive away in haste from the leader’s fear of a dead man. On they go through Virginia and up the Parkway. One owns a small business, one is his boot-licker and the third is a painter who has done a magical mural for his awed patron. All see man, horse and coffin and plunge to their deaths.

Two other men see the vision and survive. 

One is attention-deficit-disorder afflicted Lawson Hollifield of Asheville. He reads everything and imitates too many writers, especially Thomas Wolfe and Ernest Hemingway. Playing the role of great white hunter Hemingway, Lawson turns himself into an inept stalker of deer. He  is on Big Lonesome poaching when he, too,  sees the apparition of man, wagon and horse. Arrested by the ranger, Lawson receives psychiatric testing. He is successfully treated for a  glandular and chemical imbalance and becomes normal. 

The second survivor is transformed by his close encounter. He is Samuel Edgerton of Asheville, a mama’s boy who earned an undistinguished degree in music but cannot unlock wild songs within him. He seeks meaning by driving up the parkway to listen to the mountain. Plunged into depression by his mother’s death, Samuel makes a last trip to Big Lonesome to kill himself. Then he  sees the apparition. He exchanges words with the ancient mountain man who says, “You don’t know me.” This releases his music and creativity.

AND SCATTER THE PROUD lays out mountain living, mountain talk and mountain people. It probes some unusual minds. It asks deep questions and gropes for answers. What is time? What is the meaning of meaning? If only people’s minds could remember far enough back, might they not make a fresh start and thereby make sense of themselves? Does a life have to be thought about to become valuable? Is it possible to live among people without one’s individuality being worn away to nothing? If God speaks at all, will it not more likely be through nature than through men? The mountain echoes His voice. Storms are His message.

For more information on available fiction of Lewis W. Green, see his web site at www.ioa.com/~lgreen/.

Green is a masterly, rewarding novelist. Best of all, he is alive, healthy, hard at work and accessible. He lives with two affable pet wolves on his mountain tree farm east of Asheville. 

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for Independent TORCH