The Trouble with a Lost Legacy

After Memorial Day, Granny was up to speed on her usual summer crusades. Moss does not gather on a rolling stone and for Granny on the Rocky Top of East Tennessee, gathering or pondering any type of slow motion was not the type of lesson she wanted to teach to the youngsters who were growing up in the mountains.

Aging for Granny was not a consideration. This was because Granny figured the Good Lord only handed out so many days, and she was not wasting any on fretting about getting older. Besides, watching the new growth leading into summer was one of the best times of the year.

Springtime in the mountains, however, was always fickle. Normally, by the end of May, the blooms are off the dogwoods unless a Dogwood Winter places the big white flowers on hold, but this year, old man winter kept cracking his whip and the cold snaps were still icy on the high pine ridges and the bare rock bluffs.

On the first sunrise after the big memorial, frost was trying to gather on the peaks but in the warm foggy bottoms, the Smoky Mountains were living up to the name. After deciding the weather had not been right ever since the Florida folks had been sending up the rockets, Granny sipped her coffee, studied the sunrise coming over the peaks, and waited for the kids to get up.

One benefit of aging was something the youngsters could not deny. Older folks had more experience with living, and that was the payday that bought the lessons that common sense could count on.

Granny remembered when she was just a young flower and clinging to her granny. This was when all the stories came out. Her granny taught her about the signs for the weather. She taught about the best way to run a garden and the best way to harvest and can a cupboard of apple butter, and she also taught about the neighbors on the mountains, and who were good folks and who were not.

Granny was a Fields and she knew her people came from the English countryside. Her clan were the farmers of the fields and the open land. They were a family who crossed the ocean because of trouble her granny had forgotten about, but others had made the crossing and also settled on the far side of Appalachia. The folks on the rocky tops had mostly got along, except for one family that had been trouble for years and probably always would be. This was the dreaded Montagne clan.

According to Granny’s granny, the Montagne folks did everything in a very odd way, and they did not talk right. They did not set up their gardens in the way decent folks did. They ate frogs and sails and grew witches’ brew roots that could cook up a batch of crazy. According to all the elders, the Montagne clan was nurturing a root cellar full of strange.

The Fields and the Montagne clan first started fighting over whiskey. The mountains were honeycombs of caves and as Granny’s granny told the tale, the Fields had a cave that was perfect for making whiskey. The Fields Cave was huge and no one could find the end. The deep crack on the rocky ridge blew out cool air in the summer and warm in the winter. The Fields Cave was sweet for brewing mash and running a still, until the Montagne bunch raided the cave and blew up the still.

The Fields fought back, and so did the Montagne family. After a running battle over the ridges that lasted for years, both clans abandoned the best of the whiskey-making caves, but both sides bore a grudge that was still a sore subject. The Fields went to one church and the Montagne people another. Even in the present day, the descendants of both sides would practically spit when they heard the irritating name of their mountain rival.

Over the last Memorial Day, Granny led the tradition of going to the cemetery. After a long day of cleaning up the graveyard and decorating with flowers, Granny perked up when she heard some of the kids talking about a burial ground they found beside one of the old deer trails.

When the winter woods were bare, the kids were riding their four-wheelers up on the ridges and came across an old graveyard with tombstones so weathered it was hard to read the markers.

After learning about the abandoned cemetery and a memorial site she knew nothing about, Granny organized a troop of the four-wheel motorcycles and had the kids teach her how to drive one.

With the dogwoods hiding under the new growth of springtime, and the mountain laurel blooming pink and purple as the trail wound higher, a clearing broke out of the trail into a smattering of uneven stumps and a little stand of upright tombstones.

Without a doubt, the limestone slabs had been washing in the rain for at least a hundred years. Granny hated to wear her glasses even more than she had learned to hate the Montagne clan, but when she began to read from the headstones, it was even harder to read because she began to cry.

Unlike her old granny, who might have embellished the hate, the feud, and the politics between the two families, the writing on the tombstones did not lie. Buried together and resting side by side for eternity were only two last names. Resting beneath every marker was either a Fields or a Montagne, but the headstones together told the tale of a time before feuds and fights, when all Americans were truly the United States of America.