The Hills Remember Read online

  The Hills Remember

  The Hills Remember

  The Complete Short Stories

  of James Still

  Edited by

  Ted Olson

  Copyright © 2012 by The University Press of Kentucky

  Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth,

  serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University.

  All rights reserved.

  Editorial and Sales Offices: The University Press of Kentucky

  663 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008

  www.kentuckypress.com

  16 15 14 13 12 5 4 3 2 1

  The stories “Snail Pie,” “Pattern of a Man,” “Maybird Upshaw,” “The Sharp Tack,” “Brother to Methuselum,” “The Scrape,” and “Encounter on Keg Branch,” from Pattern of a Man and Other Stories by James Still, are reprinted by permission of Gnomon Press. Previously published stories not included in Pattern of a Man are reprinted by permission of Teresa Perry Reynolds. Previous publication information appears at the end of the book.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Still, James, 1906-2001.

  [Short stories]

  The hills remember : the complete short stories of James Still / edited by Ted Olson.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-0-8131-3623-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8131-3641-7 (ebook) I. Olson, Ted. II. Title.

  PS3537.T5377 2012

  813’.52—dc23

  2011046134

  This book is printed on acid-free paper meeting the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials.

  Manufactured in the United States of America.

  Member of the Association of

  American University Presses

  Contents

  Introduction

  Sweet Asylum

  The Hills Remember

  Incident at Pigeon Roost

  Murder on Possum Trot Mountain

  These Goodly Things

  All Their Ways Are Dark

  Horse Doctor

  Bare-Bones

  One Leg Gone to Judgment

  A Bell on Troublesome Creek

  The Scrape

  The Quare Day

  Job’s Tears

  The Egg Tree

  Lost Brother

  Brother to Methuselum

  So Large a Thing as Seven

  Mole-Bane

  Journey to the Forks

  Uncle Jolly

  Bat Flight

  Pigeon Pie

  Twelve Pears Hanging High

  Two Eyes, Two Pennies

  On Quicksand Creek

  The Ploughing

  The Force Put

  On Pigeon Roost Creek

  The Straight

  Sunstroke on Clabber Creek

  The Hay Sufferer

  I Love My Rooster

  Snail Pie

  The Moving

  The Proud Walkers

  The Stir-Off

  Locust Summer

  Hit Like to ’a’ Killed Me

  Mrs. Razor

  The Sharp Tack

  Maybird Upshaw

  Pattern of a Man

  School Butter

  The Nest

  A Master Time

  A Ride on the Short Dog

  The Fun Fox

  The Burning of the Waters

  Chicken Roost

  The Run for the Elbertas

  Encounter on Keg Branch

  Plank Town

  From the Morgue

  Acknowledgments

  Publications

  Introduction

  Integrally associated with eastern Kentucky and often considered “the Dean of Appalachian Literature,” James Still (born July 16, 1906) was reared in Chambers County, Alabama. He attended Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate, Tennessee, then Vanderbilt University in Nashville, and finally the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, before moving to eastern Kentucky during the early years of the Great Depression. Still would call the Cumberland Plateau home until his death on April 28, 2001. He lived primarily in Knott County, Kentucky—either at the Hindman Settlement School in Hind-man or eleven miles from that town in a log house on Wolfpen Creek.

  Despite a lingering public perception that Still was a hermetic figure who spent much of his adulthood living in one rural section of eastern Kentucky, Still was always a citizen of the world. He served three years in Africa and the Middle East with the U.S. Army Air Force during World War II, and he taught at Morehead State University during the 1960s. Later, based in Knott County, he gave frequent readings and talks across Kentucky and Appalachia and often traveled to other states and nations both to conduct research and to experience other places and cultures.

  Although Still happened to live in and to write about eastern Kentucky, his literary evocations of a section of the Cumberland Plateau and of the folklife he witnessed therein constitute some of the finest writing about any region in the United States. Still worked in three genres, but while his mastery of poetry and the novel has been frequently lauded, his significant work in the short story form has been overlooked. This is unfortunate because some of Still’s short stories are among his strongest literary efforts, and a few of his short stories are as fully realized and memorable as any in the history of American literature.

  Publication History

  Still’s short stories have not been as recognized as his novel River of Earth (1940), or his posthumously published novel Chinaberry (2011), or his poetry, in part because the short story as a genre has often been overshadowed by other literary genres. One of the goals of this collection is to bring Still’s achievement in short fiction into clearer focus for a new generation of readers. As editor, I hope that Still’s stories will once again be read often and widely across the United States alongside works of short fiction by the acknowledged masters of the genre. (I say once again because in earlier decades Still’s short stories were read across the United States, and a number of his stories were featured in major national periodicals and anthologies.) Reflecting a distinctive individual artistic voice and vision—thus bearing obvious thematic and stylistic differences from classic short fiction by such American authors as Poe, Hawthorne, Jewett, Hemingway, Welty, or Cheever—Still’s finest stories exhibit the highest standards associated with the short story genre: structural concision; a striking, resonant use of language that approaches poetry; memorable presentation of an intriguing situation; and universality of meaning.

  Another reason why Still’s short stories have garnered less attention than his novels and his poetry is that Still himself frequently and unabashedly revised previously published stories to provide skeletal support for larger works; indeed, his novels River of Earth and Sporty Creek: A Novel about an Appalachian Boyhood (1977) were constructed from recycled short stories. Regardless of Still’s artistic and economic incentives to reuse his short fiction in new contexts, I hope the readers of The Hills Remember will conclude that these stories stand on their own with considerable grace and power.

  This book features all twenty-four short stories previously reissued in the three short story collections published during Still’s lifetime: On Troublesome Creek (1941), Pattern of a Man (1976), and The Run for the Elbertas (1980). The Hills Remember also incorporates the original published versions of the tw
elve pieces of short fiction that Still grafted into River of Earth, as well as the story that first appeared in Sporty Creek. The additional sixteen short stories in The Hills Remember include six that heretofore have been published only in periodicals (“These Goodly Things,” “Horse Doctor,” “A Bell on Troublesome Creek,” “Lost Brother,” “Hit Like to ’a’ Killed Me,” and “Bare-Bones”) and ten that have never been published in any form (“Sweet Asylum,” “The Hills Remember,” “Incident at Pigeon Roost,” “Murder on Possum Trot Mountain,” “On Pigeon Roost Creek,” “The Straight,” “Sunstroke on Clabber Creek,” “The Hay Sufferer,” “Chicken Roost,” and “From the Morgue”).

  Virtually all of the short stories that Still incorporated into his novels or that were brought together into book collections initially appeared in prestigious literary periodicals—such as the Virginia Quarterly Review, Yale Review, and Prairie Schooner—or in general interest periodicals, including some of the major magazines of Still’s era (ten stories were published in the Atlantic and four in the Saturday Evening Post). Other Appalachian authors of his generation (such as Jesse Stuart) similarly placed short stories in national literary and popular periodicals, suggesting that Still’s publishing history is not in itself exceptional. Nevertheless, given the number of Still short stories that first appeared in leading periodicals, it is not an exaggeration to say that during Still’s early career influential literary figures nationwide were familiar with his work and that countless people nationwide at some point read one or more of his short stories. Beginning during the middle years of the Depression and continuing for a decade, Still possessed a national literary reputation, and his short stories played a major role in that achievement.

  The first of the three collections of short stories to appear during Still’s lifetime, On Troublesome Creek was the third of three books that he published with Viking Press, the other two being his poetry collection Hounds on the Mountain (1937) and his novel River of Earth. Collectively, the ten stories in On Troublesome Creek—and especially such memorable stories as “I Love My Rooster,” “Journey to the Settlement” (later renamed “Journey to the Forks”), and “Brother to Methuselum”—marked Still’s emergent mastery in the realm of short fiction. Indeed, the fact that On Troublesome Creek received considerably less critical attention than River of Earth had less to do with any negative response to Still’s short fiction and more to do with the fate of most short story collections; even those from leading national publishers and even those featuring stories by major American authors (Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Steinbeck, for instance) tended to generate fewer sales, and less critical response, than novels. On Troublesome Creek no doubt also suffered from the timing of its publication (the year of America’s entering a second world war): by 1941, regionalist fiction was falling out of favor, as readers were seeking a literature that articulated overtly internationalist perspectives.

  Still enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Force in 1942 and served in northern Africa and the Middle East through the end of the war. Although he was remarkably prolific during the decade before the war, Still’s literary output inevitably declined during his stint as a soldier. Nonetheless, while serving overseas he wrote what is arguably his finest—and certainly his most frequently anthologized—short story, “Mrs. Razor.”

  After the war, Still endured a difficult return to civilian life, and he published comparatively little for several years. In the late 1940s and 1950s, however, he wrote some of his finest stories, including “The Nest,” “A Ride on the Short Dog,” and “The Run for the Elbertas.” National recognition for Still’s work in the short story genre followed, as several of his stories from this period were selected for inclusion in two prestigious short fiction anthologies: “Job’s Tears,” “So Large a Thing as Seven,” “Bat Flight,” and “The Proud Walkers” in The O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories, and “Mrs. Razor,” “A Master Time,” and “A Ride on the Short Dog” in The Best American Short Stories.

  By the 1960s, Still’s work was no longer commanding a national readership, but some individuals among a new generation of eastern Kentuckians began to recognize Still as a compelling figure, part modern-day Thoreauvian hermit, part citizen of the world. By then he was teaching composition and literature classes at Morehead State University and mentoring such younger writers as Wendell Berry and Gurney Norman, and Still was soon recognized regionally as a major pioneering figure from the Appalachian literary renaissance. Crucial to his emergence as a regional literary icon was a 1968 scholarly article published in the Yale Review; written by critic Dean Cadle, that article reassessed Still’s work and drew wider attention to River of Earth. (Cadle’s promotion of that novel led to its republication by the University Press of Kentucky in 1978.) Also significant was the 1976 appearance of Pattern of a Man, a collection of ten previously published short stories from throughout Still’s career, edited by publisher and poet Jonathan Greene and issued by Greene’s Gnomon Press. The timing of Pattern of a Man was uncanny, coinciding with the 1970s-era launch of Appalachian studies, a multidisciplinary academic field that offered a forum for discussion of Appalachian regional issues from scholarly, activist, and artistic perspectives. To people associated with that regional studies movement, Still’s writings were a revelation—direct yet profound narratives reflecting the cultural values of Appalachia.

  When Still died at the dawn of the new millennium, at age ninety-four, he had secured a lasting reputation among readers of Appalachian literature based on a relatively small number of literary works. Virtually everything that Still published during his lifetime, regardless of the genre, was set in eastern Kentucky, yet his works were stylistically distinctive and thematically universal, and his oeuvre has long deserved a broader readership beyond the hills and hollows of his adopted, and much beloved, home in eastern Kentucky.

  Literary Legacy

  In the decade after his death, Still stayed on people’s minds, and his works remained in people’s hearts. Two book-length collections featuring writings by a host of authors—James Still: Critical Writings on the Dean of Appalachian Literature (2007) and James Still in Interviews, Oral Histories, and Memoirs (2009)—offered personal and scholarly reflections upon Still’s life and work, while scholar Claude Lafie Crum, in his 2007 monograph River of Words: James Still’s Literary Legacy, contributed a sustained analysis of Still’s literary achievement. Revival of interest in Still reached a crescendo in 2011 upon the posthumous publication of his final novel, Chinaberry. That novel, edited by author Silas House, is unique in Still’s oeuvre for several reasons: Chinaberry is not only the major work from Still’s later years, but it also stands as Still’s lone major work to be situated outside of Appalachia (it is largely set in Texas). And unlike Still’s other two novels, Chinaberry reflects a self-contained, unified vision rather than having been pieced together out of disparate narratives borrowed from previously published short stories.

  As a volume, The Hills Remember constitutes the completion of a project I first discussed with James Still in 1999. In conversations that year, we talked about ways to disseminate his life’s work to the widest possible readership, and Still gave me his blessing to oversee two book collections. The first book, From the Mountain, From the Valley: New and Collected Poems, was published by the University Press of Kentucky in 2001. While Still played a role in realizing that project (though he died just before that book was officially published), I had to complete this short-story collection without his input. I decided to employ the basic approach of From the Mountain, From the Valley as a template for this project, and I hope that The Hills Remember would make its author proud.

  Editorial Matters

  I have organized this compilation of Still’s short stories chronologically, based either on the date of a story’s first publication or, in the case of his never-before-published stories, on my best estimate of the approximate time of composition. Unfortunately, Still’s typed short story manuscripts generally
lack typed or handwritten information regarding the specific date of composition or revision, but a few of the never-before-published stories possess one clue as to their relative time of composition: Still’s current return address typed in the upper left corner of the page—in some cases Alabama and in other cases Kentucky. The task of constructing a chronology of Still’s short stories benefitted greatly from the late Terry Cornett’s helpful (if incomplete and occasionally inaccurate) James Still bibliography; the publications list I incorporate as an appendix in this book is intended to provide the fullest possible representation of Still’s publication history in the short-story genre. While twelve short stories previously published in periodicals were subsequently reworked into River of Earth, I include the earlier versions so that readers today can appreciate the narratives in the same way that Still’s contemporaries first read them, months or in some cases years before the novel appeared.

  Eight of the ten short stories published here for the first time—as well as the story “Bare-Bones,” which was first published in 2010 as part of a promotional piece published in Appalachian Heritage to announce this collection of Still’s short stories and which is essentially a longer, “alternate” version of the published Still story “One Leg Gone to Judgment”—previously existed as manuscripts housed among the James Still Papers held at the University of Kentucky Special Collections. The other two never-before-published Still stories included here, “Chicken Roost” and “From the Morgue,” were found by Still’s daughter, Teresa Perry Reynolds, in manuscript form among the various Still papers not yet transferred to a formal archive. In transcribing the never-before-published short stories, I made every effort to represent Still’s textual intentions. In a few cases, Still wrote notes directly on the manuscripts indicating that he considered them the most complete drafts of the stories, and I used such drafts when transcribing those short stories. Most of the never-before-published stories, though, exist in only one extant draft, obviously necessitating the use of those single sources as definitive texts. Still frequently included both handwritten commentary and textual adjustments on otherwise typed manuscripts, and in a few instances I deduced handwritten words or phrases that were undecipherable on manuscript pages.