Love and Sleep Read Free Page A

day or two days, climbing over the heap like attendant devils in a little hell, only putting fires out and not stirring them. It didn't work for long; the fire only crept elsewhere, and found other outlets. Some of the slate fires burned for years; some that were burning in 1936 when Sam Oliphant, newly Dr. Oliphant, first came to the Cumberlands were still burning when he brought his family back there after the war.
    His was a family of doctors. When old Doc Oliphant had died, Sam's older brothers had taken over his practice, leaving Sam to find a practice of his own. Instead, and without giving it a lot of thought, Sam had answered an ad for Public Health doctors in Kentucky, was accepted gratefully, and set out South in his father's Olds, part of his share of a small estate. In this car he came to ride a wide circuit, like a traveling preacher; in a country of old Fords it earned him both respect and suspicion, until it had acquired a few dents and the dusty roads had permanently dulled its lacquer.
    Wild, wild and strange he found the mountain country to be, his circuit of towns and coal camps with their simple utilitarian names, Cut Shin Creek, Stinking Creek, Black Mountain, Big Sandy River—names having been given only to places that needed them, and not out of any ambition of permanence or glory, no classical evocations, no biblical names either, no Bethel, Goshen, Beulah: maybe because the founders were unlearned even in the Bible, or maybe because however beautiful and vast their mountains were they had not believed this was God's country, nor ever mistaken it for the Promised Land. The people Dr. Oliphant preached to (how was it they didn't know how to build a proper privy, or how to put food safely by?) filled him with stories that his Westchester relatives would find hard to swallow; Sam refined them and polished them over the years, and his children refined them further in their own retellings. Sam on his first tour, examining a girl of fourteen, who's feeling peaked. His consternation: the girl's clearly pregnant.
    Child, did you know you're going to have a baby?
    Wide eyes astonished: Ain't so!
    Well it is. Do you know how it happened? How you get a baby?
    A solemn nod, reckon I do.
    Well, what happened? You can tell me. Were you raped?
    Oh doctor (a sigh of cheerful resignation), it's been nothn but rape rape rape all summer long.
    His people, their lives harsh and poignant as their fiddle laments; his dawn journeys along pea-vine roads that skirted deep glens and crossed crackling brooks (hollers and cricks, he would learn to say); the morning smoke of hidden rivers rising through the timberlands, drifting with the soft curl of smoke from cabin chimneys; even the smell of his Olds and its upholstery, the taste of his Camels and his coffee, all of it came soon to be colored for Sam with love. Love would be the reason he remembered it so fondly, and why, when a widower with no reason to remain, he lived there till he died.
    Opal Boyd was a schoolteacher, a child of the Western farmlands of the state and like Sam a recruit of the decade's hopes for progress. She wore her ash-blond hair in two long braids wound on her head in a pale tiara; she wore cotton shirtwaist dresses with woven belts, which she bought on a yearly trip to Louisville or Chicago. In her rented room in the house of the county clerk there was a tennis racket in a wooden press. Hopeful and useless and brave in that valley, the tennis racket too was touched for Sam with love.
    When Opal married Sam and conceived a child, she began to see the ravaged mountains differently. They went North to have the baby, they went to the great World's Fair in New York and saw the future, they decided not to go back. But the established practice on Long Island that Sam bought into with all of his and Opal's savings proved to be not very large or very lucrative, and by the time he returned to it after four years of war, he found that it had in effect