Past the Beech Stump

(An excerpt from The Song Poet)

Author note

This is an early chapter from my novel-in-progress, The Song Poet. The story is told here by Malachi Cochrane, looking back on the summer of 1927 in the South Carolina mountains. It’s the true beginning of everything that follows.

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This story starts on Carolina Day, 1927, at a church picnic over at Issaqueena Falls, right by the Stumphouse Tunnel. Teddi was just twelve then, and I was just six. The Goodlet sisters, Essie and Fleda, eight and nine that summer, were playing by the rapids in the pool just above the falls. Essie was acting like Will Rogers in a dress, whirling a cornsnake as a lariat, and Fleda was skittering away in her baptismal robes like a calf fit—but not willing—to be tied. She ran away, splashing down the creek, clean past the master beech stump and toward the falls.

That beech stump is long gone, but in 1927 all us little ones knew a body didn’t go past the beech stump above Issaqueena Falls. Fleda Goodlet knew it, but for a moment she forgot it—and that was all it took. The creek water pulled hard on Fleda’s baptismal robes like wind on sails.

Fleda and my oldest brother Jasper were fixing to go down to the foot of the falls that day after supper to get baptized by Reverend Wylie. But she never did go down and get baptized, that day or any other.

Essie Goodlet saw it first. Daddy heard her scream, dropped his plate of chicken, and leapt in, Sunday clothes and all. He snatched at Fleda’s robes and then got his arms around her waist and pushed her like a torpedo to the bank where her own daddy had half-slid between the rocks. He grabbed his girl, and Daddy laughed real big, balling up her torn wet robes between his big hands and over his head so as to throw them back to the bank.

He lost his balance and fell backward. Teddi and Mama and some other ladies gasped, and I saw my daddy wrestle the river, trying to grab hold of the wet boulders but slipping by them, and then finally squatting down right at the fall’s edge, water up to his neck, hands on a couple of dog-sized rocks, trying to push himself out of the fall just by force against the strong spring flow. And then one of those dog rocks went over, and Daddy was gone.

And then, despite the river and falls, it seemed like the awfullest quiet—an awful kind of false peaceful as can’t last. And screaming. And shouts of the men running and sliding down the cliff to him. That sound scared me the most. A mountain man, when he ain’t drunk—and that’s more common than you might think—he don’t shout, nary never, about nothing. But all the men were shouting and running, and even young as I was I knew this meant something bad.

And so looking at it, I reckon it starts out awful all around, this story. But it’s a happy one.

The men found Daddy wedged between two boulders under the falls, spirit flown, still clinging to Fleda’s tore-up baptismal robes like they were Hope itself.

We buried him in the churchyard with them robes dried out and folded in his hands like a flag.

Poor Fleda Goodlet took it hard. Some folks took to avoiding the girl. The morning after the funeral, the Goodlets sent her and Essie off to kin down in Sumter for the rest of the summer. The girls came back up in time for harvest. Fleda came prettier and grown up—no more girlish playing and chasing around. She was a grown woman now and serious. And Essie came up quiet, too… and Presbyterian.

In fact, it wasn’t long before all them Goodlets were attending at the Scotch Presbyterian Church. So as I say, Fleda Goodlet never did get dunked—just sprinkled.

Now that she was a Calvinist, I reckon Fleda’d allow as Daddy’s dying was predestinated, part of God’s Plan since before Creation. But us Holiness, and even Freewill Baptist, know better than that. Adam chose evil into this world, and we-all keep choosing it, so as it’s spread through all Creation like rat poison in a pot of grits. We all of us eat out of that same pot, and so all of us, no matter how sanctified, we get our dose of evil… bad things happen to fine people. And Daddy was one of the finest.

The funeral brought out near everybody to our little church. The Apostle Z.A. Sanders himself came over from the Brethren Central Holiness Seminary in Central—right by Clemson—to preach the funeral.

My oldest brother, Jas, threw down the first shovel of dirt.

And then, whilst the others walked back to the meeting hall to leave us to our grief, Ponts and me, we picked up the shovel and spade left by the gravediggers—and then it was like we three boys couldn’t bury Daddy fast enough. Somehow it seemed important that we be the ones to bed Daddy down, just the way he had tucked us in when we were babies. Mama sat in the widow’s chair beside Teddi, watching, approving, proud of her boys.

Somehow it felt like we were touching Daddy, I think… like the time him and Mama were both laid up with the ague and I brought him a wet cloth for his brow. I reckoned he was sleeping, but his flaky dry lips smiled as I petted his head, like I was used to doing with Wade Hampton IV, our Boykin Spaniel. I’d learned by then that dogs like to be rubbed high on their heads and behind their ears, and I knew I liked when my mother would rub my forehead when I was sick, but for some reason I wasn’t so sure it was right to do the same thing to my daddy. Still, I knew I liked it, and I knew we were supposed to Do Unto Others, and so I petted my daddy’s head.

But then he opened his eyes and looked at me, and I pulled my hand away.

“You got a lot of love in you, Mally.”

I rubbed my fingers against my shirt.

Daddy kept me in his eyes. “That’s so, ain’t it?”

“Yes. Yes sir. I reckon so.”

Daddy closed his eyes again. “Never hide that, Son.”

The way he said it, and the way he looked at me, I knew there wasn’t nothing to do but put my hand back to his sweaty hair and keep on petting him like a dog.

Mama was sideways with grief.

Of course all the Brethren Central Holiness meeting folks from Hill Regard Holiness came, but even ones from Hepzibah Holiness, folks what hadn’t sat under the same roof since the Schism back in ’22. Kin came from all over—Cousin Jolly from Mountain Rest, Collinses and Eppses from Watkinsville, Richardsons from Laurens, and even a McCardle or two from Greeneville.

Neighbors came. So did Daddy’s friends from the Woodmen of America, and Mama’s ladies from the Daughters of the Confederacy. The Keowee Times ran a story about how a veteran of the Great War had died saving a girl from going over them Issaqueena Falls, and two or three dozen strangers showed up just out of respect.

So did some of Jas and Essie’s Presbyterian friends, though they kept quiet during the shouting parts. Mayor Ike Paisley came. Sheriff Herc Hillhouse came too—a wide man, puffing from the walk, but he sat through the whole service with his hat in his hands.

The crowd fell still. The sun broke through the haze. The preacher read from John, and then the Holiness Brethren choir stood and sang “Nearer, My God, to Thee” and “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross.”

And what struck me most—what I’ll never forget—was the sight of folks from both sides of the Hepzibah schism standing up together, hands raised, tears rolling down their cheeks.

Mama sat in her black lace dress, jaw tight with sorrow. In her lap lay a letter from the Oconee County Sheriff’s Department signed by Sheriff Herc, saying that he’d already made some calls and started the paperwork—he was recommending Daddy for a Carnegie Medal of Heroism… created years ago by the steel man to honor people who died—or might’ve died—helping someone that they had no earthly duty to help.

And as a fact, Daddy went on to win that medal—which is a bonafide bronze medallion that Jasper and Essie keep above the fireplace mantle. I reckon if Daddy were to come back, he’d tear down that medal—he weren’t a man for laurels. But the $1,000 prize paid for most of my Seminary, gave a down payment for Ponts and Beulah’s house, and helped Jasper and Essie to bury their babies proper.

Mama had always been sickly, and that winter she turned a good-sight worse. By 1932, she was bedfast for good. Less than three years after that, we laid her next to Daddy in the Holiness churchyard.

But that ain’t the tale I come to tell you. This here story’s about my sister, Teddi.

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Closing note

This is part of the opening movement of The Song Poet. If you’d like to read more as the novel is finalized, you can join the list below. I’ll send occasional excerpts, research notes, and news from the road to publication.