The Goddess Of Happy Valley

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Title:     The Goddess Of Happy Valley
Author: John Fox [More Titles by Fox]

I

The professor stood at the window of his study waiting for Her to come home. The wind outside was high and whipped her skirts close to her magnificent body as, breasting it unconcernedly, she came with a long, slow stride around a corner down the street. Now, as always whenever he saw her move, he thought of the line in Virgil, for even in her walk she showed the goddess. And Juno was her name.

He met her at the door and he did not have to stoop to kiss her. "What is it, dear?" he said quickly, for deep in her eyes, which looked level with his, he saw trouble.

She handed him a letter and walked to the window--looking out at the gathering storm. The letter was from her home away down in the Kentucky hills--from the Mission teacher in Happy Valley.

There was an epidemic of typhoid down there. It was spreading through the school and through the hills. They were without nurses or doctors, and they needed help.

"Too bad, too bad," he murmured, and he turned anxiously.

"I must go," she said, with a catch in her breath. "One cabin is built above another all the way up the creeks down there. The springs are by the stream. High water floods all of them, and the infection goes with the tide. And the poor things don't know--they don't know. Oh, I must go!"

For a moment he was silent, and then he got up and put his arms about her. He was smiling.

"Then, I'll go with you." She wheeled quickly.

"No, no, no! You can't leave your work, and--remember!"

He did remember how useless it had been to argue with her, and he knew it was useless now. Moreover, if she was going at all, it was like her to go at once--like her to go up-stairs at once to her packing and leave him in the darkened study alone.

They had been married two years. He had seen her first entering his own classroom, and straightway that Latin line took permanent quarters in his brain, so that he was almost startled when he learned her Olympic name. It was not long before he found himself irresistibly drawn to her big, serious eyes that never wandered in a moment's inattention, found himself expounding directly to her--a fact already discovered by every girl in the classroom except Juno herself; and she never did discover, for no one was intimate enough to tell her seriously, and there was that about her that forbade the telling in badinage. With all secrecy, and shyly almost, he set about to learn what he could about her, and that was little indeed.

She came from the mountains of Kentucky, she had won a scholarship in the bluegrass region of the same State, had come North, and was living with painful economy working her way through college, he heard, as a waitress in the dining-hall. He was rather shocked to hear of one incident. The girl who was the head of all athletics in college had once addressed rather sharp words to Juno, who had been persuaded to try for the basket-ball team. The mountain girl did not respond in kind. Instead, her big eyes narrowed to volcanic slits, she caught the champion shot-putter by the shoulders, shook her until her hair came down, and then, with fists doubled, had stood waiting for more trouble.

When the term closed the professor stayed on to finish some experiments he had on hand, and at dinner in his boarding-house the next night he nearly overturned his soup-plate, for it was the goddess who had placed it before him. She was there for the summer--not having money to go home--as a general helper in the household and living under the same roof. She too was going on with her studies, and he offered to help her.

He found her a source of puzzling surprises. While she was from the South, she was not Southern in speech, sentiments, ideas, or ideals. Her voice was not Southern and, while she elided final consonants, her intonation was not of the South. Indeed she would startle him every now and then by dropping some archaic word or old form of expression that made him think of Chaucer. Her feeling toward the negro was precisely what his was, and once when he halted in some stricture on the Confederacy and started to apologize she laughed.

"All my folks," she said, "fit fer the Union--as we say down there," she added with a smile.

So that gradually he began to realize that the Appalachian Range, while being parts of the Southern States, was not of them at all, but was a region sui generis, and that its inhabitants were the only Americans who had never swerved in fealty to the flag.

By midsummer it was all over with him, and he shocked his own reticent soul by blurting out one day: "I want you to marry me." The words had been shot from him by some inner dynamic force, and at the moment he would have given anything he had could he have taken them back. He waited in terror and very frankly and proudly she lifted her heavy lashes, looked straight into his eyes, and firmly said:

"No!"

He went away then, but his relief was not what he thought it would be. He could not forget that her mouth quivered slightly, and that there seemed to be a faint weakening in the depths of her eyes when he told her good-by. He could climb no mountain that he did not see her striding as from Olympus down it. He walked by no seashore that he did not see her rising from the waves, and again he went to her, and again he asked. And this time, just as frankly and proudly, she looked him in the eyes and said:

"Yes--on one condition."

"Name it."

"That you don't go to my home and my people for five years." He laughed.

"Why, you big, beautiful, silly young person, I know mountains and mountaineers."

"Yes--of Europe--but not mine."

"Very well," he said, and, not knowing women, he asked:

"Why didn't you say 'Yes' the first time?"

"I don't know," she said.


II

She had lifted her voice first, one spring dawn, in a log cabin that clung to the steep bank of Clover Fork, and her wail rose above the rush of its high waters--above the song of a wood-thrush in the top of a poplar high above her. Somewhere her mother had heard the word Juno, and the mere sound of the word appealed to her starved sense of beauty as did one of the old-fashioned flowers she planted in her tiny yard. So the mother gave the child that name and, like the name, the child grew up, tall, slow, and majestic of movement, singularly gentle and quiet, except when aroused, and then her wrath and her might were primeval.

St. Hilda, the Mission teacher, was the first from the outside world to be drawn to her. She had stopped in at the cabin on Clover one day to find the mother of the family ill in bed, and twelve-year-old Juno acting as cook and mother for a brood of ten. A few months later she persuaded the father to let the girl come down to her school, and in the succeeding years she became St. Hilda's right hand and the mainstay in the supervision of the kitchen, housework, and laundry, and even in the management of the Mission's farm. No one had the subtle understanding of St. Hilda's charges as had Juno--no one could handle them quite so well. So that it was with real grief and great personal loss that St. Hilda opened the way for Juno to go to school in the Bluegrass. And now, one sunset in mid-May, she was back at the Mission in Happy Valley, and the two were in each other's arms.

Happy Valley it was no longer, for throughout it the plague had spread fear or sickness or death in every little home. St. Hilda had gathered her own little sufferers in tents collected from a railway-camp over the mountains, a surveying party, and from the Bluegrass. A volunteer doctor had come from the "settlements," and two nurses, and so Juno took to the outside work up and down the river, up every little creek, and out in the hills. All day and far into the night she was gone. Sometimes she did not for days come back to the Mission. Her face grew white and drawn, and her cheeks hollow from poor food, meagre snatches of sleep, and untiring work. The doctor warned her, St. Hilda warned her, she got anxious warning letters from her husband, but on she went. And the inevitable happened.

One hot midday, as she watched by the bedside of a little patient with a branch of maple in her hand to keep the flies away, she drowsed, and one of the wretched little insects lighted on her moist red lips. Soon thereafter the "walking typhoid" caught her as she was striding past Lum Chapman's blacksmith-shop. Instinctively she kept on toward home, and reached there raving: "Don't let him come--don't let him come!" And when the news got about the heart of Happy Valley almost bled.

Only St. Hilda guessed what the mutterings of the sick girl meant, but she did not heed them, and the professor from New England soon crossed Mason and Dixon's line for the first time in his life. For the first time he fell under the spell of the Southern hills--graceful, gracious big hills, real mountains, densely wooded like thickets to their very tops--so densely wooded, indeed, that they seemed overspread with a great shaggy green rug that swept on and on over the folds of the hills as though billowed up by a mighty wind beneath. And the lights, the mists, the drifting cloud shadows! Why had Juno not wanted him to see them? And when he took to horseback and mounted through that billowing rug, through ferns stirrup-high, with flowers innumerable nodding on either side of the trail and the air of the first dawn in his nostrils--mounted to the top of the Big Black, rode for miles along its gently waving summit, and saw at every turn of the path the majestic supernal beauty of the mighty green waves that swept on and on before him, in wonder he kept asking himself:

"Why--why?"

He had not come into contact yet with the humanity in those hills. The log cabins he had seen from the train--clinging to the hillsides, nestling in little coves amid apple-trees, or close to the banks of rushing little creeks--had struck him as most picturesque and charming, and an occasional old mill, with its big water-wheel, boxed-in, grass-hung mill-race half hidden by weeping willows, had given him sheer delight; but now he was meeting the people in the road and could see them close at hand in doorway and porches of the wretched little houses that he passed. How mean, meagre, narrow, and poverty-stricken must be their lives!

At one cabin he had to stop for midday dinner, for the word "lunch," he found, was unknown. A slatternly woman with scraggling black hair, and with three dirty children clinging to her dirty apron, "reckoned she mought git him a bite," and disappeared. Flies swarmed over him when he sat in the porch. The rancid smell of bedding struck his sensitive nostrils from within. He heard the loud squawking of a chicken cease suddenly, and his hunger-gnawed stomach almost turned when he suddenly realized just what it meant. When called within, it was dirt and flies, flies and dirt, everywhere. He sat in a chair with a smooth-worn cane bottom so low that his chin was just above the table. The table-cover was of greasy oilcloth. His tumbler was cloudy, unclean, and the milk was thin and sour. Thick slices of fat bacon swam in a dish of grease, blood was perceptible in the joints of the freshly killed, half-cooked chicken, and the flies swarmed.

As he rode away he began to get a glimmer of light. Perhaps Juno--his Juno--had once lived like that; perhaps her people did yet.

There was another mountain to climb, and a stranger who was going his way offered to act as guide. The stranger was a Kentuckian, he said, from the Bluegrass region, and he was buying timber through the hills. He volunteered this, but the New England man made no self-revealment. Instead he burst out:

"How do these people live this way?"

"They have to--they're pretty poor."

"They don't have to keep--dirty."

"They've got used to it, and so would you if your folks had been living out in this wilderness for a hundred years."

From a yard that they passed, a boy with a vacant face and retreating forehead dropped his axe to stare at them.

"That's the second one I've seen," said the professor.

"Yes, idiots are not unusual in these mountains--inbreeding!"

"Do they still have moonshining and feuds and all that yet?"

"Plenty of moonshining. The feuds are all over practically, though I did hear that the big feud over the mountain was likely to be stirred up again--the old Camp and Adkin feud." A question came faintly from behind:

"Do you know any of the Camps?"

"Used to know old Red King Camp, the leader. He's in the penitentiary now for killing a man. What's the matter?" He turned in his saddle, but the New Englander had recovered himself.

"Nothing--nothing. It seems awful to a Northern man."

The stranger thought he had heard a groan behind him, and he had--King Camp was the name of the Northern man's father-in-law. Ah, he was beginning to understand; but why did Juno not want him to come for five years?

"Is--is Red King Camp--how long was his sentence?"

"Let's see--he's been in two years, and I heard he had three years more. Yes, I remember--he got five years."

Once more the Bluegrass man thought he heard a groan, but the other was only clearing his throat. The New Englander asked no more questions, and about two hours by sun they rode over a ridge and down to the bed of Clover Fork.

"Well, stranger, we part here. You go up to the head of the creek, and anybody'll tell you where Red King lives. There's plenty of moonshining up that way, and if anybody asks your name and your business--tell 'em quick. They won't bother you. And if I were you I wouldn't criticise these people to anybody. They're morbidly sensitive, and you never know when you are giving mortal offense. And, by the way, most offenses are mortal in these hills."

"Thank you. Good-by--and thank you."

Everybody knew where old King Camp lived--"Fust house a leetle way down t'other side o' the mountain from the head of Clover." And nobody asked him his name or his business. Near dusk he was at the head of Little Clover and looking down on Happy Valley. The rimming mountains were close overhung with motionless wet clouds. Above and through them lightning flashed, and thunder cracked and boomed like encircling artillery around the horizon. The wind came with the rush of mighty wings, and blackness dropped like a curtain. By one flash of lightning he saw a great field of corn, by another a big, comfortable barn, a garden, a trim picket-fence, a yard full of flowers, and a log house the like of which he had not seen in the hills--and a new light came--Juno's work! A torrent of rain swept after him as he stepped upon the porch and knocked on the door. A moment later he was looking at the kindest and most motherly face and into the kindest eyes he had ever seen.

"I'm Juno's husband," he said simply. For a moment she blinked up at him bewilderedly through brass-rimmed spectacles, and then she put her arms around him and bent back to look up at him again. Then, still without a word, she led him on tiptoe to an open door and pointed.

"She's in thar." And there she lay--his Juno--thin, white, unconscious, her beauty spiritualized, glorified. He sat simply looking at her--how long he did not know--until he felt a gentle touch on his shoulder. It was Juno's mother beckoning him to supper.

Going out he saw Juno's hand in everything--the hand-woven rag carpet, the curtains at the windows, the andirons at the log fire--for summer nights in those hills are always cool--saw it in the kitchen, the table-cloth, napkins, even though they were in rings, the dishes, the food, the neatness in everything. He could see the likeness of Juno to the gentle-voiced old woman who would talk of nothing but her daughter. In a moment she was calling him "Jim," and few others than his dead mother had ever called him that. And when at bedtime she said, "Don't let her die, Jim," he leaned down and kissed her--something her own sons when grown up had never done.

"No, mother," he said, and the word did not come hard.


III

Juno had been delirious since the day she was stricken. Her mutterings had been disjointed and unintelligible, but that night, while Mother Camp and the New Englander sat at her bedside, she said again:

"Don't let him come."

"She ain't said that for three days now," said Mother Camp. "Whut d' you s'pose she means?" The husband shook his head.

Next morning the nurse for whom St. Hilda had sent arrived from the Bluegrass, and the New Englander started down Little Clover to the settlement school to consult the doctor and see St. Hilda. It was a brilliant, drenched June day, and never, he believed, had his eyes rested on such a glory of green and gold. Already he had been heralded in the swift way common in the hills, and all who saw him coming knew who he was. He was Juno's man, and the people straightway called him--Jim. When he stood on St. Hilda's porch her words and her drawn, anxious face went straight to his heart. There was nobody like Juno, and without Juno she did not know how she could get along. Her own little sufferers were in tents about her, and there was only one nurse for them. Juno, said the doctor, might be unconscious for a long time, and her nurse must be with her night and day: so who would take Juno's place throughout the hills she did not know. At once the New Englander, who knew a good deal about medicine and something of typhoid, found himself offering to do all he could. Then and there the Mission teacher gave him a list of patients, and then and there, with a thermometer in his pocket and a medicine-case in his hand, he started on his first round. The people were very shy with him at first. In a few days he was promoted to Doctor Jim, and soon he was plain "Doc" to all. By every mouth that opened he found Juno's name blessed, and many were the tales of what she had done. She had saved wild Jay Dawn's little girl and Lum Chapman's firstborn. She had brought old Aunt Sis Stidham back from the shadow of the grave, and had turned that tart, irreverent old person's erring feet back into the way of the Lord.

Night and day, and through wind and storm, she had travelled the hills, healing the sick and laying out and helping to bury the dead. Apparently there was not a man, woman, or child in Happy Valley who did not love her or have some reason to be grateful, and when in the open-air meeting-house Parson Small told of her work and prayed that her life be spared, there were fervent "Amens," or tears and sobs, from all. Doctor Jim soon found himself getting deeply interested in the people, and when he contrasted the lives of those whom the influence of the Mission school had not yet reached with the folks in Happy Valley he began to realize the amazing good that St. Hilda was doing in the hills. What a place he was earning for himself he was yet to learn, but through some mystification an inkling came. To be sure, everybody spoke to him as though he were a fixture in the land. He could pass no door that somebody did not ask him to come in and rest a spell, or stay all night. He never went by the mill that Aunt Jane did not have a glass of buttermilk for him and Uncle Jerry did not try to entice him in for a talk. Several times the little judge of Happy Valley had ridden down to ask after Juno and to talk with him. Pleasant Trouble waved his crutch from a hillside and shouted himself at Doctor Jim's disposal for any purpose whatever. But one sunset he had stopped at Lum Chapman's blacksmith-shop just as a big, black-haired fellow, with a pistol buckled around him, was reeling away. The men greeted him rather solemnly, and he felt that they wanted to say something to him, but no one spoke. He saw Jay Dawn nod curtly to Pleasant Trouble, who got briskly up and walked up the road with him until they were in sight of Juno's home. For three days thereafter Pleasant was waiting for him at the shop and walked the same space with him. The next day Jay Dawn spoke with some embarrassment to him:

"Have you got a gun?"

"No." Jay handed forth one.

"Oh, no!" said Doctor Jim.

"Go on!" said Jay shortly; "I got another un."

"But why do I need a gun?" Jay was distinctly embarrassed.

"Well," he drawled, "thar's some purty bad fellers 'bout hyeh, an' when they gits drunk they might do somethin'. Now that Jerry Lipps you seed hyeh t'other day a-staggerin' off drunk--he's bad. An' you do a heap o' travellin' alone. This ain't fer you to kill nobody but jus' kind o' to pertect yerself."

"All right," laughed Doctor Jim. "I couldn't hit a barn--" but to humor Jay he took the weapon, and this time Pleasant Trouble did not walk home with him.

Later he mentioned the matter to St. Hilda, who looked very grave.

"Yes, Jerry Lipps is a bad man. He's just out of the penitentiary. Pleasant walked home with you to protect you from him. They won't let him do anything to you openly. And Jay gave you that gun in case he should attack you when nobody was around."

"But what has the fellow got against me?" The teacher hesitated.

"Well, Jerry used to be in love with Juno, but she would never have anything to do with him and he never would let her have anything to do with anybody else. He shot one boy, and shot at another, and he has always sworn that he would kill the man she married."

"Nonsense!" he said, but going home that night Doctor Jim carried the gun where he could get at it quickly.

"My God!" he muttered with grim humor; "no wonder Juno didn't want me to come."

It was only a few days later that Doctor Jim came out of Lum Chapman's house and paused in the path looking up Wolf Run. Jerry Lipps's sister lived half a mile above and he had just heard that her little daughter was down with the fever. Jerry might be staying with the sister, but Doctor Jim's duty was now up there and, in spite of the warnings given him, he did not hesitate. The woman stared when he told who he was and why he had come, but she nodded and pointed to the bed where the child lay. He put his pistol on the bed, thrust a thermometer into the little girl's mouth and began taking her pulse. A hand swept the pistol from the bed and, when he turned around, about all he could think was: "How extraordinary!"

Jerry, red with rage and drink, was at the kitchen door fumbling at the butt of his pistol, while his sister had Doctor Jim's gun levelled at her brother's heart.

"You can't tech him," she said coolly, "an' if you pull that gun out an inch furder I'll kill ye as shore as thar's a God in heaven." And at that moment the door opened and Pleasant Trouble swung in on his crutch and grinned. Doctor Jim then heard the tongue-lashing of his life. The woman's volubility was like a mill-race, and her command of vitriolic epithets was beyond his ken. She recited what Juno had done, Doctor Jim was doing, the things Jerry had done and left undone, and wound up:

"You never was wuth Juno's little finger, an' you ain't wuth his little finger-nail now. Take his gun, Pleas. Take him to the State line, an' don't you boys let him come back agin until he's stopped drinkin', got a suit o' clothes, an' a job."

"Why, Mandy," said Pleasant, "hit's kind o' funny, but Lum an' Jay an' me fixed hit up about an hour ago that we aimed to do that very thing. I seed Doc a-comin' up hyeh, an' was afeard I mought be too late: but if I'd 'a' knowed you was hyeh I wouldn't 'a' worried."

Again Doctor Jim was thinking, "How extraordinary!" but this time how extraordinary it was that the man really meant to shoot him. Somehow he began to understand.

Still grinning, Pleasant Trouble had swung across the room, whipped Jerry's pistol from the holster, and with it motioned the owner toward the door. Then Doctor Jim rose. "Hold on!" he said, and he took the pistol from the woman's hands, strode straight up to Jerry and smiled. Now, from the top of Virginia down through seven Southern States to Georgia there are some three million mountaineers, and it is doubtful if among them all any other three pairs of ears ever heard such words as Professor James Blagden of New England spoke now:

"Jerry, I don't blame you for having loved Juno, or for loving her now. I wouldn't blame anybody. I even understand now why you wanted to kill me, but that would have been--silly. Give him back his gun, Pleasant," he added, still smiling, "and give this one back to Jay." He reached in his pocket, pulled forth two cigars and handed one to each. "Now you two sit down and smoke, and in a moment I'll go along with you, and we'll help Jerry get a job." And thereupon Doctor Jim turned around to his little patient. Dazed and a bit hypnotized, Jerry took the cigar and thrust his pistol into his holster.

"I'll be gittin' along," he said sullenly, and made for the door. Pleasant followed him. At the road Jerry turned one way and Pleasant the other.

"You heered whut Mandy and me said," drawled Pleasant. "If you poke yore nose over the line 'bout three of us will shoot you on sight. We'd do it fer Juno, an' if she ain't alive we'll do it fer Doctor Jim."

"I was a-goin' over thar anyways," said Jerry, "an' I'll come back when I please. You one-legged limb o' Satan--you go plum'"--Pleasant's eyes began to glitter--"back to him."

Pleasant laughed, and as they walked their separate ways the same question was in the minds of both:

"Now, whut the hell did he mean by 'silly'?"


IV

Only the next morning a happy day dawned. Old King Camp came home with his sons--two stalwart boys and a giant father. Doctor Jim looked long at old King's hair, which was bushy and jet-black. He stood it as long as he could and then he asked:

"Why do people on the other side of the mountain call you Red King Camp?" he asked.

"They don't--not more'n once," was the grim answer. "I'm Black King Camp. Red's my cousin, but I don't claim him."

One load was off Doctor Jim's heart. His father-in-law was like his name in many ways, and Doctor Jim liked him straightway and Black King liked Doctor Jim. Old King shook his head.

"I don't see why Juno didn't bring you down here long ago," he said, and Doctor Jim did not try to explain--he couldn't. It must have been fear of Jerry--and he believed that Jerry, too, was now out of the way.

About noon Juno came back for the first time from another world. She did not open her eyes, but she heard voices and knew what they were saying. Her mother was talking in the next room to somebody whom she called Jim. Who could Jim be? And then she heard the man's voice. Her eyes opened slowly on the nurse, her lips moved, but before she could frame the question her heart throbbed so that she went back into unconsciousness again. But the nurse saw and told, and when Juno came back again she saw her husband and smiled without surprise or fright.

"I dreamed you were here," she whispered, "and I'm dreaming right now that you are here. Why, I see you." Gently he took her face in his hands, and when she felt his touch she looked at him wildly and the tears sprang. From that day on she gained fast, and from the nurse, her mother, and the neighbors she soon knew the story of Doctor Jim.

"So you thought Red King was my father," she said, "and that he was in the penitentiary?" Doctor Jim nodded shamefacedly.

"Well, even that wouldn't have been so bad--not down here. And maybe you thought I didn't want you to come on account of Jerry Lipps." Again Doctor Jim nodded admission, and Juno laughed.

"I never thought of that, and if I had," she added proudly and scornfully, "I never would have been afraid--for you."

"Then why didn't you want me to come?"

"I didn't know you--didn't know the big, big man you are. Now I'm shamed--and happy."

One morning, three weeks later, Jay Dawn and Lum Chapman brought up a litter that Lum had made, and they two and Black King and Doctor Jim made ready to carry Juno down the mountain. Jerry Lipps was passing in the road when they bore her out the gate, and he started to sidle by with averted eyes. Doctor Jim halted.

"Here, Jerry!" he called. "You take my place." And Jerry, red as an oak leaf in autumn, stepped up to the litter, and up at her old lover Juno smiled.

"Doc," said Jerry, "I got a job."

Behind, Pleasant Trouble swung along with Doctor Jim. Mother Camp followed on horseback. People ran from every house to greet Juno, or from high on the hillsides waved their hands and shouted "how-dyes" down to her. Soon they were at the Mission, where St. Hilda and Uncle Jerry and Aunt Jane were waiting on the porch, and where pale little boys and girls trooped weakly from the tents to welcome her. And then at a signal from Doctor Jim the four picked up the litter.

"Why, where are you going?" asked Juno.

"Never you mind," said Doctor Jim.

Through the little vineyard they went, up a little hill underneath cedars and blooming rhododendrons, and there on the top was a little cabin built of logs with the bark still on them, with a porch running around all sides but one, and supported by the trunks of little trees. The smell of cedar came from the open door, and all was as fresh and clean as the breath of the forest from which everything came--a home that had been the girl's lifelong dream. The Goddess of Happy Valley had her own little temple at last.

On the open-air sleeping-porch they sat that night alone.

"I'm going to help raise some money for that Mission down there," said Doctor Jim. "I don't know where any more good is being done, and I don't know any people who are more worth being helped than--your people."

Happy Valley below was aswarm with fireflies. The murmur of the river over shallows rose to them. The cries of whippoorwills encircled them from the hillsides and over the mountain majestically rose the moon.

"And you and I are coming down every summer--to help."

Juno gathered his hand in both her own and held it against her cheek.

"Jim--Doctor Jim--my Jim."

[The end]
John Fox's short story: Goddess Of Happy Valley

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