Sitting Up With the Dead: A Storied Journey Through the American South. Pamela Petro
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a Jack meant for the adult world; a young man who through cleverness, a little magic, and sheer good luck outwits throughout all eternity his dastardly brothers Will and Tom, various supernatural adversaries, and most of the hurdles life throws in his way.
The partnership of an elderly American mountain man and a figment of the imagination of medieval English peasants (‘my best friend,’ as Ray calls Jack), is based on a good-hearted nose-thumbing at five centuries and the Atlantic Ocean. I can open a book and read the words of Jack’s contemporary, Geoffrey Chaucer, but we are not intimates; Chaucer is dead, so he can’t be my friend. Jack, on the other hand, has been an immortal lodger with the Hicks clan, living alongside each generation. Ray has said, ‘I’m Jack. Everybody can be Jack. Jack ain’t dead. He’s a-livin’ … Like I tell ’em sometimes … I ain’t everything Jack has done in the tales, but still I’ve been Jack in a lot of ways. It takes Jack to live. Now I wouldn’t have been livin’, probably, if I’d not been Jack’s friend.’
My compatriots may enjoy freefalling into an unseen future, but the invisible world I perversely cherish is the one that has passed. I want to fall backward, not forward. That vanished world – still invisible to the eyes, but accessible to the ears – lives on in Ray’s stories, by grace of a marriage of New World and Old that is far more genuine than the uneasy union of European plunder and American folly at the Biltmore Estate.
I wanted very badly to find Ray Hicks.
In the words of someone else who must also have been searching for ol’ Ray, ‘Easier said than done.’ I looked up ‘Hicks’ in the phonebook and found two listings under ‘Hicks, Orville’ in the Banner Elk area, which is the town closest to Beech Mountain. I had heard Ray had a younger cousin named Orville, who was also a storyteller, so that was promising. I rang both numbers: no answer. There was nothing else to do but try my luck in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
I followed the highway as far as I could, then started side-winding up into the foot hills. The temperature dropped twenty-five degrees in half an hour. Sham ‘Trading Posts’ by the roadside sold souvenirs and apple butter for cash; the only trading they were doing these days was on a two hundred year-old memory of the area – a stone’s throw from the Tennessee line – as the Wild Frontier. However hokey, their presence conjured vague thoughts of Daniel Boone, the eighteenth-century pioneer, woodsman, sometime Indian captive, and habitual poor speller (carving on a tree in these parts ‘D. Boone cilled a bar’), for whom a nearby town was named. Boone’s homespun swashbuckling – the story of his rescuing his young daughter from the Shawnee Indians made its way into James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans–coupled with Ray’s legendary inaccessibility (folklorist Joseph Daniel Sobol described fans ‘making the pilgrimage up the rocky road to Ray’s house, their ears popping and their cars’ suspensions rattling’), kindled a belief that I really was entering something very like wilderness.
Thick fog settled as I drove higher, and when it lifted I found myself in Blowing Rock, North Carolina. Volvos and BMWs jockeyed for position on streets lined in cafes and galleries. I saw a restaurant called ‘Cheeseburgers in Paradise’. There were antiques and estate jewelry and potters’ studios, and the mild smiles of well-dressed tourists resigned to ‘having a nice time’. This wasn’t Ray’s world, it was a twee tourist town. Winter population: 1200. Summer population: 6000. I felt like a cartoon character whose thought balloon had just been exploded. Matters didn’t improve in Boone, but merely slipped down the commercial scale from The Wine and Cheese Shop to the Hillbilly Trading Post. The mountains weren’t distant, now, as they had been yesterday; I was among them, like an insect buried in thick carpet, knobby green mounds on all sides. Whenever there was a straightaway, it was cluttered either with kitsch – old motels, miniature golf courses, and places where families with children young enough to be stupendously gullible could ‘pan for mountain gemstones’ – or slick purveyors of outdoor recreation.
Banner Elk was given over to the latter. In fact it looked like an Olympic village set on a small plateau, ringed by mountains and scattered with hiking shops, ski shops, fishing gear stores, and white water rafting centers. On top of Beech Mountain, Ray’s fabled Olympian home – reached only by turning my car wheels inside out on a road so steeply interlaced that its design would have made an Irish monk proud – I did not find Ray whittling on his porch, but a resort village of prefab condominium units.
This was heartbreaking. Maybe Ray had moved into a condo. I berated myself for turning him into a kind of holy hick; he was as entitled to wall-to-wall carpeting and air-conditioned clubhouses as the rest of us. Still, it was with no mean measure of desperation that I corralled a cop in the parking lot of a trendy toy store and asked about Ray.
‘Oh, you’re looking for Ray-the-Storyteller.’ I was as relieved as I have ever been: at least she’d heard of him. ‘He gives out Beech Mountain as his address, but that’s really not it.’ She then gave me excruciating directions to the Mast General Store in Valle Crucis, about twenty minutes away. ‘They’ll know how to find Ray there.’
‘Ray who?’
My heart sank. Pretty college students on summer holiday were weighing bags of day-glo penny candy – sassafras drops, gummi strawberries, candy buttons, clove puffs, and Charleston chews – for tourists’ children. No one knew Ray.
‘You might want to try up at the Mast Store,’ one finally suggested.
‘I thought this was the Mast Store.’
‘No, this is the Mast Annex. Store’s half a mile up the road.’
I sighed loudly enough for people to stare. My guidebook called Valle Crucis, (which means Vale of the Cross and is pronounced Valley Cruise by the locals) ‘an offbeat settlement’ on a ‘pretty back road’. This was true enough. Despite the penny candy, the detritus of tourism had remained on the highway, leaving handkerchief-size fields and pastures nestled between the switchbacks. One, indeed, cupped the Mast Store, a rambling, sagging thing of many rooflines, that looked like a brontosaurus constructed out of white clapboard. An ancient Esso gasoline sign hung out front, and an American flag flew from the roof. The Mast family had been selling everything from bowler hats to chicken feed and live chickens there since 1883.
Now it was stocked with useful stuff for modern life, though ancient advertising posters still hawked turn-of-the-last-century goods. There was a hardy smell of dust, canvas, fertilizer, and coffee. In the center of the main room sat a wood-burning stove surrounded by rockers: a central focus even in the middle of summer. An old man with a gourd-shaped head, huge eyes and no teeth rocked by himself next to a checkerboard; the red squares were set with Coca-Cola caps, the black ones with silver-and-black, twist-off beer tops. I took the facing chair and asked if he knew Ray Hicks.
‘Yeah, I know ol’ Ray. He been down here a timer two. Sittin jus’ whar ye are now. Wha ye lookin’ fer ‘im? Ye kin t’ol Ray?’
I explained that I was an admirer, and he gave me a loose collection of directions to Ray’s house. At first I was relieved to hear that Ray did indeed live ‘way back deep in th’mount’n’ – so no condo for the Hicks clan, I thought triumphantly – then, an instant later, decided that this was more bad news than good. I would never find him now. I was silently weighing my chances when the old man said, ‘Ole Ray’s as tall’s that big ole stove.’
‘No.’
‘Yes, ma’am, he is.’ He added that he’d personally been coming to the Mast Store since he was six years old, and it hadn’t changed at all but for the stock. The Masts used to sell pig feed and grain, but now the farmers were all gone. Then he leaned over and whispered conspiratorially, ‘Upstars wus the funeral parlor. That’s a-whar they kept th’caskets, up thar. They feed ye all ye’r life, then they dress ye up and pack ye off.’ After that he stretched himself and got up to take his leave, bowing and saying his mother was waiting for him at home. I must have looked incredulous, because he added, ‘She’s eighty-four, but I look older. Ye’r not too big, but she’s half ye’r size, and still a whip’snapper. She makes th’ony canned green beans I kin eat.’
Another two hours of searching turned up