Perspectives

by Jeannette Harris

Paint on the old farmhouse peels, reveals gray stubborn boards of its birth. Two cats curl on one of Gary’s new joys, a comfortably gliding wooden chair. Bookshelves, formal and connived, line every wall not taken by electronics, some discovered at yard sales to be resuscitated by clever friends -- televisions monumental and suburban, VCRs, CD players, DVD consoles, a computer of course, speakers. Newspapers pile and spill over a couch in the front room.

This morning the fireplace is filled with logs and lit, its frame and mantle painted in the bold mountain colors of country, primary blues and reds. Gary fixes a late breakfast -- scrambled eggs, salted ham, muffins, potatoes. Leonard Cohen’s Everybody Knows is playing through the speakers and one of many sets of earphones. Teddie, the rat terrier, having done his aging best to help in the war against rats, now tunneling beneath corn feedings in the barn, sleeps on a quilt, dreaming perhaps of his next ride in the commodious van Gary’s bought for traversing the Smokies to readings and tellings. His name, his fame are spreading but he has no idea how Encyclopaedia Britannica happened to find and choose one of his earlier books (Belled Buzzards, Hucksters & Grieving Spectres) as a luminary on aspects of regional divination and the occult. His writing and oral stories are so palpable, we can’t tell what’s real from what exists only in his mind. Surely that’s the mark of a master and we won’t ask if the line between fact and fiction is clear to him, or if it matters whether creation exists in a linear field we can more or less agree upon or if reality is as infinite as the universe of galaxies and the void might be.

The hot tub’s filled with warm water now and the jets are on. From the platform, facing west, undulations of mountain crests he’s focused on since childhood stretch between a frame of leaves and sky. A killing frost the night before has left mimosa pods fallen, circling a nearby tree. Come here, he beckons casually, and I walk barefooted, earphones on, toward the barn. The old farm’s nearly hidden by generational foliage still hanging on. How many places are left in the world where one can dance freely to the beat of change under an autumn sun. Between red roosters and a pair of game chickens, a room’s been cleared. Gary’s made a small workspace for painting and the gourds he grows. “The Last Brunch,” a parable in oil depicting Christ and his disciples at the table of an unidentified 20th century fraternal order, similar to Kiwanis or Lions Club, leans against fragile boards near a sawhorse holding the dried vegetable hollowed out and painted as Santa Claus. His artistic style is modern primitive, two-dimensional. If he sells a favorite piece, he’ll recreate it slightly differently.

We’re sitting on the side porch with our coffees and reading, of course. With his hearing loss, books and captioned movies have progressed from lifetime interest to requisite obsession. Gary says the deafness shuts him out, accuses me of being in my own, alienated world and I say: it’s difficult to converse. We try harder. I speak more slowly, distinctly; he watches my face and gestures intently. And finally we are talking back and forth about our experiences on earth, from birth, our devotions, emotional callings for people, places and things, how we and others convert trauma to endeavor, spirit and creativity. Deafness becomes a background, like the mountains, we hardly notice in an exploration of who we and others are, where we came from and where we might be headed. Of course, nothing is settled. We drift on: Gary to his stories and musings, accommodations for a world of interior, garbled sound and me to peaks of the Qualla Boundary where my memory, inflating and collapsing like bellows over a fire, mimics the “blue mist” forming and breaking where an elder tells me black panthers (known as painters here) greet special souls if they’ll sit quietly at that highest crest of the highest mountain peak, right over there, just like the dreams of childhood.