Age of Stone

McCallister brought two competing dreams to the ridges of Sanction County—the equal, shining lures of memory and hope. Old men would come up from distant hollers to watch McCallister's crew work the blast lanes and see with their wintered eyes these dreams he carried, see them as clearly as if they were irons slung across his shoulders. Some remembered when the railway men had come two generations earlier, siccing their teams of black convicts on the mountains in battalions, picks and sledges bashing through the passes. But this year of 1934 brought a new promise; these men arriving in the highcountry held a sheen when the sun touched their bodies. A new word was being spread through the mountains of western North Carolina: the name progress.

In the matter of only a few weeks, the nature of McCallister's mission came to be suspected, and finally affirmed. A tunnel through Callum Mountain, a bold lunatic stroke clean through the granite wedge at the east end of Croptop Gorge. They were to rip open a gate to plunge down into the gorge so that the wpa men could pave the road through, opening up the world to the hillcountry and the hillcountry to it.

At first, the young men of the county did nothing. They did not trust McCallister because he wore knee high boots buffed to a high military polish and kept a severe manner, even in his few logistical dealings with the store keeps and suppliers of the closest town of any size, Canon City, a riverbound settlement of less than two thousand Scots-Irish souls. But the notion of jobs wormed its way into them, especially at the first gnaw of autumn cold. They knew the deep hurt of winter would be on their families soon, and any man who turned down work was not only a fool, but a traitor to his kin because no good son would inflict needless hardship on those who claimed him as their only shield against that ancient anguish, Old Age.

So they had come up to the ridge, singly and in small speechless knots, hands rammed into their pockets as they watched McCallister's specialists trudge the stony path down towards the tunnel blasting. For some time the mountain boys had been content to merely watch, to place themselves in the sight of these outsiders. But when nothing had come of the simple assertion of their attendance, they began to sling canvas lean-tos from hickory branches and assemble around firepits leaking cheerless runnels of cook smoke. They whet knives against small bricks of flint. Their eyes perched tightly in bowed skulls.

McCallister ignored them for most of October, but by the month's end he made their number close to thirty, and he knew some measure must be taken. He resolved to drive them off and rode out to the encampment on his black Arabian, a horse a full seventeen hands high. A Colt revolver stuck through his whipcord belt.

He explained to them the danger of the operation he and his men were engaged in and warned that no ground in the area could be construed as hazardless. Their attack on the mountain was a relentless demand of exact science, he said, but it must be remembered that the weight of stone obeyed its own law of destruction. The ways of men were nothing in the face of such naked power. Workers who lacked the advantage of training and a particular education were as good as dead if they ventured into the growing blast lanes. In good conscience, he would not hire any man into his own oblivion. He thought this warning would be enough to repulse them, to drive them back to their coves and crags, and if not the words alone then the thump and pulse through the ground when a large charge detonated at the conclusion of his speech, clouds of powdered stone rising from below like haints absenting the tomb.

But the young men had remained there, crouching and spectating from within the boundaries of their makeshift assembly, overnighting as they had for...