Last Grape Gathering

Last Grape Gathering by Robert F. Hull, Jr. In the fall of the year we used to walk around the old garden road, Dad, Jim, and I. Howard might be along if he had a leave from the service. We would drive a piece around the rutted road that hugged the steep hillsides, our eyes scanning the trees for grapes. Then we would pull out and park on the edge of a wide curve and begin to hunt grapes in earnest. For fifty years these hills had yielded up their riches to my family. My mother 25 and father, newly married, had grubbed out a garden there when they lived at Monkey Hollow, near the drift mouth of the mine where he worked. Five children had been carried in turn on his shoulders up the hollow to the clearing under old poplars and oaks. From the black loam he had dug potatoes, picked sacks of beans, harvested fat pumpkins. In lean seasons when the mines weren't running any coal, he and his father had dug ginseng, mayapple, golden seal, and lady s slipper in the shady woods around. On these same slopes he had flushed ruffed grouse and brought them down with shots he would remember with pride years later. Where the ridges above intersected at flats or ran out to points, he had shot squirrels out of the oaks and hickories. And, of course, there were the grapes. But the land had never been prodigal with its grapes. Like most wild fruits, they did not grow very large and were often inaccessible, hanging in the very tops of the tallest trees. When the rains didn't come at the right time, the clusters were sparse, the grapes hard and shriveled . But sometimes of a late October we would find the bunches full and heavy, the grapes frosted, redolent of a musky tanginess, so tart you would wince at the first taste. The walls of the dirt cellar under our house were lined with jars of jam, jelly, and canned berries. Strawberries and blackberries we had in profusion, but my father's jelly of choice was wild grape. He liked what he called its 'sour whang." He would spoon it generously on his plate and eat it with Mom's big, steaming, white buttermilk biscuits. The last three of us were born in another house three or four miles away. Still, for several years, we kept a garden at the old place in the woods, driving as close as the car would take us, then walking down the hollow to the clearing. After we gave up gardening there, we still came back to see what apples we could find on the two yellow transparent trees that remained. And after the old apple trees had fallen, there were still the grapes. It was the remembrance of all these things that brought me home to West Virginia every fall, first from Tennessee, then Kentucky, then New Jersey, then Maryland, then Tennessee again. It was the smell of leaf mold in the underfrowth , the feel of the humus in the and, the aroma of coffee when my father took the stopper from the thermos and poured for himself and the boy-man sitting on the log beside him. It was the longing for my brothers and sisters and for the long days of lost youth. It was the sight of my mother washing and cooking the grapes, squeezing the hot juice through an old piece of muslin. And it was the first taste of the first wild frape jelly of the season on the first iscuit at breakfast next morning. And so I had come home again. It was late October, 1981. In the old house at the end of the dirt road my mother met me, coming through the kitchen on her walker, stopping to hold out her arms. And there was Dad, engulfing me, patting me on the back, asking if I nad noticed any grapes coming over Coalwood Mountain. I could not remember how long it had been since we last gathered grapes. There hadn't been enough to bother with the year before, iust bare stems with a...