Bloodroot: Reflections on Place by Appalachian Women Writers

Uncle Orphy

GAIL GODWIN Gail Godwin (b. 1937) is a native North Carolinian on both her mother's and her father's side and was raised in Asheville. She claims Alabama as well, because her mother was visiting Krahenbuhl cousins in Birmingham when Gail was born. She is the author of nine novels and two collections of stories. The Odd Woman (1974), Violet Clay (1976), and A Mother and Two Daughters (1982) were nominated for National Book Awards; A Southern Family (1987), eleven weeks on the New York Times best-seller list, won the Janet Heidiger Kafka Award, presented by the University of Rochester, and the Thomas Wolfe Award, presented by the Lipinsky Foundation, Asheville, North Carolina. Father Melancholy's Daughter (1991), also a New York Times best-seller, was a Book-of-the-Month Club main selection and won the 1991 Alabama Librarians Award. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and received an Award in Literature from the American Academy ofArts and Letters. Godwin is an alumna of Peace College in Raleigh, North Carolina, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (B.A. in journalism); she holds a doctorate in modern letters from the University ofIowa and has taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop as well as at Vassar and Columbia University. Her books have been translated into eleven languages. Her most recent novel was The Good Husband (1994), and she is completing a sequel ro Father Melancholy's Daughter, which is tided An Evening Gone. * * * Uncle Orphy Every few weeks, my widowed grandmother would sigh wistfully and say to my mother and me, "I feel like going out to see Uncle." "Uncle" was her older brother, Orpha Rogers. She'd had a younger brother, Furman, but he was killed by a train when he was twenty-five. I called Uncle "Uncle Orphy." My mother, who liked to concoct naughty names for those close to her, called him "Uncle Orful," not to his face, ofcourse. "Out," where Uncle Orphy lived, was about as far as you could get from Asheville without being somewhere else altogether-or so it seemed then. Actually it was only about a thirty-minute drive. During this drive, my grandmother would elaborate on the fallen fortunes ofherselfand her sister Ida and her brother Orphy due to the fact that their widowed father, Frank Rogers, had married again and had a second set of children, to whom he left everything in his will. My grandmother called these children "the steps." In the mid-1800s the Rogerses had been tobacco planters and owned a great deal ofland, but now even the family homestead had been sold off by Frank's grasping widow and been turned into a horrible, sprawling, tacky development. Ida had married and divorced, done fancy needlework for theVanderbilts in Biltmore for a while, then taken her youngest daughter and gone to live in Florida; Edna, my grandmother, had married Thomas Krahenbuhl, a second-generation Swiss whose job as general foreman on the Southern Railway took her out of the mountains for much of their married life; Orpha was the only one who had stuck at home in Buncombe County, where Rogerses had always lived as far back as we could trace, which was to Orpha and Edna's great-grandfather Robert Rogers, who was born at the end of the eighteenth century. After a prolonged drive, the mountain roads narrowing from pavement to gravel to dirt, the craggy pastures on either side tilting so alarmingly skyward that I couldn't understand how the poor cows kept their balance while they ate, there we would be at the bottom ofUncle's steps. There were so many steps that you couldn't even see the log house at the top, where behind the screen door Aunt Fanny's long, skull-thin face would already have materialized at the first sound ofour car. Since I was the only one who didn't have to stop on all those stairs for breath, I was always the first to see this rather spectral welcome floating at us from behind the screen door. Inside was cool and somewhat dark; in winter, there would be a fire in the 142 GAIL GODWIN woodstove. There was a framed picture I liked over the sofa, some old magazine illustration: I think it was ofa pretty young woman in a thin white dress climbing down (or up) a steep cliffin the moonlight, but...