Yonder Mountain: An Ozarks Anthology

Jan Peterson Roddy

Jan Peterson Roddy Jan Peterson Roddy was born in 1957 in Kirkwood, Missouri. She has roots in the Ozarks dating back to before the Civil War, where her family homesteaded forty acres along the Gasconade River. Her childhood was split between St. Louis, where her mother had moved from the farm to find work, and the old home places that they would return to whenever possible. She came back to attend College of the Ozarks. More interested in studying the world than books, she dropped out after a time and held waitress, barn-painting, and factory jobs across northwestern Arkansas, before buying a wooded holler in Izard County. She returned to school eventually, earning an MFA in Art from the University of Illinois. For the last twentyfive years she has taught at Southern Illinois University, living in a cabin perched on the eastern-most edge of the Ozark Uplift in the Shawnee National Forest. qQ Geography I The relentless forces that carved valleys, cracked stone and twisted old cedar trees remain in their very substance. Melt water in stream trickles, torrential rivers, and crashing falls. Winds from the belly of the earth and the far reaches of the sky. What we drink from deep wells and percolating springs is the same ancient water that rained down on hot, infant rock and again on the old one’s garden plots. It lives in our flesh, blood, spit and returns again in the end. Bald knobs we climb and dirt we work are the remnants of the glacier that paused right 138 before it was about to slide over the Ozark Plateau, deciding it had pushed enough land flat. Minerals hid in fossils lie next to carrot roots, potatoes planted in the dark of the moon, and migrate into our bones. Called Down I have gone down to the altar during the call. I have spoken in tongues. I have felt the sweet surrender, falling willingly backward into murmuring streams. Baptized in what they call Tablerock Lake, for now, while men’s dams stand and where the White River waits for a while on its way to Arkansas. I skinny-dipped in those same waters with girl- and boyfriends on clandestine escapes, out after hours from the bible college where we were counted in our beds each night. Homemade moonshine burning hot in my throat, drunk straight from plastic gallon milk jugs—a not-quite ancient rite that joined us to ancestor hillbillies and steaming back-wood stills. Tender faced, willowy boys led me to hidden rope bridges and underground rivers whose whispering siren’s moan lured us into a skin-felt faith in our own yearnings. We were called down into splits in Ozark bedrock, fissures that open and close into caves that wind endlessly, secretly, under Missouri. Caves Families eke out livings from tours led past souvenir rock displays and homemade artifact cases on through underground caverns that their grandfathers strung with electric wire and bare bulbs. Native bones that thought they’d found their final rest in the earth’s belly advertised on gaudy, painted billboards. Jesse James hid out, slept here. I believe it, hearing echoes of the drops of sweat and desperation splattering on the worn glassy floor. Wild caves hide high in bluffs, behind river bottom cane or beneath newly opened sinkholes in forest floors. Find them by the odor of damp, Jan Peterson Roddy 139 ancient stone and the deep, dark they exhale. Adventurous girls foray lamp-less past the smoke stains of old fires. Boisterous boys dare each other down the rope into Devil’s Well who’s slick bowl walls and bottomless lake have tried to swallow a few. Sweet corn mash steam from bootleggers’ stills lingers yet against the low rock ceiling between stalactites. Curved imprints of slumbering bears molded in the clay of a dry chamber. The hearts of blind cavefish throb through quartz clear skin as they circle silently in black pools that plunge into lost rivers. Bodies of young lovers wash up in the next county, having been trapped in back caverns by rising water leaking through gravel soil, past roots and chert from thunderstorms above they never heard. With an unnatural lust for the abysmal, divers sink silently into pitch-black underground river tunnels, wandering further and deeper through cold as the grave water filled chambers. Some heave their last breaths beneath a ceiling of mile...