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chapter 27 z THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE The days may come, the days may go, but still the hands of memory weave the blissful dreams of long ago. George Cooper,“Sweet Genevieve” ob, a man from the land of Uz, has told us in the Bible: “When a few years are come, then I shall go the way whence I shall not return.” Living now in the autumn of my life, I longed to return once more to Wolf Creek Hollow. My eightieth birthday was only a few weeks away—November 20, 1997—and my soul thirsted to once again visit the scenes of my childhood on the little hillside farm to which Pap and Mom had brought me more than seventy years before. For it was during that brief period in my life that were largely shaped my basic attitudes and personal beliefs about God, self-discipline, education, self-reliance, honesty, and frugality—the things that were molded into my being so deeply that they would never leave me through all the days of my life. It was a hardscrabble and pinched existence out of which I had come, but it had strengthened me for the trials I would experience and the life I would live over the ensuing seven or eight long decades. I had met with kings and presidents and other leaders of many nations. My feet had touched the soil of five continents, and I had traversed the great oceans and many of the small seas of the globe. I had conversed with both the mighty and the lowly among the peoples of the world. I had pursued, as others have said, the most J the return of the native 665 successful political career in West Virginia’s history, and had helped to shape the destiny of my state and my country in various legislative halls at the state and national levels. I believed, therefore, that the time had now come—with the snows of winter soon to fall upon the hills of Wolf Creek, and upon my days as well—when I should return to the head of that little creek where I had once enjoyed the sweet fragrance of life’s young spring. Thus, in the looming evening twilight of my years, Erma and I journeyed back to the land of my heart’s desire. Lane McIntosh, a staff assistant, accompanied us. A warm September sun beat down upon us and upon the placid landscape of the great Appalachian plateau as we made our way along the dusty road of Nubbin’s Ridge to where Ed Blankenship’s old store and mill had once stood. From here, we would begin the descent down the graveled road leading to the grounds where once stood the house in which I had lived as a boy. But before descending the mountain, I decided to travel on up the road just a short distance to where the little two-room school, which I attended in the fifth grade—the Willis White School—had rested in a grove of oak and maple and chestnut trees. The schoolhouse had burned down some years after I left Wolf Creek Hollow (just as other one-room and two-room schoolhouses have long ago faded from the American scene). With Erma beside me, I sat down upon a stump and reminisced. My mind took me back to the days when I had played during recess in the shade of those trees with a friend, Chester Peyton, and his sister, Lala, who in my childish fancy was a kind of secret sweetheart of mine. There were other boys and girls, too—around fifty, all told—whose names have long since grown dim. It was there in a schoolroom with a chalk-smeared blackboard and potbellied stove that I had sat at a small wooden desk and built castles in the air as I dreamed of great things I would do some day. And there, in my imaginings as I sat upon the stump, I could see Archie Akers, the stern schoolmaster, as he rang the bell to announce that the recess was over. But there would be other recesses in the days to come, when the “feet that, creeping slow to school, went storming out to playing!” I thought again about the spelling matches on Friday afternoons; about being asked by my teacher, Mary Grace Lilly, to fetch a bucket of water from the nearby spring. Then I thought about the close of...

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