Crum

Chapter 18

Chapter 18 It was early morning and hotter than hell and I woke before daylight . The night temperature must have stayed near ninety and now Mattie had put a fire in the stove and I guess breakfast was underway . The back of the stove that stuck into my sleeping shed made a furnace out of the place and I knew that in a matter of minutes I would be driven out. I got up and pulled on my shirt. The pants I was sleeping in were soaked with sweat, so I took them off and threw them outside. Under my bed was my flour sack with a couple of potatoes, a piece of cured bacon that I had laid in from the meat robbery, and some salt. I tied up the end of the sack, then tied the whole thing in a loop with a short piece of rope so that it would hang over my shoulder. I got some matches and my pocket knife, scrambled around in the darkness for my jeans, left the shed and began to climb Shit Hill. The early mountain light began to filter through the trees. I waited on the side of the hill for a minute or two, as I always did, hoping the place would burn down, but nothing happened. Higher up the hill I could begin to see out over the valley and catch sight of other ridges falling away across the river and into Kentucky, each ridge like the other. The light was coming stronger and the sack felt comfortable over my shoulder and I liked the tired feeling that came as I pushed up the hill. I cut over to my left and made an open space where I could look down and see the school. When I got there I knew it was a mistake. I was done and I really didn’t want to see that school again. I wanted to see something else that day. I left the open and went back into the woods. As many times as I had been up on Shit Hill, I never really had been to the actual top of it, never really had seen what was on the other side, although I knew it could only be other ridges, standing in ranks as they measured off from the river valley. I decided to go look. My climb was easy. Shit Hill wasn’t a real mountain, anyway, just a long sloping ridge that was a little too steep for houses and farming. It was bright full daylight by the time I reached the top of the hill, the top of the ridge. I couldn’t see a damn thing. The trees were so thick that any hope of seeing the valley—or what lay beyond—was completely cut off. I should have realized it, of course, but then a kid who climbs to the top of the hill, any hill, has a right to expect to see something. But you couldn’t see anything, even from the top. I walked the ridge. It was still early morning and I felt good and I wondered why I had never taken the trouble to come up here before. The woods really were beautiful, up where people had not gotten around to cutting them. Oh, I suppose they had been torn up at some time in the past, but that was a long time ago and the woods were looking good again. I found some nut trees and told myself that I would come back in the autumn to gather the nuts. I was walking in a general upriver direction, the ridge running parallel to the river valley, and I thought I would just keep walking and see where I came out. The air was even warmer now, but sweet and thick with the aroma of the woods. About an hour later I came to a huge outcropping of rocks. The trees just came up to them and stopped and the tops of the rocks reached away through the branches . They bulked up on my right, holding off the vegetation that grew against them, finally breaking out into the light to overlook the valley . I decided to climb to the top and have a look, even though I was never too crazy about rock climbing. Snakes loved the warm rocks and almost always you could find one lounging around in a crack [3.144.16.254] Project MUSE (2024-04-20 01...