Sherman

Sherman After raising his eight kids on the coast he came home, himself at last, to the place where he was born, whose forests and spiney ridges snake back and around enough to confound anybody but the likes of him and whose flowing waters were as his own blood. He chose a house of upright planks across the creek from a rutted track. Now, just back from Goofy's Pool Hall and the best cheeseburger in all of Kentucky he and I prance across a spidery claptrap of hanging slats and boards which span the creek. We climb down to his yard, pick our way among pinhorses, froes, and a beached toilet filled with birdfood and onto the porch, a jumble of splitting mauls, wedges, pulleys, axes, mallets, bucksaws, and crosscuts And through the door to the very workings of his mind where he shuffles through curled shavings and turns a naked bulb in the ceiling lighting up a crowd of chairs in every stage of becoming. Under a calendar of a winking brunette, lean solid wheels of walnut, their growth rings as ancient currents whorling into an owl's eye here, an embryo there, ocean and strata swirling between them as though the earth had laid its story in the grain. 82 The pinhorse is the only seat. He works the drawknife toward his waist, coaxing a chair leg from a blunt stump. His white beard caresses the grain. He begins a tale, leaning back on a saddlebag with a wren's nest in the pouch. We breathe the smell of wood and apples, the bitter sap of new felled oak, as above, the breeze tousles green trees, as around, dead ones wait in their roundness for Sherman to lift their bark and free the swirling song of their grain. —Noel Smith Sherman Wooten ofLeslie County, Kentucky, died on February 26, 2004, at the age of93. To many, Wooten epitomized Appalachia. At craftfairs around the region many were charmed by his mischievous baby blue eyes set offby his white beard and his blue denim overalls. They were enthralled as he took the time to answer any question, often bestowing small gifts upon complete strangers. A consummate primitive chairmaker, Wooten's old-fashioned craftsmanship made him one of the last surviving authentic craftspersons of the region. Even those who only knew him,for example, from the paintings ofMitchell Tolle or Willard Gayheart or who had merely seen the photos and profiles in Sam Venables Mountain Hands or in The National Geographic often considered Sherman the ultimate mountain man. Sherman Wooten was born thefourth ofeight children on Cutshin Creek in Leslie County on the day that Halley's Comet appeared, May 15, 1910. He was delivered by his grandmother, Fanny Martin, a midwife. His family lived briefly in Hamilton, Ohio, but moved back to Hell-fer-Sartin Creek after the death of his mother from influenza. Sherman attended Pine Mountain Settlement School and studied woodworking there with Luigi Zondi. Later he attended Hyden High School where he was the quarterback on the football team. Aftergraduating, he and a brother went west. He often bragged that he had ridden the Orange Blossom Special but only as a hobo. He served in the U.S. Navy twice, both before and during World War II. Married in 1938 and divorced in 1962, Sherman raised six of his eight children as a singlefather while working as a carpenter in the San Francisco Bay area. In 1970 he moved back to Leslie County and soon became established as a chairmaker.— Thanks to Winston Wooten for providing information for this editor's note. 83 ...