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NINETY-SIX LINE / Robert Morgan Wind shoving across the summit ground of Old Fodderstack (later Tryon Mountain on the map) stirred lace at the Governor's throat and wrists as he read the proclamation to assembled Cherokees: "Long as the stars last or the earth gives forth her green in spring . . ." his words snatched away by ceiling gusts. And then all knelt, silk knees as well as buckskin, on the forest duff and pledged to the King and prayed, while blue ranges crumpled away below them to the globe's edge, to seal the pact forever: No white would cross that line to settle, the boundary running straight from Old Fort Ninety-Six on the Saluda across this knob to Virginia. And at the very instant of the oath the minutemen of Lexington stood armed, and a hundred miles to the north the Yadkin whites already poured across the ridge into Watauga, Holsten, Upper Tennessee, to deaden fields beside the creeks. Then the King's governor shook hands with the painted chiefs and smoked his bond and rode back down the steepest summit, triumphant, though already overthrown by Regulators, already just a line in history, an invisible line crossing his named peak and slicing field and graveyard, intersecting trail and branch, family land, where I grew up many treaties later with one foot in the English 208 · The Missouri Review country, one in the high dark hunting ranges, and felt a chill when stepping across to either imaginary dominion. Robert Morgan The Missouri Review · 209 BLIZZARD / Robert Morgan Kudzu has shoaled up the highway bank, bandaging and sewing clay, the smocked red folds of subsoil. Advance lines have thrown and pulled themselves into the hardwoods, and raised leaftents on dying trunks. The Dog Days are now green in a blizzard of vine-wind and drifts and storm-weird flattening, leaving the ghosts of great oaks stooped and almost lost under the prevailing tempest. Runners thread deadmen's eyes and seize the guy wires and creosote prize of a telephone pole to wrap in hungry tightness, swarming to the top. One strand feels out the line, gripping and searching, as the whole glittering world is a waste of lushness. 220 · The Missouri Review ...

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