A Half-Life And Half A Life

A Half-Life And Half A Life (Continued from Spring 1976 Issue) by ELIZABETH HAVEN APPLETON The first half of Miss Appletons "damaging account" relates the events and circumstances of Janet Rainsford's childhood and growing up in the Big Sandy River area as the stepdaughter of Squire Boarders (Janet is both narrator and main character in the story). "I had little claim on the farmer with whom I lived. I was the child by a former marriage of his wife, who had brought me into the wilderness, a puny, ailing creature of four years, and into the three years that followed was compressed all the happiness I could remember." Thus Janet summarized her early life. When Janet was seven, her mother died and Squire Boarders soon married again—this^time to a religious spinster. Except for a few books and the pleasures of the natural scenery, Janet's life is described as a routine of drudgery and boredom until George Hammond comes in from the outside world to begin the construction of houses and facilities for mining coal near the Boarders place. Hammond "cultivated" Janet, bringing her books and encouraging her interests. She, in turn, was able to repay him by making available her intimate knowledge of the forests, river, and terrain. It becomes obvious that Janet is secretly in love with George Hammond. When the local miners go on strike for higher wages and thus threaten the closing of the whole operation, Janet agrees to carry a special letter to Catlettsburg to save George Hammond's mining company. Although realistic in method, A HALF-LIFE AND HALF A LIFE does not rete much as literature. However, it is important in a study of the development of the literature of the Southern Mountaineer. Like much earlier fiction it was obviously written by an outsider and, in the main, is unsympathetic. The mountain men in contrast to the poise of George Hammond are portrayed as crude and boorish. Mountain women live a life of drudgery, and their conversation, in the few visitings they have time for, is filled with whining comptánts and dull recitations of their activities. The central nwtif of the mountaineer in love with the outsider is one that was repeated over and over in later noveh and stories. Although Miss Appleton may well have observed what she reported , it is true, nevertheless, that mountain people in those days lived better, had more enjoyments, more variety than this story would lead one to believe. "Don't look so pale, Janet. You can tell Hammond, you know, and he'll find a way to circumvent them. And it was to tell you all this that I brought you out here this afternoon, only my unlucky tongue would talk of what I see it's too soon to talk of yet. But here's Louisa, right ahead. Make haste and get your traps, while I settle my business, and we'll be back, perhaps, in time for you to manage some way to see Hammond tonight. Nobody knows you went with me, and you'll never be suspected ." Not Tom Salyers's most rapid and vifof65 s The Cando Steamboat, which carried merchandise and passengers on the Big Sandy River between Catlettsburg and Pikeville. About 1890 (Henry P. Scalf Collection) ous rowing could make our little skiff keep pace with my impatience; but, thanks to his efforts, the sun was still high when he landed me in the little cove behind our house, where I could run up through the woods to our back-door, while he pulled boldly up to the store-landing and called some of the men to help him carry his purchases up the bank. I did not stop for a word with my step-mother, but, passing rapidly through the house, threw my parcels on the bed in the sitting-room, and, running down the walk to the maple-tree under which my dugout was always tied, jumped into it and sculled out into the river. The coal-boat had just been launched, and George Hammond was standing on the bank superintending the calking of the seams which the water made visible. I pushed...