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246 The Kentucky Anthology Harriette Simpson Arnow from The Dollmaker Harriette Simpson Arnow was a little woman who wrote a very big book, The Dollmaker, a classic of Kentucky writing and of American writing. When I met her some thirty years ago, I was astounded that such a modest and unpretentious woman had created one of the strongest and most enduring characters in American fiction. Indeed, Gertie Nevels is a woman who can commandeer a military car to take her ailing son Amos to a doctor and then, before they can get under way, perform a lifesaving tracheotomy on him using a pocket knife. It is Gertie’s love of the Kentucky land, where she has lived her entire life, that strengthens her to do whatever is necessary. It is a gift that she will have as long as she stays close to the land. Significantly , The Dollmaker takes place during World War II, when many mountain families moved to industrial cities to do war work. Gertie’s family is eventually uprooted in a migration north to Detroit. Arnow was born in Wayne County in 1908 and grew up in Burnside and in Lee County, where her father worked in the oil fields. She attended Berea College and the University of Louisville, from which she graduated in 1930. She taught school for several years and then worked as a waitress in Cincinnati while she wrote and published short stories. After marrying the journalist Harold Arnow, she lived in Detroit and in Ann Arbor until her death in 1986. h Dock’s shoes on the rocks up the hill and his heavy breathing had shut out all sound so that it seemed a long while she had heard nothing, and Amos lay too still, not clawing at the blanket as when they had started. They reached the ridge top where the road ran through scrub pine in sand, and while the mule’s shoes were soft on the thick needles she bent her head low over the long bundle across the saddle horn, listening. Almost at once she straightened , and kicked the already sweat-soaked mule hard in the flanks until he broke into an awkward gallop. “I know you’re tired, but it ain’t much furder,” she said in a low tight voice. She rode on in silence, her big body hunched protectingly over the bundle. Now and then she glanced worriedly up at the sky, graying into the thick twilight of a rainy afternoon in October; but mostly her eyes, large, like the rest of her, and the deep, unshining gray of the rain-wet pine trunks, were fixed straight ahead of the mule’s ears, as if by much looking she might help the weary animal pull the road past her with her eyes. 246 Elizabeth Madox Roberts 247 They reached the highway, stretching empty between the pines, silent, no sign of cars or people, as if it were not a road at all, but some lost island of asphalt coming from no place, going nowhere. The mule stopped, his ears flicking slowly back and forth as he considered the road. She kicked him again, explaining, “It’s a road fer automobiles; we’ll have to ride it to stop a car, then you can git back home.” The mule tried to turn away from the strange black stuff, flung his head about, danced stiff-leggedly back into the familiar sanctuary of soft ground and pine trees. “No,” the woman said, gripping his thin flanks with her long thighs, “no, you’ve got to git out in th middle so’s we can stop a car a goen toward th doctor’s. You’ve got to.” She kicked him again, turned him about. He tried one weary, half-hearted bucking jump; but the woman only settled herself in the saddle, gripped with her thighs, her drawn-up knees, her heels. Her voice was half pleading, half scolding: “Now, Dock, you know you cain’t buck me off, not even if you was fresh—an you ain’t. So git on.” The great raw-boned mule argued with his ears, shook the bridle rein, side-stepped against a pine tree, but accepted soon the fact that the woman was master still, even on a strange road. He galloped again, down the middle of the asphalt that followed a high and narrow ridge and seemed at times like a road in the sky, the nothingness of fog-filled valleys...

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