Grandfather Tales Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Frontispiece

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Preface

  Old-Christmas Eve

  Gallymanders! Gallymanders!

  Wicked John and the Devil

  Mutsmag

  Whitebear Whittington

  The Outlaw Boy

  Sody Sallyraytus

  The Old Sow and the Three Shoats

  How Bobtail Beat the Devil

  Old Dry Frye

  Catskins

  Ashpet

  Like Meat Loves Salt

  Soap, Soap, Soap!

  The Skoonkin Huntin’

  Presented, Bymeby, and Hereafter

  Sam and Sooky

  The Two Old Women’s Bet

  The Two Lost Babes

  Only a Fair Day’s Huntin’

  The Tall Cornstalk

  Old Roaney

  Old One-Eye

  The Green Gourd

  Chunk O’ Meat

  Appendix

  About the Author

  Footnotes

  Copyright © 1948 by Richard Chase

  Copyright © renewed 1976 by Richard Chase

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhco.com

  Hardcover ISBN 978-0-618-34691-2

  Paperback ISBN 978-0-618-34690-5

  LC 48-007912

  eISBN 978-0-547-53128-1

  v1.0315

  TO ALL THE GRANDFATHERS

  and grandmothers who told while I listened; and to Leonard, Eddie, Pat, Harold, Billy, Dannie and Junior, David and Tommy, Bobby, Gerald, Clinton, and Herbie—all clean and ready for bed, who sat around the big warm fireplace at Small Boys’ House one cold winter-time, listening while I told;

  and

  TO ALL TELLERS AND LISTENERS

  old and young, who discover what Tom Hunt meant when he said, “No, it’ll not do just to read the old tales out of a book. You’ve got to tell ’em to make ’em go right.”

  Preface

  These tales are the “others” mentioned by R. M. Ward in his foreword to The Jack Tales. Mr. Ward, the “old man in North Carolina” mentioned by James Turner herein, told eight of the tales in this collection. The rest are from various people in North Carolina, Virginia, and Kentucky. A bit of “The Tall Cornstalk” came from Maine. Exact sources for each tale are accounted for in the appendix.

  In this book I have taken a free hand in the re-telling. I have put each tale together from different versions, and from my own experience in telling them. I have told the tales to all kinds of listeners, old and young; and only then, after many tellings, written them down.

  This spontaneous telling process is really important for you, too, the reader. After you have read these tales, put the book away and try telling one. You don’t have to use dialect. Use your own common speech. Reading the printed word can never—especially for your young listeners—be the same as using the living word.

  For me, the writing down of these tales has often been a difficult and tedious process. Mrs. Grover Long, a descendant of Council Harmon (through whose grandchildren The Jack Tales “and others” have been preserved), told me how she had once tried to put down “Old Counce’s” tales on paper. “And I just couldn’t do it,” she said, “it all went stale on me.”

  Filling up blank sheets of paper is, indeed, not the same as the sound of your own voice shaping a tale as it wells up out of your memory and as your own fancy plays with all its twists and turns. And the best part of it is that finally by some mysterious process you find that you are listening to the tale yourself as much as the listeners around you. I’d really much rather be telling these tales to you instead of having to sit here all alone, pecking at a typewriter. It is not the same as hearing a hush settle down on a group of young people when a tale begins and watching their faces as they become more and more absorbed in what’s going to happen next to little Jack, or to Mutsmag, or Wicked John, or Old Roaney. So, you try it! After you have learned the tales in silent print, shut the book and “tell ’em.”

  II

  In getting the tales written down so I could re-tell them for you, the following people have been particularly helpful: Alice Cobb, James Taylor Adams and his wife, Dicy Roberts Adams, and their sons, Spencer and Simpson; John and Louise Powell; Berkeley Williams, Sr.; Charles and Ruth Seeger and Mike, Peggy, and Barbara; Miss Annie Willis; Robert A. Moore; Lois Fenn; Darwin and Barbara Lambert and Harvey, Priscilla, and Laura; James M. Hylton; George H. Tucker and his niece Carolyn Virginia Miller; and the following institutions: The Virginia Writers project (W.P.A.), Pine Mountain Settlement School, Berea College, Boone (N.C.) High School, Cove Creek School at Sugar Grove, North Carolina, Blue Ridge School at Saint George, Virginia, Stuart Robinson School, Huntsville (Ala.) Rotary Club, Charlottesville (Va.) lions Club, Pittsburgh Authors’ Club, University of Pittsburgh’s Department of English, Madison College (Va.), Department of English at Western Reserve University—and many schools, little and large, in Virginia, where I have told tales.

  R.C.

  Old-Christmas Eve

  It was on one of my first trips to Crockett County that James Turner took me out to see Tom Hunt. Mr. Hunt lives alone in an old hewn-log house about a mile out of the county seat; and when James and I got out of the car that cold winter evening Tom was in the yard carrying logs of firewood toward the door. He threw us a hearty welcome and led the way in to the fire.

  “How’re ye doin’?” James asked as we stepped over the doorsill.

  “’Bout like common, Jeems. They all well up at your place?” He laid the wood on the fire and poked glowing chunks underneath.

  “We can eat all we can get!”

  “Aaa Law!” Tom laughed back at him. “You’d ’a thought peace would ’a meant the end of hard times, now wouldn’t ye?” He turned and faced us: a tall hardy old man of about fifty, gentle-featured, with iron-gray shock of hair, his eyes a bit shy as they glanced at me.

  “Meet Dick Chase. He’s in here huntin’ up old songs and old tales.”

  Tom Hunt took my hand. “Proud to know ye.—Sit down, boys! Here, take these chairs. I’ll fetch me one from the kitchen. Shuck off your coats and sit. You ain’t in no hurry, are ye?”

  We threw our coats on a big oak chest by the door, and the three of us pulled up to the flaming logs. The weather, the health of relatives and neighbors, local news, national news, world news, were duly discussed. A few queries were made as to where I was born and raised, then Tom asked, “Tales? What sort of tales you lookin’ for? Old man Boyd, now, up on Dry Fork, he can tell ye everything he ever heard from the old folks back when he was a boy: all about when the Indians were in here, and the Battle of Ring’s Mountain, and that other war—the one they fit over slavery.”

  “No, it’s not history I’m lookin’ for. It’s tales about giants, and about a boy named Jack, and about the Devil comin’ up here and gettin’—”

  “Bobtail,” Jeems broke in. “How he beat the Devil that time; and tales like ‘Catskins,’ and ‘Poll and Betts and Mutsmag,’ ‘Old Dry Frye’—all that kind of foolishness.”

  “Oh, you want the old grandfather tales: ‘Jack and Will and Tom,’ ‘Chunk o’ Meat,’ ‘The Two Lost Babes’—them old impossibilities. Is that what you’re after?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Aaa Lord! That brings back old times. My granddaddy now, the one that built this house, he’s taken me on his knee many a time, right there where you’re a-sittin’, and told me about Jack till my moth
er ’uld have to make him quit so I could go to bed. And my daddy and Uncle Kel Weaver could sit up and tell tales all night—and never tell the same tale twice!”

  “Dick’s done made a book out of all that about Jack: the way he learned it from an old man down in North Carolina.”

  “A book? Huh.—I saw one of the old tales in a book one of the Weaver kids brought by here the other day, Big Claus or somethin’. It was like ‘Jack and His Heifer Hide’ but it was so different from the way I knew it, it got me all bothered up. I got to thinkin’ about that tale then, and next time one of them Weaver young ’uns asked me for it, why! it had got so cluttered up in my mind I told it end-over-backwards. I never could tell a tale unless I just told it straight out—unthoughtedly, you might say.—No, it’ll not do: just to read the old tales out of a book. You got to tell ’em to make ’em go right.”

  Tom took the fire-shovel and with a sprinkling of ashes slowed down the heat that was blazing at our shins from the fresh flaming logs.

  “Uncle Kel and Granny London—are they winterin’ down here with the Weaver folks again?” asked Jeems.

  “Came down the middle of November. Uncle Kel’s just about quit farmin’ now.—You know, that makes four generations at the Weaver house: Uncle Kel, Old Rob, Little Rob, and the two boys that are still at home.”

  Jeems rose. “Well, Tom, I expect we better be movin’. We’ll come early next time and you and I will see what tales we can recollect for this man.”

  “Oh, no! You ’uns stay the night. Plenty of beds here. You’ve come at a good time, too. You know what date it is tomorrow?”

  “January sixth,” said Jeems.

  “What else?” Tom asked pointedly.

  “Old Christmas! Now that is so, ain’t it! We ain’t kept Old Christmas at my house since I was a kid, and I don’t always remember it”

  “Hit’s not likely I’ll forget it! All that Weaver gang keeps Old-Christmas Eve with me every year—ever since my wife died.”

  Tom took hold of the poker and pushed the forestick gently against the backlog. Bright yellow flames began to work along the front edge of the forestick. “Jeems,” he said quietly, “Does this man know what Old Christmas is?”

  “Twelfth night after Christmas Eve, Dick. That’s tonight, the Eve of Old Christmas,” explained Jeems.

  “Now,” said Tom, “there’s a lot Old Kel and Granny can tell ye about old times, and the old music and all that. And we’re liable to sit up all night carryin’ on here. Aaa Lord! If it’s the old tales ye want, boys, you better just stay a while.—Have ye eat?”

  We had eaten at Jeems’s place, but Tom took the large round-wick lamp out to the kitchen and made us join him. He brought out biscuits and butter, apple-butter, jellies, and canned fruit. A large pitcher of milk was carried in from the back porch; and finally a trivet held the percolator over hot coals on the hearthrock. While we ate, Jeems and Tom told me more about the Weaver family: Old Rob’s fame as a tale-teller, and Granny’s “delight in singin’.” We had finished and just sat down by the fire again when a scuffling and stomping of feet on the porch announced the arrival of the generations of Weavers. Tom opened the door.

  Old Kel, lanky and clean-shaven, grinned and cracked Tom a greeting as he navigated in on two stout hickory canes. Granny London’s black eyes shot Jeems and me an inquisitive glance as she slipped a gray shawl from her narrow bent shoulders and moved toward the fire. Old Robin came booming in: neatly trimmed white hair and beard, apple-red cheeks, and gay blue eyes. He banged Jeems across the shoulders and wrung my hand like an old friend. “Welcome, stranger! Hit’s good to see a new face once in a while. I been lookin’ at these ugly folks here an awful long time!”

  Delia, his stoutish wife, drawled, “Who ever told you you was such a pretty thing to look at?” as Tom helped her off with her coat. “Little” Robin (i.e., Robin Weaver, Jr.) proved as tall as Old Kel must have been before age struck him. He and his wife, Sarah, had about them the warm healthy look of those who work much in the outdoors.

  They all knew Jeems. Tom brought me forward and made me known to them, as each took my hand with a “Proud-to-know-ye.” Jeems and I retreated from the fireplace while they all milled about there warming, and the spell of formality and a stranger’s presence was broken by Tom, asking, “Where’s the boys?”

  “Never you mind!” Old Rob shouted. “They’ll be here directly.”

  “Old Kel’s been puttin’ ’em up to some foolishness or other,” said Sarah.

  “He’s had Steve and Stan and a regular gang of young ’uns out there in the barn all week, a-practicin’ on somethin’ or other,” said Delia, “and sech a racket and a hollerin’ you never heard.”

  “Hit’s that old dumb-show we used to do when I was a boy over beyond the Cumberland there—in Kaintucky,” said Old Kel.

  “What is it?” asked Jeems.

  “You’ll see soon enough!”—and Old Robin set chairs for Delia and Granny.

  “Don’t let on ye know a thing about it,” warned Kel. “Hit really ought to be done without a soul knowin’ it’s comin’ off.”

  Tom had fetched other chairs from about the house, but before we had all quite settled there was a scurry of children’s feet and voices outside the door, a hush, then a timid knock.

  “Come in!” Tom called. A big girl’s face peered in at the door frame. “Come on in, Rhody.”

  Rhody entered, and a group of children stumbled over the sill behind her, wiggled out of coats, and squirmed out of sweaters. They mumbled a few good-evenin’s, and after a brief hand-warming at the hearth scampered for seats: on Tom’s big bed in the far corner, on the edge of the coat-laden chest by the door, on the floor by Granny’s chair. The women reached out and hoisted three of the littlest ones up against their bosoms. One small boy leaned against Uncle Kel’s knee. Two little girls struggled for the privilege of Old Robin’s lap until he settled it by taking one on each knee.

  “What you young ’uns expectin’ to see?” Tom asked.

  “That play-actin’ the boys are fixin’ to do,” said Rhody. “Uncle Kel he told us about bringin’ pennies, too.”

  “What play?” Old Robin burst out, with a most solemn face. “No show here tonight! If ye wants to see a show you’ll have to go to Newton to the movin’ picture theater.”

  “No sech thing!” Rhody shot back at Old Rob. “They are, too, goin’ to do that old dumb-show! We saw Steve and Stan goin’ after the Sneed boys. We hid in the bresh till they got past us; and they both were all dressed up funny, and Steve was a-hollerin’ some kind of crazy speech, and Stan told him to shut up till it was time to say it.—You can’t fool us!”

  This brought a burst of laughter from Rob and all the company. Tom sent two little boys for more wood. They struggled in with a big log which Jeems and Tom dropped in place on the fire. The two kids scurried back to their seats with suppressed giggles and quick glances toward the door. The room grew suddenly quiet. There was a creak and a quiet bump on the porch.

  MUMMER’S PLAY

  Outside in the gathering frosty dark a clear boy’s voice began to sing. The other boys joined in, a bit unsteady at first, but the strong confident tones of their leader held them firm and kept the song going.

  Joseph and the Angel

  As Jo-seph was a-walking he heard an an-gel sing:

  This night shall be the birth-night of Christ the Heav’nly King,

  This night shall be the birth-night of Christ the Heavn’ly King.

  He neither shall be born-ed in house nor in hall,

  nor in a king’s palace but in an oxen’s stall.

  He neither shall be washen in white wine nor red,

  but in the dear spring water with which we were christen-ed.

  He neither shall be cloth-ed in purple nor in pall,

  but in the fair white linen that usen babies all.

  He neither shall be rock-ed in silver nor in gold, but in a wooden cradle that rocks upon the mold.

 
On the sixth day of January his birthday shall be,

  when the stars and the mountains shall tremble with glee.

  As Joseph was a-walking thus did the angel sing;

  and Mary’s son at midnight was born to be our King.

  The song ended; and after a brief pause a loud knocking rattled the door, and a boy’s voice shouted:

  “Open the door and let us in!

  We come your favor for to win!

  We shall fight and we shall fall,

  and we shall try to please you all!”

  The boys by the chest dashed to open the door. A boy holding a broom and wearing an old battered Hallowe’en mask stepped in. He plunged into his next speech:

  “We come here to wish you cheer!

  Money in your pockets all this year!

  I’m the presenter sent before,

  and with my broom I’ll clear the floor.

  Room! Make room, and clear the way!

  Make some room to see our play!”

  The Presenter had worked his way to the center of the fireplace where he swept threateningly at us and we moved back to clear the view for all the company.

  The rest of the actors had pushed just inside the door and stood huddled there. The Presenter having cleared the way, a boy in an old store-bought Santy Claus suit came forth. His hat and beard bore sprigs of holly.

  “In comes I, Old Father Christmas,

  hard times or not;

  I know Old Father Christmas