Darcy
I sit here in my office in the gray, block-like building that houses my department, a building so at variance with the Gothic crannies and spires of the main buildings on campus that I cringe on entering its dusty and uninspired corridors. They must have been saving money when they built it during the big war. Pennywise and soulfoolish. Not that the Gothic buildings are beautiful but they’ve got character.
Melissa Caskill has just walked out. I am one of her dissertation advisers. She is enthusiastic because I am from her neck of the woods. Born and bred in the briar patch, Brer Fox, born and bred in the briar patch. We have been discussing The Tempest, which Melissa has managed to give a Kentucky accent. Her thinking on the hills is a few decades out of date, back to the time when some social historians wrote of eastern Kentucky as sheltering the noble woodsman and his family. Melissa, who is no fool, has updated the image to a conscious state of innocence such as the Duke created around Miranda. I blue-pencil these purple passages each time she delivers another installment, but next time another avatar will crop up.
At first she tried to get personal information from me, along the lines of why did I leave the hills. She knows that her grandfather and I had some kind of a friendship. I wonder if Orson told her that. I like his granddaughter. In some ways we are alike, but she is a happier person than I am. She comes from a good family. The Caskills have been around the hills for a long time, and they are sound, I think. What would I have been like now if I had had a chance to marry Orson? Melissa goes home often, but I think she is conflicted about where her future lies geographically and culturally speaking.
When I myself return to Osier County in the short summers, more and more often I fold my hands softly, sitting on my sister Luellen’s front porch, and let the hills encircle me. Green mountain shadow, blue sky, and the crystal creek down below where Luellen’s grandchildren play half-clothed. Mountains are axes joining heaven and earth. Gods play there at sunrise, the Taoists say, and perfected beings fly there. In Taoist meditation the inner human body is a mountain landscape, its forms simultaneously reflecting the natural world and the cosmos. Luellen’s grandchildren are perfected beings, sun tangled in their hair and water sparkling in their hands, their opaque gaze focused on the flowing creek. . . .