Milkweed Ladies by Louise McNeill

slopes.
    All of us along Swago Crick were tainted by the lumber boom. Back in the 1880s, a lot of our kinfolks, uncles and cousins, had gone into the white pine business as raftsmen and teamsters. And Captain Jim had had to sell his Woodland Up-the-Hollow to the loggers. In the early 1900s, when the sawmill shanty town was built over on the Buckley Flatts, G.D. went to work for them as a bookkeeper because he needed the money to piece out his farming and teaching school. At last, Uncle Dan'l had to sell his dying chestnut orchard to the lumber companies.
    But the men would still go Over the Mountain,persisting in it, as though the change had not come, as though they had to find it was not true. They would come home early, bringing only a few fish in their haversacks, and every time with new dark chords to add to their lament: even on the Mountain Lick, they would tell; even on Tea Crick there were scars; and ravage on Black Mountain Run.
    Uncle Dock died before the Great Fire of 1930, and G.D. told how the last laugh Uncle Dock ever laughed was when he raised up on his pillow and remembered a time, long back, when he had taken G.D. as a little boy Over the Mountain to fish. He told how G.D. had caught a big one, got tangled up in the fish and fishline, and had fallen head first into the pool. After Uncle Dock died, G.D. was withdrawn and silent, and he smoked his pipe cold. But he still went Over the Mountain, often going alone and coming back the same day, until one summer he stopped going and never went again.

    The Great Forest Fire of 1930 raged from the headwaters of Gauley to Panther Crick and then swept up the valley and almost over the Elk. All week down at the village, a smoke pall hung over the schoolyard, and our cow spring up the hollow tasted of smoke. In the wind that fed it, the black, charred leaf-scraps sifted down over ourfields and pastures. After the rains came, Ward and Jess went over and walked it, all day through the black and ashes. They saw the roots of the great stumps sticking up three feet above the burned out topsoil as though they still tried to clutch the earth.
    It was after the Great Fire that G.D. began to refer to Over the Mountain as The Bonnie. When G.D. was dead and Ward was the old one, Ward said that there was no place called The Bonnie, that the real name of it was Bannock Run, and that it was named for a Scotch pancake. But I know that G.D. did call it The Bonnie along at the last, and he even referred sometimes to Bonnie River. Slowly, as G.D. grew older, some several years after I was married, he began to tell my husband how it all had been: the long pavilions of shade, the clear rolling rivers, the old trails and starry camps. One night, G.D. stopped suddenly in the middle of a sentence and left it hanging there. He never mentioned Over Bonnie again. Instead, he sat in his chair by his old Sea Chest and told me and my husband about the sea: the day they moved through Magellan Straits, or the night of the great storm out on the Pacific; and Over Bonnie was, for G.D., just as though it had never been.
    But for me, the lumber companies hadnot cut The Bonnie, nor the Great Fire burned it to blackened claws. Because I was born a woman and had not gone, could not go, it lay for me as I had first found it as a girl-child by the winter fireplace, listening to the men's wonder tales. In my obsession and possession, the hunter men still walked. The great trees lifted forever across my vision, and the sounding waters still ran. My dream of the American forest was deep and mystic and old; but the dream itself was always in the distance, moving before the seekers like the sun.

The Coming of the Roads

    T he chestnut blight came slowly, a gray quiet death. At first there was a canker on one old tree, and then the canker spread. The spores blew in wind, and the branches began dying.
    We had always called Uncle Dan'l's trees “the chestnut orchard,” just across our line fence on the flat