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Spencer’s Mountain
Copyright © 1961, 2014 by Earl Hamner, Jr.
Cover art, special contents, and Electronic Edition © 2014 by RosettaBooks LLC

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

Cover jacket design by Alexia Garaventa
ISBN e-Pub edition: 9780795339578

With enduring gratitude
to my aunts, whose love
and faith and abundant
generosity made the writing
of this book possible:

Any resemblance between the characters herein and actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

Chapter 1

On the day before Thanksgiving the Spencer clan began to gather. It was a custom that at this time during the year the nine sons would come together in New Dominion. On Thanksgiving Eve they would celebrate their reunion with food and drink and talk. On the day itself the men would leave at dawn to hunt for deer.

All day cars had been arriving at Clay Spencer’s house. Each car was greeted by Clay-Boy, a thin boy of fifteen with a serious freckled face topped by an unruly shock of darkening corn-colored hair. Now the day was drawing toward evening, but still the boy lingered at the back gate waiting for the one uncle who had not yet arrived, the one he wanted most to see.

In the west the taller ridges of the Blue Ridge Mountains were rimmed with a fading autumn silver, but in the foothills, in the Spencers’ back yard, all was in darkness when the ninth and last car stopped at the back gate, Clay-Boy, waving his flashlight excitedly, directed the car to a parking place.

“Uncle Virgil?” called Clay-Boy, suddenly shy in front of his city uncle. Virgil Spencer was the one who had gone to Richmond during the Depression when the mill had closed for four years. In Richmond, Virgil had found work as a mechanic and had stayed on there even after the mill had reopened.

“Who-all’s here?” asked Virgil as he began unloading his gun and shells and hunting coat from the back seat.

“Your mama still got that law about no whiskey in the house?” asked Virgil. He reached into the glove compartment and removed a fifth of bourbon.

“There’s whiskey there all the same,” answered Clay-Boy. “They’ve been goen back and forth between here and Scottsville all day long.” Scottsville was the closest place where store whiskey could be bought.

“What she don’t know won’t hurt her,” laughed Virgil. He concealed the bottle in his hunting coat, and the man and the boy walked toward the crowded little company house where lights beamed cheerfully from each window and the muffled sounds of festive conversation could be heard.

Last year’s hunt was a shameful memory to Clay-Boy. For as long as he could remember he had wanted to go. Right up until the night before the hunt he had had his father’s permission. Then on the eve of the hunt, his mother, learning his plans, had said no. He wasn’t old enough, Olivia had claimed. Didn’t know how to handle a gun. Might not even come back alive with all those men out there crazy with whiskey and shooting at anything that moved. In the end she had won, and he had retired in an agony of frustration and cried silently into the pillow so late that he had not even wakened the next morning and had been deprived of even the pleasure of watching the men depart.

This year Clay-Boy was using a different strategy. He had spoken to his father about going on the hunt and Clay had agreed that it was all right with him as long as Olivia did not object too much. Clay-Boy then decided he just would not mention it to his mother at all and when the time came to go on the hunt he would simply go with the men.

When Clay-Boy and his uncle came to the kitchen door, Virgil threw it open and shouted, “Let’s start the party!”

“Well, Lord, look what the wind blew in,” exclaimed Olivia. Virgil was one of the youngest of the Spencer men and a great favorite with his brothers’ wives. He kissed each of the sisters-in-law in turn, and came at last to his mother, the undisputed ruler of the clan, old but still beautiful, so tiny it seemed incredible she could have mothered such an enormous brood of sons. In her white hair was a jaunty bunch of artificial violets. She had been enthroned in a rocking chair from which she had been directing the cooking, the conversation, and the setting of the table, all the while delivering a lecture on the advantages of a large family; she was far from satisfied with the number of grandchildren her sons’ wives had presented to her.

“Bend down here and give your old mama a kiss,” she demanded, laughing happily. Virgil bent forward and her hands came up and held his head while they kissed.

“What you want with a wife is to get some grandchildren like the rest of the boys,” she scolded.

“They’re all in there in the liven room, swappen lies. Go on in there. I reckon they’re expecten you.”

“I’ll be a ring-tail ripstaver!” exclaimed Clay Spencer when his brother entered the room. Clay-Boy watched as Virgil was welcomed into the group. The brothers were intensely fond of each other, and there was much clumsy hugging and back-slapping. More often than not their joy in seeing each other was expressed in an oath or a hearty laugh.

Watching his father and his uncles, Clay-Boy was impatient to be one of them. They were tall men. Not one of them was under six feet. They were small-boned but muscular, and each had some different shade of red hair and brown eyes. But it was not only to be like them physically that Clay-Boy yearned. It was his dream that some day he would earn the reputation his father and his uncles already enjoyed, for they were known to be good providers, hearty eaters, prodigious drinkers, courageous fighters, incomparable lovers and honorable in all dealings with their friends and neighbors. It was a proud thing to be a Spencer man, thought Clay-Boy.

Of the nine sons only Virgil had left the community permanently. The others, Matt, John, Rome, Luke, Anse, Ben, Clayton and Ham had left from time to time to look for better jobs, but they were never satisfied away from New Dominion and always came home again. Some of the boys—like John and Ben—drove to jobs in Charlottesville each day, but that was only twenty-eight miles away and they were always home with their families by nightfall.

Clay-Boy’s attention was drawn away from his uncles when he suddenly caught sight of his grandfather. His Grandfather Zebulon was a handsome old man. His hair, like his curling handlebar mustache, was white and carefully combed, and even his great age had failed to dim the zest, the merriment, the celebration of life that shone in his clear brown eyes.

The old man sat near the fire. He was not being ignored intentionally. It was simply that he was too old and inactive to rise and push his way into the group. His lips formed words to welcome his son and his hands would rise up to embrace him, but then Virgil’s attention would be attracted by one of his brothers.

Clay-Boy slipped over and stood beside his grandfather’s chair, and when a lull came in the conversation called, “Uncle Virgil, here’s Granddaddy.”

“Papa,” he scolded fondly, “what you doen up so late? I thought you always hit the hay when the sun set.”

“I’ll tell you the Lord’s truth,” answered Zebulon in his thin old voice, “these boys have nearly made an old woman out of me. Took my gun away from me, won’t let me drive a car from here to the gate, and they hide every drop of whiskey that comes in the house.”

“I’ll take care of that, Papa,” said Virgil. He reached in his pocket and brought out the bottle of whiskey he had hidden away and passed it to his father.

“Now,” said Virgil, “let’s get caught up on everythen that’s been goen on.”

Listening to the talk of his father, his grandfather and his uncles, Clay-Boy sat on the floor curled against the edge of a sofa, storing away each word to be remembered and savored long after the reunion was over. Suddenly he heard his name.

“Well, come on out here, son,” Clay said. “Your Uncle Virgil brought you somethen from Richmond.”

Virgil was holding out a long thin package wrapped in brown paper. “I thought it was about time you had one of your own,” Virgil said.

Silence fell among the men while Clay-Boy unwrapped the package. He removed the paper and discovered a hunting knife. It was enclosed in a sheath that had slits along the top so it could be attached to his belt. The handle was of beautifully polished wood and when he withdrew the blade from the sheath he found it razor-sharp. Self-consciously Clay-Boy attached the sheath to his belt and returned the blade to its place.

“I sure do thank you, Uncle Virgil,” Clay-Boy said. “I been wanten one.”

“Sure,” said Clay-Boy. “If the deer ain’t dead you jump on him and cut his throat.”

“When you goen to take that boy on the hunt, Clay?” asked the old grandfather.

“He’s old enough,” the old grandfather said. “When I was his age I must of killed me twenty-five deer. It wasn’t for sport back in them days. Food. Salt ’em down like you fellers do a pig nowadays. I plan on venison tomorrow night.”

“You plannen on some supper you better put some wood in the box. Nearly empty.”

Clay-Boy left the men reluctantly and was going through the kitchen when his mother noticed the hunting knife.

“You be careful of that thing,” she warned. “You’re liable to fall down and cut yourself on it.”

“Aw, Mama,” he objected impatiently. It annoyed him that Olivia always pointed out the most impossible and improbable dangers in any situation. Never had he tried out any new thing without having her warn him that it was too dangerous or that he was not old enough or he was sure to get hurt in the endeavor.

“And if you’ve got any notions about goen deer-hunten tomorrow you can just put it out of mind right now,” Olivia warned as the boy was halfway through the door.

Clay-Boy replied by slamming the door behind him as he went to the woodhouse for fuel to feed the ever-hungry old cooking range.

“Livy, you’re goen to turn that boy into a sissypants,” observed the old grandmother, Elizabeth. “Keepen him here in the house all the time. Never letten him go off and learn men’s ways.”

“It’s just not time for him to go hunten yet,” said Olivia. “You start ’em off hunten the next thing you know the old Army or Navy comes in here after ’em and that’s just one step away from getten married and leaven home. And where’s your child then? Off and gone, that’s where.”

“Nine of ’em I raised,” the old grandmother said. “They all went off and married women, God knows. ’Cept Virgil, and God knows what’ll come of that boy, breathen city dirt all day and ruinen his eyes with moven-picture shows at night.”

When Clay-Boy returned to the house, his arms laden with wood, supper was ready.

The meal was served in shifts, the men served first at the long kitchen table with their women hovering about, refilling each dish as soon as it came near being empty. The table was laden with the good country food that is abundant at that time of the year when all the summer canning is finished, when the hogs have been slaughtered and salted away in the smokehouse, when the fruits of the harvest are gathered, when the safety from hunger through the winter is assured, and a feast can be enjoyed without concern about whether the extra food can be spared.

During the meal the men ate for the most part in silence, but once Virgil looked up, and, spotting Clay-Boy across the table from him, inquired, “When you comen down to Richmond and let me teach you the mechanic’s trade?”

“Don’t you go enticen that boy out of school, Virgil Spencer,” Olivia said. “He’s goen to graduate from high school before he goes looken around to learn a trade. And it looks like if he keeps on the way he has been, he’s goen to graduate at the head of his class.”

The praise made Clay-Boy uncomfortable, and he was glad when his Uncle Virgil buttered his fifth hot biscuit and observed, “I been down yonder with city folks so long I forgot what real food tasted like.”

“You can tell that to look at you,” said old Elizabeth. “Thin as a rail. What do they feed you in them old lunch counters anyway?”

“Cardboard mostly,” Virgil replied. “You order a steak or pork chops or ham and eggs, it don’t matter what. Tastes like cardboard all the same.”

“That’s what comes from goen off so far from home. You ought to be home. Eaten in them old meal-a-minute places all the time. Wonder you ain’t dead. When was the last time you been to church?”

“Land of Goshen, Mama!” exclaimed Clay. “Why don’t you shut up and let the man eat his supper?”

“You heish your disrespect, Clay,” said the old grandmother. “Here, Virgil, try some more of these butter beans. Me and Livy raised ’em last spring and it’s about the best batch we put up all summer.”

When the men had finished and each had departed, sated and drowsy from so much food, the women removed the dishes, washed them, and reset the table.

As Clay-Boy was leaving the kitchen to follow the men into the living room, his mother called after him, “You better start getten ready for bed, boy.”

“Don’t you try to stay up with them men,” she said. “They’re goen to be in there gabben half the night.”

“Yes ma’am,” said Clay-Boy and slipped into the living room. He sat on the floor at the end of a sofa and watched while the men began to pass a bottle around the room.

“There ain’t the deer around no more there used to be,” he mused. “Nor bear neither for that matter. When I was a young buck look like all you had to do was step out the door and wait for somethen to come along. Bear sometimes, deer sometimes and all the time there was wild turkey. Times is limbered up these days. Ever’thing killed off ’cept some scrawny little old doe that don’t know enough to do her grazen while you boys is asleep. That’s about all you’ll run up on tomorrow.”

From the kitchen the old grandmother called, “Don’t you-all boys give that old man no more whiskey. You know how he gets.”

“Pay no ’tention to her,” the old man said. “I been married to that old woman nearly a hundred years and ain’t heard a thing from her but belly-achen.”

“Old woman, you heish your mouth,” the old man called. “Any man lived to be a hundred and three on the next Fourth of July got a right.”

“Them boys have give that old man too much,” Elizabeth grumbled to her daughters-in-law. “Claimen he’s a hundred and three! He ain’t a day over ninety-five. Man that old ought to be getten ready to meet Old Master Jesus ’stead of sitten in there drinken whiskey and tellen lies.”

“Up on the mountain, when I was a boy,” the old man began the story he told each year, “there used to be a big old buck deer that was white all over and had pink eyes. Lots of folks that never laid eyes on him used to claim there wasn’t no such thing. Some of them even claimed he was a ghost. I don’t say one way or the other, ghost or flesh. All I know is I have laid eyes on him.”

Sitting almost at his grandfather’s feet, Clay-Boy listened to the telling of the story. He had heard it hundreds of times before, but each new telling would send shivers down his spine, and he knew that tonight when he went to sleep he would dream of the white deer; he always did after he had heard the story.

“I never will forget the day,” old Zebulon continued. “It was comen long toward fall of the year and I was out on the mountain cutten some wood against the cold weather. Had my gun along just in case any game come by. Around the middle of the day I took a little rest and was eaten a little lunch the old woman had put up in a paper bag, and all of a sudden somethen moved through them woods like a winter wind. Never made no noise, mind, just wind. Well sir, it was that big white deer and I’ll tell you the God’s truth if I hadn’t of reared up right that minute he’d of run over me. I got in two good shots at him. I was a young man in them days, before my eyes turned to water, and I was the best shot in the country. Maybe I missed that deer, maybe he was travelen too fast. Maybe it was like some used to claim, maybe he was a real ghost and buckshot couldn’t of done no good even if it went straight through his heart.”

“What ever happened to that old buck?” asked Clay, knowing that unless the old man were forced to end the story he might start it somewhere near the beginning and tell the whole thing all over again.

“Nobody killed him yet,” the old man said. “The way I figure it he ain’t met his match. The way it is, that deer bein’ white and all, he stand out where a regular deer don’t. He has fought just about ever’thing there is to fight from man to bear and done whopped ’em all. He knows all the tricks there is to know, that deer do.”

“Papa,” said Virgil, “sometimes I think you made that old white deer up. If he really roams these parts, how come nobody but you ever laid eyes on him?”

“Oh, he’s there all right,” said the old man. “Maybe the eye sharp enough to see him just ain’t come along yet. I’ve even heard it told that if that deer dies by human hand his spirit will pass into the man that kills him. From that day on that man will be different, marked to follow a path unknown, a man marked for glory!”

The old man’s voice had risen so that it could be heard throughout the house, and for a moment after he had uttered his prophecy there was a sober silence.

“That old man is drunk,” said Elizabeth from the kitchen. “Them boys is feeden him whiskey just as sure as you’re born.”

Upstairs in the boys’ room, Clay-Boy undressed in the darkness so as not to wake his sleeping brothers. As he took off each article of clothing he placed it with care so that he might find it all the easier in the morning. It would still be dark when he dressed again to go on the hunt.

In his bed Clay-Boy sought sleep but it would not come. He was so keyed up that his mind could not hold onto any subject, but kept leaping from one exciting fact to another. Tomorrow he would join the hunters. He owned a knife which was not a secondhand hand-me-down, but a brand-new shining thing that was entirely his own and had come all the way from Richmond. His mother would be angry when she found that he had gone on the hunt, but by then it would be too late. Tomorrow he would become a hunter. So went the thoughts of the boy as he hovered on the brink of sleep.

Finally sleep did overtake him, and as he slept visions of the great white deer came again and again across the fields of his dreams, sometimes distant, a white and marble sculptured ghost at the edge of the forest; another time so close he could hear the swift encounter of its hoofs against the frozen earth before it leapt into the dream sky, so high it would be silhouetted against the moon, white on white; and again so close he could hear the bellowings of its lungs sucking in great gusts of air and exhaling so powerfully that the wind itself changed direction, always its antlers held delicately high above the ensnaring branches of the trees and the bushes. And every time Clay-Boy pulled the trigger he would feel the harsh recoil of the gun against the muscle of his shoulder and wake with the sound of the explosion ringing like a diminishing echo in his ears.

After a while he drifted into a sleep like some gently rocking unguided craft that flowing with the current will drift from shallow into deeper and deeper water, his final coherent thought: Tomorrow it will happen. Finally he drifted so deep into oceans of sleep that not even the dream of the great white deer could reach him, and he rested.

Chapter 2

It was not yet dawn when Clay-Boy woke to the rich and furtive voices of his father and his uncles that floated up to him from the kitchen. The hours during which he had slept might have been seconds, for he was awake immediately with all the intoxicating thoughts that had been there the moment he had gone to sleep.

He dressed in the darkness. It was no great chore except that he was trembling from the cold and the anticipation of whatever unknown thing lay ahead.

Going down the hall he was careful to tiptoe past the room his mother and father shared. He knew his mother would be awake on account of the noise. Over the years it had become a custom that the men would prepare their own breakfast, and he knew that if he could get safely past his mother’s door he would be free to join the men.

“Clay-Boy!” Her voice sounded distant behind the closed door and he pretended not to hear. He kept on tiptoeing down the entire stairway until he was at last on the ground floor. He felt his way along the dark downstairs hallway and came suddenly into the light of the kitchen.

Some somber thing had come over the Spencer men during the night. Perhaps it was that they had wakened too soon from sleep or perhaps they felt the effects of the whiskey they had drunk. More probably it was a foreboding about the hunt itself, for no matter who faced the deer that day would be put to a test. Before he came out of the forest, something of his character, his reputation as a marksman, his courage, his stealth, or even his very manhood would be challenged and he would either maintain his position among the men of his clan or he would lose something of himself. There was the feeling that anything could happen and each of the hunters had his own secret intention, hope, and desire that it would be he who would bring back the deer which, even as they gathered to kill it, was waiting somewhere in the darkness on Spencer’s Mountain.

At the old cooking range Clay was preparing breakfast. Already there was a huge pile of bacon, and into the bacon grease Clay poured a bowl of eggs for scrambling. Two pots of strong coffee were perking on the back of the stove; the aroma of the coffee and the bacon had a restorative effect on the boy.

Clay-Boy went to the kitchen cabinet and took down a plate for himself and placed it with the others heating on the back of the stove.

Before the food was placed on the table and all during breakfast the bottle of bourbon was passed from one man to another. The first time the bottle was passed, Rome automatically handed the bottle around to Clay-Boy’s father’s place, but since Clay was still at the stove, Clay-Boy took the bottle. Since he had recently wakened from sleep and since in his haste he had not brushed his teeth, the whiskey was the first thing to pass through his throat that morning, and as he swallowed a good slug of the stuff, his first impulse was to vomit it back again. Mercifully, for it would have been unmanly in the eyes of the other men, Clay-Boy was able to hold it down and passed the bottle on to the uncle seated to his right.

“Eat hearty, men,” said Clay, placing the platter of scrambled eggs on the table. Clay-Boy, too excited to eat, was glad when the men rose from the table, put on their hunting coats and began gathering their guns.

The old grandfather was not going on the hunt, but as each of his sons filed out of the kitchen door he offered advice and admonitions.

“I’d try that ridge over there right above where the minnow creek goes under the footbridge. Best place in the world for deer.”

“A deer is a heap smarter than a human man so don’t go thinken you can outsmart him.”

To Clay-Boy, who was last out of the door, he said, “You know what they’ll do to you if you shoot and miss one, don’t you, boy?”

And finally, when his sons had reached the back gate, the old man called to them, “Don’t nobody shoot each other,” but they were gone beyond the hearing of his voice. He closed the door and sat alone in the kitchen and watched through the window as the silhouette of the mountain began to take form out of the darkness.

A light snow had fallen during the night. As Clay-Boy followed along after his father and his uncles, he saw that each of them had stepped in the other’s footsteps so that someone coming after them might guess that only one person had made the tracks. Carefully the boy lengthened his stride so that his footsteps coincided with those made by the men he followed.

Ahead of him Spencer’s Mountain loomed snow-white, pine-green, arched with the blue of a cold winter morning. The mountain itself housed all those things mysterious to the boy. There were caves there where, long ago, boys had been lost and never found again. One of the caves had a lake in it, so deep and so hidden that if you dropped a stone from the rim you could count to five before the sound of the splash would travel back to you. The mountain itself he had never explored, being forbidden by his mother; it was said to be the home of the largest rattlesnake ever seen, a snake so outsized and savage that its fame had been carried through several counties by woodsmen who had seen it and had never been able to kill it. The mountain held all that was unexplored for Clay-Boy, but most of all its fascination for him lay in the fact that it was the range of the great white deer imbedded in his memory from the earliest tales he had heard from his grandfather.

The hunting party was about a quarter of the way up the mountain when one of the men called out, “There’s a good stand right here.”

“Let’s give this one to Clay-Boy,” Clay suggested, and the other men agreed.

“I’ll be right up there where the road turns, son,” said Clay. “If one comes ’long I’ll let you have first crack at him.”

Clay-Boy took up his station just off the roadway. He found an old tree stump, brushed it clear of snow and sat down. For a little while he could hear the distant conversations of the other men as each took his stand, but finally he could hear them no longer and a great stillness settled over the woods.

He was not as cold as he had expected to be. Actually he might have done without one of the extra sweaters he was wearing. After a while he began to feel drowsy. He nodded, catching himself each time before his gradually lowering chin reached his chest. Each time on opening his eyes he would scan all that he could see for deer and, finding none, would begin to nod again.

Something quite suddenly brought him fully awake. It was not a noise, for no sound had come. It was something the boy felt, a presence he sensed, and in the instant his eyes opened he saw standing not more than thirty feet away an enormous deer.

What he saw was fixed forever in his mind, the dull gray sky of the winter morning, the barren limbs of the sleeping trees, the virgin snow and the great deer which stood silent, immobile, and enduring through all of memory.

The deer either did not see him or it had no fear. It stood nearly rigid; only its sides moved as it inhaled gulps of air and exhaled them in small clouds of fog on the frosty air. The animal was a majestic thing. It stood with its proud head high and erect, its many-pointed antlers regally aloft. Its coat was white, and even across the distance that separated him and the deer, Clay-Boy could see that its eyes were pink.

A shocking thing came then into the boy’s mind. He had thought so much about the hunt that the whole adventure had been contained in the idea. He had pictured himself coming home triumphantly carrying the greatest deer in the forest, but the actual killing of the deer he had not even imagined. Now it came to him with a terrible knowing that the whole purpose of his being there was that he should kill the live thing that stood before him.

Clay-Boy hesitated. He could feel the small beads of cold perspiration breaking out on his forehead and down his back. He did not want to kill the beast. For one brief moment he wished the deer would leap away and lose itself in the forest, but it stood silent, quivering, waiting.

When Clay-Boy raised his rifle his hands were trembling. Carefully he steadied his aim by laying his head against the butt of the rifle and when he found the heart of the deer he closed his eyes and pulled the trigger. The recoil sent the boy tumbling backward and when he scrambled to his feet he thought for a second the shot had missed its mark. But in that same instant the forelegs gave way and the deer collapsed into a kneeling position. Even when the hind legs folded and the deer’s body was entirely on the ground it held its head aloft, as if reluctant to surrender its antlers to the ground.

Clay-Boy had heard enough hunting stories that he knew now what must be done. He ran headlong toward the stricken deer, grasped the antlers, and with all his force twisted them over and rammed them into the ground, thus protecting himself and exposing the deer’s throat at the same time.

He reached for the knife, fumbling over the snap at the sheath for a second, and then when he had the knife firmly grasped he plunged the blade into the fur and leather of the animal’s throat. A shudder wrenched through the dying deer and when the boy felt the quiver of final strength wane from the antler he held, something seared through his body that filled him with awe and terror.

Clay-Boy turned away, reeled back toward the stump where he had been sitting, and vomited. When his retching stopped he looked up and saw his father crashing through the underbrush.

“Oh my God, son,” exclaimed Clay. He pointed his gun into the sky and fired three shots, a signal to the other brothers to come in from their positions.

“I was thinking about what Grandpa said,” answered Clay-Boy, “about whoever killed the white deer would be marked someway.”

Someone was approaching down the snowy wood trail; when he turned the bend they saw that it was Virgil. He walked over to the deer, and when he saw that it was the white deer, he turned to Clay and said, “I’m kind of sorry you got him, Clay. It’s a burden on a man to be marked.”

Virgil went to where Clay-Boy, to hide his trembling, had knelt and was cleaning his knife in the earth and snow. Virgil knelt beside Clay-Boy, and though he spoke to Clay, his eyes were on Clay-Boy’s eyes. “It wasn’t no boy killed that deer, Clay,” he said. “It took a man to do it.”

It was a gracious thing for Virgil to say, and the remark had a calming effect on the boy. The trembling began to leave him and he was able now to squat alongside the carcass with his other uncles as they arrived, each one expressing his astonishment and admiration at what he had done, making guesses as to the deer’s weight and counting the antlers.

When all the men were gathered they began to prepare the deer for the triumphant march home. Slits were made in the fore and hind legs and then the strong tendon pried through so the carrying pole might be inserted.

Anse, the eldest, and Clay, the strongest, shouldered the carrying pole and led the way out of the forest. When the men had come up the mountain, Clay-Boy had trailed at the end of the line, but now when Clay stepped forward, his uncles motioned for Clay-Boy to step in the line behind his father.

Snow had begun to fall again on Spencer’s Mountain, and as it settled thickly over the place where the deer had received its death, the stain of the blood changed from vermilion to red to pink to white, and there was only the white stillness, the falling snow and the quickly vanishing outlines of the steps of men.

Chapter 3

After Thanksgiving the winter turned severe. Snow fell all through Christmas and New Year, blotting out the horizon from the boy who at odd times during the day would stop in his chores and gaze absently off toward the barn where the antlers of the great deer were mounted over the door. As the months passed and nothing extraordinary happened, he became less of a curiosity in the community, and this was a relief to him. But in his own mind he would reconstruct what had happened on the mountain, marvel at the event, and wonder what it could mean.

One day the icicles which had grown on the eaves of the barn began to glisten in the sunlight and melt. Each following day brought some new sign of spring. Olivia’s crocuses along the front walk seemed to burst into blossom overnight. The earth began to dry and the only sign of winter that remained was the crusted patches of snow that lingered in shady corners beside the house. Soon, along every path through the hills the redbud and dogwood were in blossom, and the edge of every wood was filigreed with redbud pink and dogwood white.

One Saturday morning Clay-Boy woke at dawn and listened to the sounds of the house as it awakened to morning. The morning was quiet, still bathed in the pale light of dawn, broken only by the abrasive cry of some wakeful rooster. The only sound from inside the house was the regular, terrible rise and fall of his grandfather’s snore. It came from the room downstairs which the two old people shared. Clay-Boy wondered if his grandmother was awake; she frequently complained that she had not slept a wink all night on account of the old man’s snoring.

At five o’clock, Clay-Boy heard the alarm from the clock his father kept beside his bed. It sounded for a moment, then was silent as Clay wakened and turned it off. Clay-Boy listened now to his father’s long deep yawn, smothered so as not to wake the children, and then after a moment the torturous screech of bedsprings as his father raised himself in the bed and put his feet on the floor. Clay usually muttered to no one in particular a four-or-five-word weather forecast. This morning he said, “Goen to be a beaut.”

Then there was silence again while Clay got into his work clothes, broken at last when he made his way down the stairs, through the living room and into the kitchen. Once in the kitchen Clay set about building the fire in the old wood cooking range, drenching each stick of wood with kerosene to make the fire start quicker. Then when the fire roared up the chimney he dressed in a heavier coat to go out and milk the cow and feed the pigs.

With the milk pail in his hand Clay tiptoed back to the foot of the stairs and called softly, “Sweetheart.” It was his name for Olivia and the only thing he ever called her at that hour. And she whispered, “All right. I’m awake.”

By the time Olivia reached the kitchen, Clay had gone to the barn. Soon the aroma of strong black coffee drifted up the stairway to where Clay-Boy lay, and the tantalizing smell of fried lean bacon, the bubbling, spattering, hissing sound of fried eggs, and all the warm rich sunny smells of biscuits baking.

Clay announced his return from the barn by placing the pail loudly on the kitchen table. Then Olivia strained the warm foamy milk into Mason jars, placed them in the refrigerator and sat down to breakfast with Clay.

While they ate they talked quietly and the sound of their voices floated up to Clay-Boy.

“Clay-Boy’s goen to need money for his class ring soon,” his mother said. “I put a down-payment of three dollars on it when they ordered them, but there’s twelve more has to be paid when the rings come.”

“I’m senden that boy through high school to get an education,” said Clay. “What the Sam Hill does he need a ring for?”

“It’s like a sign,” explained Olivia, “something to show he graduated.”

“Well, he can walk in some place and ask for a job and the minute the man sees that ring on his finger, he’ll know he’s a high school graduate and that’ll put him ahead of the ones that aren’t wearen one.”

“A ring is somethen pretty to go on a woman’s hand is my way of looken at it,” said Clay. “Clay-Boy don’t need any ring to show he’s graduated from high school. It’s what they put in his head that counts.”

“He’s goen to be the only one in the class that won’t get a ring, then. You want him to be different from the others?”

“You’re A–1 right I want him to be different. I want him to make somethen of himself. The rest of ’em ain’t goen to amount to a hill of beans. But Clay-Boy’s goen somewhere in this world.”

A man who had been to school only a few days in his life, Clay had an incredible respect for learning. In New Dominion it was a rare thing for a boy to graduate from high school because extreme youth was no barrier to finding a job with the company. Most boys dropped out of school once they passed the seventh grade to take a job, either to earn their independence or to help with the support of the numerous brothers and sisters. Long ago Clay Spencer had ruled out this possibility for his own sons and daughters. “I’ll give ’em what I was too big a fool to get,” he would declare. “Them babies of mine will get a high school education.”

Now the first installment of his dream was drawing near. Clay-Boy, the only boy in a class of thirteen seniors, was due to graduate on the first of May.

“I know it’s sinful to wish for somethen that just can’t be,” said Olivia, “but it would be my heart’s craven to see that boy go on to college.”

“No use day-dreamen,” said Olivia as she rose from the table to begin preparing the children’s breakfast.

“Goen to be a nice day, looks like,” said Clay. “There’s the sun comen up.”

A ray of sun sent a pencil of light into the room where the boys slept. Clay-Boy, careful not to wake his brother Matt, who slept beside him, rose from the bed and went to the window to watch the sun come up.

His window overlooked an orchard of crabapple trees. Clay-Boy pretended to himself that they had been planted by Johnny Appleseed, and there was no reason why they could not have been. Now in the first light of a spring morning a curtain of light fog was lifting from the orchard. Already the tender green leaves were glistening on the trees, disguising the heavy gnarled old trunks and branches with their color and shape.

Suddenly a flock of goldfinches flew into the orchard, thousands of little golden bundles that might have been flung from the morning sun into the pale green fog-damp orchard. They would cling to the young branches, fill the air with their canary-like warblings long enough to announce the new day and then disperse to their separate chores of eating or singing or courting. Each spring they came to the orchard and some mornings they came in such number that the pale green leaves would be concealed and the trees would become a swaying mass of gold and singing.

Clay-Boy watched the gold-green singing morning until he heard his mother’s voice calling from the foot of the stairs.

Clay went to the center of the room and pulled the cord that turned on the single electric bulb hanging from the ceiling. The glare of the bulb revealed two beds in the room. The one in which Clay-Boy had slept contained his next oldest brother, Matt. In the other bed, huddled together in a single blanket-covered lump were his next three brothers, Mark, Luke, and John. Clay-Boy gave each sleeping form a nudge, then crossed the hall, went into the girls’ room and switched on the light. There, in two more beds, were Becky, Shirley and Pattie-Cake. There was another child, but he slept in a baby bed in the room with his father and mother. His name was Donnie; he had not grown old enough to have much impact on the family and was referred to mostly as the baby. When he was satisfied that the girls were awake Clay-Boy went down to the kitchen. One after another the brood followed.

“Lord God Almighty!” said Clay as he sat at the head of the table and looked at his assembled offspring, “I never saw so many beautiful babies in my life.”

There were nine of them in all. Each one had red hair, but on each head the shade was a little different. Clay-Boy’s hair was the color of dry corn shucks. Mart’s was the red of the clay hills. Becky’s long curls were the pink of a sunset; Shirley’s plaits were auburn. Luke’s hair was the russet of autumn leaves. Mark’s was reddish-blond. John’s ringlets were a golden red and Pattie-Cake’s little ponytail was an orange red and the baby had so little hair it was hard to tell what shade it might become. The shade could be from dark to light, the color was predictable.

Each of the children was small of bone and lean. Some of them were freckled and some were not and some had the brown eyes of their father and some had their mother’s green eyes, but on each of them there was some stamp of grace of build and movement, and it was this Clay voiced when he said, as he often did, “Every one of my babies is a thoroughbred.”

They were assembled at a table nine feet long. Clay had built it himself, and it was flanked on each side by wooden benches. There was ample room at the table for all the children and even room left over; friends or relatives who happened to drop in around mealtime were sincerely welcomed. During the summer hardly a meal went by when, squeezed in among the Spencer children, there weren’t two or three of the neighboring children taking advantage of the Spencers’ sprawling hospitality, however frugal their means.

“Look at them babies,” said Clay. “You ever in your life see anything prettier than that?”

Olivia looked up from the pan where she was frying eggs to each individual’s liking and said, “I wish I could keep ’em that way. If I had my wish in this world my children would never grow up. I’d just keep ’em little the rest of their lives.”

“I remember one time when I was a little old tadpole boy,” said Clay, “I had this little baby duck. Mama’s got a picture of me somewhere holden that duck. I used to think that little web-toed quacker was the prettiest thing I ever laid eyes on. Just hated the day to come for that duck to grow up. One day I got the fool idea that if I’d squeeze that duck hard enough every day I could keep him from growen, so every mornen I’d nearly squeeze the tar out of him. One mornen I squeezed him too hard I reckon, because he up and died, but it taught me somethen. You try to keep a thing from growen and it’ll die on you.”

“Still I hate to see my children grow up and leave me,” said Olivia. “You just never know what’s goen to become of ’em.”

“My babies will turn out all right,” said Clay. “They’re thoroughbreds.” He looked over his brood fondly and when his eyes met Clay-Boy’s, he said, “I’m goen to work on the house this mornen, son. I want you to help me.”

The house was not really a house but a dream Clay had. It was his dream to build a house with his own hands, a house his wife and children could see being constructed, a house that would give strength and love to their own lives because they had seen the strength and love with which it was built. He had promised the house to Olivia on their wedding night and had shown her where he would build it, on the summit of Spencer’s Mountain in the same spot where his mother and father’s old cabin had long since rotted away.

The site was important because it had a history. In 1650 two gentlemen of the Tidewater, Abraham Wood and Edward Bland, seeking a new fur-trading field, had made a journey of exploration into the western mountains. A member of the party, Benjamin Clayton Spencer, came upon a mountain where the earth teemed with richness and which was filled with all manner of game. On the summit he built a small lean-to and returned there the following spring with his wife and children to make it his home. From that time the mountain had been family property and was known as Spencer’s Mountain.

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3