A Platters record slips into place on an antique jukebox. “Deep in the dark your kiss will thrill me, like days of old ...” Time to leave. How to explain the tears?
We continue south on Route 11 (that’s what’s nice about traveling with a dog: you think in the first person plural), and within five hours we arrive in Floyd and head for the Blue Ridge Restaurant, across from a redbrick courthouse and a statue of a Confederate soldier.
I take a seat at one of the 20 or so tables and eavesdrop on the conversation between the waitress, Iris Yeatts, and some elderly men in bib overalls.
“Hi, Bill? How you?”
“Storm’s a-comin’.”
“I heard tell.”
Lyrical language that resonates with the Scotch-Irish lilt of the area’s early settlers.
I order the special of the day—a grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup. For $3.50. The sandwich arrives on white bread grilled in butter. (Want to be laughed out of town? Order whole-grain bread.) The soup is warm and delicious. As good as, maybe even better than, the Campbell’s Mom used to serve. “Well, now, honey, that’s exactly what it is,” Mrs. Yeatts announces. “With a lot of butter and cream added.”
The cuisine of grief: High in fat, low on pretension.
After lunch we head for Schoolhouse Fabrics, a turn-of-the century grammar school turned pilgrimage site for southern quilters. Mrs. Yeatts has informed me that the women who work there can provide the names of local quilters.
I start by examining a display of quilts bearing their creators’ names. They look like they’ve been made on sewing machines; too perfect, too store-bought. That is not what I want. I want a quilt like the one my grandmother would make if she were still alive. Like the one she hand-stitched from fabrics of my childhood and presented to me on my wedding day.
A conference among the sales clerks results in a name. “Uldine Duncan up on Alum Ridge Road. Only one does it by hand anymore.”
A soft voice answers my call. I explain my project. Mrs. Duncan suggests I come over. She gives directions. “If you pass the power line across the road, you’ve passed my house.”
The two-lane road winds around a mountain, then back on itself. A sign in a pasture reads “Are You Prepared to Meet God?” just before the road makes an abrupt 180-degree about-face.
Uldine Duncan lives in a five-room house as tiny and neat as its occupant. We sit and talk. She rocks in her chair to the rhythm of the conversation. Her feet don’t touch the floor. “Them that makes quilts on machines…I ain’t got nothin’ against them, but you might as well just go to the store and buy yourself one.”
Holding up gnarled, arthritic fingers to make her point, she tells me she fears she won’t be able to practice her craft for much longer.
“Well, lemme see what you’ve got.”
I open the trunk. She reaches for a bow tie and eyes it professionally. I’m relieved by her cold appraisal. She’s seen husbands come and go. Perhaps children as well. These mountains are hard on the very young and the elderly. What’s one more dead husband? It puts things in perspective. I begin to see the clothing for what it is and what it will become rather than as a reminder of all I’ve lost.
Yes, she’ll give it a try.
I take my leave and follow Shooting Creek Road, an old moonshine route so narrow, twisting, and desolate that I wonder if my body would ever be found were my car to careen into the deep gully falling from the side of the road. There are no guardrails.
Twenty minutes later I’m at Old Spring Farm, where I bed down for the night and awake to scrambled eggs with red peppers and a chutney (or “mountain jam,” as they call it) unlike any I’ve tasted.
We leave ahead of the storm blowing in. My mission is accomplished—I’ve found a quilter—but I dread returning home to Bob’s empty closet and bureau drawers. So I head deeper into the mountains. Like the Cistercian monks at Holy Cross Abbey, who seek God in solitude, I believe that revelation finds its way into the solitary life. I elect two more days of silence within the confines of my car.
With a few exceptions. I stop in Vesta, Virginia, at Poor Farmer’s Farm, for a fried apple pie. “We make it in a big old pan,” the saleswoman tells me. “The ole-timey way, fried slowly in the skillet. You get more of the ole-timey greasy taste, which is great.” I buy two extra for the road.
Arriving at the two-lane Blue Ridge Parkway, which will take us through North Carolina to the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, I tell Gabriel, “This is perfect.” During the hour’s drive to Fancy Gap, we don’t pass another car. The rain falls into the deep green arms of rhododendrons. The air is still and warm. The only sound is of the tires moving along the wet pavement.
We drive nine hours to Knoxville, spend the night in a motel, then leave the next day for Walland and Blackberry Farm, where we settle into a cottage discreetly set in the woods among other cottages that look as though they’ve been there forever. My room has a fireplace stoked by a staff member whose sole job seems to be to keep me warm. The bathroom is marble, with a whirlpool bath and separate shower. And dinner has a great deal to recommend it—not least the wines, carefully selected from the inn’s extensive cellar and served by the owner’s handsome son, who starts me off with Champagne, “because it’s underrated as a wine with which to start a meal, and it goes particularly well with foie gras.” Oh, yes, it does.
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