Hill Man Read online

  HILL MAN

  Other books by Janice Holt Giles

  published by The University Press of Kentucky

  The Believers

  The Enduring Hills

  40 Acres and No Mule

  Hannah Fowler

  The Kentuckians

  The Land Beyond the Mountains

  Miss Willie

  The Plum Thicket

  HILL MAN

  Janice Holt Giles

  With a Foreword by Wade Hall

  Publication of this volume was made possible in part by grants from

  the E.O. Robinson Mountain Fund

  and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

  Copyright © 2000 by The University Press of Kentucky

  Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth,

  serving Bellarmine College, Berea College, Centre

  College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University,

  The Filson Club Historical Society, Georgetown College,

  Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University,

  Morehead State University, Transylvania University,

  University of Kentucky, University of Louisville,

  and Western Kentucky University.

  All rights reserved.

  Editorial and Sales Offices: The University Press of Kentucky 663

  South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008

  04 03 02 01 00 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Giles, Janice Holt.

  Hill man / Janice Holt Giles,

  p. cm.

  “Published in 1954 by Pyramid Books of New York under the

  pen name of John Garth”—P. 1.

  ISBN 0-8131-2165-5 (alk. paper)

  1. Mountain life—Kentucky—Fiction. 2. Farm life—Kentucky

  —Fiction. 3. Kentucky—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3513.I4628 H55 2000

  813’.54—dc21 99-055677

  This book is printed on acid-free recycled paper meeting

  the requirements of the American National Standard

  for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials.

  Manufactured in the United States of America.

  Foreword

  Wade Hall

  In October of 1945, when Janice Holt married Henry Giles in Louisville just after he returned from service in World War II, she acquired not only a husband but considerable literary property. It was his home community of Giles Ridge in Adair County in south central Kentucky, an area whose rich history and culture she would mine for her books the rest of her life. After four years in Louisville, she moved with Henry to a forty-acre farm on Giles Ridge, an area where she and Henry would live until her death in 1979 and his death in 1986.

  Before the move Janice had already written two novels, The Enduring Hills and Miss Willie. By 1954, with Henry’s help, she had written and published six more books, all, with the exception of The Kentuckians, set in her adopted community. Hill Man was one of those books.

  Called “Vengeance” in manuscript, Hill Man was written in 1951, just after Janice had completed 40 Acres and No Mule, an autobiographical account of their life in the hill country. Three years later, in 1954, Hill Man was finally published. Her first three novels had been published under the somewhat confining editorial policies of Westminster Press, a Presbyterian publishing house; Harbin’s Ridge and Hill Man were the first two manuscripts submitted to her new publisher, Houghton Mifflin, by her agent, Oliver Swan. Harbin’s Ridge was immediately accepted, but Hill Man was declined. Swan also offered the manuscript to Harcourt Brace and Harper and Brothers, but no one would take it, calling it formless, too episodic, and centered around an unattractive character. Then she authorized Swan to submit it to a paperback publisher under a pseudonym, and so Hill Man was finally published in 1954 by Pyramid Books of New York under the pen name of John Garth, with a first printing of 300,000 copies. It would be her only original paperback book.

  The fact is that Hill Man was a radical departure from her earlier novels that had built for her an image and a large readership. Apparently chafing under the constrictions and revisions required by Westminster, she had told Oliver Swan that it had been “a great joy to turn with freedom and a sense of integrity” to Harbin’s Ridge and Hill Man. Although Hill Man became a kind of orphaned book, it was one that she valued for its earthiness and accuracy. After reading the galley proofs for the book, she wrote the publisher: “I was struck by its strength. It is the most realistic ridge book we have written, completely honest and presenting the truest picture of most of the ridge men.” Furthermore, despite his amorality, she considered her protagonist, Rady Cromwell, “thoroughly likeable” for his “unwillingness to be beaten.” Elsewhere she said, “Rady is not fiction. He is fact.”

  In fact, however, Rady Cromwell is a backwoods hero and sexual athlete most of her readers were not prepared to accept. Set on Bruton Ridge, Hill Man presented another view of the hill life Janice had portrayed with a certain romantic aura and delicacy in Miss Willie and Tara’s Healing. Many readers and critics had already noted the “masculine strength” of Janice’s writing, but without the puritanical and marketing restraints of church and mainline publishers she was free to write a more comprehensive, honest picture of hill life that included frank treatments of sexuality.

  Giles asked the publisher not to use a “lurid cover“; nevertheless, the cover of the 25-cent paperback edition of Hill Man showed a shirtless young farmer at his plow eyeing a sophisticated-looking young woman with a mixture of puzzlement and attraction. Above the title a teaser labeled the contents “The earthy story of a Kentucky mountaineer and a city woman.” The real identity of John Garth was revealed soon after the book’s publication.

  Although the novel is fleshed-out with a gallery of colorful characters, the story belongs first and foremost to Rady Cromwell, the son of a country Baptist preacher. By the time he has reached sixteen, however, he has rejected his father’s moral strictures and has learned to shoot craps, play stud poker, drink moonshine, and make all manner of mischief. At twelve he was able to turn an ordinary hollow reed into a “touch-off,” a homemade gun that he used to win a turkey shoot. Before he is a grown man he has become a shrewd prankster, hell-raiser, and con man with an ability to separate people from their money and land. He is also a bold, crafty, hard-working, good-natured, inventive, exciting young man possessed with muscular good looks. For his daring and dangerous ways, he is admired by men and loved by women. He is a charming backwoods promoter and entrepreneur who pulls himself up the social and economic ladder, step by step, until he has mastered and used any number of women, including two wives. He is always the opportunist in the business of “bettering himself.” His other talents include playing his guitar and singing “song-ballats” like “Lord Thomas” and “Barby Allen.”

  Rady always gets what he wants: first a gun, then a dog and a guitar. Then he wanted a widow and her farm. Then he wanted an even more beautiful widow and her property. As his admiring narrator says, “He didn’t know yet how he would get them, but he never doubted for a minute that he would. For besides it being his nature to want certain things, it was his nature also to get what he wanted.”

  Rady’s robust libido is easily satisfied without moral qualms. His awareness of his own sexuality is described by Giles’s narrator: “Rady looked at his own body, curved smooth and hard, and like copper in the firelight, his legs ropey and tough with young muscles.… Clean and young and unbending strong. Like a bobcat, crouched to spring, ready to rip. Wound up and tight-sprung, he was about to burst with the good way he felt, and he stretched long and touched the foot of the bed with his toes.” Women who fall deeply, hopelessly in love with him are easy prey. He w
atches helplessly as his first wife is being gored by a raging bull, and “it flashed into and across his mind that with Annie gone nothing but Mister Rowe stood between him and that fine farm, and Mister Rowe was a sick man. With Annie gone he’d still have all he’d ever had with her, and he’d be free to get the rest.” Despite his admiration for Rady, the narrator also has sympathy for the women he victimizes: “It’s a sad thing,” he says, “but when a woman lets a man have his way with her she gives him the upper hand every time. She hands over to him the best that she’s got, expecting him to cherish it, and he don’t.”

  During a protracted seduction episode he admits to his love object that “I ain’t a pertickler nice feller.” Indeed, only a master writer could have created such an attractive, alluring rogue. Only the hand of a master writer like Giles could have described in such poignant detail the love longing of the starved and hungry Cordelia Rowe, who is powerless in the face of the sexual magnetism of her hired farm manager. Only a major talent could have gone to such depths to dissect the psychology of their doomed relationship. Only an artist could have painted the sylvan seduction scene, adulterous though it is, without pruriency or primness: “Like a water-dry deer, they slaked the long thirst of their mouths, drinking deep and greedy, until neither of them had any breath left. Like starved pieces of living flesh seeking food, their hands and their mouths looked for and found the places of love, neither of them saying a word, neither of them even knowing when they sank down to the bed of moss on the bank of the brook.” In following his nature he eventually destroys the women who love him. “Just by being yourself,” his second wife finally accuses him, “you hurt” Despite his faults, however, Rady Cromwell is one of the strongest, most believable, and memorable backwoods characters in recent American fiction. Moreover, in his daring and relentless pursuit of his ambition, he achieves tragic stature.

  The story of Hill Man is Rady’s story, but he does not tell it. It is told by an unnamed observer-narrator who participates in and chronicles his friend’s rise and fall. In fact, he reconstructs Rady Cromwell’s life not only from personal observation but more importantly from his imagination. In recording the gory details of the gruesome death of Rady’s first wife, he writes: “Rady never had to say much for me to see the whole thing just like it happened.” He is an uncommonly articulate narrator, a composite, one assumes, of both Janice and Henry Giles that explains the feminine and masculine sensibilities inherent in his narrative.

  In describing Rady’s lust for land, he writes: “There’s nothing like reaching down and picking up a handful of the earth, crumbling it between your fingers, smelling it and even tasting it and knowing it’s your own. This little patch of dirt, weedy, scrubby, even rocky, is what’s yours of the whole wide world. You can stand strong on it because it belongs to you.” Once, when the narrator states a sentiment sympathetic to women, he quickly inserts a disclaimer: “I misdoubt there ever was a woman didn’t feel a kind of sin with a man. Even when it’s a nice, legal sin. Or maybe it’s the sin makes it nice. Not being a woman, I wouldn’t know. But I’ve thought on it.”

  For his part, the narrator revels in the free and wild life that he had enjoyed with Rady when they were boys: “Take a young feller, green and full of his own juices, and make him healthy and untwisted and unsoured, and you got about as fine a being as the Lord ever created … perfect, that is, for his own uses and his own purposes, in his own time and place.” In fact, he never judges Rady, even when he realizes the probability that Rady has fathered his own wife’s first child or when he is seduced into a moonshining operation with Rady that results in a murder and prison sentence. More than likely, he will praise Rady’s boyish pranks and manly aberrations as well as his self-assured skills: “Like everything else he did, Rady did a nice job plowing.”

  As Janice has noted, however, it is the narrator who is the typical hill man, a man who lacks a lot of ambition and would rather hunt or fish than plow his cornfield. Furthermore, he is a man who doesn’t take big risks. That is why he is the anonymous narrator, and the hero of the story he tells is the ambitious, wily, hard-working Rady. Although a tragic hero with serious flaws, Rady also has his good points. The narrator asserts that Rady did his duty by sitting up with his wife’s corpse all night long and “never once closed his eyes.” And finally Rady accepts major responsibility for an illegal distillery and fatal shoot-out and serves time in prison. And most importantly, after he’s lost everything, when he is “right back down to scratch,” he refuses to give up. “He never quit trying. Like a bulldog hanging on, he kept trying.” It is this dogged spirit that triumphs in the end.

  Although Hill Man is one of Giles’s early novels, by the time she wrote it she had already mastered the speech and folkways of Henry’s hill people and uses them convincingly and without condescension in this novel. Here is a veritable folk community revealed, a cultural backwater that is like a living museum showing life as it was lived a century and more ago. From tobacco raising and moonshining to a game of skill called the turkey shoot, here is a community where the people speak an archaic English with “hit” for “it,” “twicet” for “twice,” and “meeting” for “church,” where a woman is “proud-chested” and a man does “a mort of work” and the official witnesses at a wedding are said “to stand up” at the ceremony. It is a society where entertainment is homemade, and practical jokes—like running a mule through a camp meeting to break it up—are straight out of the antebellum humor of the Old Southwest. It is a community where a bride and groom can expect to be embarrassed and kept from going to bed on their wedding night by a noisy “shivaree.”

  It is also a society in which men are men and do manly things and women are women and do feminine things. A man’s world is filled with hard work and occasional bouts of excusable drinking, carousing, hunting and fishing, and marital infidelity. And the women are expected to understand their men’s ways and welcome them back when they return from their holidays. The men take their pleasure from their women, but they generally prefer to be with each other.

  This novel celebrates the ridge culture of male camaraderie, in particular, when Rady, Jim Crowe, and the narrator go foxhunting one night, “free and unhampered,” leaving family and work and worries behind: “A free man, for a time, a free and newyoung and sapling-strong man. With a fire burning bright and you squatted in front of it, and a jug to tilt, the likker hot and good inside you, the dogs yipping off somewheres in the dark, the stars so close the tops of the trees are brushed with them. Man, it’s good” To top it off, Rady plays his guitar and sings. As the narrator comments: “A woman don’t never seem to understand a man’s need to bust loose once in a while. Women don’t seem to have the need. Or if they do they take it out in scrubbing the floors or washing the quilts or putting new paper on the walls.”

  Janice Holt Giles understood this male-dominated culture through and through, from the men’s fondness for guns and knives to their sudden itch to go “roistering around with the boys.” So does the narrator, who admits his fondness for being around Rady: “Being with him always made me feel good.” Everyone takes it for granted that married men will sometimes stray from their wives. Rady is a good husband, says the narrator, but he doesn’t let “a wedding ceremony put an end to his natural pleasures.”

  Despite its setting in the mid-1920s and its authorship in the 1950s, Hill Man is a contemporary novel, with the timeless themes and patterns and the elemental starkness of a Greek tragedy. This raw and realistic portrayal of hill life is one of Giles’s major achievements—and deserves to rank with Harriette Arnow’s The Dollmaker and Elizabeth Madox Roberts’s The Time of Man in portraying accurately and sympathetically the life of poor rural Kentuckians. No one can fully appreciate the dimensions of Janice Holt Giles’s talent without reading Hill Man. It will be a welcome and tantalizing surprise for legions of Giles readers. This story, published originally as a throw-away paperback, may indeed turn out to be one of her best. It is arguably her mos
t honest and engrossing novel.

  Unlike Rady’s second wife, the ill-fated, city-bred Cordelia, who “wasn’t cut out to be a ridge runner” and always remains an outsider, Janice Holt Giles managed to learn the ridge and its ways and adapt herself to them. It is Janice talking through the narrator when he says as the tragedy is ending: “I don’t know how an outsider could get to know and love the ridge ways, unless he could put behind him everything he’d ever known different, and forget there was anything more than the ridge in the world.” Janice Holt Giles became a major Kentucky author and a writer of national significance by doing just that and by farming with her pen the ridges of Adair County, the priceless gift that she received as a dowry from Henry Giles.

  Chapter One

  There were three things Rady Cromwell loved when he was a kid. They were his old muzzle-loading rifle, his old black and tan hound dog, and his beat-up, battered old gittar. They were solid things, that he could lay his hand to, and they belonged to him. They were almost all that did belong to him, too.

  The way he came by the rifle was like this. The Bruton boys over on Bruton Ridge had a turkey shoot one day in the fall. The trees were stripped already, the broom sedge was drying and crackling in the fields, the ginseng berries were turning red, and the mornings were frosted and rimed. It was coming on to Thanksgiving, the best time of year for a turkey shoot.

  The Bruton boys had give out that they were having the turkey shoot, and claimed they had five turkeys to put up. Everybody was going, naturally. A turkey shoot is a big affair. Not on account of winning a turkey, for that don’t amount to nothing. But on account of it giving a man a chance to show off his shooting, to brag a little, sample the moonshine, eat hearty of barbecued pig and maybe engage in a fist fight or two. In short, it was good because it was a bunch of men getting together to do the things they liked best to do.