The Darkest Story a Cherokee Elder Ever Told About the Smoky Mountains

The Darkest Story a Cherokee Elder Ever Told About the Smoky Mountains

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inTU0DN3mJc

The Hush

Some men talk to keep the dark out. Atohi Long Walker was not that kind of man. He spoke only when he meant to, and the day he told me this story he meant to leave a mark. I can tell you now, looking out at the same ridgeline he pointed to that morning, that he did. He left more than one.

The autumn I rode up to find him was the autumn of 1889. I was twenty-nine, working for the Knoxville Sentinel as a feature writer—a polite way of saying I was sent to fetch whatever the editors would not write themselves. They wanted a piece on the old Cherokee who remained in the hills after Removal. Most of those folk did not want to be written about. Atohi was different. He was eighty-three then, lived alone in a cabin above a creek the maps did not name, and he sent word through a peddler that if I wanted the story he had to tell, I should come before the first hard frost.

I went the next week. His cabin sat in a notch above the Oconaluftee, hidden so well that a man could pass thirty paces from it and never see the smoke. He was on the porch when I climbed up. He did not greet me. He looked at me a long moment, then said, in English so plain it sounded like a man laying down a coin, “You came for the dark one. Sit.”

He pointed at a stump he had set out, as if he had known the day and the hour. I sat. He was tall even bent, his hair the color of old iron, his hands the kind that had worked all their long life. He did not offer me food. He poured something from a clay jug into a tin cup, set it beside me, and looked out at the mountains for the time it takes a careful man to count to a hundred. Then he began.

I will give it to you the way he gave it to me, as well as I can. Where he used a word I did not know, I have written what he meant by it. Where he paused, I have paused. The story is true the way he told it. Whether it is true the way the world told it, I cannot say.

He said his grandfather knew the place by a name he would not say twice in one telling, because to name it twice was to call it. So he called it the Hush—not because it was silent, but because, he said, you would learn to hush. The Hush lay on the north flank of a ridge above Cardiff Branch, in a section of the high country the settlers had not built into. The Cherokee had not built into it either. Atohi said his people had marked the trails away from it for as long as they had walked the mountains, the way a man marks a snake hole with stones. The marks were not warnings. The marks were courtesy. Don’t trouble what is sleeping. Don’t ask a question whose answer you will not survive.

Then the surveyors came.

It was the spring of 1873. The state of Tennessee had at last set itself to finishing the work begun before the war and abandoned during it—plat maps for tax purposes, boundary lines for timber speculators who had bought sections of country sight unseen. A man named Cornelius Grimshaw had the contract for the eastern section. Grimshaw was forty-four, born in Maryland, trained at the Topographical Bureau before the war, and counted by his employers as the steadiest hand they had. Sober, patient, a man who could spend a full week in the field without raising his voice. He had a wife in Knoxville, no other family that he spoke of, and he wrote her a letter every Sunday whether he had anything to say or not.

His party for the eastern section was four men: Lemuel Ashcraft, his rodman, thirty-one, a Pennsylvanian he had worked with for six seasons; Hosea Tilman, chainman, twenty-six, raised on a hog farm outside Maryville, a quiet fellow who carried a Bible in his coat and never let anyone see him read it; Vernon Crowley, the cook and wagon driver, fifty years old, missing the smallest finger on his left hand, a man who had opinions about everything but kept most of them to himself; and a hired guide named Mordecai Pickering, who had been raised in the very hills they were going into, knew the country as well as any white man living, and would, as it turned out, be the only sensible man among them.

They came up through Cardiff Branch in the third week of April. The road was muddy from a wet spring. The wagon dragged. Vernon swore at the mule and the mule swore back in its way. They stopped that first night at the only homestead within an hour’s ride of the foot of the ridge, a cabin held by a widow named Velma Thornwood. She was thirty-eight, raised in the hollow, married at twenty to a logger named Edwin Thornwood who had walked into those hills six years before and never walked out. Velma did not turn them away. Hospitality in those hills was a kind of religion. She fed them cornbread and a stew thinner than it should have been, gave them the floor of her front room to sleep on, and on the second cup of cider asked Grimshaw plain what he meant to do.

Grimshaw told her. He was a polite man. He explained the contract, the lines, the markers, the timber survey. He showed her on a folded map where they would be and for how long. She listened. Then she said, “Don’t go up there.”

Grimshaw said something kind and obvious about understanding the dangers of high country, about being well outfitted, about the season being good. Velma waited him out. When he was finished she said it again. “Don’t go up there. Edwin went up. He was the best timberman in this hollow—not a man like him before or since. He went up to scout a tract for a buyer out of Asheville and he never came back. The buyer hired three more—two locals and a Welshman from down by Murphy. They went up. The Welshman came back. The two locals are still up there somewhere. The Welshman did not speak for the rest of his life. Lived twenty-two more years and never said a word. Wrote a few. Most of what he wrote we burned. The little we did not burn, the preacher took.”

Grimshaw, polite still, asked her what the Welshman had written. She said, “He wrote over and over the same line. I have written it down once, and I will not write it again.” She did not say it.

Mordecai Pickering, who had been silent until that moment, set down his cup. He said to Grimshaw, “I’ll take you to the foot of the trail. I won’t go past the second cairn. I’ll wait three days. If you’re not back by the third evening I’ll wait one more, and then I’ll go down and tell them in Cardiff Branch that you did not come. That’s the most I’ll give you, and I’ll give it because I took your money, but no other reason. I’m sorry.”

Grimshaw looked at him long. Then he said, “That’s fair. We will be back by the third evening.”

He was wrong.

The next morning was clear and cold. Velma stood in the door of her cabin and watched them go. Atohi said, when he told me this part, that Velma’s face was the face of a person who has stopped hoping and made her peace with that, and the peace had cost her everything but her good manners. She did not wave. She watched until they were out of sight.

They took the wagon as far as the lower stream and then unhitched. Vernon stayed with the mule. The four of them—Grimshaw, Ashcraft, Tilman, and Pickering—started up on foot with the gear in packs. The first cairn was a low pile of riverstones at the place where the trail crossed a small spring. Mordecai stopped and put his hand on the topmost stone for the space of a breath, then took it off and crossed his palm against his trouser leg as if drying it. They did not see what was on his hand. Probably nothing was. Probably he just made the gesture.

They climbed for two hours. The hardwoods gave way to mixed pine. The sky narrowed. Around midday they came to the second cairn, a taller pile of slate and quartz at the top of a low saddle with a broken stick laid across it. Mordecai stopped here. He set down the bag he had been carrying for them. He raised his hat. He said, “This is where I stop. Three days I’ll wait below. After that I’ll go. May whatever is left of you have the good sense to come back with you.”

Grimshaw shook his hand. Tilman shook his hand. Ashcraft did not. He laughed at something Mordecai had said earlier about the second cairn and said something I will not repeat here because Atohi did not repeat it to me. Then they went up.

Mordecai sat down on a stone and watched them out of sight. He did not go down right away. He waited a full hour to see if anyone came back. Nobody came back.

For the first half hour past the second cairn the going was easy. The trail was clear, the slope was kind, and the woods opened into a long swale of yellow grass with a creek running through it that Ashcraft said was not on any of the survey maps he had seen. That is when Grimshaw made the first note in the survey book that would later be found. It said: A watered swale half a mile long, oriented north-northwest, not in our previous data. Position to be confirmed. Below that, in the same neat hand: Time 12:40 in the afternoon.

The next note, four lines down, said: Time 2:15. We have been walking. The swale is below us still.

The note after that: Time 2:40. Swale still below us. Estimated elevation gain since last note no more than fifty feet. We have walked an hour and twenty-five minutes uphill.

I want you to think about that for a moment. They had been walking uphill for an hour and twenty-five minutes, and the swale which they had crossed and left behind them was still right below them. Not behind them. Below them. As if they had walked in a circle they could not feel.

Grimshaw was a careful man with a compass and a careful man with his own legs. He took out the compass at 2:40. He noted: Needle steady. Bearing northwest as intended. Slope underfoot rising. Sun position consistent with the hour. No explanation.

He did not turn around. That, Atohi said, was the moment he should have turned around. He didn’t.

By three o’clock the woods had changed. The pines thinned and what stood between them were trees Ashcraft could not identify, and Ashcraft had identified hundreds of species over six seasons of fieldwork in three states. They were the right shape for hardwoods, but the bark was wrong—smooth where it should have been rough, dark like wet slate. The leaves were the wrong color for the season. Tilman said, mostly to himself, that they looked like they had been painted by a man who was working from memory and getting most of it right.

The light was wrong too. Atohi said this is the part nobody who survived an encounter with the Hush could ever explain to him in a way that made sense. The light was wrong. Not darker. Not brighter. Wrong—as though it was coming from a direction the sun was not in. Tilman noted in his own pocketbook that the shadows on the trunks did not match the position of the sun in the sky. He noted this twice. He underlined it the second time.

At four o’clock they came on the first thing that should not have been there. It was a surveyor’s chain—a sixty-six-foot Gunter’s chain, the kind used in the eastern survey before the steel tape came in. It hung from the lower branch of one of the smooth-barked trees, looped over the branch and back upon itself, and the tree had grown around it. The bark had closed over the chain like flesh over an old wound. The chain was old. The handle plate was stamped with a maker’s name and a year. Ashcraft cleaned the dirt off the plate with his thumb and read it aloud. 1831. The chain was forty-two years older than they were, hung from a tree that had grown around it across the better part of a man’s lifetime. There was nobody in that country in 1831. There was nobody supposed to be.

Ashcraft started to laugh and then he stopped. There is a difference between the laugh of a man who has found a curiosity and the laugh of a man whose mind is trying to walk away from something. The second laugh he made was the second kind. Grimshaw put a hand on his arm. They left the chain in the tree. They did not touch it. Mordecai had told them weeks earlier by a fire in Cardiff Branch that the one rule on the high ridge was: do not take what is given. Atohi said when he told me this part that even the surveyors knew that rule by then, though none of them could have said where they had learned it.

They went on past the chain because Grimshaw was the kind of man who could not leave a contract unfinished, and because Tilman was a man who would follow Grimshaw, and because Ashcraft was now a man who did not want to be left alone with his own thoughts. They climbed another forty minutes. The slope kept rising. The swale, when Tilman looked back, was no longer below them. It was beside them, off to the right, at the same elevation as they were.

I am telling you that exactly the way Atohi told it, and I am telling it that way because I want you to feel the wrongness of it. It is not a wrong you can name. It is a wrong that takes hold of your stomach and your inner ear at once, the way a deep cellar smell takes hold of your throat before you have time to identify what it is.

Tilman, the quiet one, the Bible carrier, sat down on a fallen log and said very low that he would like to go back now. Grimshaw said, “A little farther. We are close to the top of the ridge. We will mark the contract point and then we will go back.” Tilman did not look up. He said, “I would like to go back now.” Grimshaw said, “A little farther.”

They left Tilman on the log.

Atohi made a point of stopping there in the telling and looking at me hard. He said, “You do not leave a man on a log. You do not. There is something about a man sitting down and saying he wants to go back that you must respect. And a man who does not respect that thing is no longer a friend to the man on the log. He is a thing the man on the log is now afraid of.”

Tilman watched them go up the slope. In his pocketbook he wrote: They have left me. The Lord have mercy. I am alone and I am not alone.

He waited an hour. Then, because the light had stopped behaving the way light behaves, and because something he could not see had moved twice in the corner of his eye, and twice through the brush beside him without making a sound a deer would make, he got up and started back down the trail—or what he believed was the trail.

His pocketbook was found later, in 1876, three years after, four miles to the south of where the survey party had left the second cairn. The book had been left on a flat rock in the open as if set there for finding. The leather was bleached white. The last entry in the book was dated April 23rd, 1873—the very day he sat down on the log—and it said: I have been walking down for three hours and I am at the same place where they left me. The light is wrong. The trees are wrong. I can hear them above me still, though they have gone on past me a long time. There is something walking beside me on the right that will not let me look at it. Then the last line, smaller, written by a hand that was no longer steady: If you find this, my name was Hosea Tilman of Maryville. Tell my mother I tried to come home.

That was all. He was not found. The pocketbook was. It was found by a hunter who would not say until the day he died why he had been in that country at all.

By the time Tilman was writing his last line on the flat rock four miles south of where he had been left, Cornelius Grimshaw and Lemuel Ashcraft were standing in a clearing that the survey notes said should not have been there. The clearing was perfectly round, about sixty feet across. The ground was bare and dark and oddly fine, as if it had been sifted. There was no grass, no fallen leaves, though the woods on every side were full of them. In the center of the clearing was an old fire ring made of riverstones, and the stones were warm.

Grimshaw put his hand on one of them and pulled it back. The stones were warm, and there was no ash in the ring, and there had not been a fire there that day or that week. But the stones were warm.

Ashcraft stood at the edge of the clearing and did not enter it. He said, “I’ll wait here.”

Grimshaw walked in. There was a notebook in the fire ring. He took it out. It was bound in dark leather, swollen with damp, and on the inside cover, in a hand that was not modern, was a name. Atohi told me the name once, and only once, and I will not say it here, because Atohi did not say it twice. The name was the name of one of the men who had crossed the ridge in 1831 when no one was supposed to have been there. Grimshaw did not know the name. He opened the notebook anyway.

Picture it. A round clearing. Bare soil. A fire ring whose stones are warm to the touch. A man holding a forty-two-year-old book in his hands in the middle of woods that should not have a clearing in them, with the light wrong on every side, and another man at the edge of the trees, too afraid to step into the open. That is the picture. Hold it. Because what was in the notebook is in some ways the smallest of the things that happened and the largest at the same time.

The first pages were a record of a surveyor’s work—notes on bearings, sketches of slopes. The handwriting was clean. Then around the eleventh page the bearings stopped making sense. The same bearing was recorded over a dozen times. The next page had only a sentence: I am not where I think I am. The next page, in the same hand: I have been writing in this book for the better part of a week and I find when I turn back the pages that what I have written is not what I remember writing. The next page was blank. The next page had a sketch of a face—not a human face exactly, not an animal face, something in between—drawn with an attention to detail that suggested the man with the pencil had spent a long time looking at it. The next page said: It sat with us by the fire last night. It was wearing Petton’s coat. Petton has been gone since Tuesday. The next page said: I have been writing in this book for nine days. Today I went back and counted the pages. There are forty-four pages of writing. Nine days. Today is the ninth day. There should not be forty-four pages. The last entry in the book was a single line written very lightly, almost not pressing the pencil at all. It said: If I leave the book in the ring, it may find another to read it.

Grimshaw closed the notebook. He did not put it back in the ring. He put it in the inside pocket of his coat. He turned to call to Ashcraft.

Ashcraft was no longer at the edge of the clearing.

He walked to where Ashcraft had been standing. The leaves there were undisturbed. There was no track of a man going back into the woods. There was no track of a man going anywhere. It was as if Ashcraft had been lifted out of his own footprints.

Grimshaw, who had once written in a letter to his wife that he had never been afraid in the field, was afraid then. He called Ashcraft’s name. He called it three times and then stopped, because the third time the woods answered him.

The woods said “Cornelius” in Ashcraft’s voice. It said, “Cornelius, I am over here.” It said, “Cornelius, please come over here.” He did not go. It said, “Cornelius, why won’t you come over here?”

He turned the other way and he began to walk. Atohi said he did not run. A man who runs in those woods is a man who is hunted by his own breath. Grimshaw walked. He walked in a direction that he believed was down because the slope was tipping that way. And after twenty minutes he was at the second cairn.

The second cairn was where Mordecai had said he would wait three days. It was now, by Grimshaw’s watch, five o’clock in the afternoon on the day they had come up. Mordecai was not there.

Grimshaw stood by the second cairn. There was no sign of Mordecai. There were no tracks at all in the soft dirt around the cairn—including, when Grimshaw looked, including his own. He had walked across that dirt twice that morning going up and that evening coming down, and there were no prints. None. Not boot, not barefoot, not animal. The soft dirt was smooth as a swept floor. Grimshaw went down on one knee and put his hand in it. He could feel the give. He could feel the way good loam takes a print. He stood up and looked back and saw the prints of his hand, but where he had walked just then to look at the dirt, his boots had left no mark. He looked at his boots. His boots were clean—not muddy from the climb, not wet from the spring, not dusty. Clean as if he had put them on that morning out of a closet.

He sat down on the cairn for a while. He could not have told you how long. The light was still wrong. He did not look at his watch because he did not want to know what time it said. At some point, and he could not have told you when, he heard somebody coming up the trail from below. He stood up. He waited. The somebody came up around the bend and into view, and it was Lemuel Ashcraft.

Ashcraft was walking the way Ashcraft walked—same gait, same slight favor of the left knee because Ashcraft had been kicked by a horse the spring before and the knee had never quite forgiven him. Same jacket. Same hat. Same canteen. Ashcraft came up to within ten feet of Grimshaw and he stopped and he smiled the way Ashcraft smiled, which is to say he smiled mostly with the left side of his mouth, and he said, “Cornelius. There you are. I have been looking for you for the longest time.”

Grimshaw said nothing. Ashcraft said, “Aren’t you going to come down with me? The wagon is just below. Vernon is making supper. We need to get off this ridge before dark.”

Grimshaw said, “Where were you?”

Ashcraft said, “In the clearing. Where you left me.”

Grimshaw said, “I did not leave you. You left me.”

Ashcraft kept the smile. He said, “You are tired, Cornelius. Come down.”

Grimshaw said, “Take off your hat.”

Ashcraft did not take off his hat. The smile did not change. Ashcraft said, “I am very tired too. Let us go down.”

Grimshaw said again, “Take off your hat.”

Then the thing in front of him did something that Atohi did not describe, because Atohi was telling me what the man who lived to tell the story had told him, and the man who lived to tell the story would not say what the thing had done. He would only say that he turned and walked off the trail, and he walked until full dark, and that when he came out of the woods at last he was not at Velma Thornwood’s homestead. He was twelve miles to the south on a dirt road outside a town called Webb’s Cross, walking barefoot. His boots were gone. The survey notebook from his own coat was gone. The forty-two-year-old leather notebook was still in his pocket.

He never opened that notebook again. He kept it in a locked box in his attic in Knoxville for the rest of his life. After his death his wife gave the box to a Methodist preacher who came to call, and the preacher took it home and burned it without opening it. He told her on the porch before he left that he had known a man years ago in West Virginia who had brought something out of high country in a leather book, and that the man had not done well by it. The preacher said it was the second time in his life he had taken such a book to burn. He said he hoped it was the last.

The party of four that went up the ridge that April returned, in time, in pieces. Cornelius Grimshaw returned in body. He took the train back to Knoxville the morning after he came out at Webb’s Cross. He did not write to his employer. He did not file the survey. He walked into his own house, kissed his wife, sat down in his armchair, and did not speak for two days. When he did speak it was to ask for water, and then for the doctor. The doctor’s note, which the doctor’s nephew showed me in 1888 when I went looking for it, said only this: Patient appears physically unharmed. Patient cannot give a coherent account of events. Patient asks repeatedly that all the windows of the house be locked at night and that the curtains be drawn. Patient does not sleep in his own bedroom. Patient does not look in mirrors. Patient is, I believe, of sound mind—which is the part of this that troubles me most.

Lemuel Ashcraft was never seen again. Hosea Tilman was never seen again, except for the pocketbook on the flat rock that the hunter found three years later. Vernon Crowley waited at the wagon for two days, then drove the wagon down to Velma’s, then drove the wagon down to Cardiff Branch, and he did not survey again. He took work as a teamster in Sevierville and lived to be seventy-one. He told the story once, very late at night, to a young man named Ezra Holloway, and Ezra Holloway is the one who repeated it to a clerk in 1893 when he was filing an affidavit on an unrelated matter. The clerk wrote it down because there was something in the way Ezra told it that made the clerk think it should be written down.

Mordecai Pickering was not there at the second cairn that five o’clock because, as he later swore to anyone who would listen, he had waited there one hour and seen something walk across the trail below the cairn that he refused to describe. He went home. He went home and he sat in his cabin with the door barred for three days. He came out on the fourth day, hitched his mule, rode into Cardiff Branch, and told the story to the postmaster, who told the sheriff, who took it down in writing. He did not feel he had failed his contract. He felt he had kept the part of it he could keep, which was the part where he refused to lie about what he had seen. He died in 1881 of nothing in particular, in his sleep. He had told his sister, his last spring, that he had not been right in his sleep since ’73. She did not know what he meant. He did not explain.

And Velma Thornwood, the widow at the foot of the ridge, the woman who had told them not to go, lived on at her cabin for nine more years. The buyer from Asheville, the one who had hired her husband, sent a man around the next summer to make her a fair offer for the homestead. She would not sell. The man came back. She would not sell. The third year the man stopped coming. She told the postmaster when he asked her once on the road that she could not leave because Edwin was up there still, and that as long as she was at the cabin he might find his way back down some night, and somebody had to be there. She believed that until the night she died in 1882, peacefully, of a winter fever. The cabin stood empty after. It is, I am told, still standing. I have not been to see it.

When Atohi was finished with the part of the story I have just told you, he sat very still for a while on the porch. The afternoon light had gone the long way around. The shadow of his cabin was reaching out across the swept dirt of his yard, and beyond it the ridge stood the way it stands today—a long blue line against a paler blue sky, no different than it had been when Cornelius Grimshaw walked up it in 1873. I sat with my cup of cider untouched and I did not speak.

After a while Atohi said, “That is one of the stories. That is the one I tell when somebody comes who has the kind of face you have. You have an honest face. An honest face will carry a story without breaking it.”

I asked him then, because I had come a long way and I was a journalist after all, the question I had been holding for the last hour. I said, “Atohi, what is it? What is up there? What did Grimshaw see? What walks around in Lemuel Ashcraft’s coat? What sits by fires and stone rings in the middle of bare clearings that aren’t there? What is the Hush?”

He looked at me a long time. He looked at me the way a man looks at a horse he is not sure he will buy. Then he said, “You’re asking the wrong question. The question is not what. The question is who.”

I said, “All right then. Who?”

He shook his head. He said that is also the wrong question. Then he turned his face away and looked out at the ridgeline again and he said, in a voice that was lower than it had been all afternoon, that the mountains were not haunted. He said that was the white man’s word for what the white man could not understand. He said that what was up in the high country above Cardiff Branch was not a ghost. It was not a spirit that had been a person. It was not a demon out of any book the missionaries had brought up the river. He said it was older than any of those things, and it was patient, and it had a habit his people had known how to honor and the new ones had forgotten.

The habit, he said, was this. It would meet you. It would meet anyone who walked into its country. It would meet you as you—as the you that you most expected to find. It would speak with your voice. It would wear your coat. It would smile your smile. And if you stayed long enough, it would learn you so well that when you came home you would not be sure which of you was the one that came down off the mountain.

He said the people who went up the ridge in ’73 were not afraid of what they did not know. That was their mistake. They were afraid of what they thought they did know. And the Hush taught them the difference.

I asked him then, because I could not help it, “Are you saying that the Cornelius Grimshaw who walked into his house in Knoxville and did not speak for two days was not the Cornelius Grimshaw who had walked up the ridge?”

Atohi did not answer me right away. He poured a little more of whatever was in the clay jug into his own tin cup and he drank it and he set the cup down. Then he said, “I am saying that the man who came home came home, and the man who went up went up, and those two things may not be the same statement.”

I did not know what to do with that. I do not know what to do with it now.

I left him as the light was failing. He stood up to walk me to the place where the path went down to my horse. And at the head of the path he stopped and put a hand on my shoulder. It was the only time he touched me. He said, “Write it down if you must. We need our stories told. But before you write it, I want you to do one thing.”

I asked what.

He said, “When you get home tonight, look at yourself in the mirror by your front door. Look a long time. Make sure you know who is looking back. If you’re not sure, do not write the story. Do you understand me?”

I said I did.

I rode home that night. I did look in the mirror by my front door. I looked a long time. I was satisfied with what I saw. I sat down to write the story the next morning.

But I will tell you something now, twelve years later, that I have not told anyone. I have a photograph from that afternoon. Atohi let me take it before I left—sitting in the cane chair on his porch, the ridgeline behind him. I sent it to a friend in Boston to be developed because we did not have the chemicals in Knoxville at the time. When it came back weeks later I unwrapped it on my desk by the window. The picture was good. Atohi’s face was clear. The ridge was clear behind him. The cabin was clear. The cane chair was clear. There was somebody else in the chair—not in front of him, not behind him. In the chair. A faint second face sat just over his, as if two photographs had been printed on top of one another by mistake. The second face was not his. It was not anyone I had ever seen. The eyes were open. The mouth was not.

I wrote my friend in Boston and asked if the plate had been double-exposed. He wrote back to say he was the most careful man in his trade and the plate had not been double-exposed and the negative was clean and he had no explanation. He sent me the negative. The second face was on the negative.

I keep the photograph in a drawer of my desk. I do not show it. I have not destroyed it. Atohi died, I am told, the winter of 1892 in his cabin above the Oconaluftee. I never went back to that country. I have thought more than once about going back. I have not gone.

Sometimes late at night when I cannot sleep I take the photograph out of the drawer and I look at it. The face over Atohi’s face has not moved. It has not changed. It is there the way it was the day the print came back from Boston. I do not know who it is. I do not know whose it is. I have not in twelve years taken it out of the drawer and not put it back. There is a part of me that is afraid that one of these nights I will look at the photograph and the face will be familiar. I am not yet sure whose face I am afraid will look back.

That is the story Atohi Long Walker told me. I have given it to you as well as I can, and as well as I can remember it, which is well enough. I have not added to it. I have not, except where Atohi himself would not say a thing, taken away from it.

There is one last thing he said on the porch that I have been carrying with me and that I do not know quite where to put. As I was leaving, just before I reached the path, he called my name once. I turned. He was still on the porch. He said, “The Hush is not the only place. It is the one that was easiest to keep a name on. There are others. The country between the high ridges has more than one of them. Most are smaller. Some are larger. The largest is not in these mountains at all.”

He did not tell me where the largest one was. I have wondered in the twelve years since whether he meant a place I could find on a map, or whether he meant something else by the word place. I am still not sure.

Look in the mirror by your front door when you get home tonight. Look a long time. Make sure you know who is looking back.

Good night.