8
2014
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
number 23
na courtesy of the North Caroli Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill library
“ex ce pt a co rn of wh eat fa ll int o th e gr ou nd an d die ” b y t e r r y r o b e r ts
courtesy of the North Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill library
Terry Roberts’s ancestors have lived in the mountains of Western North Carolina since the time of the Revolutionary War. He was born in Asheville and raised in Weaverville, NC. This story was originally part of the working draft of his first novel, A Short Time to Stay Here (Ingalls Publishing Group, 2012), set in a World War I internment camp for German non-combatants who were stranded in the US at the beginning of the war. Roberts explains that this chapter was cut from the novel because of its overall length and because it seemed to distract from the main narrative line set in and around the internment camp. It does, however, reveal more about Stephen Robbins’s original home and family, and in particular, his relationship with his mother. Perhaps, in that way, it illuminates who he has become as a man. Further, it shows Anna Ulmann’s response to life in this deeper mountain community as her relationship with Stephen evolves. Although we witness the death and funeral of Stephen’s mother in this version, keep in mind that these pages were excised from the final version of the novel, and so, I believe, Mrs. Robbins is still alive at the end of the book, living on in Anderson Cove. Readers familiar with the novel will recognize the opening of this story, but in the novel, Anna stays with Stephen’s family without him, and the reader returns to Hot Springs with Stephen. The print issue of NCLR 2014 includes an interview with Roberts and Ron Rash about their World War I–era novels. In Rash’s novel The Cove (Ecco, 2012), the German internment camp set up in the Mountain Park Hotel in Hot Springs, NC, plays a key role as well.
If our previous journey to Asheville had seemed unconventional, the journey that Anna and I made to Anderson Cove was truly out of place, out of time. The brief train trip upstream to Barnard was unusually quiet for the two of us. She went through the box of glass plates that she had brought, pulling out and showing me one that was cracked. I opened our window and tossed the faulty sheet of glass against the rock bluff that was streaming past, where it exploded into shards of light. My Uncle Walter met us at Barnard with the muledrawn wagon that I had promised Anna, and the look on her face told me that she’d assumed I was joking when I mentioned it to her. Walter was going on to Marshall by train, and I was to return the wagon to his barnyard and the mule to his upper pasture. After I had made the introductions – Walter removing his hat and bowing his head in antique fashion – the three of us loaded Anna’s camera and our other baggage into the wagon. Then Walter pulled me aside while Anna looked into the tiny country store beside the tracks. “Stevie,” Walter said. “If you’as planning on lookin’ round a bit fore you go up home, I couldn’t recommend it.” “Don’t worry, Uncle, I’ll get your wagon back in one piece.” Walter was famously possessive.
left Broad River near the Tennessee-
North Carolina state line Above Southern Express Company, Mount Airy, NC