WITH ROCK IN HAND

My sister, Lillian, has died and I have no heart to write anything new. This is a repeat of a column published a few years ago.

Even though our little community banded together to fight the ice and snow and loneliness of isolation, many times a person was on his own.

A story Dad told, long after the event, was when my sister, Lillian, was late getting home from school. Before Lou and I, younger, started to school, Lillian had to make the long journey alone.

I've forgotten the complications that caused the lateness. Of course it was always near dark anyway in wintertime with school lasting until four o'clock. But this evening it was different. Damp, foggy twilight melted into darkness with still no sign of her coming up the last long hill. So, with lantern aglow, Dad started out to find Lillian. He met her a half mile from home, trudging along in the darkness up the old Belmont Branch railroad. When she came into the circle of light and recognized Dad's voice, she dropped behind her, unnoticed she hoped, a large rock she'd been carrying for defense purposes. Against what? Who knows? Snakes? Dogs? Wildcats? Maybe just the darkness itself?

Although the rock naturally clattered some when falling, Dad didn't let on. No one ever belittled anyone else's fears or the means he took to overcome them. But his heart must have been touched with sorrow that his little girl was so scared, but also with pride that she intended to fight back as best she could.

It became a favorite family tale, still retold when surviving members of the family get together. It speaks eloquently of the Rock of Fierceness with which we did battle, and plan to still do battle when and if the occasion arises.

There are fears, then as now, which a person couldn't, and can't get at with a tangible rock. The river flowing through the valley was both a friend and an enemy. It enriched the narrow fields lying up to it, but in the matter of a few angry hours, it could wipe out a crop of corn or wheat that had been put in with grueling hard work and poor equipment. The sun, so necessary for growing things, could, within the space of a few days, fire the crops so badly that the mortgage teetered ominously. The war against sassafras sprouts, honeysuckle, bindweed, cockleburs, was never ending. Every day there was, like a low-grade fever, the underlying fear of hog cholera, limberneck in the chickens, any number of diseases in the cattle.

The Scotch-Irish, I believe, stood it best. In their blood was still a vestigial trace of the type of indestructibleness it took to cope with the harsher, bleaker life of the moors and highlands of their ancestral homes. Thus, they were honed to hardships. Perhaps thrived on it. Each one they overcame strengthened them for the next. They did not intend to go down easy. Many had to fling their last Rock of Fierceness by cutting railroad ties, digging wells with little more than rock and crowbar, grubbing roots from daylight to dark. As soon as they were able to straighten up from having flung their last rock, they looked around for another one to meet the next enemy.

When I hear bagpipes playing, the traditional music of the craggy highland, I hear indestructibleness. There are no starts and stops in bagpipe music once it is underway, but an ongoing, underlying current, as if the musicians had got hold of something they couldn't stop. And when it does stop, so abruptly, I seem to hear rocks falling, as if the last battle has been won and some safe circle of lantern light has encompassed the indomitable musicians.

REJOICE!

Lillian has thrown her last "rock," breaking down death's door and thus entering into a bright new dimension.