Lonesome Mountain

TAPS FOR PRIVATE TUSSIE--Jesse Stuart--Dutton ($2.50).*

When they buried Uncle Kim the coffin was covered with a flag. "I had been to one or two funerals before, but I had never seen one like this funeral. . . . The grass felt soft and warm to my bare feet and the little puddles of sand were hot enough to burn my toes. . . . 'Trouble, trouble, trouble,' Grandpa whispered. . . . 'Man born of woman is full of trouble.'. . . The wind lifted Grandpa's white corn-silk beard up and down.... He was bent like an old tree weighted down with branches. . . . Uncle Mott's face was almost as white as the milkweed furze that I've tried to catch on the meader.... I'd say it was more the color of a yellow clay road when it dries out in the spring."

Six of Uncle Kim's first cousins lifted the big black coffin to their shoulders. "My kinfolks . . . walked in the procession behind with their arms around their girls' backs. ... It was the greatest bit of excitement that I had ever seen, just to walk in the great procession and hear the people laugh and talk. . . . Before we had gone far up on the mountain, Brother Baggs . . . said: 'Brothers and sisters, let us sing Beulah Land!' If you don't think it's hard to climb a mountain and sing, you try it one of these days. Try it when the July sun comes down upon your back with blisterin heat and the lizards are scurryin over the dead leaves ahuntin a wisp of shade on the backbone of a mountain that is steamin in the swelterin heat like a pan of bread in an oven. ... I hurried up to the grave to look down in it. It wasn't as deep as I was tall. . . . On another grave was a tattered flag, that the wind had faded until you could hardly tell what it was. Parts of it had been beaten off by the strong mountain wind and had caught on the huckleberry vines. 'Oh, my Kim,' Aunt Vittie screamed. . . . Tears ran down her cheeks and wet the flag in two tiny places. I'd never noticed before that Aunt Vittie was so pretty. . . .

"They lifted the coffin over the grave hole while Grandpa pulled the flag from over the coffin. They lowered Uncle Kim down into the mountain earth to the bottom of his shallow grave. . . . Now the great procession of people moved down the mountain faster than they had climbed it....

I walked beside of Grandpa a-holdin to his hand. Many sang songs as we walked down the mountain, a mountain so steep that it made the knees creak to hold us back."

Low Life & High Living. The main story of Taps for Private Tussie is about the surviving Tussies (known as the Relief Tussies to distinguish them from the Tussies who remained Republican) in their swift squandering of Uncle Kim's $10,000 insurance. It is thus a Tobacco Road of the hill people, more shocking because it deals with the death of a soldier, painful and raucous in many of its details of low life among the people for whom he died, but enlivened all the way through by Jesse Stuart's magnificent use of his native idiom and his love for the country where it flourishes.

This part of the novel loses its savor almost as soon as Uncle Kim is buried. Readers may quickly forget the farcical, burlesque-show complications of the Tussies (46 of them move into a mansion; Grandpa greets the sheriff who comes to evict them with the query: "How many boys did you have to die for our country?").

But they will not forget the legend of Sid Tussie's education. It is a classic. Taken out of the novel of which it is the finest part, it is one of the best stories of childhood in American literature. Sid Tussie lives in a clear-eyed, clear-headed wonderland of woods and mountain people, innocent as rain, dodging the occasional attempts of his drunken kinspeople to kill him dead, and watching them--how they drink, dance, ride mules, fight and keep out of jail--with such sharpness that their archaic Kentucky highland talk is truer in his recording of it than it is on their lips. Some readers may regret that Jesse Stuart did not devote his entire novel to the boy's life.

*With illustrations by Thomas Benton, $2.75.

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