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Quilly Hall
An Ode to the Holston Hills
a novel
Benjamin W. Farley
QUILLY HALL
An Ode to the Holston Hills
Copyright © 2008 Benjamin W. Farley. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
ISBN 13: 978-1-55635-543-1
Manufactured in the U.S.A.
Quilly Hall is a work of fiction. Aside from historical personages and places, the novel’s characters, events, and situations are purely fictional. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
With the exception of book reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the author.
To
All my family
Preface
Not every novel requires a “Preface,” but somehow Quilly Hall mandates one. My grandmother, Catherine Foran White, a child of Virginia’s Holston Valley, never wearied of telling stories. Born in 1877, she was reared in a rural time in a rural world that modernity has since forgotten. I cannot return to Abingdon’s Holston Knobs without remembering her, or her cabin, or her rocker, or her smile, or her farm. She filled me with a wonder for life and a love for adventure and dreams. Of all my family, this book is dedicated in memory to her, and to my Uncle Clark, her middle son.
I am indebted to Dr. James R. Metts, Sheriff of Lexington County, SC, who shared with me his experiences and wisdom concerning the office of sheriff and its numerous demands, aspects of which I have dramatized in one of my character’s career. Any mistakes in fact or judgment, however, are entirely my own. So also in the case of Major Richard Daeger, US Army (Retired), Vietnam Infantry Company Commander. Major Daeger served as a line officer during the Vietnam War. It is his memories of that conflict that innerve Thomas Edmonds’ own reflections. Words cannot express the full measure of my gratitude to Major Daeger and to all who served with him.
I am beholden to many historical resources, especially to Lewis Preston Summers’ History of Southwest Virginia, 1746–1786, Washington County, 1777–1870, whose sketches of the County’s soul are preserved in his work.
Chapter One
Actually, her name was “Quelle.” Tall and enchanting, she still gazes down from her marble-top pedestal to savor the silence that hovers in the shadows of the hallway. I use the present tense, because I inherited the statue from my grandmother. Quilly’s serene countenance effuses an immeasurable calm. Time after time, it has buoyed me from childhood to this very day. Quilly’s braids are drawn back in a golden bun against the back of her neck, each braid interlaced with a delicate thread of green ribbon. Strands of dark honey streak her hair. On her right hip, she cradles a wide-mouth–cinnamon-faded jug, and in her left hand she tilts a second, filling a birdbath with imaginary water. Two scruffy pigeons balance themselves on the lip of the fountain; one is drinking, while the other stares up at Quelle. A brown apron covers Quilly’s gossamer dress and modest curves. The statue’s inner material is of plaster of Paris that sometimes leaks through, leaving white deposits that flake off. An ivory cast defines her slender face; all else is glazed in bronze and green. Her precise age remains a mystery, although my grandmother insisted that my grandfather purchased it for her at the Chicago World Fair. But that would have been in 1897. And why would my grandfather have gone to Chicago? To our family’s knowledge, he never left Virginia and rarely spent more than two nights away from home. So there has always existed this mystery about “Quilly,” or “Quelle,” which is her name in German and which means “source,” or “fountain.”
The name “Quilly Hall” derived from my grandfather Edmonds. In a rare moment of uncharacteristic frustration, he reportedly blurted out: “O Hell! Why does everything have to take place in Quilly’s hall? Why can’t we just serve them on the porch?” He was referring to the icy mint juleps that were being prepared for a cadre of his in-town friends. The name stuck, and after that everyone began calling the place, “Quilly Hall.” Before that, the home place was simply known as “the Edmonds House.” Built in the late 1790s, it stands today, with its gray-and-white slab limestone exterior gleaming in the sunlight, where from its grassy knoll it overlooks the road that leads from the mountains westward into nearby Abingdon.
My grandmother—Virginia Katherine Edmonds—relished our family’s history, and as a small boy of six, I would rock beside her in the living room and listen. “It was a wilderness, Tommy, without roads, or inns. The Indians were gone. Only occasional raiding parties made it into Virginia. The Nations of the Iroquois had driven out the Cherokee and Shawnee. Then came Daniel Boone and those valiant men, like your great-great grandfather. Here they came, journeying into this vast domain of forests and saltlicks! Of game and a soil blessed with the rich silicates that still raise our crops taller than we are! Oh, Tommy! Think of it! How it must have blazed in their eyes and set their hearts to palpitating just to see it!” She loved hyperbole, extravagant and exaggerated expressions, and words like “palpitating” and “silicates,” exact assignations when describing objects or events.
Grandmother’s father had fought with units assigned to defend Chattanooga and Tennessee. According to her, he received wounds both at Chickamauga and “in the field in front of Atlanta,” as the last extant roll call describes it. I have never been able to trace all of his company’s movements, although my grandmother and her sister-in-law, my Aunt Viola, provided many first-hand details from tidbits the old veteran dropped from time to time. His name was Howard Campbell Lorran, a private of Company A 63rd Regiment, CSA. Unlike my paternal grandfather and his father, my great-grandfather Lorran’s grave lies along the Middle Fork of the Holston River, and not in town. I must have been four or five, when one cold January day my grandmother, mother, Uncle Everett, Pearl, and I rode in a wagon to visit his grave. We had to take the wagon, as the road was impassable by car. The journey also had to be undertaken when the road’s clay ruts were frozen, or had turned an iron-hard red.
My grandmother had packed a large picnic basket of fried chicken, pinto beans, biscuits, a cake of butter, and a jar of strawberry jelly. She wanted to visit her brother, Jim Lorran, and his wife, Viola, since the graveyard was on their property. “They’re very poor,” she explained. “I always take food when I visit them. Our whole family was poor, and I would be too, if it weren’t for your grandfather.”
“Mama, we’ve heard all this before,” Uncle Everett interrupted. Uncle Everett was driving the wagon. His tall lean figure bent forward as he held the reins. His face and hands were tanned by nature’s elements, his eyebrows thick and black like his hair, and with eyes “that could pierce right through a board,” as Grandmother put it.
“I know, but I want Tommy to hear it as often as possible.
“Tommy, your ancestors, the Edmonds were very wealthy. And Holman, your grandfather, would come over the mountains to visit us, since we lived on one of his farms. We were poor, Tommy. Your grandfather felt sorry for us. He loved Howard, my father. Your grandfather was only a child when the War broke out. His father had fought in many skirmishes, too, but never with General Lee, or Stonewall Jackson. He commanded a home guard when the Yankees burned Abingdon. He never forgave them for setting fire to the courthouse, or for throwing a torch into his father’s house in town. If it hadn’t been for his mother, who picked it up and threw it back out, the house would have burned to the ground. He took a gunshot wound to his breast, defending a barricade on Main Street. He died in 1894 but managed to hold on to most of his father’s farms and