by Frank R. Reade, 1957

Glenrochie camping trip and death of Papa (Frank S. Robertson) in 1926

On an August afternoon in 1926, Jim Vance came over to Glenrochie in his big truck to take a group of camp girls on an overnight trip to White Top mountain.  As we drove through the gate at The Meadows, I saw Papa sitting on the front porch.  He looked lonesome and alone.  So I asked Jim to stop the truck and wait for me there under the broad-leafed shade of a sprawling old catalpa tree, and told the girls that I wanted to go up and talk to Papa for a few minutes. 

            Papa said that he had been coughing a lot and that he felt weak and no-account, that the more he coughed the sorer his throat got and the sorer his throat got the more he coughed and the hell with it all.  He said it wasn’t any fun to live a long time after all your friends were dead,- and his eyes filled up a little.  He said I’d better not keep the girls waiting.  Anyhow, it looked like a rain making up over on the South Fork; so I’d better run along, and he hoped we would all have a good time, but he’d be damned if he saw any sense in climbing a mountain except on a horse, and not much then, -what with the timber cut out, the deer all gone to East Virginia, and nothing to shoot at but the view!

            I had never known Papa to be so depressed.  At parting, and for the first time in many years, I lifted his black skull cap and kissed him lightly on his bald head.  Then Papa looked a little embarrassed, and wanted to know if I ever proposed to grow up.

            It had been twenty-eight summers since he had held me up on his shoulders to hear my baby sister cry.

***

            We had climbed the White Top next day, all the way to the dense lashorn forest at the summit and, returning, had stopped for a moment at the edge of the cleared field where the Great Spirit had once trod when the earth was young.  The day was beautifully clear, and, as we looked out and down into the coves and valleys below, I fancied I could see the big maple trees in the backyard of The Meadows, and Uncle Archie [Robertson] sitting there on his rickety little porch.

            Then we came upon the steep, narrow path that goes down abruptly to Konnarock.  There I remembered old Jim Wilson’s story of a famous deer hunt that had swept up through Taylor’s Valley to Konnarock, before the War, – and once again I could see Papa as a young man on horseback crashing through the rhododendron, could hear the Meadows’ hounds as they streamed out before him, could feel the earth shudder as Old Glory blazed away at the end of the hunt, and tired hunters and tired hounds turned again home.

            And there at Konnarock a message was waiting for me.  Papa had died in the night. 

            For a time after supper he had sat on the front porch with some of the family who had come over from town for a visit.  In rare good humor, he had told old tales that were clothed with laughter.  After he had gone to bed, the Glenrochie girls who had not taken the White Top trip had come back from a picture show in Abingdon, had come down between the rock lilies that bordered the long front drive to The Meadows, singing.

            “Listen to the camp girls,” Papa had said.  “How sweet their voices are tonight.”

            About midnight, he rose suddenly from the bed and walked to the window.  And then, the throat cancer having eaten into an artery, he sank down quietly, and soon was gone, peacefully, as his friend Channing Price had gone, peacefully, at Chancellorsville.

***

            Just before we turned into The Meadows’ driveway, I asked Jim Vance to stop the truck for a moment, and I told the girls that Papa had died.  They were very quiet as we passed the house, and I dropped off the truck and closed the gate behind them as they went on over to Glenrochie.

            At the house, I found my own people as I had expected to find them, distressed, but behaving as though no one knew that, with Papa, The Meadows and all that it had meant for generations had died, –that his had been the last surviving spirit of a Past that once was singing gold.

            The funeral would be the following afternoon:  I am the resurrection – and the life….and then the short journey to Sinking Spring Cemetery, where the living would come again into the presence of the Dead, where Papa would lie near Mother, removed only a little way from the Unknown Confederate Dead.

            All the necessary arrangements had been made,- but my Aunt Katy was disturbed because she had not been able to find a letter from General Stuart anywhere in Papa’s den.  A week or so before, she told me, he had laughingly said that he would like to have this letter tucked in with him when the end came.  I knew where the letter was.  Mother had had it framed for Papa, and Papa had wrapped it in newspaper and had hidden it away on the top shelf of his desk, and he and I were the only ones who knew where it was.

            And so I got up and went into Papa’s den and got the letter.