A novel of Lawrence County, Missouri · 1838–1885

What theHills Keep

A Friend

In less than a minute, on a market Saturday, two men were dead — and the woman both of them loved would carry the county’s verdict for the rest of her life.

What the record kept

Every man in these families is still on the tree. Not every woman is.

A man could do a great deal and keep his place in the record. A woman could do considerably less and lose hers — dropped out of the family tree, her children entered under somebody else, the branch closed over where she had been. It happened often enough to be a habit.

The book

Mt. Vernon, Missouri. April 25, 1885. On a market Saturday, in front of half the county, two men met on the south side of the public square. One was a farmer who had never been known to miss. The other was a merchant who had never been known to stop talking. In less than a minute, both were dead — and the woman both men loved would carry the county’s verdict for the rest of her life.

What the Hills Keep goes back to where the whole of it rose, the way you walk a creek up to its spring — to 1838, when the first of them rode into Lawrence County and chose his ground; to a benefit concert where a quiet man watched a girl sing; to a wedding, a store, a storm, a bottle of cordial sold in all kindness; and to the slow, ordinary, catastrophic years by which good people arrive at a minute nobody can take back.

Drawn from newspapers, county records, and the stones themselves, this is a novel about what a place remembers, what a family buries — and what the hills keep.

Length
126,000 words
Chapters
Forty-six
Years covered
1838–1885
Status
Finished

How it opens

You cannot ditch a spring.

Chapter One · The Spring

The hills of Lawrence County were old before any white man put his name to the land, and they would be old long after the last of those names had worn from the stones. In the autumn of 1838 the timber ran thick on the western ridges, the limestone broke through wherever the ground rose steeply, the springs came cold and clear out of the rock as they always had, indifferent to the business of settlers and their particular hopes.

It was then that Thomas Wallace Holt rode into Lawrence County, twenty-three years old and alone, on a horse that had carried him eight hundred miles out of Hawkins County, East Tennessee. He rode out to the place of his uncle, John Williams, who had settled on the river in 1831 and given it his name without ever quite meaning to. Tom stayed long enough to be neighborly and went out looking at ground.

He had come with a saddlebag, a bedroll, and an intention, which was less equipment than most men brought into the Ozarks and turned out to be as much as he needed. Tom did not waste motion and did not waste words; of the two economies he was prouder of the second.

He found the spring on a Tuesday, when the late season had dried the grasses and made the water visible from the limestone shelf above. He stood there a long time, a man with everything he owned on the horse behind him. He looked at the spring and thought, here.

In August of 1840, Tom married Martha Rachel Pruett, whose people had come out of East Tennessee into Mount Vernon Township the same season his had ridden in. Two days married, he brought her out to show her what she had agreed to and stopped her on the limestone shelf above the spring.

She looked at the spring. She looked at the long slope above it, at the limestone outcroppings, at the timber to the north and east. She looked at the sky.

“This is it,” he said, in a tone matter of fact, but turned to look at her directly.

“I gathered,” Martha said, as she looked from him to the surrounding ground. “Good water. That slope above it faces south. Timber’s close but not so close it’ll shade the fields.”

She was quiet a moment. “It’s a right smart way from town.”

“Two miles from the square.”

“That’s a long way in February, Tom.”

“Hit ain’t February.”

“No,” she said. “Hit’s October.” She looked at the spring again, the clear cold run of it over the limestone, how it widened into a small basin before it found its course through the lower grass. “It’s a good spring,” she said finally.

“Best I’ve seen in the county.”

“Then I reckon we’d better get the wagon.” She nodded at him, flattened the front of her dress and turned back toward the road.

Tom waited another moment. He was not a man given to sentiment, but something in him had settled in a way it had not settled before, and he recognized the feeling as certainty, which was the closest he came to happiness.

The Big Spring at Mount Vernon, photographed this summer. The geography in the book is real, and so is this water. It is not the spring the first chapter opens on — that one rises on the home place, a few miles west — but it is the same limestone doing the same thing, a quarter mile off the square.

Forty-six years later that lesson — you cannot ditch a spring; raise your ground and let the water run — passes to Tom’s son on the morning Cal Holt marries Nora Bell.

The first ones in

The county in this book was settled by people you can still go and read about.

They came into the Ozarks in the 1830s with a saddlebag and an intention, and most of them are buried within a few miles of where they finished. Some have a stone. Some have a place in the row where a stone should be, and nothing on it.

What follows is what the record actually says about two of the first — the newspapers, the census returns, the county's own books, the stones. It is offered without commentary. Read it and draw your own conclusions.

Keep in touch

Hear when the book is ready.

What the Hills Keep is finished and being made ready to print. It will be published when it is right rather than by a date somebody picked, and the people on this list will know before anybody else.

Leave your name and you will hear about the novel and nothing else. No money changes hands here, and there is no list but this one.

If it is the history you are after rather than the fiction — the families, the graves, the records, and the non-fiction being written out of them — that work is at williamsgraveyard.org.

Paperback Ebook Either

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Fact and invention

The novel is fiction. What it was built on is not.

Two men died on the Mount Vernon square on a market Saturday in April of 1885, and that is in the county papers, where anyone can read it. The public frame of this book comes from that record — the fair premiums, the tornado, the store, the lawsuit, the square — along with census returns, marriage and probate records, and the stones themselves. The geography is not invented either: Lawrence County is Lawrence County, Mount Vernon is Mount Vernon, and the square is one you can go and stand on.

Everyone in the novel is invented. The characters carry names of the author’s making, and they think, say and do things no record supports, including one invention of a different order that is identified plainly in a note at the back of the book. Nothing in these pages should be read as an account of what any real person thought, said, or did.

The real people are a separate matter, and they are kept separately. They are at williamsgraveyard.org, under their own names, beside the records they can be checked against — which is the only honest place to put them, and the only place the woman this began with gets her name back.

The byline is borrowed. Somewhere in the county papers of these years, an anonymous mourner paid public tribute to one of those people, would not give a name, and signed only A Friend. Whose tribute that was — and why a novel should be signed the same way — is the last thing the book has to say.

— A Friend