The Mountains Won&39t Remember Us and Other Stories [Paperback]

From the bestselling author ofGap Creek,comes a breathtaking collection of stories about the lives and history of the settlers of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Struggling to survive in an ancient mountain landscape that alternately thwarts their efforts and infuses them with joy and vitality, the strong-limbed and strong-willed people of the Blue Ridge Mountains undergo the transition from ploughshares to bulldozers -- from the Indian skirmishes of the post-Revoluationary War era to the trailer parks of the present day. In these eleven first-person narratives, Morgan visits the themes that matter to all people in all places: birth and death, love and loss, joy and sorrow, the necessity for remembrance and the inevitability of forgetting.
This is a moving tribute to that which is universal and eternal -- the majestic immutability of the earth and the heroic human struggle to live, love, and create new life.An accomplished novelist and poet,Robert Morganhas won the James B. Hanes Poetry Prize, the North Carolina Award in Literature, and the Jacaranda Review Fiction Prize. His short stories have appeared inPrize Stories: The O. Henry AwardsandNew Stories from the South,and his novelThe Truest Pleasurewas a finalist for the Southern Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. He is a professor of English at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.Chapter 1

Poinsett's Bridge

Son, it was the most money I'd ever had, one ten-dollar gold piece and twenty-three silver dollars. The gold piece I put in my dinner bucket so it wouldn't get worn away by the heavy silver. The dollars clinked and weighed in my pocket like a pistol. I soon wished they was a pistol.

What you men have done here this year will not be forgotten, Senator Pineset said before he cut the ribbon across the bridge. The coming generations will see your work and honor you. You have opened the mountains to the world, and the world tolc$