Vote Yes or No--Imaginary

 

At the head of the long oak supper table sat Sarah’s father, Squire Ephraim Sharp, seventy-one years old, his white beard bristling above a black broadcloth coat that had seen forty years of circuit court sessions. Across from him sat Sarah’s husband, Gideon Arbogast, thirty-four, his broad shoulders still smelling of wet wool and river-bottom pine, drying his boots by the hearth. Between them sat twelve-year-old Caleb, holding his breath over a pewter spoon of hominy grits. 

The freezing rain of December 7, 1891, had turned the six miles of clay road between Huntersville and Marlin’s Bottom into a bottomless trough of red mud, and that same mud was tracked halfway across Sarah Arbogast’s scrubbed puncheon floor.

At the head of the long oak supper table sat Sarah’s father, Squire Ephraim Sharp, seventy-one years old, his white beard bristling above a black broadcloth coat that had seen forty years of circuit court sessions. Across from him sat Sarah’s husband, Gideon Arbogast, thirty-four, his broad shoulders still smelling of wet wool and river-bottom pine, drying his boots by the hearth. Between them sat twelve-year-old Caleb, holding his breath over a pewter spoon of hominy grits.

Tomorrow was Tuesday, December 8—the day the men of Pocahontas County would ride to the polls to decide whether the seat of justice would stay where God and the Virginia General Assembly had planted it in 1821, or be dragged six miles overland to a muddy riverside cornfield recently christened Marlinton.

"Five thousand dollars," Squire Ephraim spat, striking the table with his knuckles so hard the buttermilk pitcher jumped. "Five thousand pieces of Grafton silver from Colonel John T. McGraw and his Pocahontas Development Company! And half the farmers on the Greenbrier River are ready to sell their birthright like Esau for a mess of pottage!"

Gideon didn't flinch. He kept his eyes on the hickory logs popping in the fireplace. "It ain't just five thousand dollars toward the building, Ephraim. It’s three and a fifth acres of flat bottomland deeded free and clear, and free rooms for the clerks till the brick is laid. That means no special levy on my eighty acres of Knapps Creek hill-ground to rebuild a courthouse here in Huntersville that’s got cracks in the plaster wide enough to throw a dog through."

"That brick courthouse on the hill stood through the War!" Ephraim roared, his face flushing the color of a winter winesap. "My father helped haul the limestone for the jailhouse! General Robert E. Lee’s own soldiers marched past that porch on their way to Cheat Mountain! And what is down at Marlin’s Bottom, Gideon? Tell the boy what’s down there! Five farmhouses, a covered bridge, and a mile of wooden surveyor stakes driven into broom-sedge!"

"There’s a water-grade along the Greenbrier River," Gideon answered quietly, though his jaw tightened. "And you know as well as I do, sir, that Senator Camden’s surveyors have already run the levels. An iron locomotive cannot climb Beaver Lick or jump the hills into Huntersville without tearing its boiler out. The railroad is coming up the river. When it comes, the timber mills and the hides and the freight depots will sit at the mouth of Knapps Creek, not six miles up it."

"Speculators' lies!" the old Squire thundered. "I run a harness shop and keep two rooms for jurymen on the Warm Springs Pike. If the court goes to the river, what happens to the taverns here? What happens to my shop when the lawyers and witnesses stop riding into Huntersville four times a year?"

"Father, Gideon—hush now, both of you," Sarah said firmly, stepping between them with a cast-iron skillet of fried salt pork. She wore the weary look of a woman who had spent three months trying to keep two stubborn men under one roof. "The ballots aren't cast tonight, and you won't settle the three-fifths law over my supper table. Caleb, eat your meat and go grease the wagon hubs."

Caleb slipped out the back door into the raw December dark, grateful for the cold air.

Our house sat right on the seam of the tearing fabric—two miles below Huntersville along Knapps Creek, where the narrow valley began its winding descent toward the wide bottomlands of the Greenbrier River. In his pocket, Caleb carried two folded slips of heavy white rag-paper he had picked up off the floor of his grandfather’s harness shop that afternoon:

• One read: FOR REMOVAL OF COUNTY SEAT TO MARLINTON.
  
  
• The other read: AGAINST REMOVAL OF COUNTY SEAT.
  
  

There were no secret voting booths in 1891. Tomorrow, a voter had to walk up to the window of the election commissioners, state his name aloud in front of his neighbors, and hand over his printed slip. Every man in the district would know which ticket Gideon Arbogast dropped into the box—including the father-in-law who held the mortgage on Gideon’s team of horses.

At dawn on December 8, a brittle frost crusted the mud ruts. By seven o’clock, the turnpike was alive with the clatter of iron horseshoes and iron-tired buggies.

Squire Ephraim refused to ride in Gideon’s farm wagon. Dressed in his tallest beaver felt hat, the old man climbed onto his sorrel mare and rode briskly up the creek toward the Huntersville courthouse precinct, where the old guard—merchants, teamsters from the Staunton-Parkersburg Pike, and aging Confederates—had gathered around a roaring tar-barrel fire.

Gideon hitched his two bays to the spring wagon, helped Sarah and Caleb onto the plank seat, and turned the horses west toward Marlin’s Bottom.

"Are we going all the way to the river, Pa?" Caleb asked, pulling his wool muffler over his nose.

"I promised Andrew Price I’d haul a load of cedar fence posts down to the bridge," Gideon said. "And I reckon you ought to see what half the county is fighting over."

After an hour of jolting along the rocky creek bed, the hills suddenly fell back, opening onto the broad, mist-shrouded terrace of Marlin’s Bottom.

Caleb stood up in the wagon bed to stare. On any ordinary Tuesday, this place was as quiet as a churchyard, save for the hollow rumble of wagons crossing the long 1854 covered bridge spanning the green waters of the Greenbrier. Today, it looked like a camp meeting and a cattle muster rolled into one.

Across the frosted meadow where Tenth Avenue and Court Street had been freshly staked out with white-painted locust pegs, a great canvas tent had been pitched. A painted cotton banner stretched between two sycamore trees proclaimed in bold black letters:

MARLINTON: THE FUTURE METROPOLIS OF THE GREENBRIER VALLEYVOTE FOR REMOVAL — NO TAX LEVY FOR THE FARMER!

Standing on an overturned cider barrel near the covered bridge was a man Caleb knew had never swung an axe in his life. It was Colonel John T. McGraw of Grafton—broad-chested, clean-shaven, wearing a fur-collared overcoat and gold-rimmed pince-nez glasses that flashed in the pale winter sun. Around him stood three young civil engineers holding brass transits and unrolled linen maps showing neat grids of numbered streets, avenues, hotel squares, and railroad sidings where, at that very moment, three spotted cows were chewing frozen cud.

"Gentlemen of Pocahontas!" McGraw’s rich courtroom baritone carried clear across the bottomland to the men warming their hands at a pit of burning slab-wood. "Look upon these mountains of virgin spruce! Look upon this noble river! For seventy years your treasures have been locked behind fifty miles of mud turnpike! Vote for Marlinton today, place your temple of justice at the gateway of the iron horse, and within ten years you will sell your white oak and your cattle at a railroad depot within sight of your own courthouse steps!"

A mighty cheer went up from a crowd of rough-coated men who had ridden down from the Levels, Edray, and Green Bank—men who had always resented riding clear across the county into the eastern pocket of Huntersville just to record a deed or pay their taxes.

"Fine speech from a man who bought the bottom for ten dollars an acre and wants to sell it back to us in town lots for two hundred!" jeered a voice near the bridge. It was Abner Barlow, a blacksmith from Huntersville who had ridden down with four friends to challenge voters at the river precinct.

Several timber-rafters from Buckeye took a hard step toward Barlow, their fists balling up. Gideon quickly stepped down from his wagon, placing his broad hand against the chest of a hot-headed cousin from Knapps Creek.

"Let him be, Luke," Gideon said evenly. "A man gets his say at the ballot box today, not with his knuckles."

By two o’clock that afternoon, they were back in Huntersville. If Marlin’s Bottom had the fever of a camp meeting, Huntersville had the grim, defiant air of a fort under siege.

Around the old red-brick courthouse and the thick-walled stone jail, nearly two hundred horses were tethered to the hitching rails. Inside the printing office of the Pocahontas Times, young Andrew Price and his brothers stood by their hand-cranked press, looking out at the town where their father, the Reverend William Price, had founded the paper years before. Everyone knew that if the courthouse moved, the Times—which depended on county legal notices and sheriff's sales for its lifeblood—would have to pack its lead type into wagons and follow the court to the river.

Squire Ephraim stood right beside the courthouse steps, flanking the polling window like an Old Testament sentry. Every time a farmer from the beaver-dam country or Beaver Creek walked up the steps, Ephraim caught him by the coat lapel.

"Remember who carried your store account during the dry summer of '88, Thomas!" Ephraim called out to a hesitant sheep farmer. "Did Colonel McGraw of Grafton shoe your horses on credit, or did Huntersville?"

Then Gideon walked up the gravel path, Caleb trailing two paces behind him.

The chatter around the courthouse porch died down to a low murmur. Every man there knew Gideon Arbogast lived under Squire Sharp’s roof. Every man knew Ephraim had sworn before witnesses at the general store that no man eating at his table would cast a vote to ruin Huntersville.

Ephraim stepped forward, his rheumy blue eyes locking onto his son-in-law’s face. The old man reached into his waistcoat pocket and held out a crisp white slip printed with AGAINST REMOVAL.

"Here is your ticket, Gideon," Ephraim said, his voice shaking slightly in the cold air—not with rage now, Caleb realized, but with genuine fear. "Don't let strange men from Grafton tear down what my granddaddy built."

Gideon stopped on the bottom stone step. He looked at the old brick courthouse with its scaling white trim, then over at the harness shop where Ephraim’s painted wooden sign swung in the December wind. Finally, he looked down at twelve-year-old Caleb—a boy who, in ten years' time, would either have to leave Pocahontas County to find wages in the coal mines, or build a life right here if the railroad and the mills came to the river.

"I honor what your people built, Ephraim," Gideon said softly, taking off his wool hat. "And as long as I have two hands, you and Sarah’s mother will never want for bread or roof. But I cannot tie this boy’s future to a stagecoach road that’s already dead."

Reaching into his own flannel shirt pocket, Gideon drew out the slip reading FOR REMOVAL OF COUNTY SEAT TO MARLINTON. He walked up the steps, gave his name clearly to the clerk, and watched the commissioner slide the slip through the slot of the locked walnut ballot box.

Squire Ephraim didn't shout. He simply lowered his hand, turned his back, and walked slowly through the mud toward his harness shop, shutting the heavy oak door behind him.

The lamps burned late in Huntersville that night as messengers on lathered horses galloped in from Green Bank, Dunmore, Hillsboro, and Marlinton with the locked saddlebags containing the precinct tallies.

To move the county seat, McGraw’s faction didn't just need a majority; under West Virginia law, they needed three-fifths—sixty percent—of every vote cast. Around seven o’clock, word came that the eastern precincts around Huntersville and Frost had voted heavily to stay. At the general store, men began uncorking jugs, convinced the sixty-percent hurdle had held firm like a stone wall.

Then, at nine o’clock, the riders from the Little Levels and Green Bank splashed up to the courthouse steps, their horses blowing clouds of steam into the lantern light.

Caleb stood pressed against the cold windowpane of the courthouse corridor as the county clerk stepped out into the hallway with a sheet of foolscap covered in ink figures. The crowd pressed in so tight you could hear the ticking of pocket watches.

"Total votes cast in the County of Pocahontas," the clerk read aloud, holding a kerosene lamp high, "one thousand, four hundred and fifteen!"

"How many to move?!" Abner Barlow shouted from the doorway. "It takes eight hundred and forty-nine for three-fifths!"

The clerk cleared his throat. "Against removal of the county seat... four hundred and seventy-five. For removal of the county seat to Marlinton... nine hundred and forty."

A stunned silence fell over the Huntersville porch—sixty-six percent. They hadn't just cleared the three-fifths mark; they had cleared it by ninety-one votes. Down in the darkness toward the Greenbrier River, six miles away, someone touched off a blast of black blasting powder on an anvil—a dull, distant boom that rolled up the Knapps Creek hollow like summer thunder.

Behind the crowd, Caleb saw his grandfather standing in the shadow of the stone jailhouse wall. The old man looked smaller than he had that morning.

"Don't fret, Squire!" a lawyer named McClintic called out fiercely, slapping a leather law book against his knee. "They haven't moved a single deed book yet! Come Monday morning, we’ll file bills of injunction in circuit court that'll tie up their tax levy and their sheriff's orders from here to Charleston! It'll be snowing in July before they lay a single brick in McGraw’s swamp!"

Gideon walked over to where Squire Ephraim stood in the mud. For a long moment, neither man spoke as the anvil cannon boomed a second time down on the river.

"The boy’s cold, Ephraim," Gideon said quietly, holding out the reins of the wagon team. "And Sarah’s kept a pot of coffee hot on the back of the stove. Ride home with us in the wagon. I’ll lead the mare behind."

The old Squire stared toward the dark western hills where the town of Marlinton waited to be born. Slowly, he nodded, rested a trembling, blue-veined hand on Caleb’s shoulder to steady himself, and climbed up onto the wagon seat beside his son-in-law.