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By Root 1387 0

falling, and though Jacob cried out “I’ll catch ye!” and “I’ve caught ye!” he could not, would not. Limbs of trees deflected the plummet of the body away from his grasp but did not soften the descent enough to keep Murray from slamming into that which awaits the fall of all. Jacob would never forget the sound, all of the parts of the sound: of flesh violently bruised, of lungs expelled, of bones snapping, of blood spurting. Some months later, when he himself would lie abed with the frakes and the fear of, not of falling but of getting the fear of falling, he would load his rifle and instruct Sarah to use it upon him if ever he left the house except to relieve himself out back.

Murray Swain was the founder of the Stay More cemetery. There’s an old story that when the next wave of settlers came into Stay More, six families from various parts of eastern Tennessee and northern Georgia, the men were gathered at the Mayor’s—Jacob’s—house for the formality of requesting his permission to settle. One man declared that he would like to start a blacksmith shop. Another said that he intended to start a sheep ranch. Another declared his intention to start a trading post. Still another was going to start a gristmill. Each of the men had some intention to contribute to the establishment of the village, except for one very old man who had suffered the long trip from Georgia and was ill. “What about him?” Jacob asked the others, and they replied, “Oh. Him. Reckon he aims to start the cemetery.” Jacob thought maybe they were trying to be funny, but he didn’t laugh. He just stared them down and informed them, “We done got one.” And in fact, when the old man died within a few days, and was given a proper burial, there was already another headstone in a clearing down Swains Creek a ways, a headstone quarried from slate and inscribed with the name and the too-brief dates, the last of which was the earliest in Stay More, and the inscription, “Falling no more.” It was Lizzie Swain herself who, without irony or approbation or sorrow so much as plain observation, named the lofty jag of bluff “Leapin Rock,” and defied all her descendants to go near it. Throughout the history of Stay More, it was always difficult for anyone to avoid seeing that landmark, looming up to the west of the village as a silent reminder that there is a place to fall from, a silent temptation to those who want to stop falling.

The six families were the Plowrights, the Coes, the Dinsmores, the Chisms, the Duckworths, and the Whitters. Collectively they increased the population of Stay More by thirty-three, as if to compensate for the decrease by one. They built cabins or houses very similar to, but carefully not identical to, those of the Ingledews and the Swains. Zachariah Dinsmore did indeed construct a primitive gristmill on Swains Creek, and Levi Whitter erected an even more primitive building which became the village’s first general store or trading post, much to the disdain of Eli Willard the next time he came.

Willard’s current merchandise, the knives and scissors and razors, it must be noted, performed just a little more satisfactorily than his clocks: the jackknives could be opened only with a pair of pliers and closed only with a hammer; the screws fell out of Lizzie’s scissors and Sarah’s too (although they discovered that they each had two knives as a result) and Jacob’s razor gave him many mornings of pure agony and bloodshed until he discovered that it worked much better if he first lathered his jowls with soap. But even beardless and fresh-shaven he found that Sarah did not appreciate him any better than she had before, at least not in bed. Once, inspired by drink, he tried again the bath-in-three-waters: rain, creek, spring, hoping it might produce some magic response in Sarah, but this had only the effect of erasing his olfactory identity. “It aint you,” Sarah said, in the dark, refusing to let him into the bed. “Whoever ye air, you aint you.” He slept with his dogs, whose keen noses could recognize at least a trace of whatever remained of him.

Jacob