Portrait of a Pioneer

I'm reading a book on an Appalachian old-timer, Alex Stewart. A tougher-n-boot-leather jack-of-all-trades, he's featured in Foxfire 3 for woodcraft learned from his father and grandfather. I've never heard of anyone living through or doing the things he did, though the old west would have had matching characters.

He grew up dirt poor, running barefoot in the woods. I loved this story of his school days:

"I had so little to eat that I'd try and sneak out to get away from the crowd to eat my dinner. I'd go around the side of the cabin and the teacher started coming around there to eat too. He'd have biscuits and butter and applebutter and something like that every day. All I'd have was just dry cornbread and molasses, and I was ashamed for him to see me eat. I'd have my molasses in a tea cup and I'd carry it and my cornbread in a little wood bucket that Grandpap had made for me.

"He looked over one day, and I's sitting there with a big piece of cornbread and he said, 'Would you care to swap some bread with me?'

"I said, 'Swap some with you?!'

"He said, 'I like cornbread better than I do biscuits. I'd like to swap with you.'

"Well, he knowed that would tickle me to get to swap with him. I had a half pone of cornbread, and I retched (reached) it over to him and he retched me back two biscuits. And he said, 'I can spare you some applebutter to go on them biscuits if you want it.' And he retched over and got one of them biscuits and put me some applebutter on it and I thought I had a fine dinner that day. From then on, every time I'd go to school, he'd come around and swap biscuits for cornbread."


the harvest moon two nights ago, through Twitty's telescope