SHORT FICTION - THE LEGEND OF FRANK JOHNSTONE

By Ted Olson

"The Legend of Frank Johnstone" is an original tale concerning a Scottish immigrant who during the mid-nineteenth century settled on the western edge of the Virginia Blue Ridge region--today that particular area is part of the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia. In 1979, when I was a counselor at a West Virginia summer camp, I created this tale for my own enjoyment and for the edification of a small group of urban children who like me were temporary residents in an alien but intriguing Appalachian environment of densely wooded hills and once-farmed, cleared hollows. "The Legend of Frank Johnstone" evolved that particular summer to satisfy the collective need of young urban people who had been thrust together into an unfamiliar rural environment and who were jointly craving to develop deeper identification with that environment by understanding its elusive "sense of place." Although essentially fiction, the tale's historical background is based on fact and its setting is authentic--it is set in Cooper's Cove, the Hampshire County, West Virginia mountain hollow in which I first told this tale. Cooper's Cove was the location of the summer camp where I worked during my years as an undergraduate college student. As a camp counselor, my main responsibility was to lead natural history workshops. Yet, because that camp had in its curriculum always accentuated the study of natural history over cultural history, I introduced into the camp's program a folklore unit loosely based on the popular Foxfire model. Just a year out of high school when I first told this tale, I was already fascinated by folklore, having read numerous books on the subject. And so, during overnight camping trips while we were sitting around the campfire, I would tell stories to the mostly urban campers. I wanted to impart to the campers some information about the human history of Cooper's Cove, but little was known about the place--apparently, no one affiliated with the camp before me had shown much interest in the Cove's cultural history. Furthermore, the camp was located in an isolated part of Hampshire County, and I had only recently arrived there from my childhood home in Washington, D.C. and had had little time to gather information about the County's local history. Thus, during my very first overnight camping trip as a counselor, I concocted my own story about the settlement of Cooper's Cove. That summer I told "The Legend of Frank Johnstone" to many groups of campers, and I often readjusted the tale in response to their reactions; so it evolved orally before it was ever written down. After I left West Virginia that summer I quickly wrote down the "summer's-end" version of the tale before I would forget it entirely. Re-reading "The Legend of Frank Johnstone" today, I think that it represents the earnest if naive attempt of one urban person to understand the complex cultural history of the misunderstood and under-appreciated Appalachian people and their rural way of life. The tale might also be seen as a documented example of the camp lore that emerges every summer at camps. Most camp lore, while enjoyable and meaningful to its creators at the time of inception, is ephemeral, quickly dying out at the end of the camp's session as the people who created that lore disperse to lead their "normal" lives. Whether or not the following tale--a sample of "camp lore"--holds meaning apart from the specific environment in which it was generated, "The Legend of Frank Johnstone" has survived, albeit in altered form, having been translated from a fluid and interactive oral text to a fixed, self-consciously literary written one.

--Ted Olson

"The Legend of Frank Johnstone"

I met Zachary Cooper by his cabin one May morning a dozen years ago. I was a college student then, taking a course at the University of Maryland, and one of the requirements for passing was to document some kind of folklore. Not sure what topic I should study, I procrastinated, until there was only a week left in the semester. At that point I called my brother Joe for advice. He told me about a West Virginia storyteller he had heard the previous summer at a folk festival in New York City. According to Joe, Mr. Cooper enthralled the audience by talking about the history of his mountain farm--all the while leaning upon the microphone stand as if it were a hoe.

Mr. Cooper answered his phone after maybe twenty rings. I explained my assignment to him, then asked if I might interview him at his farm the following weekend. He said simply, "Okay." That Saturday, I sped through the suburbs toward the mountains. By nine in the morning I had reached Winchester, Virginia, and just over an hour later I was driving through the gap into Mr. Cooper's cove. Getting out of my car to open the gate to his farm, I noticed saplings sprouting up in his fields. I saw, at the base of the nearest ridge, a cabin; sitting on the front door stoop was a man, carving something. I parked by the side of the dirt road behind a rusty truck, then ambled up the well-worn path toward the cabin. The man remained seated; his eyes were now fixed on my tape recorder. When I was roughly a dozen feet from him, Mr. Cooper finally spoke to me: "What's that contraption for?"

"To preserve your story for the future," I replied.

"Maybe the future won't want to hear it," he responded.

His white beard hid his chin and neck, but not the New York Yankees' insignia on his tee shirt, which was tucked neatly into his wrinkled overalls. I sat next to him on the stoop. After some chitchat, I asked him if he would be willing to tell me the legend he had told in New York City. He wasn't listening, I thought--he just gazed off toward the ridge that overshadowed his cabin.

Then, suddenly, Mr. Cooper threw the wood figurine he had been carving in the direction of the ridge, and stuck his knife into the stoop's uppermost plank. Pointing toward a large stone-pile on top of the ridge, he started speaking--as much to himself as to me. Having placed my tape recorder beside me on the stoop, I now pressed the record button.

"The legend," he said, "You want to hear the legend? Well...."

Back in olden times, a knight named John left his lord's castle in the borderlands between Scotland and England and fled to the north of Scotland, where he planned to stake out his own domain. Walking north as far as he could walk, John came to the coast; there he looked out to sea and spied, across a broad channel, an island. He decided to make that island his own, even if he had to fight for it.

Building a boat out of some trees he felled, John crossed the channel and landed on the island; there, he discovered other people--a clan; they came to meet him by the shore. Knowing he couldn't conquer them easily, he devised a plan. He would boast of success in battle, which might convince the local chieftain to let him marry into the clan. Now, John had never won a battle and he had lost some, but he told such a good story that the chieftain believed him.

John married one of the chieftain's daughters, and for a wedding present the chieftain gave John and his bride one of that island's peninsulas. There John built a small stone cottage, and there his wife bore him sons; they were called the sons of John, or the Johnsons. Years passed, and the Johnson Clan grew large in number and stature. With muscles more like stone than flesh, the mighty Johnsons ran into battle brandishing stone axes and chanting, "For We Are As Stone," which would frighten rivals into submission. Eventually the Johnsons conquered everyone on the island--even their own relatives, the descendants of the chieftain who had fallen for John's story. Spreading their landholdings across the island, the Johnsons built a castle on their original peninsula, with stones gathered at the seashore. Inside, on the castle wall, they hung a symbol of their strength, a golden medallion, inscribed "For We Are As Stone." And to reflect their newfound power the Johnsons changed their name: Johnson became Johnstone.

Illustration by Bart Galloway

But, like the summer sun in the northern sky, the Johnstones soon fell. One winter, strangers invaded the island, with better weapons. By the light of the moon these strangers attacked the sleeping Johnstones, killing most of them, and demolished the castle, then sailed off to ransack another island. When the remaining Johnstones--those who had escaped the assault--came out of hiding, they were horrified to see all they had lost. After burying their dead, they agreed they should leave the island forever.

Then, while sorting through the rubble, one of the Johnstones found the golden medallion. He recited its inscription aloud--"For We Are As Stone"--to his fellow clansmen, and they decided to stay. In the shadow of their ruined castle, they built a large hut, and inside that hut they hung the medallion.

For many years the Johnstones fed on the fish they could catch off the shores of their peninsula. But one year they didn't catch any fish; because of a disease in the sea there weren't fish to catch. That winter all but one of the Johnstones starved to death. As soon as the earth thawed out, the lone survivor, Frank Johnstone, buried his clansmen. Then he planted potatoes, the only crop that would grow in that cold northern soil.

Several years later, Frank Johnstone's potatoes were destroyed by a strange blight. He began to starve again--but he wasn't the only one suffering: the potato famine was felt throughout the British Isles. Many people, hoping to escape their pain, embarked for America, sailing from cities like Glasgow and Belfast. My grandfather was on one of those ships; Frank Johnstone was on another.

Frank Johnstone boarded a ship with all his earthly possessions, the golden medallion, and a new bride he had married in port. As the ship left the harbor, he looked westward toward the green fields of America, where, he surely thought, he would never be hungry again.

The ship on which the Johnstones sailed was docked in Baltimore, but they did not plan to settle in a city--they wanted to farm. Someone had told the Johnstones that land could be bought for very little money in the hills of western Virginia; someone else had told them that the area was unsettled wilderness, teeming with game and free of red men. So the Johnstones journeyed inland, and in the spring of 1847 they reached Winchester; there, Frank Johnstone signed the deed for a plot of land located right where we're sitting.

The Johnstones walked into this very cove through its only opening--the same gap you just drove through, where the stream cut a path through the ridge. Coming from Scotland where the forest had already been cut down, they must have been amazed at the size of the trees that grew here then: huge oaks, humongous hickories, taller poplars, and chestnuts--that was long before the chestnuts all died off, killed by a blight.

When the Johnstones arrived here that spring, this cove had never been logged. In those days, leaves blocked out the sun; unseen creatures drank from the stream. With an axe bought in Winchester, Frank Johnstone chopped down some trees and built a crude cabin, with a bark-slab roof to block the rain. His wife dug up rocks, and in their place she planted potatoes. On the outside of the cabin's door, to reflect the sun of a new sky, they hung the golden medallion.

The potatoes soon sprouted, so the Johnstones hoped for a good crop. That September, however, a snowstorm surprised them. Waking to a foot of snow, they slogged to the garden patch to retrieve their potatoes, but those tubers had frozen.

A lot of snow fell that winter. Before long the Johnstones were starving. Frank Johnstone went hunting, using a rifle he had obtained in Winchester, but that weapon was foreign to him: he shot one doe all winter.

By May, the sun had finally made it over those ridges and into this cove, melting the snow and awakening the wildflowers. When the soil in their garden patch was warm enough, the Johnstones planted more potatoes.

It had been a long time since they had eaten much. Frank Johnstone climbed up that ridge in search of food, and he found some. Up there, by that stone-pile, is a spot where, as soon as the snow melts, mushrooms--puffballs--blanket the forest floor. He was so busy gathering puffballs, he wasn't watching where he was going: he tripped over that stone-pile, fell hard against a boulder, spilling the puffballs he had been cradling. Getting to his knees, he noticed, in the middle of the stone-pile, a very dark hole, a cave--he had almost fallen into it. Appalled at his carelessness, he ran back to the cabin. He did not tell his wife where he had been, for he had nothing to show for all his efforts. A fellow in town informed me that the stone-pile was a burial mound erected by an ancient race of Indians--mound-builders who lived in these parts hundreds of years ago. That fellow told me that, when one of those Indians died, members of his tribe would bury him, would mark his tomb site with a pile of earth and stone so the dead would not be forgotten. The mound-builders eventually abandoned their mounds--another race of Indians chased them southward. That fellow said that the mound-builders fled to Mexico, where they created more magnificent tombs. The newer Indians, though, didn't stay long in this area, finding these hills too rugged to live in.

One night in late spring, a year after the Johnstones arrived here, this cove was shrouded by clouds that would not leave; soon, a heavy rain began to fall. The roof of the Johnstones' cabin soaked up the rain, then collapsed on the sleepers beneath. Suddenly drenched, the occupants huddled under blankets beside their extinguished fire.

There was little light at dawn. Overhead, clouds were colliding: thunder shook the cabin, lightning kicked over a nearby tree. Heading outside to investigate, Frank Johnstone could see no sign that the rain would ever end; he also saw that their potato plants had been uprooted, had been washed downstream.

He tore the golden medallion off the door--it was cursed, he now believed. He would free his family of this curse...forever. He dropped the medallion in a metal box and wrapped the box with rope. He didn't tell his wife what he was doing, where he was going.

Rushing up the ridge with the box, he came to the stone-pile and the cave. He entered. Now out of the rain, he lit a candle with flint and steel, so he could see. Then he descended, stepping from ledge to ledge as the cave narrowed. Soon, he could go no further; there, the darkness began, the darkness of Hell, he thought, where the Devil was waiting to reclaim the cursed medallion--that old, dead stone from an old, dead world. The Devil possessed it, the Devil could have it. Frank Johnstone flung the box bearing the medallion into that darkness--it bounced from stone to stone, disappearing.

Illustration by Bart Galloway

Water dripping within the cave extinguished his candle flame. He climbed up clumsily, groping for toe-holds, until he thought he could see the sun. But, lunging for the light, he knocked loose some large stones--one struck him on the head. He fell backward, screaming; no one could hear him.

The rain continued, flooding this cove. Frank Johnstone's wife sought refuge partway up the ridge, in a brush-and-blanket shelter under some hemlocks. For days she remained there, hungrier than ever, waiting for her husband. When the rain finally stopped, she took off, like a bird freed from a cage. She would never return.

Brambles sprouted around the cabin that summer, and the next summer, locust seedlings. Soon the walls of the cabin caved in. Squirrels planted acorns in the clearing, and in soil free of stone, the oaks grew quickly.

I settled here just after World War I, and I saw no trace of a clearing--I didn't think to look for one. When I moved here, this cove was forest, and it had always been forest, as far as I knew. And I wanted to farm. So, when a logging company offered to cut down my trees, I said, "Okay." Well, the company cut down every last tree from here to the ridge; and as it turned out, the company's owners benefited the most from the arrangement. Although I wasn't one of them, I wasn't dumb--I had been to school and had read books. Yet, when the company owners told me I'd be helping my country if I let them have this cove's trees, I didn't question it. Wood was in great demand then, because in those days sea-sick immigrants and former soldiers all wanted to build houses for their families. However, from the sale of all those big trees, I made just enough money to buy, at a sawmill, just enough boards for a small frame house. And no sooner had I finished building that house than it burned down. Hunters broke in while I was out hunting, took what they wanted, then set the house on fire. Only the stone chimney remains--I've left it standing as a reminder of what I've lost.

My house destroyed, I built this cabin at the base of the ridge. I've resided in this cabin for forty years, and I can't imagine living anywhere else. I don't need electricity, though I had a telephone installed so I could hear from people.

My brother Ben lived nearby. He owned a farm on the other side of the ridge. You drove by the site of his farm on your way in here; you might not have noticed it because the buildings are gone and the forest has returned. Ben was always working, and so was I; we rarely saw each other. From April to October we would not--could not--leave our fields. It was the fever in the air--to work all the time: to clear the trees, to heap the stones, to push the plow, to plant the seeds, to reap the corn.

One September evening, an early snow surprised us, crushed our crops. Ben labored all night, trying to save his crops before they were buried. Shortly afterward he took sick. Later that week I went to check on him, found his body on his bed, cold, dead. I gave what was left of Ben's corn to his livestock to get them through the winter; when spring arrived, I sold them, and with the proceeds I bought Ben a headstone.

As I've grown older, I've traveled further and further away from here; but I'm not ready to leave for good, my work's not done. Nowadays, when I'm not off at some festival, I like to pass my time sitting on this stoop carving figurines out of scraps of wood; lately, strangers have been offering me money for those things--I have no idea why. I need to finish what I've started, to replant this cove with trees. I often gaze southward to see the world I created: the field that once fed me, now barren, rutted by hooves and wheels. When I can't stand to look in that direction anymore, when my sight is washed out by the sun's glare, I turn around, look toward the ridge, where my eyes can rest in the shelter of those trees.

Some years after I settled here--in the early 1940s--I took a walk one spring morning up that ridge, thinking the puffballs might be out. And they were out: I gathered a bucket's worth, then rested on a pile of stones. I had walked by those stones before, but now, sitting on them, I examined them closely for the first time. I noticed that each stone was nested on another stone, as if someone had placed them that way; but who would have done that? Indians? The stones were loose, so I removed a few of the ones at the top. Then I spied white powder. Curious, I removed several more stones, and crouched closer. What I saw shocked me: I saw two chalky sticks. When dusted off, they appeared to be...bones, from an arm. The thought of my having desecrated an Indian's grave terrified me--I used to tell a story about this cove being haunted by the red man's ghost. I thought it was just a story. I ran down the ridge, drove to the nearest telephone (which was at a friend's house in town), and called for help.

The next day, an archaeologist from the university, an expert on the Indians who once lived in this area, drove through the gap in a brand-new truck. He and I climbed up the ridge; I carried his shovel. When we got within sight of the stone-pile, the archaeologist stopped, then remarked that it didn't resemble other Indian burial mounds in this part of West Virginia--this mound was smaller and had not been covered with earth. I, coaxing him to look more closely, showed the archaeologist where the bones jutted out from between the stones. He was astonished--he said he had never seen Indian remains so well preserved.

The archaeologist excavated for the rest of that morning. Digging with some care, he unearthed the bones of a nearly complete human skeleton. Not knowing whether to be scared or excited, I helped wrap it in a blanket and carry it to the archaeologist's truck. He drove back to the university.

A few days later, he returned, claiming he needed to collect more evidence. He might have been wrong in assuming the skeleton was Indian, he informed me. He had subjected the skeleton to a battery of tests in his laboratory and had decided that the bones were probably too recent to be Indian--they were likely not much more than a century old. Three other trucks arrived shortly after the archaeologist, with what seemed like an army of his assistants. I led the group up the ridge to the stone-pile; there, with picks and shovels we dug deeper, tossing the stones off to the side. Soon we had uncovered a hole that had been buried--it was the opening to a small cave. The archaeologist wanted to go inside, but said he had left his mining helmet in his truck. I volunteered to run down and get it.

When I returned, the archaeologist crawled into the cave and disappeared, his helmet illuminating the darkness before him. He descended with difficulty into the cave and saw nothing, so he started to climb back up--but then noticed something strange: glittering markings on the cave wall. He followed the markings downward until, to his amazement, he found a box lodged in a crevice.

When out of the cave, he held up the box for his assistants to inspect: it was heavily dented, made of some type of metal. "This was not made by an Indian," the archaeologist announced. With everybody huddling around him, he pried open the box. The lid peeled right off, and a round, encrusted stone spilled out onto the ground. The archaeologist picked it up and ogled it: it was a medallion inscribed with some undecipherable phrase. He put the medallion back in the box and the box into his knapsack--he said he needed to take them to his laboratory for analysis. He and his assistants rushed back to their trucks and left.

All that summer I was distracted by my farming tasks. By fall I began to wonder if I'd ever hear from the archaeologist again. Finally that winter, he sent me a typed memo, stating "the skeleton is approximately 100 years old; the medallion was forged from gold centuries ago; its inscription is Gaelic, which, translated, means 'For We Are As Stone.'" I never heard from the archaeologist again. Whatever happened to the bones and the medallion I simply don't know--they may have been buried in a box or sold to a museum.

Shortly after receiving the archaeologist's memo, I had a weird dream: something--someone--was emerging out of the earth, arms outstretched.... I awoke, looked out the window. It was dawn, I thought, so I stepped outside--saw the full moon and knew it was night.

Feeling restless, I headed up the ridge. The slope grew steep, so I stopped a moment. While standing there panting, I spied a patch of mist--it seemed to be moving toward me. Of course I was spooked, all alone as I was; but there was no place to hide. Yet to my frightened mind the mist looked like a human figure, its arm outstretched pointing at me. What did it want? Not me, for it drifted past me, didn't touch me. Reeling, I raced back down here.

I got home and lay down on my bed, exhausted. It was dark now; the moon had left this cove. I couldn't sleep...couldn't forget what had happened. After awhile, I heard sounds. It was, I thought, that oak sapling I had let grow just outside the cabin by my window--it was a branch rapping against the glass. Soon the sounds got louder, more frantic--the wind was picking up, I guessed. I arose from my bed. Groping for the axe I kept by the door, I went outside. The sky was so dark now. The sapling--if that was what it was--was now pounding; I was sure it would break the glass. I raised the axe and moved through the darkness toward the sapling. When I thought I saw it, I swung, but missed, hit the cabin wall instead. Freeing the axe-head, I cracked the handle. I gripped the axe and swung again at the sapling, but again I missed. This time, the axe-head glanced off the wall, broke from the axe-handle and struck the ground. Throwing down the axe-handle, covering my ears, I stumbled back to the door stoop. Then, extending my arms to feel for the door, I realized...I couldn't hear anything.

When I woke up, the sun was soaring in the sky. In my exhaustion I had fallen asleep on the door stoop, right here. After my eyes had adjusted to the brightness, I walked over to where I thought I had been that night. I hadn't been dreaming: there, in front of the window on the ground, lay the sapling, severed; and beside it, the axe-head.

I tell you this, but please keep it a secret (people may think I've lived alone too long): that morning for the first time I realized how beautiful this cove is, despite what I had done. Before that morning, I had never really noticed such things.

I didn't feel like working that day, yet there was a lot of work to do. I had a curious urge to know more about this cove, so I drove to the county seat to visit the county archive. There I learned what I needed to know to make sense of things. In an old county record book I read that, in 1847, a man had settled in this cove--his name, Frank Johnstone. I also read in that same book that in 1848 a Mrs. Frank Johnstone reported her husband as missing, probably deceased; the book recorded the fact that she put her husband's land up for sale and gave, as the place to send her proceeds, an address in Scotland. From those few facts I pieced this story together. So now you know the legend of Frank Johnstone.

I wish I could lead you up the ridge to see the stone-pile, but I'm too old to make that climb. You'll have to go on your own.

Ted Olson is the author of a poetry collection, Breathing in Darkness (Wind Publications), and of a scholarly study of traditional Appalachian culture, Blue Ridge Folklife (University Press of Mississippi). He is also the editor of several books, including CrossRoads: A Southern Culture Annual (Mercer University Press).