Gap Creek

Set in the rural Appalachian mountains of the Carolinas, the novel follows Julie Harmon, a strong, hardworking young woman who narrates her passage from girlhood into marriage and early motherhood.

Julie begins by recounting the death of her younger brother Masenier, the only boy in the family and the child everyone spoiled. The year after an extraordinarily cold day known as Cold Friday triggers their father's chronic coughing sickness, Masenier grows pale and weak. When he develops a dangerously high fever, Julie's father insists on carrying the boy down the mountain to Dr. Prince in the nearby settlement of Flat Rock. Julie, the family's strongest worker, takes Masenier on her own shoulder when her father grows too winded. The doctor diagnoses typhoid, but on the trail home Masenier has a violent seizure and chokes to death on masses of worms. Julie sits on the cold ground beside his body, feeling that human life means nothing while the moonlit mountains go on unchanged.

After Masenier's death, their father's lung disease worsens. Julie and her sister Lou handle the heavy outdoor labor while their eldest sister Rosie manages the cooking and the youngest, Carolyn, does almost nothing. Julie resents that every hard task falls to her, yet she does the work because no one else will. One March night, unable to bear watching her father die, she goes outside to split wood, chopping and weeping. Rosie comes to tell her their father is dead.

In late summer, a young man named Hank Richards stops his wagon while Julie and her mother are sawing a fallen tree by the road. Julie feels an overwhelming attraction, though she is mortified that he has caught her barefoot and sweaty. The following Sunday, Hank walks Julie home from church, gives her her first kiss at the family spring, and proposes that same afternoon. Julie's mother protests that Julie has known Hank less than a week, but they marry a month later.

Julie and Hank move to a house on Gap Creek in South Carolina, where they live with an elderly widower named Mr. Pendergast in exchange for Julie's housekeeping and cooking. The old man is demanding and critical. A man named Timmy Gosnell periodically appears intoxicated, claiming Mr. Pendergast owes him money. Julie drives Timmy away with a walking stick while Mr. Pendergast hides inside.

Hank's sharp-tongued mother, Ma Richards, arrives for a visit and criticizes Julie's cooking at every turn. Julie performs nearly all the brutal labor of butchering Mr. Pendergast's hog. While rendering lard, she accidentally knocks one pot of boiling grease against another, and the kitchen catches fire. Ma throws water on the grease, causing it to explode and spread. Mr. Pendergast crawls into the burning kitchen to retrieve a jar of pension money hidden behind the wood box; a can of kerosene explodes and engulfs him. Julie drags him out and smothers the flames with wet sacks. That night, she tends the badly burned old man, giving him laudanum, an opium-based painkiller, and corn liquor. He hallucinates about hellfire and takes a deep breath he never exhales. Julie and Hank are left alone in a house that does not belong to them.

Ma Richards guesses Julie is pregnant and announces she will stay, but Hank diplomatically takes his mother home. Alone on Gap Creek, Julie is deceived twice. A man posing as a bank lawyer persuades her to hand over Mr. Pendergast's pension money to cover a supposed lien on the property. When Hank learns what happened, he slaps her across the face. That evening, he tells Julie he was fired from the brick kiln at Lyman because the work was finished, and Julie understands the admission as his oblique apology. They reconcile. Soon after, a couple claiming to be Mr. Pendergast's stepdaughter and her husband take Hank's remaining money, Julie's jewelry, and household valuables. A promised receipt never comes.

Julie inventories what remains: potatoes, old corn, molasses, squash, apples, and dried beans. She sells ginseng roots from the attic to buy coffee and sugar. Her sister Lou visits with her new husband and youngest sister Carolyn, bringing warmth and laughter, but the visit ends and Julie and Hank face Christmas alone with no money.

A devastating Christmas Eve ice storm turns to rain, and Gap Creek floods. Water fills the house and Hank insists they flee into the dark. The surging current separates them. Julie fights her way to the barn, where she finds Hank on the ladder holding a shotgun, declaring he will kill himself. She talks him down, telling him he is not important enough for the Lord to make a special flood just for him. He fires both shells into the roof, and they shelter in the hayloft until the water recedes.

Christmas morning reveals the cow dead in her stall, potatoes rotting in the flooded cellar, and mud everywhere. Julie and Hank scrub the house and begin attending Gap Creek Baptist Church. On New Year's Day, moved by Preacher Gibbs's sermon, Julie walks to the altar and joins the congregation. Four weeks later, Hank does the same.

The brutal winter brings near-starvation. Church women bring baby clothes and jars of preserves. A mink kills the last chickens. By late March, Julie and Hank survive on cornmeal and grits. Hank confesses he was actually fired from Lyman for hitting his foreman, and that word has spread so no one will hire him.

Julie goes into labor while Hank is away fetching Ma Richards. Alone in the house, she delivers a tiny, premature girl on the kitchen floor, biting through the umbilical cord. She and Hank have agreed to name the baby Delia, after Julie's mother. Hank returns, having turned back partway up the mountain. Julie has no breast milk, so Hank feeds Delia with an eyedropper, keeping her in a shoebox by the fire. Julie develops a high fever and, in a delirious vision, sees her dead father, who tells her she will live and continue to work and love. She asks if the baby will live but receives no answer. The fever breaks.

Ma Richards arrives and helps care for Delia. Julie and Ma have a fierce quarrel in which Julie accuses Ma of always needing to be in charge. Hank walks in and kneels them both down to pray; they embrace and reconcile. But the baby is too small. One night Julie finds Delia cold and still in her shoebox. After a small funeral, the baby is buried in the orchard.

Julie throws herself into relentless work, planting every seed on the place, canning, hoeing, and attending every church service. When Timmy Gosnell appears one final time, Hank drops to his knees and prays aloud for him instead of fighting. Timmy backs away and leaves.

A lawyer named Mr. Raeford arrives with Preacher Gibbs, presenting papers from Mr. Pendergast's actual heirs demanding a hundred dollars in back rent. Hank decides they must leave before dawn. On her last look through the kitchen, Julie opens a dusty tin on a high shelf she has never touched. Inside is a twenty-dollar gold piece, Mr. Pendergast's final hidden cache, overlooked through all their months of hardship.

Before dawn, in bitter cold, they walk north up the mountain toward the North Carolina state line. Julie grows nauseated on the climb, and Hank realizes she is pregnant again. At the gap on the border, the red sun rises over the mountains. Julie steadies herself, feels her belly grow firm and calm, and they start walking again.