Mary Jane and Paul Kelly
It’s been just over one year since my father, Paul Dewitt Kelly, died. I can’t pass by the Nickajack Dam near Jasper, Tenn., without remembering the first time my mother crossed that same water.
Fifty-five years ago, my grandmother thought my mother was crazy to leave Athens, Tenn. and move to the tiny speck of a town, Jasper. She filled my mother's head with grizzly tales of murderous roughnecks and the absence of running water.
I imagine my mother expected the worst after she married my father: mountaintops strip-mined and barren; unfriendly souls peeping at her suspiciously through closed blinds; rotting outhouses. But she sat in the passenger side of his car, clutching her pocketbook nervously, as my father drove her down Highway 41, past tourist stops with live bears, to her new home.
When Highway 41 opened up over the Tennessee River, and blue-green mountains spilled down into the river and islands floated in lush clumps of scalloped treetops and the rock bluffs stood guard at tops, she gasped.
“You never told me it was so beautiful!” she said, stunned at the incredible beauty before her.
“I didn't want to get your hopes up,” my father said sheepishly.
A few days later, on a foggy morning, my mother drove up the mountain with me, then two years old, exploring her new home. I imagine she was a little apprehensive about uprooting herself and moving to a new place where she knew no one.
She found herself walking along the bottom of the steep stone cliff. Maybe she heard a tiny sound. Or maybe a pebble ricocheted down the rock face. But she looked up, and when she did, she saw dozens of tiny white goats somehow balancing on the perpendicular rock. A minuscule white goat was perched on almost every ledge.
When she told my father about seeing the magical little animals, he was incredulous. They were legendary. His father had told him about these tiny white goats; he had seen them once himself. But my father never had. And he never did.
My mother never saw them again, but I know she looked up every time she was near a cliff, wondering if they’d show themselves again.
I believe that my father’s ancestors spoke that day. I think that Sarah Ann Kelly, the woman who singlehandedly rowed outlaws and thieves across the Tennessee River at Kelly’s Ferry, and Alexander Kelly, the tough little man known for fighting men twice his size, sent my mother a message. I think they wanted to show their approval of my father’s young bride, and her baby girl, and welcome them to those parts.
All I know is, she never looked back.
(Ferris Robinson can be contacted at ferrisrobinson@gmail.com. www.ferrisrobinson.com)