The Heart of the Blue Ridge

Summary

Plutina, a feral sylph of the Blue Ridge, breathes resin and mist, her cradle a cabin of split cedar, her lullabies the hush of wind-harps strung between spruce. Grandfather’s beard is a glacier of moonshine-scented frost; her only courtier, Dan Hodges, is a bootleg Lucifer who distills lightning in copper veins and trades thunder for obedience. She spurns him for Zeke, a quiet agrarian cartographer of loam and dawn. Retribution arrives on four paws: Dan’s rifle silences her pet bear—part sibling, part oracle—its blood signing the snow like a rejected betrothal contract. Zeke swears a vendetta older than the Cherokee trails. A revenuer, gut-shot by Dan, crawls to the farmstead; Zeke’s mother, a matriarch with yarrow in her apron and scripture on her lips, nurses the stranger back to ledger-keeping life. Gratitude transmutes into patronage: Washington papers crown Zeke guardian of virgin timber, a sinecure that smells of creosote and manifest destiny. While he waits for iron transport, Dan kidnaps Plutina, promising arson and ancestral murder unless she kneels in forced wedlock. A cave, womb of limestone and bat-whispers, becomes the chapel of her intended sacrifice; a cliff, its altar. Zeke’s arrival is a storm in human skin. They grapple—muscles like mountain laurel roots twisting over granite—until gravity claims Dan, a plummet that paints the ravine with a comet of curses. Dawn finds two silhouettes on a trestle, exchanging vows as the first train of their future exhales coal-breath into a sky rinsed clean.

Synopsis

Mountain girl Plutina lives with her grandfather, refuses to marry moonshiner Dan Hodges, preferring instead Zeke, a young farmer. When Zeke learns that Dan, in revenge, shot Plutina's pet trained bear, Zeke vows to kill him. After a revenue officer, shot by Dan, is cared for by Zeke's mother, Dan vows to kill Zeke. Dan and Zeke fight, and although Dan is beaten, he escapes into the mountains. Sometime later, the revenue officer secures for Zeke the position of overseer of government timber lands. As Zeke waits for a train after missing the first one, he learns that Dan, who has threatened to kill Plutina's grandfather and sister and set fire to their house unless Plutina marries him, has abducted her. Zeke arrives at a hidden cave where Dan has taken Plutina just as she is about to jump from a cliff. The ensuing brawl ends when Dan is plunged over the cliff. Finally, Zeke and Plutina marry.