Masterfully wrought and keenly observed, Mountain Path draws on Harriette Simpson Arnow’s experiences as a schoolteacher in downtrodden Pulaski County, Kentucky, deep in the heart of Appalachia, prior to WWII. Far from a quaint portrait of rural life, Arnow’s novel documents hardships, poverty, illiteracy, and struggles. She also recognizes a fragile cultural richness, one characterized by “those who like open fires, hounds, children, human talk and song instead of TV and radio, the wisdom of the old who had seen all of life from birth to death,” and which has since been eroded by the advent of highways and industry. In Mountain Path , Arnow exquisitely captures the voices, faces, and ways of a people she cared for deeply, and who evoked in her a deep respect and admiration. Harriette Simpson Arnow (1908-1986) was born in Kentucky and later moved to Detroit, the setting of her best-known work, The Dollmaker. Arnow is among the foremost chroniclers of Appalachian life and the great postwar migration north.   MOUNTAIN PATH By Harriette Simpson Arnow Michigan State University Press Copyright © 2012 Thomas Arnow All right reserved. ISBN: 978-1-61186-058-0 Chapter One Back of Superintendent Russell's shoulder Court House Square lay, dusty yellow in the July sunshine, deserted on this week day morning save for one tall man dressed in faded blue shirt and overalls. Unconscious of being watched, the man stood and slowly cut a small golden muskmelon into neat cubes which he conveyed to this mouth with the blade of the jackknife used in the cutting. Louisa Sheridan watched the blue flash of the knife blade in the sunlight, saw the red-gold gleam of the man's whiskers, and tried not to think it a picture she saw, but a man like other men she would come to know in Canebrake on Cumberland. Would the fathers of her pupils be tall men, dressed in blue, eating with jackknives, speaking in soft voices, friendly, laughing little, not boisterous like other men? Last night she had watched a group of teamsters from her hotel window, and they were like that. Poor people, and ignorant and unambitious, holding in them a curious power to make her feel young and afraid. Superintendent Russell made a little scraping with his chair, and she felt guilty as a too-obedient child caught in some unaccustomed mischief, and hastily looked at the man across the table. He had not noticed her lapse of attention, but sat with his eyes yet fixed on the map, a blunt forefinger sliding through a narrow twist of the blue snake that was Cumberland River. The map, a geological survey of Somerset County, Kentucky, was spread backward to her vision so that at present she could get small sense from it, but must sit, contenting herself with silence, until the employer of district teachers found the place that was Canebrake. She watched the man's sliding forefinger, and thought that it was ugly with its ragged black nail and red hairs. She did not remember ever having watched a finger like it before. She thought of the hands and fingers she had known back there in Lexington: dried yellow-white fingers of her teachers, her aunt's expressionless too-white hands, brown yellow fingers of her classmates, and her own. She spread her hands and looked at them as if seeing them for the first time. Small and ringless and smooth, a pale blemish of cigarette stain on two, deeper acid stains on her right forefinger and thumb, and on the long finger of her right hand a small callus rising in a little mound of yellow thickened flesh below the nail on the left side. Pencils had done that; pencils covering yellow sheets and then neat note books with mechanical drawings, figures, symbols, all the jargon of trigonometry, analytics, the calculus, and physical chemistry. Under cover of the man's bowed head she rubbed hard against the bit of thickened flesh with her thumb. For the moment it seemed the only concrete evidence that she had lived twenty years before she came to sit in this office and had spent three of those years in making a mark on her finger. It would go away she thought with a childishly unreasonable sadness. How long was seven months—till February she had heard another teacher say at the meeting yesterday. Would she forget a lot in seven months? She couldn't graduate with her class in chemical engineering. "It's about here," Superintendent Russell said without raising his eyes from the map. "You know," he continued, jocosely apologetic, "I've only been in office since January, an' I've never got around to goin' to Canebrake." "How do I get there?" The man slowly slipped two fingers of the hand not busied with the map through the red bristle of his hair. "A bus goes down Dixie. I reckon it's th' best plan to take it to High Rock." He laid the forefinger ruler fashion on the map and squinted at it, "About sixteen miles from High Rock I take it to be." "The sixteen miles?" He stared at the fly-specked map. He seemed not