SHORT STORY WEDNESDAY: THE ROMANCE OF ROSY RIDGE

"The Romance of Rosy Ridge" by MacKinley Kantor  (first published in The Saturday Evening Post, June 5, 1937; published in book form that year, although it had only 96 pages; reprinted in Post Stories of 1937, 1938; and in The Pocket Book of American Modern Short Stories, edited by Philip Van Doren Stern, 1943)

"It was good corn growing weather that July night when the stranger first came along, making his music through the hollow all the way up to Rosy Ridge.  Old Gill MacBean and his wife and the youngsters were sitting out on the stoop when they heard the man coming."

It's post-Civil War Missouri and tensions from that conflict are still high.  People in the community appeared to be evenly divided; you'd see as many men wearing old Yankee blue trousers as you would wearing the old butternut yellow trousers of the Confederacy.  MacBean had no truck with Yankees -- he had lost two sons fighting for the South, as well as a brother at Willow Creek.  And the area had been plagued by night riders so MacBean kept his rifle handy.

The stranger was making music the like of which MacBean had never heard.  First he played Gentle Annie, then Billy Boy, then Jack o' Diamonds -- all while slowly walking up to the MacBean place.  The music had a strange humming noise, unlike any instrument MacBean had ever heard before.  It turned out that it was just a comb and a piece of paper.  The stranger introduced himself as Henry Bohun (soon to be called Comb-Humming Henry), a schoolmaster before he began wandering.  Henry played a tune that no one could dance to, "but it was a song to make you love, and perish happy in the remarkable joy of doing it."  (Henry said, "Well, maybe it hadn't ever been played before in these parts.  It comes all the way from Europe, and a man named Liszt made it up.")  MacBean was suspicious at first of Henry, (he was also a little taken aback when he introduced his two pus -- Paul and Agrippa -- to Henry, saying that he named them so because Paul came before Agrippa in the Bible; Henry responded, "You haven't got Jesus and Pontius Pilate, then, somewhere around, because I seem to have read Jesus came before Pontius Pilate too.").  Anyway, MacBean extended his hospitality to the stranger, offering him food and a place to spend the night.

And, of course, MacBean had a daughter -- Lissy, with strawberry-yellow hair and clear blue eyes and little freckles that were on her smooth round cheeks and her soft mouth smiling...

The story is not called "The Romance at Rosy Ridge" for nothing.

And then MacBean discovered that Henry had fought for the Union and he banished Henry from his home and from Lissy, fully expecting Henry to take up wandering again.  But Henry stayed in the area just to be close to Lissy, even though he could not be see her.

And then the night riders came...

A gentle, folksy, lyrical, and life-affirming story..

The author is best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Andersonville.  He also wrote The Voice of Bugle Ann, Gentle Annie, Glory for Me (filmed as The Best Years of Our Life), and If the South Had Won the Civil War (an early alternate history novel).

The story was expanded slightly and made into a popular film (although it ended up losing half a million dollars -- go figure) in 1947, starring Van Johnson, Thomas Mitchell, and Janet Leigh (her first film role).  The film had an amazing cast, including Marshal Thompson (later to play Dr. Marsh Tracy in Daktari), Dean Stockwell, Guy Kibbee, Jim Davis, Paul Langton (perhaps best known as Leslie Harrington in TV's Peyton Place, and O. Z. Whitehead (one of John Ford's stock players; he was Al Joad in The Grapes of Wrath, and showed his virtuosity in The Man who Shot Liberty Valance, where at age 51, he played a lollipop licking schoolboy).   The film was also notable for its uncredited actors, including Barbara Billingsley (Beaver's Mom. June Cleaver), Gail Davis (TV's Annie Oakley), Marie Windsor (known as "the queen of the B's") Kermit Maynard (Ken's brother), Guy Stockwell (Dean's brother), I. Stanford Jolley (you'll know him when you see him; he was a very familiar western heavy in over 300 films and television shows); and Rhea Mitchell (one-time co-star of many of William S. Hart's westerns; her career faded soon after this, and she managed an apartment house in retirement until a disgruntled houseboy strangled and killed her when she was 66 -- not all Hollywood stories end prettily).

Anyway, it's a great flick and you can see it here:

https://archive.org/details/the-romance-of-rosy-ridge