Among the chatter and the hubub of commerce at Sand City's Borders bookstore on Saturday, March 20, about two dozen people sat rapt to hear stories from Pearl K. McCullough, a first-time author, at age 87, of a memoir of her early life in the Appalachian mountains called A Mended Vessel. "I get emotional and I don't want to weep," she said in a soft Southern lilt. She spoke in a hushed, firm register about traumatic experiences in her childhood, her life in the mountains among the community she describes as "mountain people," and lessons she learned from her beloved grandmother. At age eight, she said, she was raped by a teacher. The experience caused her to go mute for a number of years and she didn't tell her family. Her hard-hearted father, a widower, was going to send her to an institution when a grandmother she had never met, whom she called "Granny," intervened, taking the young girl into her North Carolina mountain cabin to care for her amidst "tribes" of "mountain people" including Cherokees and Irish. This was during the Great Depression. "Granny was a healer," McCullough told her audience. "Not the the laying of hands kind. She used herbs and [natural[ medicines." In the book, she describes her grandmother sharing natural remedies with local Native Americans. In addition to her psychological shut-down, the young McCullough was struck with whooping coughs, which had killed two of her nine siblings. She lost consciousness, she says, for days, but remembers her grandmother lifting up her chin and telling her, "'I want no more of this. Granny knows you can talk...you'll get this out of your innards...you're going to start talking.'" And responding to her grandmother's prodding, she did. In addition to the non-stop chores of tending farm animals, McCullough says she used to work the harvest with others from the community. One worker was an older boy who, when McCullough was "10 or 11," beat and raped her in the barn. When her grandmother found her, McCullough lied about what happened, but later was coaxed into telling the truth. "'Child, we are not going to close our hearts and minds to this,'" her grandmother told her. She mixed the girl a tea concoction that set her to sleeping, but she remembered waking up to see her grandmother take the gun down from its mount above the fireplace. "'Granny, please, please,'" McCullough recalls saying. "'It's alright, child,'" her grandmother said. "'Granny will take care of this.'" And the young girl fell back asleep. Days later a search party came looking for the boy. McCullough's grandmother lied to them, saying that she didn't hadn't seen him. Three months later, the boy's body was found "at the bottom of a cliff." But the damage lived on inside McCullough--she was pregnant. Having by then learned of the uses of various herbs and plants from her grandmother, she concocted a special tea, drank it, went into the woods and endured the induced abortion she sought. None in the audience left as McCullough recalled stories. The crowd only grew. She spoke of the time, as a young teen, she spent high in the mountains cooking for lumberjacks. One man fell on his saw, slashing himself from his hip, across his torso, to his shoulder, which called for McCullough to use her medicine woman knowledge. She washed her hands and sterilized a needle in coal oil, and sewed up the man's wound. At the stomach, she said, part of his intestines were jutting out. "I gently pushed it back in and kept sewing." The man survived. Thus spoke McCullough, softly but firmly, about her marriage to country singer Eddy "Tennessee Plowboy" Arnold, who'd been managed by Colonel Tom Parker, who discovered Elvis Presley. She talked about coming to California (she currently lives in Carmel with her husband Mike), her kids, and her need to speak out for "women that lie beneath the sod" whose stories of abuse and pain were never told. She spoke of her work with racial issues, a run-in with the KKK and her "deep feelings" for people of color, pronouncing it "culuh." Her book, published by Xlibris last year, in brisk, simple language goes further, traversing stories of bartering amongst mountain people; spiderwebs and chimney dust being used to stop bleeding; her grandmother's delivery of a baby conceived from first cousins, born with his feet backwards; her singing in the mountains and dipping her feet into cold streams and sleeping under a crinkly blanket filled with "shuck" that would be changed each harvest season. Pearl K. McCullough grew up in what we might call poverty, but has gathered a wealth of life. A Mended Vessel shares part of it; a second book is in the works. A Mended Vessel is available at Borders bookstore or by calling 888-795-4274.