Rain and more rain fell there in three days and a freshet then had left what towns remained as islands. Sheer banks of root and clay carved by boulders unthinkable in size that man and his machinery had thought them impossible to budge. The river and all its tributaries drawn and redrawn overnight as if they were the careless signature of a drunken god using the earth for a writing pad and the worms for an audience.

Then daylight broke and the light putrid gray shone on an exhausted river that appeared to not move at all. Forced to watch inch by inch the destruction it had wrought, punishment undue for the student before the clown.

When the waters receded enough to wade through, the land was seen to be reset. Corn fields reduced to bare soil and bare soil reduced to bedrock. Trees fully grown plucked and discarded overshoulder like weeds tossed from a garden. Mountainside stripped nude and cabins abducted to the valley. Their residents loosely buried far from their family’s plots. Headstones stolen. Newstones revealed. Slate large enough to record their names one-hundred times over.

It took longer to update the deathlists than it did the maps.

Miss Ella Williams, Chimney Rock.

Mr and Mrs Whitacker and two small children, Hickory Nut Gap section.

One unknown man, Bat Cave.

Three unknown children, Marion.

And so on.

Remembrance distilled to a bleak avenue of words printed on thin paper burned then for warmth when the scrap was soaked through and scattered.

Those barely living yet waded either on foot or atop horse or mule and surveyed their waterlogged towns like their forebears had surveyed the land before they themselves had built it up. The fools putting up structure too deep in the valley, too steep upon the slope. Perhaps a cruel prank to end a line, a name. Perhaps they meant nothing of it at all.

“Goddamn,” the men would say. They would spit the last of their tobacco into the still gray water that permeated the stucco buildings that still stood downtown. Those buildings stood not with pride but only as a testament of luck. Fortune was not to be had. Nobody laughed then and for a time after. Joy for some never visited again.

Birdsong even ceased.

The waters eventually receded to where they were before the rains, though the people still toiled through the silt under lamplight for days and days and days after. The scraping of shovel and spade against earth and stone replaced the pulse of the land there.

The scraping of shovel and spade replaced the pulse there.

The scraping of shovel and spade.

The people’s tears and sweat and tears and sweat nearly flooded the valley again but they endured and endured until the evidence of their ancestors’ work had been eventually uninterned. Released from a prison of mud and grime to a world changed.

Teams of horses hitched with fresno scrapers and mules with stoneboats were led down lanes peeling up layer upon layer of mud as if the streets were a rotted onion and when those drags behind the teams bit cracked pavement and broke they would be replaced with chain and plank and the teams would be set again to slow pass after slow pass.

Once the roads were passable and the mountainsides were dry, town and city and mountainfolk all gathered at the square for food and water with pinched faces and quiet voices recounting their survival through the wind and rain and fury as if they were trying to convince themselves that it was not a dream in the night.

A woman no older than twenty stood in line for bread and soup and unsweet corn pone and shared nothing of how she clung to a maple tree for nine hours while the river rose and rushed around her.

“Pa’s took” was all she said. One of many took to the wayside some unknown distance.

Those with animals and farmstock spoke of their loss like a calculation of business. Chickens that were tied to porches and cows that were driven uphill to die had begun to decay and even weeks after they were cleared the soursweet cadaverine lingered in the air.

“The horse, cow and her calf, and the shoat gone with the barn when the mountain slipped,” a man shared. He himself so old that he could have seen the first flood sent from God, the leveling from which this storm drew inspiration and from whom bore the signature of the same remitter.

“Where’d all y’all run offta?” another man asked him. “Your daughter and her baby?”

“Uphill to the barn,” said the man who prayed he’d not outlive any of them, Lord willing.

Lord willing.

Not one week would pass before he would be greeted by his daughter and her baby in soft light wherein no pain could be brought. He had gone downhill to find them and at a crossroads in Edneyville his search concluded when he saw his daughter strung up in barbed wire on a debris pile with her bruiseless baby, both of them heavier than they should have been. Water in them. On them.

He collapsed nearby and he would not rise again.

Like all the other men then, he wore a collared shirt and a jacket that matched his pants and a tall felt hat. Each man dressed as if that day had his brother’s funeral and the next day had his own.

More and more supplies from Raleigh came in over the weeks as strands of rail lines here and there were surveyed and deemed passable. There weren’t many that were. Most of them were washed away and if they weren’t washed away, the earth underneath them was. Thin bridges of metal and tie suspended in air over a span so great that from a distance it looked like someone had set a tightrope between two new mountains, like a painter had begun to sketch a mountain range but stopped at the outline.

Once the people were fed, some could begin to hear how loudly their lives called to them. Little would be the same for all but those with the least lost would find themselves again in familiar orbit. But those who lost everything found anger and vindication agreeable companions.

Powerless they were against the pine barons who before the rain shaved the hillsides bald down to clay and would continue to do so with discounted land conveniently left uninhabited.

The people would find no quarter on the dry peaks around Asheville where wealthy men built their resorts with cheap labor. Those same men thought they could then harness the power from water for their electric lights. If those dams had been built by engineers rather than out-of-town contractors, then perhaps the rivers would have given more warning of their rise.

Hungry they would become for cooked food, for salt, for milk, these people unable to buy from commercial grocers who blamed the silence over the telegraph lines for the increased prices. It would take months to rebuild those lines but never would the cost of things return to where they had been before the floods.

“Simple economics,” they were told.

Isolation suffused when government surveyors promised the owners of textile mills and commercial farms and coal mines that the health of the nation’s economy depended on their hard work and that it was a great priority to assist in their rebuilding. The unsettled people surely thought that that assistance would be extended to them. They were told instead there was no clause in the constitution that pertained to them. A system for the unfungibly productive. Not for those who have built their houses from heavy logs from their woods nearby.

Where then would they go?

Some would set themselves to the western skyline toward a land whose unseen flatness was nearing fiction to those hillfolk. Others fit enough would be sent across the Atlantic to toil in semidrained trenches. What difference in war was there to the paludal migrant from the great flood that left only him?

For the rest, for the remaining: They were tasked with rebuilding mountain and retracing road and rail and retilling earth and reseeding loam and by and by returning life to their highlands and life to their valleys. Family names carry on and after a while their success was woefully evident in how often they were marked across dry graveyards. Triumph in fortunate death.

Years would pass and the river would swell slightly from time to time and if it weren’t a reminder of spitted times for those who remembered such times it was a spectacle for those who never knew. Soon the accounts of the great flood became stories and then just stories and those were replaced and forgotten by new accounts of other things which too would become stories to be forgotten all the same. What would death become if the dead could speak?

Eventually more and more from the flatlands found themselves drawn to the fresh air and to secluded weekend cabins and to views on vistas so vast that the mountains seemed to come up on waves of a verd antique sea arrested in motion by the viewer’s own shortsightedness of time.

But when they arrived, they arrived in droves.

Cornfields bought and paved over and replaced with tall concrete buildings with roofs that caught and sluiced rain at a gallon a second. Those buildings set upon the ridge high above the canopy of lesser trees and the people looking out through clear windows at peaks and valleys were so grateful to finally see what was advertised in their newspapers and magazines and on billboards and televisions.

People from far-flung cities who had never known a moment without the noise from highway or from the hum of electricity or from the crescendoed snore of jets overhead came for the novelty of solitude that was no novelty at all for the family hillside. But when one neighbor was offered a lifesum and more for their cabin and the land it sat on, another neighbor raised their hands and another lifesum and more was given. And another. And another. And another until the fingerprint of the mountain was dragged over sandpaper and cauterized over a low flame.

No matter, for the newly enriched left for land down toward the valley and those uphill watched them go gladly. No one questioned why the land to the river was so cheap. No loans. No plot that wasn’t bought outright. No division couldn’t be made to accommodate any number of mobile homes, the single opportunity for a person to own their privacy in a country where the idea of such a thing eventually becomes conspiracy. No downslope person looked up the incline and said that they didn’t want to be up there. No dream better than that. No one knew otherwise as their life’s goal was the nation’s goal. No one was told to look downriver as those stories were just that.

Just stories.

Over the next one-hundred years, the increasingly fortunate land owners and a few in their trailers moved up the mountain ramp leaving the rest to wonder how much harder they needed to work to make it uphill. At least they could give what they had to their children. They could give their home, their debt, their stories. But as the years passed, the landowners were forced to raise the rent on their plots.

“Simple economics,” they said. No matter. Rent was cheaper downhill.

Downhill went as far as the river shore would take them. Then downhill meant over the escarpment and beyond to Shelby and over state lines to Johnson City to the north and Greenville to the south.

The original lifepulse of the mountains there gone. Generations reduced to collateral victims of their own forebears’ survival, moved out of their homeland to make room for those seeking another novelty.

And the stories went with them.

One-hundred and eight years was more than enough time to forget when the river had last risen so high. How could it have come up higher this time? Had it ever done this before?

It had rained mightily for two days after a time of no rain at all. The ground had little vacancy for what it was presented. Then another storm so powerful it bore a track through the south like a nail through the palm.

This storm had a name. Bright one, shining one, the Greeks would have called her. How then the stars did shine above the raging torrents.

Nobody was given any warning. Days before shelves were stocked. Hours before bathtubs were unfilled. Minutes before history was no different than fiction, still just a story.

There was no sunset to end that day. Only a halflight from a vague fire that dwindled behind its ashen curtain to fall to a line at world’s end. Few windless moments between the outer and full dark.

It wasn’t long after midnight when the power went out. The cold blue flashes at every street corner streamed down powerlines and past worried windows like the light from the high beams of speeding traffic fleeing from some nightmare in the rearview mirror. At the tops of mountains the wind tore the branches from the sourwood trees and pulled the roots of oak trees out of the ground like they were planted as saplings that morning. Howling and moaning all night until there was no sound at all for the wind had nothing more to chew on. A thing distilled to a principle elemental force. How lucky for the upland folk to be so close to a finger of God.

Calm collapsed entirely to no relent while the storm worked in the dark to prove how malleable the land was, like something between lead and mercury. Bright one, shining one, she the agent of impossible alchemy.

Eventually the unwrung slopes became so saturated that the topsoil could no longer last the force of gravity and it along with every felled and yet to be felled tree rushed down the mountain. Rough logs like an arrow through helpless fish on a trotline skewered stickbuilt and mobile home alike and sent them to the valley below to rising waters.

Many of the upstream dams had been overtopped and leaked water from all sides in defiance to man. The rivers who had for years been choked out of their water had it all returned with interest at once. Warnings of imminent flood had been sent to cell towers but many of the warnings were never broadcast for their lines of copper and glass were severed and tangled in an embarrassed Gordian knot.

Even with warning, there was hardly enough time to flee and hardly anywhere to go. Those who went uphill were met in opposition by slick slopes and earthen waterfalls and those who stayed put sat on rough shingle atop their manufactured homes watching their neighborhood turn either to archipelago or to a fragile flotilla set to yaw and roll in disconsolate torment to the sea and beyond. All this in the dark.

When the dawn came it brought a daylight that was free of fog and cloud. A clear morning as if the storm had swept up the dust in her wake so that those below could see her work in unambiguous gleaming.

See them. There they are. A mother and her child on top of their rectangular home in the center of a new river. It had been lifted and pushed into her neighbors’ homes but stayed there like an improvised dam while the water coursed in the night. Before then it was her and her husband and their young child as well as her own father. The four of them living in one trailer where she was more of a mother to them all than anything else to herself. Though now in the new day, she was a mother to just her son who was not much older than a year.

As the day brightened and the dream of swimming in black waters was fading and her muscles sorely mending themselves after fighting the current, she noticed she could see more of the sky that morning than she had any other morning. Whether it was due to her vantage atop her home or due to the midhorizon trees being mown down, she was loath to think of such things further. Instead, she held her sleeping child. Her son. She moved the slimy hair off his forehead like the day he was born and she petted him lovingly like the day he was born and she rocked the boy to the rhythm of her heart like the day he was born and she let her mind range on the kind of world she had brought unto him like the day he was born. What kind of world was this?

A world where in six hours helicopters from Tennessee and Georgia would fly overhead spotting waterbound survivors and in twelve hours be rescued by men and women in rubber boats who would later say they had come from southern Louisiana where these storms were more common.

A world where in another twelve hours the town’s square would be filled with dismembered families adding their missing names to a white board in hope for a quick erasure.

A world where as time went on some of those names would never be erased and instead simply transferred to a dense obituary section that spanned above and below the fold and went on for pages, the death dates therein approximations, most on the night of the storm.

A world where her town was so overwhelmed that she thought it better to take her child and walk aimless along the road. Mud and silt clung to their shoes and made each step heavier than the last.

A world where there was another town. A dry town. A town with food and water and shelter. There had to be another town, she thought. Other families who walked the road shared this daydream. There is always another town.

Trailer homes not unlike their own were set in the middle of the road and they walked around them like rangers measuring a battlefield. The air there was rent with the smell of gas from severed lines and overturned cars.

“Be thankful,” she told her boy. And as if to convince herself, she said it again.

Up the road a ways were a number of stores which she prayed might be open or at least able to help. The fatherless mother and the fatherless son walked on with the other families like collieless herds driving themselves without heed.

A world where when they arrived at the strip mall along the highway, they would find grocery locked up and the stranded refrigerated delivery trucks likewise. Inside the fruit and vegetable rotted in the dark and outside the survivors pleaded with the drivers to unlock the containers so they could drink warming milk and eat uncooked frozen pizzas and savor the taste of fresh whole fruit for they did not know how long it would be until such a thing should be before them again.

But no matter how much they begged, storefronts remained closed and trucks stayed locked. The shopkeeps and drivers took turns on satellite phones to call their bosses who themselves were in dryer, less desperate settings.

These bosses. They listened to the tinny pleas of the people and all they could hear were the coinless complaints from a stateless collection of mudcovered indigents who had been unborn from their world and rebirthed as helpless babes who cried for a system of milk and water that was incompatible with the bosses’ system of numbers and growth.

“We can’t risk the liability,” they said atop their hoard.

“But they’ll break in if I don’t –”

“Let them. Call the cops and we’ll collect the insurance money.”

It was not long until the mother and her child found themselves in a rankless mob that wore a face carved by hunger and fear. The boy looked on from his mother’s arms and could not understand.

From his own birth to that point, the son had made little noise over his year and some months of his life. He cried only when hungry or when scared and he babbled and cooed when his mother spoke to him and he knew that moving his cheek to his shoulder sent the bottle away and brightening his eyes brought it to his pursed lips. And even now when he was cold and with empty stomach and in soiled clothes that had dried stiff after the soaking in the night, the son made no sound at all. He knew not of the sustenance in the blur of the rectangular shape ahead of him or of his mother’s thoughts on whether she could still give milk. Even the night before was unknown to him, it all merely a mixture of flashing light and yelling and choking on water and the dark that followed and his mother beating on his back and the water from him expelled painfully and him in her tight embrace that did not let up no matter how hard the rains drove into them. He did not know that night was nearly his last. He only knew that his mother had him hitched atop her hip and that she was there.

The voices of the mob rose and the mother was ready to commit herself to a course of actions which would then surely bring the hot waxen seal of an evil that she had only ever read about.

But among the voices, one was heard above the rest and all it said was ‘Mama’.

She looked at her son and she saw his eyes beleaguered by dark circles and red vessels on yellowing white and she looked up so that he could not see her cry. The sky was blue and it was calm.

She hitched her son up higher on her hip and turned away from the mob and went back to the road so to find a hope they both could understand.

The road was long and scattered with signs like doorless mats that indicated that there were two towns and that the road connected them like riflebore joins stock to sight. The mother and child walked down the middle of the blacktop unopposed to traffic.

The two of them were itinerant travelers in a landbetween where it could not be known if they trailed fate or if fate trailed them or if fate had abandoned them altogether. See them guideless and beyond all steering.

It was quiet and the air was clear and cool and the mother’s shoes were heavy with mud and mile and she thought little of the hell behind her. She did not know whether the other town was still there or in what shape it was but she went onward up the gentle slope as if heaven were at the other end.

The road became steeper and she more tired and the boy slipped down her hip often. It took more and more energy to hitch him up and when she couldn’t lift him over her hip any longer she set him down and they both sat on the mudstrewn pavement like it was their own living space. Her legs and arms and lungs burned and her throat was dry and mucousless and her boy seemed to fade into merited exhaustion.

They had no bags and their pockets were empty. All they had was the unknown distance they traveled from their wreckage to here and she did not know how she could exchange that for food and water for her boy.

Below her the pavement vibrated and from up the road came a single car. The mother did not stand or wave the car down but their position on the road communicated well enough their desperation to the driver.

The car slowed to a stop and the man driving asked if they were alright.

“We walked from near Swannanoa,” she said.

“It bad there?” the man asked. She didn’t answer. “Y’all going up to Black Mountain?”

The man was about seventy and pulled mindlessly on his long white beard as they spoke. His clothes were clean and wrinkleless.

“Yessir,” she said, coming up to stand. “How much further?”

“It’s a ways,” the man said. “And the road’s a mess. I’s surprised to make it out in this old thing.” He gave the door a loving pat as if it were alive. “Nineteen eighty-eight.”

“Sir?”

“Eighty-eight Volvo. Three-hundred and –” he bent in his seat and looked through the steering wheel. “Twenty-five. Three-hundred and twenty-five thousand odd miles. Only owner too. Gave it to my son before –” The old man looked at the small child in the middle of the road. “Oh, enough of that. Y’all get in and I’ll take you back to mine and my wife’s. Town’s a mess. A real mess. I guess it’ll take ‘em a while to start giving out help. Not much to be had there now I’d say. We’ve got a grill and water. Generator’s keeping the beer cold too, if you partake. I would. That alright with you? My wife’d love the company, ‘specially of womanfolk. And the baby, course.”

“Wouldn’t want to impose, sir.”

“None of that,” the man waved dismissively. “Hop in. We’re just up the road.”

The mother nodded and picked up her son and got in the backseat. It was warm in the car and familiar music played quietly.

“Radio’s out all over,” the man said, checking the mirrors and maneuvering the car across the wide road. “Ain’t a station broadcastin’. Dead air. Tape deck still runs though. Let me know if you’d like it off.”

“No sir,” she said. “It’s nice.”

They drove up the road listening to The Stanley Brothers. Angel Band. From the backseat she felt the warmth and the light from the sun strobe on and off and on again through the trees that still stood. She pressed her hands against her pants and unintentionally loosened some of the dried mud. Small sheets of brown clay fell below and she saw that the floor was entirely covered in wet earth. Her eyes welled.

“I’m sorry sir,” she said. “We’ve dirtied up your car.”

She saw just his eyes in the rearview mirror but their expression was not a wrinkle different than when he first set them on her and her boy.

“No ma’am,” he said as he had said anything else that day. “Back there takes a beating as it is. When it was my son’s, I’d take the hose to it pret’near every week. You know how boys are. It’s a mess back there anyways before y’all hopped in. I should have apologized for the clutter.”

The clutter he spoke of must have been in the trunk, she thought, because aside from a box of cassette tapes, the backseat was empty. She insisted that she would clear the mud after they got settled and the man insisted that he would instead and the two volleyed until they turned from the highway onto a narrow street that was lined with houses built in a time between floods.

“Let’s see if he’s got that tree cut up yet,” the man said curiously as if he was the only one in the car.

They continued up the street and over its shallow crest and on the other side a young man stood between two sections of the same tree. The bare cut ends were like two woody white faces and beside them were the pieces of the middle section stacked as rudimentary pyramids.

The man rolled down his window and said, “atta boy”, and drove on.

Chainsaws buzzing and generators working saturated the air with the sound of mechanical hornets making sense of their fallen nest. It was a horrible drone. It was a necessary drone. It was a drone that came through the car windows even when they were rolled up.

Not long after, they turned onto another road and trudged up a steep grade until they reached an intersection of narrow streets. Just past the crossroads, they pulled into a gravel driveway to a level lot among about a dozen others. There were no fences separating any of the other houses, just soft transition between different species of shorn green grass.

The house was painted blue with white trim and the porch was covered but not screened-in and the front door was set squarely in the middle of it. Two wooden rocking chairs like thrones to the left and right. A generator hummed in the backyard.

“Kick your shoes off there,” the man said.

The three of them walked into the living room that made up most of the house. Stacks of books lined the walls where furniture would have gone and even where there was furniture there was scarce a bare spot a book did not cover. On the left wall a coffee table lay between a large couch and a fireplace encased in large flat stones. Books throughout. Stories within. The walls were mostly bare, but every few feet there were pictures of a family taken in film. Another story. Another time. The only place this catalogue of stories did not extend to was the small kitchen in the corner.

There a woman chopped an assortment of vegetables. She was not many years younger than the man. She had her back to the room and hummed a wandering melody in time with the rhythm of the knife on the cutting board.

“Darlin’?” she said with a final chop.

“We’ve got guests,” the man said excitedly.

“Do we now?” The woman turned around and saw the mother and her boy. She drew in a delicate gasp and set the knife down behind her. “We do, what a delight. Let me take a look at you.”

The woman walked to meet them at the door. She was tall and her shoulders were broad and her gray hair curled softly at its end just past her collarbones. The cloth apron she wore covered a red gingham dress that she had since she was a young woman herself, younger probably than the mother standing in front of her now.

“They were walking up 70 when I found ‘em,” the man said. He looked at his wife from behind the mother with an expression of wide eyes and perched brow and an almost imperceptible shake of his head. His wife sighed

.

“Oh, bless your hearts,” she said softly. “Well, come on in. Let’s find you youngins some clothes.” She touched the mother’s shoulder and showed them across the room. “Water isn’t running but we’ve filled a bath before it went out and if you can manage a bucket and a washcloth, you can take a birdbath in the sink back in the bathroom there. It’ll be like the good ol’ days.”

When they got to the bathroom, the woman told them to sit tight and she went into the bedroom and returned quickly with an armful. There was a plain olivegreen lined dress and some underwear and for the boy a red shirt and blue shorts.

“Does he still need a diaper?” the woman asked.

“Yes ma’am, he does.”

“I think we’ve still got some cloth ones around somewhere. Set a second.” She left for a few moments longer this time but returned with another armfull of clean white cloth. “Here we are. Y’all get washed now. Towels are just right there. There’s the bucket too. Plenty of soap. Use what you need, hon.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” the mother said. “But y’all really don’t need to –”

“Oh, hush,” she waved dismissively like her husband. “Y’all get washed and come out for some roast vegetables and soup and beer for supper on the porch. He got the generator hooked up to the fridge and to the hotplate. Hot and cold. Who would have thought? He grilled up the veggies too. Ain’t need power for good clean grillin’. Yes ma’am. Now, we’ll just be out on the porch. No hurry.”

The woman left them after setting the fresh clothes on the sink and the mother gently bathed her boy in the dim room like when he was a babe himself, when the thought of running water was not a thought to be had at all. Running water.

The mud and grime washed down the sink drain as short-lived rivers of fading brown and she worked the washcloth on the boy and then on herself until the cloth wrung clear

Only on her were there spots of blueish yellow that did not wipe clean and she winced when she noticed them and again when she touched the bruising edges. She had not noticed her reflection in the mirror until now and she could not help but laugh at the sight of them two standing naked in a house that was not their own.

The lined dress fit loosely around her shoulders but she did not mind. The boy’s clothes fit as though they were his. She folded their spent towels and washcloths and soiled clothes neatly in a stack and then hitched the boy on her hip and went to the porch.

There the old couple sat in their rocking chairs with bowls perched on their chests each blowing in turn on a spoonful while the other spoke.

“Couple of days or so if we just keep the fridge hooked up,” the man was saying. “Longer if we cut it off for half the day, keep the door shut. Can’t say exactly how – hey, looky here.”

The mother stood shy in the doorframe.

“Well, if the Lord hadn’t delivered us an angel then I don’t know what he’d done,” the woman said rising from her chair. “You set here and I’ll fix you up a bowl.”

“Thank you, ma’am, but –”

“None of that. You set.”

The mother sat with her child on her knee while the old man looked on with delight.

“We’s just saying that y’all can stay as long as y’all need.” He sipped loudly from his beer and set the can on the armrest and wiped the foam from his long mustache. “We got all you need. Food’ll last a while, plenty of water, beer, games. Books for a lifetime or two, shu. We got it all and you’re welcome to it. You and your boy. We got milk aplenty for him, if he likes it. Growin’ boy’ll need it.” He took another sip from his beer and wiped the foam again from his mustache. He rubbed that hand on his jeans and said, “Yes ma’am.”

The woman’s voice rang out from the kitchen. “You want a beer, hon?”

“No ma’am, I’m alright,” the mother said softly.

“What?” the woman yelled.

“She said no, darlin’,” the man yelled back over his shoulder. He took another sip from his beer and pointed the can at her boy. “He want one?”

The man let out a hardy laugh which seemed to draw the same from the boy. The mother smiled and shook her leg, bobbing her child up and down which made him happier yet.

The woman returned with a tray that held two bowls of soup, a rough hunk of bread, a glass of sweet tea and water both with ice, and a small cup of milk. The soup steamed and under the meniscus of the glasses were dozens of tiny water droplets. Some steamed down the smooth glass like tiny rivers. Some like tears. Running water.

“I hope you’re okay to be eating settin’ here,” the woman said. “Dinner table’s all full up of his tomes and the like.”

“Yes ma’am,” the mother said, shifting her boy to the center of her lap. “Plenty fine.”

The tray was set on the arms of the chair and it all smelled better than anything she could remember.

“Go ahead and eat up, hon,” the woman said. She sat in a folding chair next to her husband. “It’s already been blessed.”

“Yes ma’am.”

She raised the spoon to her boy’s mouth and he gratefully accepted and once he had his fill, the mother worked on her bowl. By then it had cooled off but she didn’t mind. She made quick work of the first bowl, the second, and the third. While she ate, the man and woman asked her for her and her boy’s names and they traded theirs in turn and the woman said that she was glad to have held onto those old clothes. She said that it was never a bad thing to hold onto what you’ve got and her husband agreed and for a moment they were quiet. The man pointed out a robin pulling up worms in the yard in front of them.

After the mother had finished supper, the woman asked the mother if she worked and when she said she just watched her boy, the man asked where her husband was.

“He’s took,” was all she said.

The rest of the evening held quiet distracting conversation and as the sun set and the world around them darkened they retreated inside to play cards and Yahtzee by candlelight on the coffee table in the living room. They boy fell asleep on the couch and was unperturbed by the sound of dice rolling and their recording scores and the woman constantly correcting her husband’s miscounting and their laughter when the boy’s mother won game after game. Crickets chirped and cicadas hummed outside in tune with the generators and soon enough they all agreed to turn in after the next round.

The woman brought blankets and pillows and apologized that the couch was all they had by way of a guest room and the mother said she didn’t know what she would do if it weren’t for them. They all said goodnight and the man and woman went into their bedroom and shut the door behind them. The mother placed a blanket on her son and dared little more so he didn’t wake from what she prayed was a dreamless sleep.

She lay on the ground between the couch and the coffee table with a blanket loosely over her and she looked at the woodgrain tracing each river with her eyes until it became too dark to see. And in that true night she thought of the world she had brought to her son and she wondered if her own mother had ever thought the same. All this a waking dream for rest was far off.

When she closed her eyes she thought again of her own mother and her own grandmother and the story that she only ever heard once about how the great grandfather no one hardly ever knew was took by the river and took to the wayside some unknown distance and then she thought of that same river she played in when she herself was a child and in that river was so much and it must have had so much because it had taken so much and she thought then of the rainbow trout and crawfish and those breathless lungless creatures therein that never came up for air save for when she turned over rock with her small hands showing her sun to those that crawled on their bellies as if their single stone shelters were the last obstacle to a fundamental knowledge that would deliver them to a world of light. To a world of fell oak and ash. A world of drought and storm and flood.

It was there where the wild chestnuts grew no longer.

Table of Contents

Mama’s Boy

What We Always Do: In One Scene

Catfish’d Be Fine

Some Notes on the Stories Herein

About this Thing and the Author

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Mama’s Boy

Called himself a mama’s boy. Said so himself.

He lived in her old house.

‘Golfballs 50¢ Each’ painted on a plank sign in his yard out front about two feet from the road.

The black words bled on the white background.

He probably got the stencil from Walmart or that drugstore down the street.

The sign itself once a pallet or maybe a fence board.

Golfballs he probably got from the ditches and woods off near the course in town.

In the center yard a porcelain bathtub with a paper sign that said it didn’t leak.

Fifty bucks.

His mama used to put up Christmas lights every year but ever since she died the place was dark.

Just couldn’t bring himself to it.

To hang the lights.

Neighbors didn’t see him for six months after the funeral until one day someone saw him cutting down that hemlock that was dying at the end of the street.

Cut it down and cut it up into big chunks and wrapped a chain around a chunk and chained the chunk to the hitch of his ‘95 Hilux and dragged that sumbitch up the road.

Piece by piece.

Tore up near every inch of pavement between her house and that tree.

Didn’t mean to.

It was that log skipping every time the chain got tight and leaping out of the slack like a bird dog going after whatever it was that just fell out of the sky.

He unchained the log in the middle of his backyard far from her house and he went back for the next one and unchained it and went back for another.

And another.

And another.

That truck runs like a champ, he always said.

Supposedly it had recently quit burning coolant.

Bluewhite smoke coming off the exhaust said otherwise.

Smelled like gas whenever he shifted it into second too.

Still ran though.

Still ran.

He had that truck since he was a kid.

Said once he used to deal crack in it way back when.

Smoked it in there too.

Eventually he’d stop dealing and just got to smoking crack whenever he could.

He’d run around North Carolina and parts of Georgia and he said give him ten minutes in any shopping center and he’d have a fist full of it and a Coca-Cola.

Guaranteed took him longer to get the Coke.

Made his mama so mad one day that she said she’d flat out die if she caught him smoking in his truck out back again and he said alright mama and quit cold turkey that day.

Yes ma’am.

Today.

I swear.

Love you too.

He situated the logs in a sort of pile and doused them in gasoline and lit a match.

Two and a half days to go to ash.

A week for the pile to cool off.

Nobody asked him what he was doing.

Not one neighbor minded that dead tree down the street gone.

Fifty-cent golfballs probably weren’t selling too good.

Probably he needed money to get some new Christmas lights.

He was a mama’s boy after all.

Said so himself.

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What We Always Do: In One Scene

Interior. Small kitchen flush with linoleum, a vague design worn to a silvergray away over the years. Wallpaper here and there peeling to show yellow brown dried glue beneath it. The refrigerator hums and ticks occasionally. It’s an old thing. A card table in the corner where only two could sit, new daylight filtering in through the opened window above it, the white lace short curtains moving in the breeze. The table dips in the center. Papaw holds a halfcocked newspaper by the fold and reads it through the bottom half of his glasses. On one side of him a one-day old cup of coffee from a now three-day old pot and on the other side a nigh empty pack of Parliaments with three or four unsmoked. One cigarette turned upside down. Mamaw sits across from him and looks in his general direction contemptuously. Her fingers interlocked and bridged below her chin holding her head up. Papaw takes a drink of coffee. It will be a nice spring day.

MAMAW Will you quit that?

Papaw glances up from the newspaper, regards his wife, and sips from his cup again. He returns to reading.

PAPAW Quit what, dear?

Mamaw points at him but the paper is a strategically placed blind.

MAMAW That.

Her arms and legs cross in the same movement. She is hunched at the front of the chair, head now unsupported.

PAPAW I’ve no idea what could possibly be bothering you this time.

MAMAW (pointing)

It’s that – that thing you’re doing.

PAPAW Well, my darling, I’m doing a lot of things right now.

MAMAW My Lord, Peter. Sitting on your fat ass sucking down cigarettes all the live long day ain’t a whole lot. What the hell else are you doing?

PAPAW For one, I’m sitting here listening to you.

Papaw brings the paper closer to him.

PAPAW (quieter)

Ain’t that something?

MAMAW And what else?

He turns another page and sucks on his teeth. The sound from behind the paper is like a long zipper traveling down a mile-long jacket.

PAPAW And, I’m breathing. Trying to read the daily for another.

PAPAW (whispered)

Trying.

MAMAW And?

PAPAW Well, shit dear, lots of things is what I could tell ya. Hell, I guess my blood is flowing because my heart is beating and that’s beating because my brain is telling it to and my brain is working because…

He folds the paper over completely and looks at the refrigerator and talks to it, quieter, more contemplative.

PAPAW Well… because it just does, that’s why. It just does. But I guess that’s not really me, per se. It’s my…

He waves a hand around like he’s wafting some aroma and he snaps when it comes to him.

PAPAW It’s my id, that’s it. That’s me, ain’t it?

Mamaw leans completely back in her chair, arms and legs still crossed, and looks up to the ceiling with closed eyes.

MAMAW No I wouldn’t say that.

Papaw shrugs, whips the limp paper stiff, and returns to reading.

PAPAW Right, I guess I wouldn’t say that either. So what is it about me that’s bothering you?

Mamaw returns her hands to her chin.

MAMAW Oh don’t you say that like that.

He lowers the paper slightly but still reads.

PAPAW Say that what like what?

MAMAW (sharp)

That!

PAPAW (loud) That what?

His fingers tighten and wrinkle the edge of the paper where he holds it.

MAMAW (sharper)

You know what.

Papaw surrenders the paper to the table. A few of the center pages fall out and onto the ground. He picks them up and speaks while bent over in the chair.

PAPAW (strained)

Jimonetney!

He grabs each page, one at a time, like he’s starting an old lawnmower and puts them in his lap.

PAPAW If I knew what was bothering you then Jesus Christ is our mailman and the Apostle Paul is his dog.

Mamaw gasps.

MAMAW Peter, don’t you dare. You know what it is you’re doing.

He puts the pile of pages from his lap into a disorganized heap on the table and reaches for his pack of cigarettes, pulls his lighter from his breast pocket, and lights one as leisurely as he can.

PAPAW I know some of what I’m doing, just not the doing of which is getting your tights all twisted.

He blows a solid stream of white smoke out the window and looks out it. Perhaps longingly. Then, he takes a sharp breath inward and chokes on nothing. He lets out a series of loud, unproductive coughs.

PAPAW (wheezing)

Shit.

Mamaw looks at him with eyebrows high. Her jaw slackens and a small gap forms between her lips.

MAMAW I think you do know.

Papaw, barely better now, continues to smoke his cigarette and coughs intermittently.

PAPAW (choked)

Oh, is it the bugs in my guts that make my stomach gurgle? The ones you say I should be feeding apple cider and oatmeal.

MAMAW You are a fool. They are not you, Peter.

PAPAW My guts?

Mamaw reaches for the pack of cigarettes but Papaw, still looking out the window, pulls them closer to him. He then turns from the window, picks up a page from the heap which was not the same as what he was reading before but reads it nonetheless.

MAMAW (sighing)

No, the bugs.

PAPAW We have bugs?

MAMAW Peter!

She gets up from her chair and walks a short step to the refrigerator and leans against it.

PAPAW Oh, is it the way I’ve been walking lately?

She pauses and looks at him incredulously.

MAMAW The way you’ve been walking lately?

PAPAW Yeah.

MAMAW Lord help us.

Mamaw murmurs something else under her breath and looks up toward the ceiling.

MAMAW (still looking up)

No, Peter. It ain’t that.

Papaw sets the paper down on the table and looks at her for the first time this morning.

PAPAW Is it my new-

Mamaw throws her hands up and walks back to behind her chair. She braces herself against the back of it.

MAMAW No, Peter, it’s not that neither.

He lifts up a corner of the paper heap as if to check if the words were still there.

PAPAW Well then. I have no idea what it could be.

MAMAW You don’t?

She hangs her head down and fiddles some of the loose linoleum up with her slippered foot. Papaw thumbs through the paper heap, letting each corner fall on the next.

PAPAW Was it something I said?

MAMAW Are you listening to me?

He puts out his cigarette on the heel of his shoe and throws the butt out the window. Papaw then reaches for the second to last cigarette in the pack, lights it, and returns to looking underneath each paper, as if he lost something.

PAPAW Are you listening to you?

Like a hawk she looks back at him.

MAMAW (sharpest)

Peter!

Papaw stops searching underneath the pile of paper and looks back at her with a surprised look, shoulders nearly to his ears. He speaks to her as if he were dismantling a bomb.

PAPAW Remind me again, dear.

MAMAW Here, sweetheart. I’ll help you out.

She begins counting on her fingers.

MAMAW It’s not your breathing. It’s not your heart or your brain or your bugs or guts or whatever else you think is or isn’t a part of you.

PAPAW Well, what is it?

He reaches for his coffee cup and lifts it to his mouth, as if to hide. With the cigarette still in his mouth, he takes a sip and shrugs. Mamaw slaps the table so hard that Papaw both spills his coffee and loses his cigarette underneath the table. The heap of paper then falls page by page on the ground, some pages atop the cigarette.

MAMAW Will you quit slurping so loud?

Papaw holds both of his hands prostrate on the table.

PAPAW I ain’t slurping. That’s just how I drink.

He pinches his nose loosely and sniffs while looking around.

MAMAW I think you’re just doing that to get at me. Rile something up in me. God’s peace and patience is all I have for you.

Underneath the table, the ember from the cigarette catches a corner of the paper and it goes up into a small flame, unnoticed.

PAPAW To get at you? Hell, Dianne, why would I go about doing that?

PAPAW (under his breath)

Peace and patience my ass.

A small curl of grey smoke wafts up, unnoticed still.

MAMAW You tell me! Ain’t never heard you slurp like that until just today. I wish your parents sent you to Cotillion.

Papaw stops looking around the room and looks directly at Mamaw who quickly turns her back to him and walks back toward the refrigerator. The flame grows and jumps to the cuff of Papaw’s pants. The fibers blacken and sizzle. Again, all unnoticed.

PAPAW Cotillion? They don’t have Cotillion in Iowa. Least not when I was a kid. You know, I think –

A campfire now in the kitchen. Smoke billows steadily from under the table. Papaw flinches both legs off the ground like someone is vacuuming beneath his feet.

PAPAW (sharp on the ‘Sh’ but quiet)

Shit.

Papaw looks under the table and sees the flames both on the ground and on him.

PAPAW (loud and sharp on the ‘Sh’)

Shit!

Papaw quickly shoots back from the table and slaps his right leg aflame. He strips off his pants and throws them away from him, forgetting that away from him was still into the fire.

PAPAW (breathless)

Son of a –

The flame dampens for a moment but then quickly burns brighter as the rest of his pants catch.

PAPAW (sharp and quick)

Shitfire.

He looks around the kitchen jaggedly, of course finding nothing to put out the larger fire beneath the table. Mamaw still turned, seemingly directs her entire focus away from her husband who is now dancing wild and pantless behind her, a level of titanic disregard that no other human could achieve. Papaw puts a hand to his chest and feels the damp left there by his spilt coffee. He strips off his shirt and begins beating the flames down. It only takes a few floggings for the flame to die. Black ash floats through the kitchen, some out the window. Mamaw turns and stares at her now near naked husband who himself is there heaving.

MAMAW Whad’ya do that for?

PAPAW Do what?

Mamaw gestures to his nakedness.

MAMAW That!

Before Papaw could answer, Mamaw scoffs and walks out of the kitchen in a huff. Papaw looks around the empty kitchen then moves his chair back to the table. He sets down and grabs the last cigarette from the pack on the table, the one kept upside down. Papaw pats around his bare chest with an open palm, stops his search, points up, and reaches for his coffee and ash-stained shirt beneath the table. From inside the breast pocket, he pulls a dented lighter, flicks the flint wheel, and brings the flame to his cigarette. He leans back in the chair and gazes out the window and draws in a breath and out comes a clean stream of smoke, not a tobacco leaf wasted, not a whisp out of line. He feels the breeze come through the window on near every inch of his skin.

PAPAW Pretty nice day, ain’t it?

END

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Catfish’d Be Fine

His appetite was fixing itself to want a catfish, so Silas thought he might as well go fishing.

This morning wasn’t any different than yesterday morning and tomorrow morning probably would be more of the same but today somehow seemed better than any other day to drop a line and see what was biting.

He lived not far from a pond. It was about an acre or so big and he figured it was about fifteen feet deep because he caught some pretty big fish there from time to time. The pond was stocked with bass and carp and some other smaller fish that he called brim when he lived in Lorida, Florida, but after he retired and moved to Johnson City, Tennessee, he learned they called those fish there shellcrackers.

He thought those shellcrackers were real sons of bitches to handle. They were about as spiny as a porcupine though he’d only ever seen a porcupine once or twice. Once on the television and once at a zoo in Orlando. But he figured since that one wasn’t wild and kind of far away it didn’t count.

But getting poked by a brim or shellcracker or whatever it was called wasn’t near half as bad as getting barbed by a channel cat. That pond had them stocked too and it ruined his entire day the last two times he got stuck. His hand throbbed for a whole three days after the first time.

He thought he’d learned his lesson to bring a towel with him so he could handle the things better and he did bring it for a while. But one time after moving all his tackle into the new tackle box he’d gotten himself for Christmas he neglected to move the catfish towel and he didn’t realize he’d forgotten it until he pulled a twelve-incher out of the pond. It wasn’t until shortly after that that he learned his second lesson. Always double-check that you’d packed the catfish towel.

But his hand hurt for only two days after that though. He thought maybe he was becoming immune to catfish poison.

He hoped to catch at least something today. There wasn’t anything worse than coming home with nothing except fewer nightcrawlers after getting excited all morning about catching a big one and frying it up real good and eating it real good.

But he figured he’d bring at least something back from the pond. He’d better. What the hell else was he going to do?

He was really craving a catfish. Trout’d be fine too. He’d be okay with a couple of shellcrackers even though their fillets were real small. He’d just have to catch a good number of them. Hard to get the rib bones out of those fillets. He hated swallowing that shit. Catfish were easier to deal with. After barbing them. Tasted better too.

“Yessir,” he said awaking in bed from a dream he’d already forgotten. “Catfish’d be fine. Catfish’d be real fine.”

If he didn’t catch anything what would he eat?

Couldn’t do Taco John’s again. He’d had that for the last few nights and it was all the way in Elizabethton. He had to be real careful driving on 321 because that’s where all the cops hung out and his registration was long past expired.

He could afford the ticket and he could afford the registration fee but he didn’t want to bother with either.

The worst part about getting pulled over would be getting a DUI. After a day of fishing he’d usually put back twelve beers at least. But after a bad day? Bad day of fishing’d put him back a full case. Twenty-four of them. Cold. Hot. Didn’t matter. As long as the can was full and fresh, nothing else mattered. Except getting another DUI.

Another DUI meant that that cop would make him get out of his truck and walk heel-to-toe like one of those circus freaks and then he’d make him close his eyes and touch his nose while reciting the alphabet backward which he could hardly do forward without singing and then he’d get thrown in jail and get the shit beaten out of him and become some guy’s bitch or have to find himself a bitch and then eventually he’d plead before some judge and say he’d never drink and drive again and of course stay on top of his registration and then he’d get out six years later anyway because this sure as hell wouldn’t be his second or third or even fourth DUI.

And by then he wouldn’t be an old man but a real old man and he didn’t know how much time he had left. None of that seemed worth a handful of Potato Olés and a soft taco even after a shit-poor day of fishing.

Long John Silver’s would be a decent alternative because they had those popcorn shrimp he liked so much.

But he really wanted to catch a channel cat.

So he turned himself upright in bed and put his feet on the matted part of the carpet where he’d set himself off. He started his day.

He winced. Something popped hard.

He washed his face with water from the sink and pumped two splashes of Brut under his armpits and two across his chest. He splashed the green glass bottle only once into his palms and set it down on the sink’s edge and lathered the cologne underneath his balls and then wiped the excess onto his face. Called this whole process getting right, the whole time humming “It Was a Very Good Year.” He loved Sinatra.

After every time he got right he’d look at himself in the half mirror there and make sure there wasn’t nothing different. A new wrinkle here and there was fine but his doctor had scared him a while back. Something about a mole she’d found. Said it could be cancer and could have already spread to his liver or intestines or even his brain. And he used his brain so that really got to him.

Turned out to be nothing. But still he always gave himself a once-over.

The only thing that should be changing were the tattoos he was getting lasered off. They were from a long time ago when he was a real dumbass. A real piece of shit. He got them when he was young and running hot and drinking too much and hanging with the wrong crowd. The kind of crowd Silas’ daddy whipped ass for in France. Nineteen-forty-something. Silas never made the connection.

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Table of Contents

Texas Toast

A Fair Book Trade with My Friend Jack

The Invite-Only Banjothon

Between the Last One and Nothing at All

Texas Toast

To Ken and Ann.

I’m helping my friend build a rock wall.

Not one you’d find on the English countryside separating estate from estate but one that simply prevents a mountain from slipping through your front door.

It won’t be a high wall. Only about a foot tall. But it will be long.

The rocks are heavy and it’s hard work but we make do.

The first day we only built a few feet, maybe three or four. Maybe five. It was my job to load the rocks from the pallet at the top of the driveway onto a cart. A cart that fell apart more and more with each load.

The driveway’s steep and the cart unwieldy and with each trek down the sloping mountain I became more and more convinced that the overburdened cart would divorce itself from my meager control and careen into either one of the cars parked at the bottom.

It never happened.

We listened to Bob Wills and chatted when the saw wasn’t sectioning the old railroad ties that made up the old wall we were replacing.

He talked about his textbook he had just published while I wondered if creosote always smelled that sweet.

Blisters from the back and forth of the Sawzall found their way between my thumb and index finger. Right on the webbing. In defiance of my work gloves. Someone days later asked me what happened to my hands. “I’m building a rock wall with my friend”, I said.

On the second day we used up the rest of the pallet of stones within the first hour of work and then spent the next three playing puzzle.

Finding the perfect arrangement of base stone and middle stone and top stone. The both of us wondered if his wife would like our choices.

Would she appreciate the combinatorics we had iterated through?

Stone by stone finding the perfect reduction to order so that no miskeyed rock would send imperfection cascading down the wall.

Is there any piece of art that is appreciated more for the versions or the drafts that preceded it? Or is the thing itself at last what is measured?

We never got to the bottom of that, but we did agree that that day was much easier. Or at least it was more academic.

We took generous lunch breaks.

On the first day we ate cold roast beef sandwiches and watched the birds chitter out front.

He made Country Time lemonade that was so sweet you could see the sugary sediment at the bottom of the glass.

We went out to lunch on the second day at our usual lunch spot just down the mountain.

A BLT for him and a chicken salad sandwich for me.

He asked what Texas toast was and I wasn’t sure, but I gave an answer anyway.

I’m sure he knew I was speaking nothing but bullshit.

I had only ever thought about Texas Toast in that it’s not any other kind of toast.

It’s just different.

We drank two sweet teas and talked about the work that was left for the next month.

Another pallet or three.

“It’s a lot of work,” I said.

“Yeah,” he replied. “What are those stones made out of anyway? Stones?”

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A Fair Book Trade with My Friend Jack

It was a cold rainy morning when I left Hendersonville for Knoxville early Friday, a morning that made it easy to just get up, make chicory coffee, pour it into a travel mug, and set off. The sun had just begun to come up when I texted my friend from high school – Jack – that I was on the way.

He was the first I would visit with that trip. We had planned to get coffee and catch up at a friend’s cafe near downtown Knoxville called Partial Cafe and Wine. Every time we see each other, about four or five times a year, we swap books we think the other would like, read them, and report back.

The last official trade was his Wendell Berry (Jayber Crow) for my John Williams (Stoner), though we had brought nearly our whole libraries for the other to choose from. So, to conserve weight in the car, I chose two books I thought he could make quick work of: O Pioneers by Willa Cather, a wonderful short read about a family of immigrant farmers in turn-of-the-century Nebraska, and Basin and Range, part of John McPhee’s larger geologic travelogue collection called Annals of the Former World. On an unofficial, unplanned meet up while he and his now fiancée Caroline were travelling through WNC, he had brought me River of Earth by James Still, another quick read of life in coal country during the Depression. I was eager to see what he would bring for our book swap this time around, though he told me we would have to wait until later.

“You’ll like what I picked out for you,” was all he said when we sat down at the cafe table.

It had begun to rain heavily there, so we tucked in and caught up. He sipped on his coffee and talked about his upcoming wedding plans and his big birding goals for the year and I nursed a lavender ube latte and caught him up on my work and writing. It was Friday, so he had brought his computer to get some work done before the weekend. I was happy to have an extended moment of quiet so I could finish Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood.

Plenty of people came in and out of the cafe – some students with their notebooks and beginning-of-the-semester motivation, some professionals in suits with brown shoes and black belts, some people just trying to get out of the rain. I think I heard “It’s really coming down” about once every ten minutes and if I didn’t hear it in that interval, I made sure to say it myself.

After a while, Jack shut his laptop and we both agreed that we were hungry.

We walked under Jack’s umbrella to a nearby Jewish deli called Potchke where we had salmon and white fish bialys and 5¢ seltzer water and chatted about how much there was to do in Knoxville. He had a bit more work to do, so he got back at it and picked off what was left of his bialy while I finished off the crossword for that day, along with a few other puzzles, and once we cleaned off our plates entirely, around noon, we set off to Jack’s apartment to wrap up our visit. Jack lives on the top floor of an apartment complex where his unit overlooks a large cemetery across the street.

“Are the neighbors quiet?” I asked.

He pointed outside the window and said, “They are.”

Then, he walked over to his bookcase and grabbed a thin book. Industrial Society and Its Future by Ted Kaczynski.

“It’s the Unabomber’s manifesto,” Jack said. He smiled. My excitement at the surprise was visible.

‘Finally,’ I thought to myself. “Something to shake off last month’s Dostoyevsky blues’.

“I think you’ll really like it,” Jack went on. “Yeah, he’s a terrorist, but there are some good points in there.”

I gave the first few pages a read and I told him I’d probably think so too. Books about migrant farmers and geology aren’t quite as exciting, but Jack was eager to get into them both. From there, we hugged and I walked through the door and down the stairs, making sure to keep my copy of Jack’s book under my arm and out of the rain. Just then, my phone rang and the second purpose of my trek to Tennessee began.

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The Invite-Only Banjothon

The Front Range of Colorado has a surprisingly lively bluegrass scene, something I took full advantage of while I lived there. It was never hard to find a bluegrass jam to pick at and it was even easier to find some bluegrass band playing a five-hour set at one of the one-thousand breweries in and around Boulder.

To the untrained ear, all bluegrass sounds about the same. To the trained ear, all bluegrass does sound the same. But, by God, is it a hoot to play.

Something about a 1-4-5 progression about someone dying and about to be killed or both just plain gets you going. A wife murdering her good-for-nothing ne’er-do-well indigent manchild husband? Count me in.

It was playing one of these songs at a bluegrass jam at one of the breweries in between Boulder and Longmont where I met my friends Scott, Mitch, and Mike. These fellas are first rate musicians, banjo, mandolin, and banjo, respectively. They play other instruments as well, but they are Scott Banjo, Mitch Mando, and Mike Banjo in my phone. It’s a system that works well for me.

To balance out the long-term effects of bluegrass, two of them have a PhD and the other one has an MD. Of course, you’d never know these men are doctors in their own right.

Well, except for Mitch who will show you pictures of his dog on his phone and swipe one picture too far to reveal one of his patients with a knife sticking out of their head (I’m told they were fine).

Scott perhaps doesn’t hide it well either when his favorite bit is to constantly insert “Did I tell you I went to Stanford for grad school? Yeah, PhD, Geology”.

Mike is the one who is reasonably well-adjusted, though he spent a good portion of his life living in Antarctica and I’m not sure the effect that has on a man in the long run.

Regardless, these are my people, good people. Good people that I make an effort to see any time I’m on the Front Range. This time, though, they were coming to southern Appalachia for what was described over the phone a few weeks before as “a banjo convention.”

Like all bluegrass-oriented events that take place in a hotel in the middle of the city, I figured this would be one of those publicly advertised things where anyone could show up, listen to a little music, and get on their way. I was wrong.

When I picked up my friends from the airport, they wasted no time telling me about the secrecy of this event.

“On all the banjo pages online, you’ll see tons of active posts with a lot of discussion and then you’ll see people asking about this thing. You know, info on when it is and where it is,” Scott said. He leaned forward from the backseat. “Nothing. No comments, no likes. Nothing.”

“How did you know about it?” I asked.

“Because of Mitch.”

I looked at my mandolin playing friend. “How did you get an invite?”

“Because I have a Loar,” he said nonchalantly.

I needed more.

“This isn’t just some get together,” Scott continued on. “This is an invite-only meeting of people with pre-war banjos. 1930s and older. There are some mandolins there too but it’s mostly a banjo thing. More or less all pre-war. Old stuff.”

“How’s the jamming?” I inquired to properly gauge regret for not bringing my guitar.

“Loud,” Mike said.

I’m glad I didn’t bring it.

“Hey, can you take us to a liquor store first?”

“Sure, Scott.”

We arrived at the hotel with plenty of beer in tow and I told my friends I’d catch up with them after I parked. As I walked up to the lobby from my car, I found the line to the elevator backed up with three people and about twenty banjos in their cases stacked so high it would rival the Egyptian pyramids.

“Best take the stairs,” one of the banjo laden men said to me. “I’ve been here twenty minutes.”

I nodded and took the stairs to the fourth floor where my friends were staying. On each flight, you could hear anywhere between two and ten banjos picking different songs through the walls. I pushed the heavy door open to the fourth floor, walked past a group of fine people fresh off a pack of Winston reds, and about halfway down the hall Scott had his door open. He was swearing at his laptop.

“Fuckin’ work shit, man.”

“Need a beer?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “Just none of that fruit flavored shit.”

I cracked two Highland Brewing IPAs, handed one to Scott, and started to put together my camera as he finished up his work. He swore under his breath and in between sips. Mitch and Mike filed in shortly after and that was enough for Scott to call it a day.

“Come on,” Scott said. He slammed his laptop shut. “I’ve got a friend here I want you all to meet.”

He led the way down to the third floor and into the first door from the stairwell.

“Holy shit, it’s Scott,” one of the men inside said. “And he’s got friends. Who would have thought?”

“Hey Wes,” Scott said. “This is Mitch, Mike, and Carson. Mitch and Mike are from Colorado and Carson lives in North Carolina. Asheville area.”

Wes looked at me with his eyebrows perched high on his face. “About a four-hour drive?”

“Actually, only two.”

I shook his hand.

“Real close,” he said. “Me and Brad here, and two others, got in last night from Michigan.” He pointed to a man sitting at the desk at the foot of the other bed. I hadn’t noticed him until then. Like Scott, he too was swearing at his laptop. He had a banjo on his lap.

“Good Lord,” Mike said. “How long of a drive is that?”

“About nine hours,” Wes said. “Brad, tell them about what happened to us coming out of town.”

Brad spun around in his chair.

“Oh shit,” he plucked a chord on the banjo as if it were a bell and school was in session. “It had snowed a bit yesterday morning and the roads were icy and not four minutes into the trip does Wes here slide right on through an intersection just barely skirting past the nose of a semi who was also sliding through the intersection. First words out of all our mouths?”

Both Wes and Brad said in stereo. “Are the banjos okay?”

We all laughed and settled into the small room. On the far bed there were two banjos sleeping above the covers, so we all had to sit on the edges of the two beds so as not to disturb their dreaming.

“Brad,” Scott said. He pointed at the banjo he was holding. “What year is that?”

His love for this banjo sprung forth like the stored rains from a levy had broken after one-hundred years of heavy storms. He spoke of it so amorously I wondered what it was like to be his wife.

The banjo was from 1930 and had a four-digit serial number. Its name was Rocky and once he was done speaking on it, he played it for longer than he talked about it. At this point, we were all yelling over the banjo just to keep the conversation going. Brad nodded and smiled and occasionally let a chord ring out so he could shake the mouse of his laptop to keep his computer from turning off. Scott looked at Brad’s thumb.

“You really wear your thumbpick pretty high up, don’t you?”

“Oh sure yeah,” he yelled back. He stopped playing. “Gets a louder sound, I think.”

“All original parts? Ball bearings, tuners?”

“Yep, everything except the bridge. The bridge I carved from some birch I got from the woods out back of the house I grew up in. I must have shot a thousand squirrels out of that tree as a kid.”

“Hey Brad,” Wes said. “What song you say that was?”

“Oh, I can’t remember. It’ll come to me.”

Wes took a sip of his beer and said, “Well, it was mighty fine.”

After some time and a few more vague melodies, Mitch said: “How does dinner sound?”

We all said it was a good idea and drained our beers and headed down to find some food.

While we were all eating, Wes talked about the music festival he puts on near Lansing. He gets some pretty big names each year: Del McCoury, Billy Strings, The Seldom Scene, and on and on. His father had originally started the festival in 1973 and gave up the mantle to Wes about a decade ago. He says he enjoys it.

“It is a lot of work though. But I’m happy to keep it going. You meet a lot of good people.”

After dinner, we came back to the hotel and found the entire second floor where the restaurant and ballroom were to be commandeered by roving gangs of banjo-yielding honkies setting up in circles to play while others put together tables to sell their wares. Custom made banjo picks, lesson books from the early 2000s, and, of course, some banjos priced in the early 2000s – dollars, that is.

“Last year,” Scott said. “Last year someone was selling a pre-war banjo for $250,000. I think Lloyd Loar made it.”

“And last year someone bought it,” Mike said.

Mitch scoffed. “Good Lord.”

We stood around and listened to the music. Scott bought an old guitar capo and I bought a guitar pick and then the four of us walked out of the small ballroom and into the hallway. There we ran into a few bluegrass-famous players: Noam Pickelny of the Punch Brothers, Jake Eddy – a killer flatpicker (which is the bluegrass word for “guitar player”) – and Michael Cleveland – a blind and half deaf fiddle player from Indiana who was one of the last people to play with another blind bluegrass musician who went by the name of Doc Watson.

“Hey Michael,” Mike said.

He said hello back and asked us how we were doing, just like anyone who isn’t famous would ask. Later, Mike said that his wife, Candace, had bought a fiddle from Michael some years ago and a few weeks after the purchase, Michael called her to ask how she liked it. They apparently talked for a few hours on the phone. Ain’t that just the bluegrass way.

We walked around for a bit longer and went up to the different floors and dove through the open doors into rooms where we heard music and dove out once the song was over. After a while, I relayed to my friends that it was indeed time for me to go. I had to drive back to Hendersonville that night for a gig the next day. We all hugged and said goodbye.

“Are you good to drive?” Mike asked. “Not too tired?”

It wasn’t too late then, but I wouldn’t get back home until about 11:45pm at that point.

“I’m good.” I told them my approach to staying up on long drives at night: For each hour on the road, it’s half a diet Coke and one Marlboro gold. Everyone laughed. I said it works.

“That’s really not a bad idea,” Scott said.

We waved goodbye and I drove to the nearest gas station off I-40.

Around 9:30pm, I walked into the gas station and grabbed a diet Coke from the cooler and went up to the counter.

There, the attendant on one side of the counter and a customer on the other were both leaning toward and pointing at a piece of paper.

“Now, I know that I’ve got a possum nest here and here,” the customer said with his finger sliding on the paper. “Probably here too. Just don’t know what to do ‘bout ‘em.”

“And you ain’t put out no kind of poison or nothing?” The attendant rubbed his chin.

“Cain’t bring myself to it. They ain’t hurtin’ nobody. Just hiss something else when I get too near ‘em.”

“Well, then I suppose you just –” The attendant saw me approach and signaled slyly to his compatriot to hide the paper. “I’ll take you over here. Is this it?”

“Could I grab a pack of Marlboro gold seventy-twos? The short ones, if you got ‘em.”

“Yep,” he said.

I didn’t ask about their reconnoitering I walked in on. I didn’t receive an invite. The attendant found the cigarettes and pushed them across the counter.

“Need a light?”

“No sir.”

He told me the price and I paid and started back toward my car. I turned to open the door with my back and I saw them assume their original positions. Paper out. Them studying it as if Eisenhower himself was there watching in judgement.

“And my dogs are good fer nothin’. They just bark and ain’t scaring nothing off. I’m pretty sure I heard one of them possums bark back.”

“I’d like to see that.”

“You come on over whenever then.”

I cracked my diet Coke and lit a cigarette and headed back to Hendersonville down the dark highway leaving behind who knows how many other invite-only meetings.

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Between the Last One and Nothing at All

Winter had thrown a heavy blanket of snowless cold over Appalachia. Hill and valley there in a frightened serenity. On Sunday, there was word of a late-week storm. Monday gave the same prediction.

“Up to a quarter of an inch precipitation for the Fruitland Valley,” the weatherman on the television said. He danced a stiff dance of only arms in front of a green map of the forecasted area. The television was on in every household and in every bar that had a television and on in the Fruitland Beer Garden.

Twenty-five taps lined the wall and the television there was above taps thirteen through twenty-one on a shelf about headhigh. An old cathode television that would turn to static every time the register would open its till.

“They don’t know shit, these weathermen,” a man at the bar said. He swatted the air dismissively with one hand and drank a dark beer with the other. He was older and thin and he scratched periodically a patchy beard that required little upkeep. The leather on his boots was creased and his denim jeans well worn. Around him were other like men, all hardly distinguishable from the other.

“Ah hell, Frank,” the bartender said. He was a good two decades younger than any of the patrons there and he wore his youth proudly. “I’ve never known you to believe any man on the TV that’s more good looking than you. Bet you’d think different if I put on Channel 5. I just know it.”

“With Sandy?” His eyes opened a little wider and his brows were uneven as he thought about Sandy’s long brown hair and tastefully styled dresses. He almost choked on the next sip of his beer.

“Yeah, Sandy… Sandy…” The bartender snapped his fingers as if to get the attention of the thing that captured his memory. “What’s her last name?”

“Walters,” another patron at the bar said. He was also getting over a choking fit.

“Yeah, that’s it,” the bartender said. “Sandy Walters on Channel 5.”

“Where you heard it here first,” several other men chimed in unison referencing the channel’s slogan.

“She’s a good one,” Frank said. “Says it like it is. None of this panic bullshit you see on Channel 3.”

“This is Channel 2, Frank,” the bartender said.

“Well, that one too,” He drank from his pint until there was nothing left. The heavy foam left over slid down the glass. “You know what I mean. Say, why don’t you put on Sandy to see what she says.”

All the men at the bar perked up.

“Alright, Frank.”

The bartender found the heavy remote and scrolled through the channels. In three clicks, there she was.

“ – will be at least an eighth of an inch of ice in the forecasted area. Something to keep an eye on as the week progresses. Derek?”

“See?” Frank drew from a fresh beer he forgot he asked for. “Nothing to worry about. An eighth of an inch? That’s like –” He measured the distance with his thumb and index finger by barely separating them. The bartender’s head fit just between the gap from Frank’s perspective. He turned to show the measurement to everyone else at the bar but when none of the other patrons paid any attention, he quit the display and quietly said: “It’s nothing.”

“I heard it only takes a half inch to bring down a power line,” the bartender said directly to Frank.

“But Sandy said it’s only an eighth inch coming down,” Frank said. His heart beat for her: the Channel 5 meteorologist.

“I’m just saying it’s good to be prepared,” the bartender said. “Best to have what you need and not end up needing it then need something and not have it.”

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