Every morning that second week I rose early, shoveled in cereal, and lit out for Kinder Mountain and the tree house, determined to arrive before Buzzy Fink came and went. The prospect of actually finding a friend in this forsaken place began to wash the stain of anger and hopelessness that had attached itself to my recent past. I would wait for him there, in the tree-house porch rocker, looking out over the mountains and conjuring my own names for them from the future adventures we would have. Sometime after ten o’clock his head would pop up over the porch platform. “Ha… Indiana!” And off we would go.
But back at Chisold, evenings slid into a routine of awkward dinners in the kitchen and strained conversation on the porch afterward. Pops in his worn wicker chair with his never-lit pipe and a glass of Clinch Mountain sour mash whiskey over ice. Mom in one of the wing chairs in the living room soundlessly replaying the horrifying memory loop of Josh’s last moments. Me lying on the edge of the porch, mute and brooding.
To combat my numb boredom, I took up Pops’ copy of Treasure Island and found myself transported to a new world with Billy Bones, John Trelawney, and Long John Silver—a place of buried treasure and murderous pirates, of desert islands and mutinied ships, plunder and mendacity, adventure and deliverance. A world without the weight of judgment, the sting of reproach, the crush of blame.
Some nights an old friend of Pops’ would wander by to sip mash and offer snips of argument that were either taken or not. Other nights Pops and I would just sit by ourselves, sometimes in silence, sometimes in one-way conversation, watching the evening fold over itself. Evenings so still, even small winds teasing the old hickory by the front porch sounded like brushfire. And the easy spinning of ice and sour mash whiskey in a low glass with SWP etched into it like a flower. He would hold the glass from the top and swirl the mash and ice until a random thought revealed itself like the white ball of a roulette wheel settling on a number.
“Lead pipes… that’s why the Roman Empire collapsed… they all went insane from lead poisoning.”
And so it would begin.
“It jus ain’t fair is what I’m sayin. They dint invite us into this country, we jus took it,” Lo Gilvens argued one evening. Lothario Gilvens was a regular visitor to the porch at 22 Chisold Street, primarily due to sloth, since it was twice as far for him to walk into town as it was to sit on Arthur Bradley Peebles’ front porch drinking the man’s sour mash whiskey. Pops didn’t begrudge Lo the whiskey, although it was widely known that Lo Gilvens couldn’t carry his half of an interesting argument.
“I’m not defending it, Lo. All I’m saying is what the whites did to the Indians was no different than what the Indians had been doing to each other for five thousand years before we came. Coveting is one of the three basic human emotions, right behind love and fear.”
“You left out hate,” Lo corrected.
Pops shook his head. “Hate is overrated. People only hate if they can’t attain what they covet.” I could tell Pops felt the conversation unchallenging so he changed the subject.
“Kevin, I’m going out on calls Monday morning to dehorn and castrate some yearlings and inoculate some pigs. I’d like your help.”
Pops was still a practicing large animal veterinarian, usually making several calls a day around the county. Recently, however, he had turned over much of the office business, the dog and cat stuff, to Mrs. Quell’s nephew, whom he held in slight regard. “Couldn’t pull the prick off a parrot,” he said when Lo asked why he wouldn’t bring Dr. Quell instead.
“Dint know parrots had pricks,” Lo said.
“Well, Lo, I confess that parrots are not my area of speciality, but I can assure you that they do indeed have penises, albeit not particularly large ones.”
That seemed to satisfy Lo, who knew better than to test an argument with Pops on anything related to the veterinary sciences.
I was secretly excited about going on a call with him, but the last four years of my father’s missed ball games and broken promises had left me expecting little.
“So, how about it Kevin?” Pops asked.
“I guess,” I said sullenly and looked off at the abandoned house across the street and studied how it seemed to be brushed in alternating shades of black.
Two gray forms accumulated from the vapors of the evening and took the porch steps. “Kevin, could you please get Mr. Skill and Mr. Meadows a glass of sour mash with no ice?”
I had graduated to official bartender on the porch, which didn’t require much expertise since the only thing Pops and his friends ever drank was sour mash whiskey. I poured the drinks and brought them to the men on a tray.
“Thank you, son,” they said.
“Arthur, the standard of service on this porch has improved substantially since Kevin arrived—I commend you,” Chester said and raised the mash. Pops grunted agreement and began spinning his mash and ice in the low glass with the SWP monogram.
Chester Skill and Pops had been friends for most of their lives. They attended the University of Kentucky together, and after a thirty-year career in newspapers in New York and Chicago, Chester retired back home to Medgar. For him, investigation and argument were as essential as air and water, so after a year of penetrating boredom, he acquired the Missiwatchiwie County Register and was now its publisher and editor in chief.
“You boys hear about Simp Dodger?”
Pops and Lo shook their heads.
“Killed by flyrock this afternoon. That’s why I’m late. Wanted to get it into tomorrow’s paper. Everybody’s talking about it.”
Pops sat up in his chair. “Where did this happen?”
“In his own damn backyard,” Paitsel said, measuring out the syllables like they were bitter medicine.
“What’s flyrock?”
Pops looked over at me. “Flyrock is what comes off the mountain when they’re blasting.”
“I heard this huge explosion last week.”
“We are becoming a regular war zone the way they are blowing up everything.” He frowned and shook his head. “Back when the mines were underground they would use just a bit of explosives to loosen things up; you could barely hear it. With this new way, they blast through four hundred feet of rock and dirt to get to the seam from the top. That takes some ordnance, let me tell you.”
“Why don’t they just do it the old way?”
“Greed, mostly. They can get twice as much coal out with half as many men by coming in from the top. Plus, some of the seams are thin or unstable; on those you really can’t be tunneling.”
“I saw three mountains the other day when I was exploring that had the entire tops taken off. It looked weird.”
Pops harrumphed. “It’s a crime, if you ask me.”
We were all silent with our thoughts until Pops took a sip and shifted. “How’s Betty? I’ll go on up tomorrow.”
“Not good,” said Paitsel. “She was home when it happened. Rock was the size of a basketball an took off most a Simp’s skull. Paul says he’s going up Frankfort to meet with the regulators.”
Pops sat back in his chair. “We’ve got to put a stop to this.”
“Now you’re soundin like Paul,” Lo said. “He’s a regular one-man ruction. Says he’s gonna chain hisself to the dragline.” He chuckled and shook his head.
Paitsel unwrapped a long, powerful arm and chopped the air with his hand. “Don’t underestimate him, Lo. The man’s got no back-down.”
“An Bubba Boyd don’t neither.”
“That’s a fact.”
“His boys been sayin some things bout Paul. Disgustin things.”
Paitsel opened his mouth to reply, but Pops beat him to it. “That’s when I knew Paul was onto something.” He pointed his pipe end at Lo. “Bubba wouldn’t be spreading all these rumors if Paul wasn’t a threat.”
“Heard Bubba’s pushin hard for the Mitchell place,” said Lo. “Next, he’ll be comin here to buy Jukes.”
I sat up on the mention of Pops’ boyhood home in the mountains. Mom had told me so many stories about Jukes Hollow—the unimaginable beauty, the waterfall, the natural swimming pool, the centuries-old trees—I felt possessive of the place even though I’d never seen it.
“Who’s this Bubba Boyd man?”
“He’s the one taking the tops off all these mountains. He owns the mines and most of the town,” Paitsel said. “Not a man I want in my foxhole.”
“And he wants to buy Jukes Hollow?”
“He’ll have to pry the deed from my cold, dead hands,” Pops replied, staring out into the darkness.