The Second Life Of Old Benny Reed

       "Where you off to with that hog's head?" Charity scolds from her rocking chair beside the cook stove, her hands still darning as the scents of wood smoke and browning biscuits fill the room. "Debt to pay up the hollow," Benny answers, straining to pull on his leather work boots from the three-legged stool by the door. "Bible says an eye-for-an-eye," she preaches as her long gray hair waves with each backward rock. "Wild," he hollers stepping out into the dark blueness of pre-dawn that promises another glorious day of Indian summer. "That's the only sermon I need."      Wilderness is what Benjamin Reed was getting less of since his adolescence in the hills above Tazewell, Virginia. The Shenandoah Valley swarming with settlers after the American revolution was one of the reasons he and Charity had moved their family across Clinch Mountain into eastern Kentucky. Now the next generation was making its way into the bluegrass r...

     "What's the matter pop, cat got your tongue?" a red-bearded young man calls as he and a hound peer down at the gray-haired old man stuck in the top branches of a rhododendron grove. "Wolf's more like it," Benny scowls at his twenty-four-year-old second son, the spitting image of him at that age. "You put me here, now get me down!" "Hold your horses," Daniel laughs at the reproach and follows the loyal dog from to the ledge his master had fallen from. "I can reach your boot from here."      The footprints in the mud around the cache site had told Benjamin Reed all he needed to know about the varmint of Cow Creek. It's not easy to distinguish wolf from dog tracks, but the ability of a single large canine to drag and bury an oxen carcass told him it was a lone wolf.      The Kentucky Appalachians of the 1800s housed both gray wolves and the slightly smaller red wolf, though that taxonomic distinction was unimportant to the...

https://images.app.goo.gl/ mvDH2dWkbKtZatn37      "Tarnation," exclaims the prostrate and still tipsy Benjamin Reed lodged atop the rhododendron thicket. He moves a shoulder in an attempt to roll and quickly pulls back, the weight shift threatening to dislodge him from the precarious perch at least twenty feet off the ground. He tries lifting a foot with the same result and remains stuck after attempting to move all four limbs, but at least he knows his arms and legs are still working.      "Rock of ages cleft for me," he sings with a sigh, resigned to using the one movable part that doesn't risk a tumble to the death:  Let me hide myself in thee; Let the water and the blood, From thy wounded side ..., is halted mid-verse when his squinting eye catches a reddish motion on top of the ledge.      In later years illicit moonshine became associated with insanity or worse, blindness and kidney failure. In the early twentieth century, as coppe...

https://www.appalachianhistory.net/2021/05/is-the-kentucky-long-rifle-misnamed.html      Five sharp caws from a big black bird glistening in the sunlight atop the tallest fir on the northern ridge announce Benny's climb up through the rhododendron thicket to a sandstone outcropping above the cache site. He skirts behind the ledge and sets his satchel on a narrow foothold strewn with pine needles. Removing the biscuit tin, he levers off the top and hands one to the hound, signaling him to lie down. Jack happily complies by curling into a circle and chomping into the buttery dough still warm from the wood stove.      Next he removes the three lead balls and places them in a nook on top of the rock. Then he slips the gun strap off his shoulder and leans the long rifle against the back of the rock, the end of the barrel reaching to the shoulder of his six foot frame. He unclips a ramrod from under the barrel, leaning it beside the gun before squatting down t...

       "Where'd she put my horn at?" Benny mumbles, loading a few lead balls from the top shelf of the dry larder into a leather satchel and throwing his old long rifle over a shoulder. "You old goat, you ain't shot a gun since last Samhain," Charity scoffs as she pulls a baking sheet from the stove. "Should be up here with the shot," he groans in the flickering candlelight while straining to reach the back of the shelf. "Might be hanging right where you left it last week," she chides with a nod over to the whiskey barrel. "Best take a passel of these biscuits to get you through." "Won't need em," he answers while strapping the powder horn over the other shoulder. "That varmint'll come to me." "Don't count your chickens before they hatch," she cautions as she slips a tin into his bag. "You don't know what I seed up there," Benny calls by way of goodbye as he heads out into ...

https://kidadl.com/animal-facts/ox-facts        "I ain't seed Quincy since Nan left," observes Benjamin's son Daniel as he stacks a barrel onto the family's ox cart in the cold drizzle of a low cloud settling up against the ridge.  "Come to think of it, I heard your mom say she heard a ruction up the hollow," old Benny replies while helping to heft the next keg for tomorrow's drive down along the Licking River to Covington. "That old ox has a hankering for cane so I'll take a gander up there." "Good, cause I'll need two teams for getting a load out of these hills in this mud," Daniel calls as his father strides up the hill.      Two teams of oxen is exactly what Benjamin Reed had used ten years earlier to transport his family and their belongings the hundred and fifty miles from the rim of the Shenandoah Valley in Tazewell, Virginia to the Appalachian foothills of eastern Kentucky. Back then John Quincy Adams, at four-year...

  https://explorekyhistory.ky.gov/files/show/1997       "If I was a snake I'd have bit you," blurts old Benny to a lithe young woman hacking her way towards him in the noonday sun finally cutting through the fog on the upper reaches of Reed Branch.   "So sorry," she blurts while stumbling back and dropping the blade from her right hand and a bundle of thick stems from under her left arm.  "Cane's free for the taking down on Cow Creek," he offers, scrambling to gather up the brown stalks.  "Tis our first harvest this side of the ridge in many a year," she explains, wiping a sweaty brow on the sleeve of her plain linen dress.      Benjamin Reed had selected these particular three-hundred acres as his land grant from the vast Preston holdings in the mountains of western Virginia and Kentucky partly because of the thick canebrakes. Dried stalks of the native bamboo plentiful along waterways were used for roofing and fencing, and the lea...