Chapter 8: An Eye For An Eye

 




     "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 region down from the Ohio valley and up through the Cumberland gap, and not all were out to build a cabin.

     Saddlebag preachers arrived soon after the settlers, their horses walking the Wilderness and Greenbrier trails and then following waterways back into the hills. Sent by their Methodist, Presbyterian, or Baptist circuits, these traveling clergy brought brimstone to remote settlements that were already stoked for the fire, not having seen a church since leaving the east. With mountains replete with vipers and spring-fed dunking holes, eastern Kentucky was primed for an evolving American evangelism.



     "Blamest thing," Benny exclaims upon his return from feeding the hungry wolf. "I run into that dark haired girl at the upper brakes."

"You was always running after some Indian girl," Charity laughs by way of recalling his youthful sojourn over the hill before they met and married.

"She says some of her people over to Licking Station is going to Arkansas."

"Well maybe ye should go too, you old fool."

"Maybe I will," he ponders in what she takes as mock consideration, failing to see his darker eye flashing red as the hazel one goes green.




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Chapter 6: Seeing Red

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...
Read more

Chapter 7: Lone Wolf

     "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...
Read more

Chapter 5: Backfire

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...
Read more