Somewhere in the Ozarks stands a cabin, behind the cabin a shed, and near the shed an aging young man stripped to the waist chopping wood.
His suspenders dangle from the beltline. His back’s blotched red, agleam in sweat. His hair is dark and wispy with streaks of white. The body, lean and strong; the face, empty of expression, full of thought completely impenetrable to the casual observer so sorely lacking in these parts. The seat of his pants hangs heavy, sullen and forbidding, indifferent to social norms, hostile to all etiquette, defiant of popular views as to how a pair of buttocks should be clothed.
The axe flies up, the blade swings down, the logs crack and splinter in the sun. Wood chips lie flayed about the chopping block, mindless of the executioner and his work. Each blow resounds sharp, then hollow, soaring above the clearing into a timeless sea of pine and junipers, the sky a silent witness, the day a careless bystander.
Whorls of smoke drift from the scene of the lonesome homestead. Poke, watercress and persimmons scent the crisp mountain air. Granny Pawqut’s cooking from the cabin. Her hair long and gray in a braid has fallen asleep across her huddled shoulders, while the hands scrub, peel and stir over a pot unseen through the window. Her head is bowed, her eyes steady if tired, her face partly shaded from the light of the yard like the corner of a painting that mostly goes unnoticed for the action that is promised in the foreground.
Out of sight of her window is the shed, dark to the onlooker, although the door hangs open. It’s a low-set, uneven structure that, despite the rotting wood of its walls, its dirt floor and sagging roof, gives no sign of vulnerability to the whims of nature and indeed looks as if it might withstand the worst the mountains could throw at it, be it blustering winds, cruel rain or a pall of frigid snow set upon it in the dead of winter.
Inside the shed are the usual tools of subsistence living, arranged helter-skelter and layered with dust: a wheelbarrow with well-worn handles, a length of rope cut short at one end, a shovel whose blade is still moist with mud. Flies swarm around a basket covered in the corner. There’s a cot in there, too, the mattress soiled and torn. A dark-green quilt is folded neatly at the foot of the bedding with a copy of Gideon’s Bible lying face-down on top.
There’s an old hound lying just outside, a sleepless sentinel on the doorstep of death, his master long gone to meet his maker. The front paws are held forward to support the muzzle, the ears long and crumpled in the dirt, the hind quarters in a crouch so flaccid and flush to the ground that possibly only a shrill whistle from the nearby burial mound of his late owner could launch the beast into something resembling a stance.
Jeremiah Davies was a wild man, a huckster and home wrecker, too. He’d roam the hills selling moonshine for rheumatism, and fuck men’s wives if they weren’t home. He wasn’t above rape, either.
Any woman that would have him by force was as good if not better than the willing, the wanton or the gullible, he’d always say.
The old man’s energy for amorous adventure did not however extend to his wife, who soon grew used to long, lonely nights, her yellow-leaf years falling soon after the birth of her first and only child, Josh.
Josh was equally disinclined toward fatherhood, preferring the life of back trails and surprise visits to other isolated mountain homesteads. He’d sell anything he came across, but wasn’t one to steal.
More often he was greeted as an itinerant entertainer, telling whoppers around the campfire for handouts that sometimes included trinkets if the audience were outsiders. He’d occasionally venture down to a truck stop or visit one of the mining towns at night.
They say he could play the fiddle, but tall tales were his real forte. “Night crawlers,” he’d call them and scare the pants off little kids and old women alike. The storyline was always the same: A drifter who waylaid carpetbaggers and city slickers intent on taking advantage of mountain folk. He’d win their confidence then steal their souls, chopping up the bodies thereafter. Greed and vanity lured the victims to their death, while the drifter subtracted years from his own life, perpetuating more attacks on the foolish and corrupt.
Old Jeremiah had no such longevity of life himself, but was shot dead in the back by a revenue man or jealous husband while still in his fifties, though no one actually knew his exact age. Elvira, his woman, didn’t last much longer than the burial. Some say she lost her mind well before. The mountains play mean tricks on a man, on a woman and even a dog. She’d been known to roam the woods at night butt-naked but for a flimsy shawl; looking for her lover, they said – not a man, nor a boy, but a woodland creature of some sort that defies the imagination. Nothing but a little runt, they said.
Josh found her one morning on his way home from a hunt, her hair floating tangled among the lily pads of a pond that barely covered the pale of her face.
“Will you be having vittles?” Granny Pawqut shouts from the cabin in no particular direction.
“I don’t reckon I will.”
The man continues splitting the logs, crashing the axe deep into the hide of the wood. It will be dark in a few hours, and the man still has to pack his things – nothing much more than a change of clothes, a large hunting knife and some personal belongings. All he needs for the road.
A red-tailed hawk swirling in the sky screams at its prey in the trees. Granny Pawqut wipes her eyes in the fading light of day.
Filed March 26, 2015