Salt Lick Ch.1 Post 8

A commune sprouted, recessed back in the lone verdant pasture of the mountain’s base. That’s what the longhaired men and women, and their smudge faced offspring called it. A commune. Which made them communists, according to Uncle Gus. He’d been to Viet Nam, together with my Daddy. They served in the same unit. They had seen real live commie pinkos arm and arm with the dreaded Viet Cong. Uncle Gus knew an enemy when he saw one. To him the world was a question, a question he believed in answering. He wasn’t unhappy, just suspect. The world was amiss.

The Flood Mountain commune didn’t out as much. The land itself was fertile, and unblemished. It sat in the wash of the mountain, where glaciers once roamed, depositing deep shale, and coal veins, and mineral rich topsoil in their wake; a forgotten road that split from Flood Hollow Way took you right to it. The longhairs set up army/navy surplus tents and they went about building their homesteads by hand, from wood they cut, land they worked by day, and slept on at night. Nobody could doubt their diligence. It was their intent folks doubted. Eastern Kentucky blistered at the thought of anything but hard living coal miners, rock farmers. A sparse economy. Wayward moral ecologies were not needed here. No one liked a freeloader. Least not Daddy, nor Gus Clancy, Sheriff, protector of the mountain tops, and valleys below.

As for the longhairs, you could see them naked as jaybirds, when they bathed en masse, in Cow Creek. They were all slender as any bean Daddy grew, and even bathing regular like they did, they were flocked with mud. All of them, babies right on to the full-grown men. To be fair, the men wore beards that grew haphazard, defiantly brown, yellow and orange, strawberry and midnight, rangy and thick. In any case, they stayed put over there by Flood Mountain, more often than not. An intricate wooden gate swung wide, and closed their dirt road to unwanted traffic. Daddy sometimes left parcels of food there for them, but this was no act of benevolence, nor could it be called altruism. It was his mean streak that did that. Word came back from their first forays into town; the communists were vegetarians. Not once did Daddy leave them vegetables produced from his toil. No. He left them venison, and he left them head less chickens yet to be plucked, and he left them fat slabs of pork butt, wrapped in wax paper that went rotten in the sun. The longhairs didn’t take to it- all that meat brought undesirable animal invaders into their slice of Kentucky heaven. Daddy didn’t care a whit, though. That was fine Crider soil they were plunked down on top of, and they had as much right as he did to it, and yet there they were, farming, naked, half naked, squatting on soil Daddy long desired.