He took a sip from the can.
Now, I’m not an excuse maker. I’ve done a lot of things I couldn’t back up in the court system over the span of my life, but I’d do almost all of it again. Including today. I’d do today most especially the whole goddamned same way ever time you asked me to. Ever time anyone did. Same way.

Momma called today.
I bet she did. News travels fast don’t it. Beats all to hell. What’d she say? Naw, don’t answer that. Let me finish.
She didn’t say nothing.
I told you to let me finish.

I sunk deeper still into the polyester stripes on the sofa.

No, don’t get cold with me. I’m laying this open for you to see something of me. I can’t talk straight like this with anybody but you, don’t you see that? Whole time you been carrying on with Ellard, and then Gus, I been right here waiting for you, son. Hoping maybe some sprout of good had been seeded by this little calamity of ours.

I sat up, I crossed my legs. My skin itched. What had he done? This circle monologue of his meant something, only I never followed him on these stretches of his, because his words struck out from him with little light for others to make sense of there intent. He spoke in wagon wheels, with those high arches covered in tanned hides or canvas, so you could not divine intention.

Look, I done my share. I done it good today, and whatever happens, I ain’t letting Gus or nobody come take you two boys from me.

I was tearing at my very seams.
Did you shoot one of the commune people? Did you?

He put down the can before he sucked it dry this time, and a shocked look came over him.
Did I shoot what? No. No, shit no, that’s what you think of me?

He stood up.
I’m not a killer, Clement, I’m your father.
Then what’d you do?
I knocked Bobby Judd into next Tuesday. His face opened up then, the first time Daddy showed up since he’d been home. But he vanquished it almost immediately.
And I paid the price, and you all will not take my actions as your own, you hear me?

I turned the TV on. He came over and snatched the clicker, and shut the thing off.
You hear me? That’s never the answer.
Aw, you’re just like Momma. You don’t mean it.

He got up, and he reached his hand out for me, like he was ready to snatch me up and pummel me. I leaned out of reach, and ran to the screen door, but stopped there.

He didn’t follow. Sat on the sofa, and stretched out his legs before him.

It’s not like he didn’t have it coming.
He knew if he kept talking I’d come back.
The guy tries to tell me how to raise you kids, how to keep my marriage in tact, like he knows something on the matter. I lost my temper. Next thing I know, I have him in a headlock out front of Deuce’s, and I slammed his head up and down in the road. A sight, not much blood, but dust, and wind, and then, strangest thing, little brown tumbleweeds, like out of a cartoon. But they weren’t tumbleweeds, they were tufts of Bobby’s hair I pulled out, or tore out of him as he struggled to free himself. Then the cops came and I slugged him good, sent his lights flickering a moment, and I got up and held out my wrists and told that runty one to cuff me, that I wasn’t drunk, and he better get his boss on the horn, to meet me at the jail.

When we got there, Gus stood out front, but he ran up to keep Bobby Judd company, to settle the man down, and that’s a task. Judd was bouncing all over the place, like I spiked him with some of that ol Cocaine, bouncing this way bouncing that, sprung loose on them little chicken legs of his, pointing at me, and then to his head, screaming about how he’d go bald on account of my reckless ways. And that did it, I stopped moving forward and I leaned way over the side of that deputy and I spit over Gus’ shoulder and it landed right in Bobby’s open mouth.

Everything stopped. The deputy turned in time to see it, Bobby Judd shut his mouth only to realize what happened, and Gus turned at me with this look I hadn’t seen since we got back from ‘Nam. Googly eyed. One time, patrolling, the lieutenant up ahead, gus then me, then the other folks snaking through that forthy jungle, trying to keep so quiet, and the lieutenant went straight down into a trap, a pit of stakes. They’d covered over it with a canopy of leaves and sticks, and he never knew it. Straight down, dead before the spikes finished poking through him. Gus’ eyes just like that day.

His hands trembled, but his voice stayed true.

I started to laugh, and Gus did too, and old Bobby, well I gotta give him this, he knows defeat when he sees it. He turned back around, and walked off, like his whole body lost all that energy and he was tugging at millstones. Shit, Clem, you know you got a dance contest next month?

I forgot. We all forgot.

The phone rang, and I let it continue. I set about making dinner. By the time I’d finished Cub returned with a handful of seeds he wanted me to toast, and Gus brought Daddy back. We sat around the table, the four of us, eating macaroni and cheese with a cracker crumb crust. I’d learned that trick watching Momma crush whole saltines in her palm and spread them over top. She said that gave the dish an air of cuisine. Quiz-een, she’d repeat, and wink her eye at me. Momma believed it was them little things, the smallvictories he called them, that separated man from beast.

Gus got up and got two beers out of the fridge.

He sat a beer in front of Daddy. And Daddy tore the tab off and drained it in six seconds flat. He burped out the carbonation, and we all laughed, except Gus.
You gonna tell ‘em or am I?
Hey, I said, I didn’t say anything to you know who, nodding to Cub.
So we ate there in silence, the two men getting up every few minutes to fetch another round of beers, until Gus put down his napkin, and got up.
Clement that’s a hell of a macaroni you made there.
And he left, just like that.

Then something bizarre happened. Daddy cleared the table, and cleaned the dishes his own self. When he was through with that, he took Cub by the hand, and walked the two of them upstairs, and ran a bath, and he proceeded to wash the boy, and put him to bed, before the last of daylight had gone.

Cub never once protested.

That’s how I knew something terrible had happened.

My mind heated up quick. I couldn’t sit still, his voice cutting through the furious silence, from the bathroom. I imagined worse case scenarios, finally settling in on just one aberrant reality. Daddy had gone over to the commune, and somehow ruined my prospects with that tow headed girl. That was it. That could be the only reason Gus drove him home. This was serious. He’d lost his truck, no he’d driven the truck through their gate and ran over a few of them. That’s it, he had run over my girl.

I circled around the TV, clicker in hand, changing the channels as I went. News on every channel. Straight laced men, with helmet hair, and two piece suits spoke slowly of hostages, and oil. I didn’t care. I heard his footsteps come down the stairs. I sank into the sofa.

Clem, we gotta talk.

I held the phone away from my ear, like some frayed wire ran all the way from her to me. Like snakes were dancing through the lines, and maybe the same one that bit her was coming for me. No such luck. She just wasn’t listening, and she prattled on, not yet having deduced how much her role had changed in our family, had changed the lot of us. Her role disintegrated a little more each hour she stayed gone. At first the change moved slowly, a little inch each week, but as her absence sustained, the disconnect bubbled up a little more with each new day, by now, by the din of this abstract phone call, change came to our family hourly, according to my calculations. And where we had swirled around in torpor at first, and our inconvenience bolted us to one another, we three remaining family members knocked around the house off kilter, but with a blossoming pride in ourselves, and each other. That disembodied voice of hers singing through those fiber optic braids meant little to any of us. She could go on talking into infinity. I clamped my hand over the mouth piece, and called over to Cub. He buzzed across the floor, his round eyes empty of emotion, empty of thought. Lucky to be so blank. I put the phone in his hand, and went upstairs. Cub unleashed a volley of questions she must have had trouble answering, because he repeated them each a few times over. I heard him explain twice, it’s me Cub, don’t you recognize my voice? Before I shut the bedroom door, he said, no Momma, I gotta go.

Swirling in the cool breath of dwindling fondness, at the indifferent hands of mathematically charged tables multiplying time and distance and equaling something rapidly decreasing in sentiment, or emotion. She crafted this chill in us. Couldn’t she see that?

Cub was at the age where he played with imaginary people, of his own creation. I had done it, too, at his age.
He had crafted a tent of sorts out of his clothes, and bath towels, which he draped over the desk chair we shared, and the drawers he’d removed from his dresser, giving the room a haphazard appearance, not altogether ruined, but the flow was wrong. Where my things were, the flow simply stopped. MY part of the room had levi blue jeans and jc penney snap button shirts, hanes undershirts and underoos and tube socks that made my feet hot and itchy, all heaped together in a mound beside the closet where they were supposed to be stowed. And in that closet on the floor sat a stand my father had made, tacking it together with no nails, dove tail joints slathered in wood glue, and clamped together. A stand for my buck shoes. And there they sat, their brilliant white patent leather tops glistening in stark contrast to the stained walnut wood on which they perched. Oh this was grandeur. This was the best part of life I knew then, staring at those shoes. They glimmered, and they moved different in every way from the pair I used for practice, a pair dark and scuffed, with heavier soles, a spiny indifference rent right into them. But I loved those shoes too, I did. They had offered me to the world of this mountainous scuffle. They had had prepared me. The phone rang again. And rang. I yelled down to Cub, but he didn’t answer me or the phone. I looked out the window, and saw him in the sunflower patch, shaking stalk after stalk, and holding out his palm, collecting the seeds, then moving to the next one.

I bounded down the stairs, and was out of breath by the fifth ring, when and I picked up, unable to say anything, while I sucked the life back into my lungs.

Hello, a man’s voice said, is there anyone there?
Hold on, I managed, at last, huffing. Hold on one minute.
Maybe it was a wrong number. Since her departure, the only caller we had was Momma. Daddy took his calls in person, in town, or in the yard. Away from our prying ears.
Alright, I said.
Is this Clement?
It is, who’s this?

It was the stringy deputy Gus hired last fall, made him cut his hair. The one they made do all the scrut work.
We got your Daddy down here.
My face tingled.
What’d he do?
It’s a long story, and I ain’t square on all the details, besides, you know, everyone’s innocent until proven guilty in this country, son. Your uncle wants you to come down here…

The Patron saint of sleep is Saint Dymphna. When I was smaller, Momma would sit onto the edge of my bed, and she’d list the saints she knew, and trot down the easements they offered. Daddy wore out early in those days, splitting his time with a garage in Salt Lick, and the land he farmed out front. His snoring coated the list of Momma’s saints in a special glow, but her list never ended. The saints continued on down the alphabet, where she would start over, or she’d remember one she missed. Their patronage grew as well. Saint Christopher is known to be the Patron saint of travel, his medallion hangs from car rear view mirrors everywhere. But he also represents fruit dealers, and bachelors, and those afflicted with toothaches, and gardeners, and epileptics, and surfers. That kind of information is useful to children, it operates in unspoken truths, and describes the indescribable, the chaos of life patterned by the saintly patronage of one’s faith. My faith then grew steady as Momma’s. That was her gift. Faith was an action of hers. Belief shrouded her with true bliss, activated a signal which tick tocked in her, and gave her strength. Or, it did. What I took to be her gentle way of coaxing me to sleep turned out to be a manifesto she culled from deep within herself. A plot. Once I knew the characters populating the hymns and sermons of church, Momma believed my mind would follow, if properly prepared, more formally along their path. One long and lonely path. A path that receded into itself only to reappear again, and again.

So I learned her church hymns, and sang them to myself what nights she took Daddy by his hand into their room. The early mornings, after such a night, Daddy stuck his fingers into the earth and hummed, and sometimes lost himself enough to sing praise to the lord, happy to be where he was, and nowhere else. And that is a happiness that spreads. It is.

I have been a believer. I lived in the house of a great believer, and that I now swivel from one side of the coin to the next on a daily, even hourly basis, is reason be. Blood is thicker than water, that may be so, but even blood will boil. Days I dare not believe. I see the snake, and hear the devil, but I seek only to be a teenager.

But before Cub came along, I lay in the hold of Momma’s belief. The church, our church, was filled with diligent women who already raised their children, and lay in need of something more. What more they found, they offered to the lord, as they set about to teach his word. That’s a rabid trust, where loss and success are measured in imagination, and blind faith. A sign  hung out front of our church. It read simply, God’s house, and underneath, Reverend Bobby Judd presiding. Like we were a part of heaven’s court. The only law that matters.

When I passed one of our parishioners on the street, they let me know it.

  There’s young Clement Graves, one of them would say loud enough I knew to stop.

  Have you learned all the apostles?

  I have, I’d say, hoping the woman would press me.

  Have you learned why they were the apostles?

Ask, and you shall receive.

  No.

  Well then you’ve got your work cut out for you tonight, another chimed in. They traveled in packs, ready to pontificate at the drop of a hat.

This reverent flock of women also impressed upon me the natural mystery of life. For none of them stirred in me any sense of appeal, or of vitality, yet they spoke of a world  loaded with the ravenous, bound with the besotted, and rife with pagan rituals. How would they know of any of the rotten parts of life, these women, who grew their children into believers, and whose men sat home on Sundays, but clapped them on their backsides when dinner was served. What more did they know than me?

This was blasphemy. And Momma let me know it, after a weak moment, I admitted my feelings.

  Their good grace is what you better be after, young mister, she said, a strict attitude alive in her, ready to rule my knuckles.

  Those women raised children they sent to war, some of whom did not return, and they offer you the wisdom of the lord. I raised you in his image, she said obligingly, untangling her hand from my hair.

  I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it that way. It’s just that…

She cut me off.

  It’s just nothing. You know what deceit promises? The lord will abhor the bloody and deceitful man. Psalm 5.

But the Graves side of my family did not migrate here until after the Civil War, and because of that wrinkle, Daddy cared little for the “what-if” conversations his friends held under the boozy gauze of night. Conversations that soon became arguments, with nowhere to go, leaving everyone full of loss in the end.

Momma’s people felt their heartstrings plundered by the bitter choice of sides. Ellard alluded to it. When I asked Gus to elaborate, he scowled. We were at the jail.

 Family is about as decipherable  as algebra, he said.

 They twist your words to suit their means. When you call ‘em on it, they fight you. In the real world, the world where family don’t count, the law does. That’s reason enough for trouble. You can’t sue family, or they bounce you out of it. Family law 101. He winked at me, proud he understood every vestige, every tiny nuance of kinship, even those not set down on paper.

He walked us to his prowler.

 Listen, kiddo, what you don’t know will take you farther than what you do. But I’ll tell you something, anyway. Of all them great grandpappies your cousin told you about, two had brothers, and the brothers that came of age for the Civil war, they stopped talking to each other early on. A whole subdivision of Clancies live in Louisville, and the man they ascended from is your great uncle, and he shot at his brother, wounding him…

I squirmed at that, my whole body feverous with the thought. An image more insufferable than Cub’s superior connection to Daddy.

 Not a feud, I said, alarmed.

 Crap. I’m not even 14 yet. Does the whole town know about this?

 No it wasn’t any blood feud. The one brother fought for the south, your great great uncle, and the other, your great great grandfather, he fought for the Union. Neither one had slaves, or much property to call their own. But after the war, the Confederate brother helped raise money to pay for the statue that still stands in Louisville today, in commemoration of fallen Confederates. Because of that work, he found more work, work he prospered at. And he never lent a dime to help his broke little brother, in Salt Lick.

This information meant a lot to him. I could tell. He stopped the car. His body relaxed, pushing into the bench seats, and we stared at the fence in front of the Flood mountain commune. He relaxed so much, he closed his eyes. Not me. My temples pulsed with the bad news. I decided the best use for that story of his; the best thing was to let it migrate back where it came. Ignorance, complete, and total, and unrepentant. You can not tell the girl who occupies your mind, the past your family cherishes, is part Hatfield, part McCoy. You can’t.  Our heritage had so many pieces I’d rather push onto Cub Koda, hoping I could somehow escape their stench. While his descendants engaged in feuds, and smoked corn cob pipes, my lineage came from soot stained men who traced their legacy across the sea, who ran from famine, land wars, and religious persecution. I knew what persecution was. My daddy played the banjo, my momma served the lord, and fled to amusement parks when that didn’t work, my brother got his name from the singer of a band whose hit song is Smoking in the Boy’s Room. And to top it off, the buck dancing shoes that unbound my feet tied me to the very image of it all.

Hayseed.

I was glad when he turned the engine over and drove me home. We hadn’t a glimpse of the girl, but it was time to go. I slid way down in the seat, afraid my past might imprint more of itself onto me as we whizzed by its landmarks.  

With each new gunshot, I sank back into the earth, onto my knees, down as far as I could go, sure a bullet soon would ricochet off a solid pine and burrow into my skull. I strayed farther and farther behind the last group of them, lugging the lunch pail, and the cooler of beer. I understood. I never want to describe that day again. The way the patch of blood sprouted in the animal’s side, and the triumphant glee that erupted once the deathly blossom came. In the end, as night fell, the bodies of the wolves were dumped in the back of one of the pick ups and hauled off to the dump, where I watched as they buried the bodies in a hole they dug.

Some say eastern Kentucky differs from its western parts. I say no. It all coagulated out of embellishments and truths that split families into factions, balanced by the scripture, producing a singularity of place, a bonafide region. Sure. Kentucky blends together like its whiskey, from Paris, and Lebanon, to Florence, and Cadiz, to Versailles, Warsaw, Glasgow, Sparta, Athens, Bagdad, Frankfurt, and Melbourne, to London, to Salt Lick, and to our evaporating village of Peasticks. And while the ground is no more blue than the grass it proudly grows, the truest Kentucky, like Ellard’s beloved mythology, comes out only at night, and it towers above us all. Like Daniel Boone. Born elsewhere, died elsewhere, buried elsewhere, too. United we stand, divided we fall.

Daddy came from miners, all of whom had miner children, and raised them up to charcoaled indifference as black lung took them down. My father’s father mined, and his father mined, his father mined, and before him, they were in another country altogether, digging ore, not anthracite from earthen walls of doom. That black diamond, though, spreads throughout the hills and valleys of Kentucky. At one point it told the rest of the country, here is a place of power. Here is a place where fuel combusts. And combust that fuel did in infinitesimal, but lethal shards of coal granulating in the lungs of poor men in need of quick money. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, black lung to black lung. Daddy spoke little of his people, instead he offered me their hands when we made it in to Salt Lick. Each trip a new hand thrust down into my own, attached to a body born with the same useless smirk Daddy wore, raccoon faced by coal dust. Each one wheezing a rattle that urged all who did not understand it not to try.

I danced to music passed on from these miners. And each song hailed something sacrosanct rising from its own ash. They railed against the stupor of life. Collected holy mountains, and rotten lovers in a unity established by proxy- the songwriter became the reverend, the song became the sermon, the night became the service, and all sin was anointed, as in the church, by spirits. Music fell from instruments because of a fear of God, not from respect, his stature not decayed by the passage of time, or the grip of reality. Hoedowns, corn liquor, pipe smoke, and toothless grins transmitted a calculation. And that calculation said, merriment is the path to enlightenment, but merriment also leads to damnation. A fine line. A line toed and ignored by the men and women who consecrated it as a law. The music I discovered on the radio waves drifting in from Louisville, the screeching arpeggios driven by back wood stomp stuck to the same deliverance offered by the murder ballads that came before. They sought out disapproval. They burrowed in nebulous regions. They yearned for an us and a them. Rebellion is rebellion, whether it rails against your parents, or rugged mountain living. Kentucky’s past is replete with dissent, and divergent beliefs. That’s mountain music, an old banjo plucking out the timeless tune.

In the state of Kentucky, Daniel Boone looms large. High Schools fight for his name, towns dedicate their main street for him. Our schoolbooks fill with stories of his doings, true or untrue. For awhile, I sometimes got him mixed up with Davey Crockett, which is a travesty, my teacher told me, since Davey’s from Tennessee, and everyone knows Tennessee is full of hicks, and woodchips, and not much in between. The nearby National Forest bears Boone’s name. Salt Lick tongue kisses its border. And this vast expanse of Boone-dom, looking much like it did in his time, devoid only of the natives who killed his eldest son, has been a part of my family since before my father. The hills still speak of Boone’s blood soaked victories, planted haphazardly as they are with northern black oak, white oak, and scarlet oak, bark the color of over cooked beef, but dressed with a bloody crimson foil before their leaves fall down dead. Yellow pine, pitch pine, and table mountain pine stand in between, for good measure. It’s not all oak, pine, oak, though. Other timbers, natural to this place, lean against exotic saplings sprung from what people here euphemistically refer to as the Old World. Deciduous, fat round beams lurch next to thin bent evergreen ones, all aimlessly scratching at the sky. Daddy knew it as Cumberland Forest as a child, and he shot more animals than I will ever see beneath its leafy canopy. The name change came as a result of campaign strategies. Now, politics shift the boundaries of Boone’s Forest from town to town as Governors change places, and partners, leaving the mineral rich, tree laden lands annexed, to be mined, and clear cut, and quarried through fair practice of purchase, or the outright thievery of eminent domain. That’s Daddy’s feeling. I’m only his parrot here. Whatever eminent domain means, it is a concept too full of subterfuge for me to digest.

Just three years ago, the state tried to rekindle the gray wolf population in the Daniel Boone. The thing is, humans are the wolf’s main predator, and we  proved deceptively powerful. People poached and killed the wolves to keep their dairies and coops unmolested, to keep the barren tracts barren, for machines to work the soil into something unrecognizable. Daddy huddled a group of men together by Gus’ prowler one night. The intention was to practice their aim on the animals while they waited for Deer season. They trundled through the forest under cover of night, with small penlights guiding their way, at each new den they came across, they marked the trees with bright orange neon ties. The next day, Daddy woke me, handed me the lunch pail, and a mini-cooler full of beer without a word, and told me to follow him out to the truck.

When we got to the forest, the rest of the hunting party was already there. Daddy held a rifle for me, at me. His friends unpacked big double barreled shot guns, and high powered precision rifles from these finely tooled leather satchels, as their bellies flopped over their waistbands, but all of them with brittle thin, celery stalk legs, reminding me how close to boyhood they all were. My gun’s barrel ran long, black, and sleek, a wooden husk behind it the color of mahogany smelled of mineral oil and coal dust. But as he pushed it on me, I moved away. That was a blackness I wanted little to do with. Gus was beside me. He understood. His own son had not immediately loved the glory of the hunt. And Ellard certainly came around, one way or another.

 Listen Doyle, Gus said, don’t take this wrong, but sometimes you gotta let them want to do it. Figure it out for themselves. They see us shooting, monkey see monkey do, you know?

Gus pushed the barrel of the rifle down to the ground, and then he playfully thumped me on the shoulder, keeping his eyes on Daddy. And Daddy surprised me. He put the gun up into the truck, without a word, no cussing, nothing.

 Six, he said, why don’t I have Gus deputize you, and have you bring up the rear, in case any of them old wolves try to sneak attack. Think you can handle ‘at?

I did. So, Gus made a few motions with his hands, mumbled an oath about the sanctity of fresh meat, and four legs, and stared at me intently.

I gulped air.

 Do you so solemnly swear?

 Ok.

Daddy rapped his hand on my back so hard I lurched halfway down to the ground.

 You’re a Graves after all.

 He’s half Clancy, Doyle, Gus reminded him, snapping the bolt of his rifle into position.

 Let’s hope he takes after your half, Augustus, and not Mae’s.

What crossed my mind as the first of the rifle fire caved in around us was this: why didn’t the wolves in the other dens take light, and flee? Was it confusion? Did the flash from those muzzle bursts entrance them the same way they did me? Or was it the cacophony of the blasts, commingling with the hale laughter of the hunters? The sounds got my attention. As the men got off the first volley of shots, they killed a few of the condemned animals, and they heaved the dying beasts onto a couple of blue plastic tarps from K-mart. Then they split into smaller groups.

Daddy and Gus traveled way up front, and were so far ahead, I couldn’t hear their voices, or see where they headed.  But I marveled as each group called out their positions in precise yardage with military style compass readings, remembering trees and brambles they first encountered in their youth. And the carnage, it was tremendous. Brutal slayings, that made them laugh, and heckle each other, as if the blood, and the entrails that sprayed the trees of the Boone forest was nothing but paint. And now, here they were, their camouflage stained, wet with the sticky oozing blood of the dead wolves, crawling on their bellies, their rifles and shotguns clamped in their ruddy hands, unwilling to remember the war they all fought in a scramble of years beforehand, where the bodies most certainly were sticky wit hthe same substance, only that time it was from each other, and they did not laugh at all, but sucked in their breath in staccato breaths full of worry, and fear. 

Ellard stroked his freshly grown beard, a beard which had thwarted him, not that it grew sparse. No. He cut it off where it came to his neck. It scratched too much, he said. The rest of it was brown and long, and speckled with trace hints of red, and went long ways from his chin. Apparently his ma had squirreled away a bic razor, who would search her, and now Ellard’s neck shaved clean, and populated with the red bumps of agitation that also lesioned his mind.

 Did you deliver the letter?

 No.

 Waiting for the time, the right faction to overcome.

 No. That’s not it.

 What’s the problem then?

 You can’t unload that on me. Not without a fair trade.

 See, I’ve taught you well.

 You ain’t taught me a damn thing, that’s my point.

 If you’re mother caught you talking like that, you’d not make it far or long on this green earth.

 Ellard, it’s me, your couin, talk English for a change. I ain’t gonna tell nobody.

 Listen, Clement, I’m fixing to get out of here.

 What?

 My mother has saw fit to get a lawyer, who thinks he can get me a bail appeal, and spring me loose.

 You said this was the best thing that ever happened to you.

 And now it’s time to move on.

He pulled my hands toward him and took another bite of the sandwich. What about me, I asked him, you said you would enlighten me. He tapped another book.

  This is what I meant. My heads a filter still, weeding out the songs of one Ronnie James Dio , while preserving the lyrical allegory of these myths. Do you know the story of Lycurgus, or Daphne, the price of a drachma?

 Course I don’t Ellard, you know I don’t.

 All of it mixes together and makes up one gigantic mess of misinformation. Ronnie James Dio sang Turn up the night. What use is that to me? Lycurgus was torn apart and eaten by wild horse, Daphne was a nymph who later became a laurel tree, though not of her own volition. I dunno what a drachma’s really worth, but I imagine it to be a fifty cent piece, or a dollar, fifty cents doesn’t buy what it used to.

We were lost. Ellard rambled on, caterwauling ruins of stories he half knew, and half invented. He ate the sandwich, and when the deputy delivered his lunch, Ellard defiantly pushed the basket to me, and winked. This is not his insanity, I thought to myself, as I delivered piece after piece of Jessamine’s freshly fried chicken to my mouth, hoping to be convinced. In person, Ellard’s own myth ran wild, and if it presented such a show, it sure enough delivered what show he wanted. I edged further away from him on the bunk. He lay down and crossed his legs. One moment he spoke about Ozzy, the next he pardoned Hades.

 Isn’t he the one responsible for hell, I asked him.

 Well, now see, there you go, the Awesome Lord of the Dead is what the Greeks called of Hades. They had to name him so many times, he spelled them with his wily ways. The bible lifted Hades, and made him Lucifer, like I told you before, and also Satan.

 Momma hates that name. She says it makes her skin crawl.

And then he was off again, scurrying all over our family history. Family struck a chord in Ellard, as his confinement controlled his ability to reach out and touch any one of us.

 Let me tell you the story, our story, the way no bible will tell you. We are a family of men, a strong group of men, outlaw, religious, natural through and through. Ok? Listen. Benjamin Franklin Abelard begat Alvin Loyal Abelard, who in turn had three daughters and they each bore sons of different surnames, one of whom was Calvin Ellard Clancy, your great great great great  grandfather. Calvin Ellard Clancy begat Ellard Alvin Clancy, who begat a daughter Melissa Madison Clancy, and she died alone. Her brother was Ellard Alvin Clancy junior, and he begat a third, who in turn made two girls and a boy, an accident of chance that came once the girls were grown and married off, and I can’t remember their names, married or otherwise, the boy however, our great grandfather named him Sterling Berea Clancy, because he had seen the names of the towns he wandered through, and liked the way they sounded clumped together like that. And Sterling likely never knew what hit him when he came across our grandmother, Hazel Mae McCreary, who bore him two children, Augustus Alvin Clancy, and Margaret Mae Clancy. As you know, Augustus Alvin Clancy begat Calvin Ellard Clancy, restoring the C to its proper place in our story. Ever the stickler, Pappy. Never did one of those men leave the great state of Kentucky, but for the wars that came along and got ‘em. Some buried over in the Bramble plots, the latter ones in Hunt’s Cemetery off Slate Valley road. Out in the distance, that’s the grass they cut today. Reeks of death, that grass. Got a song to it, too, a mournful song. You know, they say that smell overlooks all logic, in the face of memory, and resurrects dead people in your mind, quick as it comes.

I faced his window, with the bars set into concrete, and masoned in by more beige bricks, pretending not to hear. Beige was someone’s idea of what color repentance should be, I decided. Beige defeated purpose. Beige might be the color of death.

 Did you meet our grandparents Ellard?

 I met them, ‘deed I did. Too young to tell you how it went.

 What about all them others? Who told you that story?

 My Daddy, and your Uncle. We’re the last of the Clancy men. You’re family, but you don’t bear the surname, so I figured it was my right to tell you about your past.

 What are you gonna do with yourself, Ellard?

 Momma got me a lawyer. I assume he’ll get me out on bail appeal. And I got a pal works down in the Avondale Shipyards.

 Where’s that?

 Louisiana. Listen, I’m right tired, now, Clem.

 Ok. I’ll go.

 You’re right about that letter. I’ll figure something else out.

I left him to his books, and dreams, and lazy premonitions of grandeur in Louisiana. The deputy had gone so I walked back down the hallway, counting imperfections in the brickwork, and then there was uncle Gus.

 C’mon Six, I’ll give you a ride home. First I gotta ride over and check on ‘em squatters.

 Who?

 Flood Mountain people.

My breath leapt out of me. Gus let me sit beside him, after he stowed his shotgun in the trunk.

 What did he have to say? You were in there a while.

 He said he wanted out.

 He’s gon’ get out, too. Hired a lawyer to shut his Mother up.

 You hired the lawyer?

 I did. Don’t feel right having him in jail. Had to arrest him, otherwise I wouldn’t win reelection, given to preferential treatment and such. That’s how the folks in town would see it.

 Why don’t you visit him?

 Same reason kept you away. He talks funny, makes me feel inconsequential. I can talk normal to you, and Cub, your pa. Ellard, that boy beats a drum only the crickets know.

Deputy Johnson sang in the choir with Momma, and he waved me on to the oaken door whose clouded window was stamped Chief, in letters outlined in gold leaf . I rapped lightly on the door, but it resonated in the glass, because the pain didn’t fit right, and my uncle’s voice came swiftly.

  Who is it?

  It’s me Clem, sir.

  Well come on, then.

I opened the door, and there my uncle sat, chomping on a biscuit. Behind him sat the basket aunt Jessamine delivered them in, the others wrapped in a striped white and yellow linen like my mother’s.

  You hungry, boy?

  No sir.

  Quit with the official talk, Clem, it’s Gus. I’m always Gus to you. Ellard, he’d do well to call me sir sometime. How’s things?

Things were terrible. Things went from bad to worse. Things hung nooselike round my neck, and I was no milkcow dumb to her own bell, I knew their meaning. I knew. Things would not get better however hard I tried.

  I’d like to see him, if that’s alright with you.

 He took his feet off the desk, and sat upright in his chair. There were crumbs spread across his desk, and some at the corners of his mouth. As he finished chewing the last of his biscuit he got up, and passed his desk, brushed by me, to open the door. He called out in a bigger voice than I heard him use, see this boy gets to see prisoner  A518, on the double. He looked back at me, and winked, and leaned down, so his knees were bent, and his eyes even with mine. I held out the flower. He shook his head, and his jowls swung loose. You don’t need to butter me up to see your cousin, son, he told me. Then he stood up, and his knees rasped.

  Someone bring me a vase.

 The deputy asked Gus if I could bring my lunch down with me. Gus looked down at the lunch pale clutched in my fingers, and he clenched his teeth.

  Whatcha got in there, Clem? A file, maybe a razor? Any knives? You ain’t got any tools for deviancy in there do ya?

  I brought some lunch, and a bottle of Bubble Up. See?

I opened the pail. Neither man looked inside. They began to chuckle. I closed the bag.

Take him down, Johnson, Gus said.

Ellard made a slight attempt to pick up some of the books, when he spied me following behind the deputy.

  What’s lunch today, Johnny?

  I’m sure I ain’t got a clue, your ma brung the Chief biscuits, so probably fried chicken and, uh, biscuits.

  And who have we here?

I peered round the deputy.

  It’s me, Clement.

  I know it, kid. Come on in. He made a place for me to sit on his bed, and he went to the chair at his desk.

  Alright deputy. We’re fine.

Johnson went out.

  You said you ain’t like coming into this place.

  That was before you started making sense. Before you wrote me them letters.

  Yeah, so?

  The first time we come in, with Momma, you acted all funny. Singing. Tousling my hair like you were some kind of adult grown up.

  I thought maybe they might let me out if I acted weird enough.

  You sang that song, that crazy song.

  That song ain’t crazy, Clem. That’s gold. Pure gold. Randy Rhoads, Ozzy. Never been a band with more gold in it than that one.He slapped the desk.

 I pulled a pen and paper from the lunch pail.

  I need to ask you some questions, cousin Ellard.

He stood up and went to his window. A lawn mower cut an unseen lawn somewhere, and the smell of the cut grass wafted in so gentle it lifted him out of his environs for a moment, drawing him to it. He twitched his nose, and snuffed at the air. What kind of questions, he asked me, not turning from the window, continuing to snuff, as it to suck up all the fragrant cut grass molecules he could. He hadn’t been in jail that long.

  I want to know what you meant about the bible.

  What’d I tell you about the bible?

  You wrote in a letter that you thought it might have been plagiarized.

  I didn’t use that word, I know that much.

  No, but you said you thought the myths you been reading might have influenced some of those bible stories.

He backed away from the window, and sat not at the desk, but beside me on his cot. Yeah, that’s the truth, Clem, he said. He unwrapped my sandwich, and took a bite, and told me we had a long one coming. He handed me my sandwich back.

  Look. I ain’t making this up.

He pushed one of the books at me.

  Read it.

  I didn’t come here for books, Ellard. I need to talk it out.

  Ain’t we talking?

  Yes.

He took up the book himself.

  Come now, Clement, listen.

He stood up.

  Eosphorus. The morning star. The name Eosophorus means Dawnbringer, like his Roman equivalent, Lucifer, ya got that, clem, Lucifer, lightbringer. The very same fella what’s it…

He grabbed the bible.

 Yeah here it is, Isaiah 14:12, How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning? See, he is the lightbringer, they adapted the old myths right there, Lucifer shows up long before this old book was written. Here, in the Odyssey.

His copy was almost as big as his bible, and equally grubby, dog eared, worn, and a splendid looking thing. I grabbed it.

  That’s the one, Clement. You always had a knack for finding the one thing that was worth it.

  You mean that?

  ‘Course I do. I mean, come here. Look at those pages. Look at the lettering. Turn to the fronstpiece. Right there it says it. Old books make the best ones, I say.

  What about music?

  Aw, I don’t know. You been reared alright I guess. Music ain’t like girls. It’s timeless, but we got phases, and sometimes we gotta listen to some loud shitkicking jams to match our inner spirit. A kid like oyu, you developed a taste in music at such a young age, you’re a spoiler for the others. Know too much.

  But you said in that letter you can’t know too much.

  About some things, no, you can’t.

  Which things?

  You never know. Sometimes you spend all your waking moments learning about a thing, and turn to find out while you learning the thing got turned out, rounded a corner and is something else entirely.

  What? That don’t make sense.

  That’s right.

Ellard lay back and handled one of his books. Then flung it off the bed.

  Myths aren’t nothing but a way to teach you how to do thigns someone else wants you to do. The reason they got appeal to folks like you and me is the same reason them songs ring true, we young men of the world want to rip the clothes off  the girls we see, and that’s Lucifer, Reverend Judd says. Only it ain’t Lucifer. Lucifer is constellation, a light source, and the myths had him pegged for good things, but they still had him pegged, something to learn a lesson by.

  What’s the use in learning anything?

  I think you know that one already, Clem.

When Momma departed, Cub Koda knew it accorded him the lone benefit. A child, in single digits, can fathom things with a clarity that needs no refulgent commentation. It is innate. It is pure. It is wonderful. And, of course, it is not eternal. It lasts a few short years, and dims into analytic supposition and soiled denials meant to protect us further, yet only muddling our view of the world.

Cub padded from our room into Daddy’s, toward the commingling noise of our father snoring and the television. He stayed a half an hour, sometimes, transfixed by the electromagnetic connection, alight in the big Zenith’s persistent flickering.

There was a place I could go.

I woke before they did, and was downstairs before the sunlight came. I packed Daddy’s black lunch pail with a peanut butter sandwich fritos, and a bottle of Bubble Up soda. My father bought the soda the day after our trauma began, in a loose witted attempt to quell our nerves, and his own. When I came inside for dinner, he bowed his head, and nudged the ice box, go on, look inside ‘er, he told me. And there the gleaming pine needle green bottles stood, as if the Lord sent down the Tabor light to shroud it. So proud and stoic, Daddy asked for me to get one for him and me to share, and cement this strange place we found ourselves lodged together inside of.

Lunch packed, I set out to seek the counsel of my closest advisor. For counsel, a face to face meeting must occur, so that each twitch, and nod, each moan, and throat clearing grunt came together in a cacophony of erudition. Momma’s spiritual wreck, and what other word was there for what she now experienced, had tarnished my faith, no doubt. Although, that faith had suffered on other occasions, this knock’s power diverted a solvent stream of divinity inside me. My faith fell off kilter. The buck shoes in my closet lost their value, and the sounds from my late night radio sessions dulled by their own metallic devotion to the ridiculous black and white perspective of right and wrong. Where were the comforts of our habit? Where was the understanding Momma read to us as we bathed, the New Testament in one hand, a scrub brush in the other? What shield would press me into its steely reserve and strain out the bitter defeats of yesterday so I could climb deeper into the cleansing light. It seemed perhaps only Ellard could answer those questions.

Aunt Jessamine stood on the porch of the police station’s beige brick frontispiece. Ain’t you a sight, she said. Ain’t you just a sight. Come on over and give your Aunt a hug. As we broke apart, she put her two freckled hands onto my cheek, like to squeeze a zit, but applied no pressure. Instead, she gazed into my eyes, and though I broke the stare, she kept it, like she’d zoomed inside my head, and inspected the wires and whatnot for bad connections, loose ends, frayed bits, chewed pieces of chemical microbes, until I could avert my gaze no more. She swung her head side to side, as if it moved apart from her shoulders. Get on in there, she said, tell your Uncle what you want. Listen, honey, don’t worry. I’ll swing by soon enough. She loved taking charge. I’ll give the whole house a real cleaning, she said and bent down to pick a star shaped flower which she put in my hand. She smiled at the picture I made, and left down the path of stone pavers that led to the street, and gave the building a detached feeling, like no official business should occur in a place so full of natural stylistic delight. I turned to the door, as it swung open and a couple of men who I knew by face, but not by name, carefully stepped past me. The door told a different story than the path that led to it. Its window was mesh wire and the wrought iron of the handle twisted as it went down, it turned uncomfortably in your hand, as if to let your body feel what your mind already knew, this was no place of business, this was where laws were tended.