Man. Wife. Boy. The Jenkins family lived on top of Toler Mountain. Fifteen miles by road. We managed it in two by climbing straight up and over.

Mr Jenkins was a Holy Roller who brought the message, and a good bit more, every Sunday down at a little church in Buttermilk Junction. Mrs Jenkins made cherry cobbler and nothing else when she wasn’t sitting in the front row of her husband’s church listening to him tell the congregation what they’d done wrong and what he’d done right.

Preacher Jenkins was just he right amount of odd for a man named Ennis. His clothes were tighter than they should have been and he spit shined and coiffed his hair just enough. At the altar he paired excited eyes with thin strained lips and came off looking like a possessed race horse. Ennis Jenkins could look a man to death. If you didn’t fall out in a dead faint from the heat or the spirit or cause it was just what you were suppose to do, then you fell out when he eyeballed you long enough.

He did his job well.

The Jenkins farm was separated from Carl’s property by two limp lines of bobbed wire. When we got there Robert was in the yard.

The only son of a preacher man was a funny looking kid with long, skinny arms and bottle thick glasses. He hung upside down on a tire swing singing an old mountain mourning song.

Dewey stepped across the fence as soon as he heard the words.

“I don’t believe what I’m hearing,” Dewey said. “Upon my honor, show some respect for the dead for goodness sake!”

Billy and I followed our cousin into the yard. Robert ignored all of us and kept singing.

“Poor boy’s gonna diiiieeeee……”

We took a seat around the tree and waited. Dewey spit and spat for a good five minutes before finally slowing our neighbor down enough to start in.

“Listen,” said Dewey, “I’m only gonna tell you this once, you don’t sing Tom Dooley like that boy.” He then went on about singing from the soul and from the gullet and from a life’s worth of talent.

No one ever accused Dewey of being a music man. Except Dewey. He said he was a connoisseur of the stuff and here’s why: He’d been playing it all his life, for one thing. Around the time he turned four and got his awful ‘boys let me tell you’ tick, he got his first fiddle. For another, he’d been worrying over the strings for years, and last Spring penned our all time favorite hymn, ‘Sittin’ on a Slop Jar’. He started to sing it for Robert.

He stood up straight and began to belt out his latest rendition, with a yeeee-haaawwww at the end. Robert fell off his swing in a dead fit of laughter and Mrs Jenkins came out to see what all the screaming was about.

She asked Dewey his name and wanted to know where he’d heard such a song.

Billy covered his eyes.

I rolled over and laughed into the grass.

Robert held onto his fits.

Dewey stood proud and smiled. “I’m a Payne ma’am. Of the Beartown Paynes. And I wrote it myself thank you.”

Mrs Jenkins was 30 but in her high collar and long skirt she looked like a grandma. An old funny one who couldn’t believe what she was hearing and wouldn’t know how to deal with it even if she did. “Well,” she said, trying to figure out what to say to a boy who wrote songs about chamber pots and modern day man, “maybe you could sing another song. Like Old Rugged Cross or something.”

Dewey grimaced and said he’d sooner not and he’d just keep quiet if it was all the same.

It was.

He danged her under his breath as she went back to the house and then sat down with the rest of us to moan about under appreciated artists and how a man had to chop his ear off if he wanted any respect these days.

Robert waited until the door was good and closed behind his mother and then asked. “What d’you want anyway?”

His face was red. Sweaty. Like someone held a magnifying glass over his head in the noon day sun. I didn’t like looking at him so got straight to the point. “We just come to get a curse. We got five dollars.”

Robert fell back like he’d been slapped in the face. “I could get killed for even talkin’ about this,” he said. His mouth puckered and pinched when he spoke. “It’s powerful magic you’re wanting and it’s dangerous to get.”

Dewey slapped his knee. Like he knew it all along. “Well pin a rose on my ass,” he said, “Danger’s my middle name.”

Sometimes it was Death or Darling or Dennis, depending on who he was speaking to, but most of the time it was Danger.

“Well,” said Robert, “Ya’ll don’t need to worry ’bout it none. I’ll do all the gettin’ this evening. Take your money now and meet you half way down the hill in the morning after I drop off Mrs Toler some food.

Mrs Jenkins made lunch twice a month for the mountain’s seniors. Mrs Toler was as senior as they came - the mountain bore her name.

“I ain’t trustin’ nobody with that kind of money,” said Dewey, stuffing the dollars back in his pocket. “That’s a lot of bucks for a boy that don’t look real honest.”

Robert jumped to his feet. Righteous. Angry. “My daddy didn’t raise no liars.” He’d fight. If he was the fighting kind. He wasn’t. “You give me the money and you’ll see.”

“See, that’s another thing. That ole man of yours……”

“Shut up Dewey!” I grabbed the money from his pocket. “It ain’t but five dollars. We need this.” I tried on the pity and motioned to Billy. He was sitting off to the side trying not to feel too guilty. My brother reeked of pity. “You gonna help us do this or not Dewey Payne?”

He thought about it for a few seconds, then got distracted by a fistful of lightening bugs floating over his shoulder and handed me the money.

“I got a good mind to ask for interest accumulative,” he said. “Since you’re family and your step daddy’s beatin’ you, I’ll let it go this time.”

I thanked him with a grunt and passed the money to Robert. Told him I’d see him in the morning and it had better work or I’d be back to roll his swing down the mountain. He nodded and took off after Dewey.

I smiled at my brother. He was grimacing and twitching and smacking at a thing crawling on his arm.

“That’s spiteful ain’t it?” he said.

“You better not be talking about Carl again. I done told you it’s him or us.” The last thing I needed was for Billy to go chicken and rat us out to mother.

“I ain’t talkin’ about him. I mean them.” He pointed to the two older boys.

They were dancing. Cupping at the sky in big swoops. The bright glow of lightening bug butt sticking to their foreheads like neon war paint.

Billy and I sometimes caught the insects in a jar. Called it a lamp. The bugs never gave off any real light but the glow in the glass still looked real nice. We poked tiny holes in the top, to let the air in. They still died.

“It ain’t spiteful,” I said. “It’s just something to do.”

I hollered to Dewey to “Get on over here,” and said “We gotta get back before Carl gets mad.”

Robert said he’d see us soon, and it was good magic we were getting.

It may have been. We’d never know.

Something happened the next day. It would be months before Sheriff Ed Long figured it out. In the meantime Billy and I didn’t have a curse. Dewey lost his five bucks. And Robert was gone.

Death has a way of taking over a small town, where everyone knows everyone else, even when they don’t. Preachers come out and talk about God and the Devil and about how sometimes things just happen and they don’t know why. Men throw fists at the sky and sit alone in the dark behind four wheel drives to think and drink and try to understand. Women dish food in church halls because they want to be with others and because gossiping isn’t really a sin if it’s done over the daily bread, amen.

The year we moved to Toler Mountain two children went missing.

The first was gone for months. The county and a helicopter came out to look for him. No one bothered about the second……they didn’t know….he was hardly gone at all.

Children from all over told ghost stories about one. About how a horse wouldn’t pass the pine grove where they found him; about a mysterious young playmate who sang Tom Dooley and the blues. No one said a word about the other. Or maybe they just didn’t say a word around me.

The first body was a mess. Everyone who saw it said so. A gassy bag of use-to-be boy with a towel wrapped around it’s head. The other looked just like he always did. People who had never seen him, and now never would, came to the funeral and talked about how beautiful he was.

I said he looked pure dead to me and what’s beautiful about that? No one told me I was too young to know. Or that it was a mean thing to say. But they wouldn’t, would they? Because we were the ones who found him. And we were the ones that knew who done it.

“Boys if this ain’t the dumbest thing I ever saw. What a place to build a club house.” Dewey didn’t like the tree. A petrified oak in the middle of a poison ivy patch.

“It’s so if we have to run from Carl,” Billy said. “He might catch us, but he’ll catch something else first, wont he!”

When I had said the words my brother called me mean, but the look on Dewey’s face made him cover his eyes and giggle.

I hadn’t seen him laugh in weeks. His curls bounced around in what was left of the sun and for a moment I was glad Carl’s temper turned on me last.

Carl had decided some weeks earlier that his newly acquired younguns should attend Hill Heights Fundamental Church. He didn’t go; but that didn’t matter. The son of a deacon collected us every week in a blue and white Volkswagen van, just in time for the heated three hour service. On our last visit to the holy house I dared a conversation about prophets with eight year old Bobby Jones. Later that week I learned two things. One: Carl had spies. Two: He knew something I didn’t. That girls who talked to boys when they were six became loose women with babies when they were sixteen. Especially when they were so disposed. According to Carl, I was so disposed.

Billy spent the rest of the week trying to make it OK; even though he was little and couldn’t really do much of anything except tell me how it’d be when he got older. Then, he’d be big and strong just like the Incredible Hulk and wouldn’t let Carl, or anybody else, whip me or nothin’. I loved him when he said things like that. Yes. One day my brother would become a monster of a man and we’d never be afraid of anything else again.

When Dewey stopped moaning about the location of the tree I told him. “You know what that kid said dont you?”

“What kid?” asked Dewey.

“Kid that lives ’round the mountain.” said Billy.

Dewey had helped us locate our neighbours the week before.

“He told me he knew an old lady who’d give us a curse for five dollars. We could hang it over Carl’s bed and his arms’ll fall off. You got five dollars?”

“I got ten.” Dewey always had a pocket full of cash. Lord knew where it come from. “But curses don’t come cheap girl.” He said he hauled liquor for one of the magistrates. “Not if they’re genuine.” Could have been the truth. “You ‘d know these things if you ever done any reading on the spirit world.”

Billy didn’t like it. “That ain’t right.”

I wasn’t sure if he meant Dewey’s spirits or my prayer to make a man limbless. I didn’t care. Carl was the devil.

“So.” I said. “That ole thing wouldn’t know right if it bit him. Besides. This kid’s a preacher’s boy.”

Robert Dudley Jenkins. His father was a Holiness Minister from Buttermilk Junction and the only neighbour Carl didn’t hate. The others: a crazy man with an outdoor toilet; a blind liberal with a house full of cats; and a bunch of drunks who didn’t do anything but holler weren’t worth a damn. At least thats what Carl said.

We disagreed.

Billy liked the toilet man. I preferred the liberal (she shot her husband so why wouldn’t I?) Dewey got on well with the drunks. Not a one of us liked preacher Jenkins or his family but if Robert could get me a curse I’d be his friend for a month.

“So, lets go see what he’s got.” Dewey was already on the move. “Bet it’s Injun.”

Dewey had the money and Robert had the means. I was so happy I almost cried.

his daddy’s name was ennis

I went to my senior prom with a guy named Moose. Only he wasn’t a Moose at the time. He was a Jason and my best friend’s brother. He wore a white tux with a red cumberbund and I put my hair up in a big pile of ‘what the hell’.

Reggie laughed and said he looked like a giant Tylenol, and me, I looked like a little girl who got dressed by her grandma. But Reggie could say those things because he was good buddies with Moose and he’s sorta like my brother in a weird not-really-anything-like-it-at-all way. (He took my mother to see Reba. She was menopausal and he was a Saint. God bless him.)

The next year Flynn went to the prom with the same said Moose. I think maybe they got it on. I’m not too sure.

Point is, I’ve been trying to track down his brother for some time now. His head is stuck in every high school picture ever taken of me and when all my girlfriends went separate ways he joined Buffy at the BC. When I left for England he started climbing a bankers ladder. Last time I saw him, I attended upon his establishment to seek out a little loan (London wasn’t cheap boys) but forgot what I was doing when he showed me into his office and let the gossip train run. Did you know…yadda yadda yadda….

So I think I’ll look him up through his brother. Reggie’s always going on about him. About weddings and mullets and way too much beer. Local celebrity MOOSE (DJ extraordinaire) should be sooooo much easier to find than John Patrick Reed. So maybe he’ll help me out.

Googling NOW…..

Laura was mean and pugnacious. Not the way most children are. She didn’t play practical jokes on busybody aunts or pull the ears of annoying cousins like I sometimes did. She told families of their father’s indiscretions and then wondered aloud in other people’s company why the children were so ugly and the mothers so dim. She also stole my bike.

Carol was fat. A big lopsided ball of flesh with little beady eyes and bad skin. Laura said too much. Carol didn’t say enough. She kept hush when the former blamed the drowning of a neighbours cat on Dewey, even though she saw her sister put the animal into a plastic bag and throw it in the creek. Carol ate crawdads. Raw.

Alice had red hair. Redder than her siblings. She wore it protruding from either side of her head in imaginative cartoon style pigtails. There was nothing else remarkable about her.

Dewey said if I didn’t have anything else to be thankful for, i ought to be thankful I hadn’t come from that bunch. I’d be a fat, copper-topped, bike thief and wouldn’t that be as bad as it got.

Things being what they were, he said, I was a right attractive kid. Couldn’t help but be….falling from the same tree as he.

I let him say it. Because I reckoned he was right.

Danny’s dead. He died because he didn’t want to live anymore, if you want to know the truth of it. That’s hard on a family. Knowing someone they love would rather be dead in a hole in the ground than be with them. And that’s where they all said he was. Because he didn’t believe.

A boy from the mountain, turned into an old man, preached his funeral: “We can’t help this poor soul anymore. It’s too late for him now. But we can help our living brothers and sisters…..”

Maybe someone should have shook him a little. Saying the things he did. No peace be with you or God’s gonna comfort you. Just “Well, he went to hell but you don’t have to.” I’d have hit him over the head with the Good Book he was beatin’ if I thought it would do any good.

He meant well. I guess. But what’s that they say about the road to hell……

Pa says the preacher’s a fine man. He and Danny grew up with him. His brother would have wanted him there, to say the last words anyone ever said about him.

I don’t know about that. I think maybe Debbie should have done it. I think he would have liked that. Cause some preachers don’t know what they think they do, and I don’t think that preacher knew much about Danny.

Sure, he knew he drank and raised hell for 50 years. Who didn’t? Knew when he was young he spent more time in a Jailhouse Avenue bed than in his own. Knew he met his old lady in a bar in String Town.

“She was dancing on a table,” Danny told me this himself, “I took her home and never took her back.”

“That’s a fact, boys.” Pa was with him on the night.

The preacher didn’t know Danny spent most of his life thinking Pa was good enough for the both of ‘em, and one day, before it was too late, he’d make it right.

Now, maybe that ain’t the way to do it. To a preacher’s way of thinking. But that’s how Danny done it. I believe.

A week before he died, before he decided he wasn’t gonna move anymore and nobody could make him, he told Pa he was going home. Said he’d let the Reverend take him down to the river and wash his face.

A man like Danny don’t go down to the river for nothin’. He don’t talk about baptisin’ lest he means it. He ain’t about show.

The preacher’s busy on the pulpit, trying to help the living on their way to the other side. Well, maybe Danny didn’t need his help. Maybe he done it himself. A man can do those things. Without a mountain preacher. If he really wants to.

Maybe someone’s washin’ his face right now. Down in the Jordan.

You never know. And that’s all I’m tryin’ to say.

It’s all good at the Italian eatery. Grilled swordfish on a bed of aubergine and sweet peppers. Two servings of spinach because it’s better than the panna cotta and I’ll take sauteed over sugared any day. A glass of Chianti. I’m working my way through the menu with the house red.

Tall dark and handsome has the agnello every time. Baby new potatoes in garlic, herbs and loads of butter. The kind you want to drown in. A fine Bordeaux, because his pallet is a bit more discerning than my own. Espresso. Espresso. Espresso. Then cheesecake. Lemon. He’s a cheesecake fiend.

When I was 8 and my brother 6, we dug up a dead horse. Didn’t know it was a horse, of course. Thought it was a dinosaur. Maybe one of those little mean ones. Billy rolled the ribs and the rest back home in his Radio Flyer (we found the carcass about 30 acres out on a 90 acre farm). I carried the skull. Straight to our mother.

Nothing like an 8 year old carrying a big horses head to scare a woman to death. Never mind Billy and his wagon full of bones.

She broke out the bleach and doused everything we’d touched. My mother had mild OCD and Clorox could clean anything….even Lord knows what. (As in…”Lord knows what kind of germs is on that thing.“)

Turns out a few years earlier our funky down the road neighbour, the one who ran the horse farm with 1 horse, buried his pet mare on the wrong side of the fence after she came down with something he had never heard of before.

Yep.

You’d think an 8 year old would have a disconcerting dream or two after digging up the neighbour’s use-to-be horse, but earlier that month we were in a car behind a farmer and his Ford and I spent 14 miles being eyeballed by a dead palomino hanging off his tailgate. (Don’t ask. I don’t know.)

After that, bare bones really didn’t bother me.

I’m drunk as a skunk and feeling fine. It’s not my fault. It’s the tablets. They’re for migraines. I only get three a month - only use three a year. They’re suppose to thin out the blood, or something. Keep the vessels from pressing against things they shouldn’t. Pain relief. All that. They cause me to hallucinate. Ever so slightly. Hallucination is soooooo much better than keep your eyes shut because it hurts when you seeeeeee.

I’ve had loads of tests run. The neurologist says he’s never seen anything like it before. “Maybe I can do more studies. Highly unusual.” Tall, dark and handsome says it’s because I’m ooooh so clever and off the charts. Tall, dark and handsome is decidingly biased.

“Yes. Very irregular,” says the specialist. “But it probably wont kill you, or else you’d be dead by now.”

I think this is a good thing. But he’s German and doesn’t speak very good English, so who can tell!!?!

I’m letting the knee go today……because the head hurts worse.

The German sees me again on the 7th. The knee doctor, next week.

I’m falling apart.

She wears the ugliest sweaters I’ve ever seen. I’m not being mean. They’re really that ugly. No one would wear them in the 80s so someone, somewhere, put them all in a box and saved them for her. They’re all about kittens and nature and grandma’s old dressing gown. Made from polyester yarn and chenille. Sometimes a little leopard print.

She’s a beauty queen who doesn’t have a clue. The kind who sovereigns over festivals and farm fresh summer squash, then reckons she’s ready for Annie Leibowitz and a room full of fashionable.

She thinks she’s gorgeous and that just makes it worse. I wonder where stereotypes come from; then I look at her and stop wondering. It’s tragic. Really. Someone should tell her. Cause she tries so hard. But I wont. Because it’s too much fun to look and laugh. Is that mean? Yeah. A little. But she’s 22 and has killer legs. A girl with her legs deserves to be laughed at for something.

Man, those sweaters are awful.