prologue 2.0

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 stare up 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 used-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.