Ernest Payne, found in the Tug River near Iaeger, had been missing since Wednesday last and is supposed to have been murdered. Toler Tribune, July 21, 1946
Browsing category fiction
Junior was righter and more just than anyone he knew or had ever known. Most had come by God as a course of living or family. The Almighty had been thrust upon them and they accepted the mystery because duty and the minister told them they had to. Not so with Junior. He was hand-chosen.
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
The first fruits of leap year shine forth in the case of Miss Belle Harper of Pucketts Ridge, West Virginia who shot a man because he refused her offer of marriage. Toler Tribune February 7, A few years back
Welcome to The Toler Tribune. This bi-weekly paper edited by one Mr Cumpton Cline – who is Hazel’s husband – is devoted to bringing the latest news and information to the good people of our community, Toler Mountain, West Virginia. We have correspondents in Pucketts Ridge, Lex and Pike. Birchey Vance also sends us news
The room settled in around me. Clumsy cousins of other cousins sat side by side on cheap wooden pews, dressed in Sunday’s best for a Saturday evening wake. Aunts with faces longer than their years cried and talked religion and swapped recipes. I stood up. Forced myself down the rows. A woman upholstered in her
Pt 1: I was five when I knew him. When I helped him hunt snakes in the mountains of West Virginia for Preacher Slaughter and the serpent handlers. The snake handlers were a Pentecostal-Holiness offshoot, whispered about in dark corners of other Appalachian churches. A few hundred in number, a majority practiced their brand of
“They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them…” – Mark 16:18 Whitley was old and from Kentucky. His face, tanned and leathered, lost the elasticity needed to form expression sometime back in the sixties. A pair of eyes some once called fine lay beneath a fringe
Summer faded into fall and the leaves began to drop. To rot by the road and on the mountain side. Old Man Bishop killed a hog. Invited the whole town out for pulled pork and revival. The place needed a soul cleaning and a man from Alabama was coming to do just that. In a
Man. Wife. Boy. The Jenkins family lived on top of Toler Mountain. Eight 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
Dewey was peculiar. He was short. Not at all thin. A no-heller of the Baptist variety who wore a small face on a big head. Fond of drinking songs and scripture, he carried a poke of tobacco in his left pocket, and an Oldtimer in his right – just in case he needed to stab
She forgets. It use to be little things. The name of her neighbour’s husband. The iron in the wash room. Then it was the kitchen. She left the fry pan on and caught the wall afire. She told no one and thought about her grandfather. She was five when he forgot her name. Six, when
