Chaneysville Incident Read Online Free Page A

upstream, near the hulk of a dead hickory, was the place where, surprising no one so much as myself, I had caught my first catfish. Old Jack had helped me bait the hook, had shown me how to get the fish off it. And then he had taken his knife and shown me how to scale the fish and gut it, and we had built a fire and fried the fish in bacon grease in a black iron skillet he had packed along. It was a lot of trouble to go to and it could not have been much of a meal for him—it wasn’t much of a fish—but he said there was something special about a boy’s first catfish, no matter how small it was.
    Then the bus was moving along the southern slope of a mountain—raw rock on one side, empty space on the other. I was almost there. I emptied the flask, capped it, put it in my pocket. I pulled my pack towards me, tightened the laces, checked the knots. Then I stood up and made my way towards the front. Five minutes later I stood by the side of the road, shivering in the sharp, clear mountain cold, and watched as the bus roared away into the darkness. And then I began to walk.
    In the pink and eerie light of false dawn I stood and looked up at it: an array of houses spread out along four streets called, starting at the lowermost, Railroad, Union, Lincoln, and Grant, connected at the eastern end by a slightly larger one grandly and ridiculously named Vondersmith Avenue. The streets were only vaguely parallel; the houses were not much better. They were oddly shaped, so tall and thin that it seemed their foundations were too small to support their height and, more often than not, leaning dangerously to confirm the impression. Most were of wood, and had often been patched, with corrugated metal and plywood and tar paper. Paths led from their back doors to yards where clotheslines sagged. Smoke rose from their rough brick chimneys and drifted down the slope, bringing to me the odor not of fuel oil but of kerosene and pine wood and coal and, mingled with it, the faint effluvium of outhouses. At the center of it all stood a small church made of whitewashed logs. That was it. The place locally termed Niggers Nob and Boogie Bend and Spade Hollow and, more officially, since the appellation came from a former town engineer, Jigtown: the Hill.
    I shrugged to resettle the pack on my shoulders and started up, thinking, as I did so, about the countless times I had made that climb, happy to be doing it, knowing it was the final effort before food, or drink, or bed, or just refuge from whatever it was that I needed to hide from. More than once I had reached the foot of the Hill on the dead run, pursued by white boys from the town, shouting names and curses; I would make the climb imagining that all the house windows were eyes staring at me; that they knew, somehow, that that day someone had called me a name or threatened me, and I had done nothing besides close my eyes and ears, trying to pretend it was not happening.
    But now I was a man, and the windows were only windows; the only effect they had was to make me wonder what was happening behind them. At one time I would have known with virtual certainty. Behind the windows of that house, the one with the siding of red shingle molded to look like brick, Joseph “Uncle Bunk” Clay would have been shaving, the muscles of his arms looking strong and youthful, his dark brown skin smooth and tight against the pure white of his athletic shirt. The steam would have been rising from the enamel basin before him as he wiped vestiges of white lather from his face with a creamy towel, and he would move with surprising agility for his fifty-odd years as he began to put on his bellboy’s uniform. Aunt Emma Hawley would have been making sour milk biscuits. She had been making them exactly the same way every morning for forty years; Mr. Hawley insisted on having his breakfast biscuits. That was the weather-beaten house at the far end of Railroad Street, the one with the low shed next to it, in which three