Them Old Mountain Stories Ch. 01

((This is Chapter One of a five chapter story. Each chapter will feature some of the main, framing story of a bartender and a girl in a bar in modern times and also a full fantastical tale that one of them tells the other about one of their relatives. Both of their families are from the Appalachian Mountains of Tennessee and Kentucky, so the stories are told in the style of those cultures. The stories they tell are more than just tall tales - they'll be important to the bigger plot as well. I hope you enjoy these tales half as much as I enjoy similar stories by Manly Wade Wellman, whose Silver John stories made me want to write.))

*****

The One I Love the Best

It was always Thursday when these things happen at the bar, always when I was filling the well bottles and breaking down cardboard boxes with a knife that wouldn't cut cold butter. It was like a secret song summoned wild things up out of the past of the hills, one that slid in under the strains of the old country standards I played all afternoon on the digital jukebox. Your Cheatin' Heart played. He Stopped Loving Her Today played. There were only three other people in the bar, drinking, and they looked like they needed those old, sad songs exactly as much as I did, but for a different reason. I needed them for their incredible power to plumb those artesian wells of East Tennessee weirdness with the sound of slides across steel guitar strings. When I made out the schedule for the week, I put myself on Thursday afternoons to back the bar alone and nobody else cared because the tips were terrible. They had never seen a blind guy's seeing-eye dog run off with another man's prosthetic leg.

That's what happened last Thursday.

I had my back to the door when jukebox Dolly Parton started begging Jolene not to take her man. I must have, since I didn't see the girl until she was already sitting there with her elbows on the bar and her chin propped in her upturned palms, puffy coat shrugged off onto the back of her chair revealing her thin tank top and no bra to speak of underneath. Of course she was wearing a tank top in the middle of February. I'd never seen her wear anything but a tank top. She had as many freckles from her wrists down as a winter night on the mountains has stars.

"Well," I said, smiling in surprise, "flaming locks of auburn hair, ivory skin, and eyes of emerald green." And, just as the song said, her beauty was beyond compare.

"I love it when you play my song, John."

"Jolene, what am I about to ask you?"

"Whether I want my bourbon water back or on the rocks?" She tilted her head and smirked.

"Noooo..." I drew out the syllable even as I drew closer to her. I leaned down, set my elbows against the bar, and mirrored her. "I'm going to ask if I missed you turning twenty-one. You're too young to be here, Jo, too young by two years last I checked."

"But John," she near sang. The way her lips pursed around the "O" in my name could have boiled snow. "What's a drink gonna hurt?"

"Hurt me plenty when I go to jail and they fine my ass back to rags for serving underage."

She cut those glass-green eyes to the right at the guy sitting ten feet down at the corner of the polished oak bar. "Randall, you a cop?"

"No ma'am," the old flannel-wrapped man said, looking away from his beer. "I hope to never be."

"Pete, you a cop?" She turned away from me to look behind her at the guy who comes in from open to happy hour three times a week to read Clive Cussler novels in peace. I don't keep the TVs on in the bar if I can help it.

"Nope," he said without looking up from the yellowed page he was turning. "Junior's in the bathroom, but he's so far from a cop he's a felon. John, give that girl a drink. Nobody here got any problem with Jolene having a drink but you."

Her triumphant smile broke open over the slight crook in her front teeth. I rolled my eyes at her.

"I can't sell you alcohol. It's not going to happen." I started off as a bouncer here, before I learned anything about bourbon. I can still push my palms against the insides of my biceps, square my shoulders, and speak with the authority that makes people change their course with a quickness.

"Don't sell me anything, then." She leaned forward across the bar and stroked her long fingers down the front of my t-shirt. Every hair on my chest electrified. "Trade it to me."

"Trade?"

"Sure," she purred, her nose inches from mine. "I got something I know you want."

Did she ever! I had a split-second of absolute certainty. I would pour Randall, Pete, and Junior each a finger of Old Granddad, then tell them to kindly take a hike. I'd lock the door and let Waylon Jennings sing out from the jukebox about his love for a girl named Amanda while I finally got to see every inch of pale skin and every rusty freckle that ever teased from under Jolene's tank top and cut-offs. I'd have the perfect fiddle curves of her back beneath my hands while I made her gasp at my thickness parting her tight folds. How long could I keep the bar closed before people pounded on the door to be let in? Maybe I'd just throw her over my shoulder and take her back to my apartment. It was only two blocks away. Hell, I'd carry her back up whatever mountain her people came down from just to part those long, creamy thighs with my cheek and hear what she sounded like when she came.

Then I remembered how much I didn't want to go to jail.

"No, Jo, I'm pretty sure serving you bourbon in that kind of trade is whole other kind of illegal."

"What could ever be so bad about a story?"

"A...story?" Her tone was teasing, but I was certain that's what she said.

"That's what I know you love the best, John. What you want." She barely spoke the last word, it floated on a soft exhalation right into my ear. "One of them old mountain stories."

"Like the Flat? Waiting to wrap around me in the shadows?" I laughed, walking around the short side of the bar. Knowing what game Jolene was playing made me want to run the scores up a bit. "Or maybe the Tailypo, circling my cabin in the night?" I leaned against her back, gripping the bar to either side of her and whispering against her red hair in a voice I made creak like an old screen door, "Tailypo, tailypo, give me back my tailypo!"

"Not bad," she leaned her head back against my shoulder. Our cheeks were almost touching and I swear I felt sparks arc between them. "You sound like a nice old lady telling haint stories."

"Like your grandma, maybe?"

"Nope." She swiveled on her stool suddenly and pressed the tip of her nose against mine, her pupils crowned with gold in her feral green irises. "My old gran's near as mean as me."

She called my bluff before I was full-aware that bluffing was what I was doing. I had seventy pounds of (mostly) muscle on Jolene, but in the half dozen times she'd been in my bar trying to scam a drink, I had the distinct feeling she could snap all my bones like a stack of sticks if I hit the wrong wild note inside her. I backed away, but tried to cover it by going to the jukebox and cuing up some serious bluegrass. If Jo wanted to spin out a mountain story, she might as well have the fiddle riffs to run it on. I took my place again behind the safety of the bar.

"I don't care if you look as good as you think you do, I'm not trading good bourbon for some old haint tale I could hear at the county fair."

"What if it's one you never heard before?"

"Not likely," I snorted. "I've heard them all. All the little variations, too."

"Heard 'em all? Says who?" The idea seemed to genuinely offend her.

"The ethnomusicology department of the University of Tennessee, for one." Even wrinkling her nose in confusion she was one of the most beautiful girls I'd ever seen. "But they only gave me a Master's. Maybe there are a few more stories you get to hear when you go for the Ph.D."

"You got a college degree in haint stories?" She looked over at old Randall to see if I was pulling her leg. He shrugged at her with a look on his face that said it sure sounded like something I'd do. "How? How is that even a thing?"

"You said it yourself," I went back to prepping for the bigger crowd to come. "Stories are what I love. If you want to get real technical about it, I have a degree in haint ballads."

"So what if I can tell you a story you didn't hear in college, nor nowhere else?" She crossed her arms under her breasts, which thrust them provocatively against the edge of her tank top. "That would be a rare thing, wouldn't it? Worth a heavy splash of Buffalo Trace?"

"Jolene," I sighed, seeing I was not going to win anything in this argument but her leaving and taking her firm ass and cream-colored breasts with her, "if you can manage that, I'd say it's worth a double."

"Can I have a Diet Coke to wet my whistle while you're making up your mind?"

How could I resist? I filled a glass with ice for her and topped it off with the spritz gun. This is the story Jolene told me that earned her a bourbon and started everything else that happened that Thursday.

*****

This was a story that my Daddy told me that his father, Padraig Connelley, told him. I don't know if some of it is true or all of it is true, since I never got to ask my grandfather myself. He died before I was born. I'm the youngest out of my brothers and sisters by a fair bit and Daddy was born last out of his, too. My oldest brother, Ryan, says he remembers Padraig a little, as a friendly old man with sparkling green eyes and a voice that could make the hills ring. But Ryan also remembers hiding behind my mama's skirts because, old as Padraig was, there was something fierce and terrible in him that even babies could sense. No child under five would sit in his lap, though they'd all cluster around to hear his stories. As they got older, I guess they started thinking of him as an old man and ignored what their own eyes and guts told them he was for true.

In 1906, my grandfather was eighteen, which was old enough to be a man with his own house and plot of land for beans and corn out back. Those were other days, days when every man and woman who lived in the mountains knew the true name of the plants and the language of Raccoon and White-Tailed Deer.

It was still in the holler, snow was on the ground and heavy on the roofs of the cabins. Padraig was no kind of early riser, so he was still halfway asleep and pouring a cup of black coffee from the tin pot on the stove when Colm Connelley kicked in the door. If it had been any other man running into his house wide-eyed and snorting like a horse, Padraig would have had his rifle in hand and that man would be someone else's mess to scrub out of the floorboards. Colm was Patrick's half-brother, though, so it only raised his hair a bit. Their mother was a witch-woman who kept two brothers as husbands because she couldn't bear to choose between them, but that's a story for another time. Colm was ten years older and as broad across as the door of a barn, a smith born, like his father. Padraig was as slim and quick as a fiddle bow. Both had their mama's chestnut hair, but each had his father's look about him.

When Colm calmed enough to speak, it was clear why he came for Padraig. His day had started before dawn, like any other. He made bacon and a pan of biscuits for himself and his wife, Alana. After breakfast, he pulled on his boots to go out to the forge where his apprentice, Molly, had started the fires burning already. Colm had begun his day in the forge as he always did, by praising the spirits of Fire and Iron and striking his anvil with Breaksong, the sacred Making hammer his father Dermot Connelley forged as his masterwork before he died. You can shape iron with any fire hot enough and any hammer hard enough to beat on it with, but you want a buckle that never breaks or a chain to lay across the threshold to keep your lover from wandering? You need iron that's touched only a Making hammer.

That morning, when Colm spoke his blessings and struck the anvil, a shock went through his arm and Breaksong exploded into a thousand shards of black painted porcelain. He'd no sooner turned to call out to his apprentice, Molly, a sweet, strong girl just turned sixteen, than he saw her grasp up a pair of iron tongs from the wall in her bare hand and she shattered to china dust as well. Colm grabbed at Molly's empty leather apron in disbelief for only a moment. Strange things happen up on the mountain sometimes, stranger things than that. Colm ran for the house, but what he saw in the kitchen was no comfort. Alana had cleared the table when he left for the forge, but as soon as her finger brushed the iron of the biscuit pan her whole body had broken apart inside her dress, as surely as Colm's hammer and his apprentice. That's when he lit out across the holler to Padraig's cabin and ran plumb through the door.

Padraig was younger than Colm, but he was a wanderer and he listened to old folks and held dear to their mountain stories and the older ones, from green places across the sea. He knew precisely what flavor of thing replaces the precious things in our world with exact replicas that cannot bear the touch of iron: the Aos Si, the Fair Folk.

"I've got the measure of the problem," Padraig told his brother after hearing the tale, "but not an inch of the solution. 'Tis alright, we've got a ride out to the River Mound to think on it."

"I thought she'd be safe, Pad. I thought she'd be safe so long as she wore her ring." No gold wedding rings in the mountains in that day, and not only for lack of the gold or the money for it. Folks wore rings forged with the Making hammer, rings of iron and silver. Gold was soft and pretty and warded away nothing more dangerous than easily-discouraged adulterers. To protect a marriage vow from things that could do real harm, one needed a ring made of sterner stuff.

"You didn't find it in the house?"

"No, neither whole nor in pieces."

"Then she was taken by something higher than I've had dealings with before. A cold iron ring will keep away the ones that haunt trees and caves, or steal the milk out of a cow, or swap a baby for a magpie. I've an inkling what it is now."

In the old stories, there was one Aos Si lord famous for the pottery his artisans produced and the effect it had in the mortal realms: the Duke of the Summer Sky. He was not storied to be the oldest, nor the cleverest, nor the darkest of the Fair Folk, but he was Aos Si for certain and that made him older and cleverer and darker than anything that walks the earth.

Padraig packed an oilcloth sack with leftover biscuits and a hunk of country ham, and brought his boots in to warm by the stove enough that he could flex them around his feet to lace them. He took his rifle from the cabin wall, then placed it back. He was a sure and steady shot, even riding, but he knew no weapon that worked here could harm what they hunted. With his warmest coat wrapped around him and his rabbit-fur hat, he was ready for the snow outside and the strange place beyond snow's silent reach.

Colm and Padraig rode through the holler at as slow a pace as Pad could get his brother to keep to, though Colm's blood sang to rush down to the river and follow its curve to the earthen mound, taller than a barn, that was already old when the first Connelleys walked across the ridge and settled in. Some said the River Mound was built by Cherokee people, or by their old people, who they came from before they had their name. Padraig had heard enough stories from a washer woman, brown and lined as an old apple tree, about those people to know it might not be true. He and Colm pulled the horses up and staked them on long lines to graze and drink from the water's edge, if need be. They draped them with woolen blankets to stay warm until someone came to fetch them. Neither was planning a long trip on the other side of things, but time moves differently there, in ways one can't fully know before coming back out again.

"Ho, what's that?" Colm asked in a low voice, touching his brother's coat but giving no other indication of alarm. "Those eyes a-watching in the woods, you know them?"

Colm was excitable that day for good reason, but his basic nature was steady and calm, suited fine to a man whose life's work is shaping iron one strike at a time. Padraig followed the line of Colm's eyes and saw the two glowing yellow spots in the snow-streaked woods around them.

"Hello, Cousin," Padraig called out in the polite greeting of the old language. "How's hunting today?"

"'Cousin' nothing," the eyes called back. "Padraig Connelley, I'm near as close kin to you as that big fool gawping behind you."

"Uncle Night-Eater! Am I glad to see your sharp pair of eyes today. How's hunting?"

"Poor today. Rabbits don't like snow. I smell biscuits in your bag, though, nephew."

"Come down and have one, maybe you saw what I'm looking for."

Out from the trees trotted a red wolf bigger than a man but a touch smaller than a pony. "No words of greeting from you, Colm?"

"I apologize, Uncle," Colm worked out carefully in the old language, "I am not as good with talking in the old talk as Padraig."

The wolf laughed, a sharp, ragged sound like the crack of a dead branch peeling free from a tree. "Nobody's so good with talking in any language as Pad, that's how he gets into and out of all his troubles."

Night-Eater sat and regarded them, waiting for his biscuit. "What are you hunting today, boys? Not rabbit or deer like me, unless you've finally embraced hunting with your natural gifts instead of bullets." His teeth showed in what might have been a smile if his lips worked the way human lips do.

"We track Colm's wife and his apprentice. They were taken by one of the Fair Folk, one hardy enough to ignore her iron ring for a bit. I have an idea it might be the Duke of the Summer Sky. Alana's small and slim, with black hair to her waist. Unless she's full enchanted, she's probably putting up quite a fight. Molly is younger, tall and strong-built with hair of gold."

Night-Eater cropped at an itch on his flank. "I've been a wolf a long time. All women look the same to me now. What do they smell like, Colm?"

"My wife smells like cornbread and quilts. My apprentice the same, but like the leather of her apron and like the heat of the forge, too."

"Ah, why didn't you say so at the start? Those two I smelled, sure. They went into the door over there just before dawn." He tilted his shaggy head toward the River Mound, which, now that he'd spoken of it, did seem to have a door in it where there had been only smooth, snow covered ground before. Padraig gave Night-Eater one of the biscuits from his bag.

"Since hunting's so poor for you today, Uncle, why not come with us on the other side?"

"I think I might. You boys'll never find your way back if all you're using is your squinty little eyes."

Through the door was not the packed earth inside of the River Mound but a field that stretched in all directions with swaying grass taller than a man's waist, all stalks heavy with summer seeds. The air fair trembled with heat, and where the wide curves of the river had been in the world of men a shallow crick cut instead in this world that was Beside and Beyond. Night-Eater put his nose to the wind and to the ground and led the brothers through the grass which parted before them like hair does to a comb.

"You did well to give her an iron ring, Colm," the wolf snuffed, "she'd be much harder to track without its scent of being out of place here."

Though the trail was an easy one, the going was hot. The brothers shed their coats and hats, their woolen scarves, even their heavy boots ended up in the sacks slung over their backs. They were country fellows, used to going barefoot when the world was warm, and the grass of the Si meadow was soft as a first kiss. Though they tracked for hours with Night-Eater, the sun never dipped lower in the sky but bore down overhead in perpetual summer.