Them Old Mountain Stories Ch. 01

"Padraig?" the Duke asked, an afterthought, when the five were crossing the spacious porch "you have given me such a good contest today that I have decided I will give you a measure of the fire of the southern sky anyway."

"Now, Duke?"

"No. When the vessel I will make for it is ready."

"Thank you, sir, for your many kindnesses." Padraig bowed and hustled all of his party off the porch and into the perpetual summer sun, for Aos Si kindness is often next to Aos Si cruelty in their hearts.

"When the vessel is ready, yes," the Duke chuckled at empty air, "but mind you don't get burned when it is."

But that is another story for another day.

*****

Old Randall at the end of the bar had gasped and laughed along with the story like he probably hadn't since he was a boy. Pete, sitting behind Jolene, hadn't made any indication he was listening, but I noticed he hadn't turned a single page in his open book while she was talking. Junior had settled his tab and gone before she got to the part about the door into the mound. I pulled down a bottle of Buffalo Trace Reserve and poured a generous double before sliding it across the foot of polished wood between her pale slender fingers and my thick, hairy ones.

"Jolene, how much of that you reckon is based on a truth, even a half-truth?" I asked.

"How much is true?" she shrugged her freckled shoulders and savored the first sip of bourbon. Her nipples hardened against her thin tank top at the sensory pleasure of it and I was glad the bar stood between us to cover my own reaction. "My mother's mother is an herbalist up there, still. She keeps a record of everyone who was born and died in the holler and up the mountain, for she's a Campbell and the Campbells built the first house there in 1726. The record she keeps is painted on the plaster of the long back wall of her cabin with each name, their parents, date of birth, and date of death. Someone started it there long before she moved in, but she keeps it up and adds to it."

"How many of the people in that story have their names on that wall?"

"My grandfather Padraig and his brother Colm are there, both dead of course. Alana, Colm's wife. Padraig's first wife and their baby. All dead, so I can't exactly ask them if any of it's true."

"And Molly O'Barrow?"

"Oh, she's there, too. So is her son, my uncle Roarke Connelley, born in 1907, but his entry is weird. She had no other children."

"Weird how?" asked old Randall. "I mean, other than he'd be over a hundred now and he's your pa's brother? Not that I full-on believe that, neither, though if your pa was fifty when he had you and his pa was fifty when he had him, that's a hundred years right there. I guess it could be so."

"His Christian name's half crossed out," Jolene's eyes flicked down to her glass. "Underneath it is written 'Burns-the-World'. I don't know exactly what it means, but I know my Daddy and everyone else always referred to him as Burns, not Roarke."

"Til' all the seas gone dry, my dear, and the rocks melt with the sun. I will love thee still, my dear, while the sands of life shall run." I couldn't help myself. Jolene and Randall both looked surprised, though Randall less flattered. I didn't believe for a second that she had no idea how her uncle earned a name like that and I pushed her to see what more she'd say about it. "What? Your family not much for poetry, Jo?"

"Not the kind can't be set to a fiddle reel, no."

"So your old uncle's not named for Robert Burns, then?"

She laughed with her head thrown back, the sound as incongruously harsh as her long white throat was inviting. "Not from the other stories I've heard about him, no."

"Well, when John starts spouting poetry, that's my cue to skedaddle." Randall tossed a crumpled twenty on the bar and worked his bad hip down from the stool and shrugged into his coat. "Good story, Jolene. Reminds me of the ones we used to tell late at night when I was a kid. I never heard that one afore, neither."

"Good time for me to leave, too," Pete, who'd been silent to that point, nodded to me to run his tab before he dressed against the cold. "Jolene, if you've got another story like that in you, make sure you stop in the middle and hold the second half ransom until you finish it, like Scheherazade."

"It's not finished yet," I said without turning around from where I was printing Pete's credit card receipt.

"How'd you know?" Jolene asked, smiling broadly as I turned around.

"The jar. The one they already had, to protect from sickness." I reached across the bar to hand Pete his card back. "Those kinds of stories never leave something like that untouched at the end, especially when there's a price to pay."

"In 1918," Jolene intoned, "influenza took half the county, but no one on the back wall of my gran's cabin wall, not even babies, died that year save one person: Molly O'Barrow."

"And the jar?"

"Can't say for sure, but on a high shelf on that same back wall has always sat a plain-looking stonewear jug that my gran warned me not to touch the same way I shouldn't touch a woodstove I don't know for sure is cold. Last time I was home I looked closer at it, since I'm taller now and have more practice reading the way the old people used to write. The name on the jar is 'Summer Laughs Last'. So it has and so it does."

Pete shook his head and chuckled as he headed for the door. "Should have made him give you another drink for that, Jolene."

"I'm good, Pete," she waved him out. "John's going to give me something even better."

"Oh?" I had a number of ideas of what I wanted to give Jolene now that we were the only two in the bar, and nearly all of them would be health code violations. She fixed me steady with those gold-green eyes.

"You're going to tell me a story about your people. I love bourbon, I do. But I'm just like you. Stories are what I really love the best."

*****

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