The Death and Diary of Cyril Spragins

By Chance Raymond

There is a paradox to a place where rubber meets dirt, to a place where its avenues are stuck in their genesis and the tracks in the ground are from retreads and not horse and buggy wheels. Beaten paths of mud holes where the faces of rocks seem to grow out of the ground, nothing more than bumps in the road to the hillbillies who live in those woods.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chance Raymond
• Release date: Nov 11, 2016
• ISBN: 9781370921959

Chance Raymond

Chance Raymond was born in Knoxville,Tennessee in 1955 and has lived in San Diego since 1985. He returns home now and then to visit his family and see the mountains.

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Preface

In the winter of 1970 an old transport plane which belonged to the backwoods Mafia crashed in the deep forest. But the crash happened at night and there wasn't an explosion. A year passed before the wreckage was discovered by a hunter. Meanwhile the planes oil leaked into an underground stream which flowed to a young hillbilly's creek and turned the water black. When the neighbor's cows waded into the drink and got sick and died, so spread the rumor of oil in the hills. The news brought oil men from Texas to the Smokies at the same time a young woman vacationed there. When the local police discovered she had a rap sheet three pages long and was an acquaintance of the oil tycoons, it seemed no coincidence that the young man fell off a mountain peak near her rented chateau with its picturesque view. The accusation which developed was that the cowgirl disguised as a hippie frightened the young fellow to the cliff and forced him over the ledge.

Decades later a writer named Frazier Paine is assigned by a publisher to clear her name. This story is less about the victim and the defendant and more about the writer's effort to solve the closed case. He begins his quest for the truth by capturing the spirit of the backwoods environment. Next he tries to figure out the essence of the characters and their everyday psyche. But in the end he discovers the complications of reaching an honest verdict when personal opinion and circumstantial evidence enter courtroom drama.

The Wood

Way down South in the Tennessee hills where the Smoky Mountain fog rises through the treetops like smoke until you can't tell it from the clouds that sail over the alpine, there is a place called The Wood, sometimes called The Woods. If you follow the old highway out of Knoxville until you see a cow pasture that has a few old planes parked in it next to a barn, and the barn has AIR FUEL FOR SALE painted in faded red letters on its rusty tin roof, you’re almost there. Near the barn’s arch way is a rustic gas pump with a round top and on the far side of that pasture is a fence row with sixty-watt light bulbs strung along the barb wire and cedar post. There may be a few cows grazing the grass or staring at the grove the planes would glide over when they come down if any ever landed there besides the one in the field that flies. That plane belongs to the hillbilly Mafia but you didn’t hear that here. They used to have two that flew.

If you turn onto any one of the country roads after you pass that and drive until you run out of asphalt, you will motor out of this century into a backwoods garnished with long winding ribbons of red clay lanes, none wider than wagon trails. Beaten paths of mud holes where the faces of large rocks seem to grow out of the ground, nothing more than bumps in the road to the hillbillies who live in those woods.

There is a paradox to a place where rubber meets dirt, to a place where its avenues are stuck in their genesis and the tracks in the ground are from retreads and not horse and buggy wheels. The first mailbox is yet a country mile away and incidentally, delivered by a local who owns a station wagon.

Cruising on, breaks in the trees steal from the brawn of the woodland as the peaks of yonder hills descend to the upper frame of your windshield. Soon you find yourself driving alongside green pastures, passing modest but well-kept houses with flowerbeds in the yard, and God forbid I call anyone's home a shack, passing other yards cluttered with junk that has been there so long, weeds and wildflowers are growing through the rust. The way takes you past ram shackled farms that employ a few pigs and chickens. Now and then you pass a farm house that has a barn in a scrubby pasture behind it with a hoop of cows corralling a bale of hay, engaged in one of those genial meals where none look up but to see if the other is also chewing.

*

Should you ever find yourself in the midst of those timbers, on your way out or on your way in, you may come upon a narrow green pasture that stretches a half mile through the woods and inspires you to stop and take a picture of the colors in the yonder horizon. It is sometimes called the old pioneer way. The skies there are sometimes as aquamarine as the sea or as blue as a blue bayou or as madder red as the sun’s glow on a muddy river. You may even think you see an ocean and become enraptured by its vastness. You begin to ask yourself if the yonder expanse is the body of a large lake and will toss back and forth if it is part lake and part sky or all sky. Out where the terrain ends is Hells Canyon. A little before sundown as the daylight nods into dusk, a fiery glow emanates from the abyss. In the late evening, provided there is a sun in the sunset, as the day wanes into twilight, you may think a hillbilly went and tried to barbecue a deer out that way and set the forest on fire. Accepting you don't notice the blazing reflection does not have smoke, but clouds, rising from it.

That sky seems uncanny to the superstitious but it intrigues the mentally ill and those with