The Bloody Creek Massacre

By Robert Burns Clark

Laurel Valley is a community in the Carolina hills. Nobody knows why, but Montgomerys and Capshaws have been killing each other for over one hundred years. On a peaceful Sunday morning, Lee Montgomery drove his wife, mother-in-law, and four children to church. The youngest was four-year-old Olin Montgomery, the apple of the familys eye. When Lee reached the ford at Bloody Creek, the horses spooked and would not cross. Lee had the instincts of a wild animal. Something was amiss. Pistol in hand, he got out of the wagon to search the thick brush enveloping the trail. A dozen guns fired in unison, shredding the flesh of the Montgomery family. All was massacred, except Olin, whose little body was shielded by his grandmother. Fifteen years later, Olin has grown into manhood. It was his lifes mission to get revenge for his familys murder until he meets Etta, the daughter of the Capshaw clans patriarch. Their love is doomed by their families hatred.

Bloody Creek is Romeo and Juliet set in the crossfire of a Hatfield/McCoy feud. This time, will the young lovers survive?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 17, 2018
• ISBN: 9781984517548

Robert Burns Clark

Born in the hills of North Carolina, where tales of the past were kept wildly alive by an extended family of storytellers, Robert Burns Clark knows a thing or two himself about telling a story. After graduating from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the School of Law, Clark made a movie called Moonrunners and, shortly after, moved his family to California to continue his writing pursuits. A few years later, Moonruners was adapted into the Dukes of Hazzard television series. Clark has written, rewritten, or edited over forty episodes of prime-time television, including The Dukes of Hazzard, Tour of Duty, The Class of 61, and Hardball. He has written and produced several movies of the week. His first novel, Pittsburg Landing, received critical acclaim and was awarded an Honorable Mention by the San Francisco Book Festival.

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Copyright © 2018 by Robert Burns Clark.

Library of Congress Control Number:     2018903692

ISBN:            Hardcover               978-1-9845-1753-1

 Softcover                  978-1-9845-1752-4

                      eBook                       978-1-9845-1754-8

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 04/13/2018

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CONTENTS

The Teller

The Beginning

Fifteen Years Later

Capshaws

Settling Grudges

Bloody Creek

The Montgomerys

Rosa Lee Nyland

Griffin Frank

The Panther

Womanly Advice

Miz Spittle’s Juke Joint and Whorehouse

Bandits

The Panther Prowls

Masquerade

His Lost Father

Fit for Hell

Girl in Mask

John the Baptist

Olin Up A Tree

The Feud Breaks Bad

Moonlight?

Ezekiel 16.6

The Valley of Death

The Son of a Cur

Banishment

The Lion Lay With the Lamb

Thunder and Lightning

Angel’s Bane

Preparing for Combat

Mr. Thomas Jefferson

Wild Roses

The Capshaw Crypt

Mr. Jefferson

Forever Together

Precious Memories

Peace in the Valley

Bloody Creek

The Teller

Standing here on the top of Edenton Peak, a body can see three states. Looking westward, might near sixty miles away, is Tennessee. Leastwise, that’s what I’m told. I ain’t never been sixty miles from this here mountain. And if you turn your eyes southward, across the Chattooga River, that there’s South Carolina. I been there once. Didn’t like it. Saw a water head and a hair lip on the same day. Lots of in-breedin’ down there, I been told. Some people swear, that on a really clear day, you can see the face of Forty Acre Rock over yonder, all the way to Georgia. I ain’t never seen it, but I keep lookin’.

The man speaking was six feet seven inches tall in his bare feet and skinny as a rail, giving him a cartoonlike appearance. His nose was much too big for his narrow face, and his eyes were deep, dark, and squinty, making him look as if he was bothered, even in the dead of night, by a bright light. His unruly auburn hair had, most assuredly, never been combed. Some said, except for the eyes, he had a hawk’s face. He could easily have just stepped out of the Sunday funny papers in his ill-fitting, faded, baggy overalls.

But his presence was not unsettling, not even to children and strangers. There was something comforting and inherently gentle about this man. You could tell that he had little in the way of material possessions and didn’t care. If fortune brought him a reward of value, he would probably give it to someone he felt was more needful. But there was a lingering sadness in his eyes and the rasping grit of suffering in his voice.

He leaned on his hoe and looked longingly over the valley. The hills were colored emerald green as far as the eye could see, tinted with shadows fading from blue to purple and threaded with an early morning, ghostly mist. The green sea of spring foliage was touched here and there with the snowy white of dogwood, the pink and fuchsia of wild cherry and crab apple. Some parts of the undulating ground were lined with rail fences and cut by narrow wagon trails. A few small cabins dotted the landscape, the air filled with the whisper of a spring breeze and the chorus of a million celebrating songbirds.

Peaceful, ain’t it? the man said wistfully. He raised his hoe and chopped the weeds from the middle of another row of freshly sprouted corn with the precision of a trained surgeon. He worked his way to the end of an arrow-straight row, stopped and wiped his brow on his shirtsleeve, and then bent and picked up a handful of the rich, black soil and let it reverentially fall through his fingers.

There’s fertile ground hereabouts, good timber for making cabins and fence railings. He waved his hand out over the valley. There’s plenty of cool sweet water and a bounty of game, fruit, and wild berries. God blessed this here valley and gave it all to man. He paused, an old and deep hurt slithering into his voice. Standing here looking at h’it, listening to h’it, you wonder how such a place could breed so much hatred and violence. It’s hard to figure how so much blood could be spilled on this ground in anger.

He walked to the edge of his garden and pointed. Far, far in the distance was a waterfall.

Some say h’it all started down thar on Bloody Creek, but it commenced long before that. Some say bad blood was made during the War Between the States, when some families took the side of the North and some the South. Others say it was all on account of a hog. The briefest hint of a smile crossed his leathery, weathered face. Hogs used to range free in these hills. Folks would round them up in the fall for slaughter. One story goes that Ebinezer Capshaw and Anson Montgomery fought over a shoat, and Eb shot Anson dead.

He spit a wad of snuff from his mouth and dipped a new taste from the tin he carried in his shirt pocket. Fact is, don’t nobody know how it started and don’t nobody really care. All they mind is that Capshaws hate Montgomerys and vicy versy.

Now, that’s all in the past. But the past lives wildly hereabouts. He turned and looked behind him as if to address someone standing there, but there was no one else within hearing, no one to listen—not a single living soul. Not any that could be seen by the human eye.

My name is John the Baptist Purefoy, minister of the gospel, herbalist and miracle healer. He held a long finger to his lips and gently shushed.

So’s, you listen up. You listen good to my ever word. I’m going to tell you this story as only I know h’it. How sweet love come to this valley and melted many a hard heart. An appalling sadness filled his face as he turned and looked back toward the distant waterfall on Bloody Creek. I will tell you how two hearts brung us peace. But … no joy.

As his words drifted out across the valley, a tear welled in the eye of John the Baptist Purefoy, minister of the gospel, herbalist, and miracle healer.

The Beginning

The trees and shrubs formed a thick, impenetrable wall along both sides of the winding trail. A person couldn’t see three feet into the tangle. The trail was a narrow, ill-maintained passage, hewed out of the mountains by the local men with their hands, picks, and shovels. Oftentimes, to pass on the road, a traveler had to roll large stones and boulders out of the way or drag fallen trees to the side. It was early summer, which meant the undergrowth was at its thickest. The branches of the taller trees cascaded over the crude roadway blotting away most of the light, casting the surroundings, even at midday, in a dusky darkness.

Around a sharp turn on the road, a wagon appeared, pulled by a fine matched pair of Belgian drafts, the pride and joy of the driver, Lee Montgomery. He had traveled all the way to the port of Philadelphia to buy their sire and a fresh female that the auctioneer had taken off the block because she had gone lame. She was destined for the slaughterhouse, and Lee bought her for a penny a pound. Lee patched her hoof with warm pitch and sulfur and a week later rode her home. Lee was known as the best horse breeder in the county, and buyers came from miles away to purchase stock from his small, but prized, herd.

It was Sunday morning, a day of rest and peace in the lives of the hardscrabble hill people, and Lee was driving his family to church. Beside him sat his wife, Annie. Despite the hard mountain life, and having given birth to five children, Annie was still beautiful. Her deep green eyes were hypnotic, and there was not a hint of gray in her dark raven hair. After ten years together, Lee still could not take his eyes off her. He remembered the day like yesterday, when he found her sitting on the banks of Bloody Creek, singing the old Scots ballad Barbara Allen. Not only was she beautiful; she also sounded like a chorus of angels as her voice lilted in and out of the song. She had been fourteen, and Lee only eighteen, but he was already regarded as a man among men in the hills. He bought his first brood mare when he was only twelve, with money he had made splitting fence rails, and at seventeen, he bought the old Penegar homeplace, forty eroded, rundown, worn-out acres considered unfit for growing crops but perfect for pasture, and there was enough arable bottomland to grow milo, alfalfa, and hay for the stock.

There on the banks of Bloody Creek he had mustered up all his courage and walked right up to Annie and startled her with his query: Annie Green, will you make my wife?

Then, she startled him with her own unexpected question: Do you love me?

Up until that day, Lee had never been alone with her, not for a single minute. He had seen her often, with her family, at church meetings and community get-togethers. He had only spoken to her once, at a church picnic. She was serving lemonade, and he had said Thank you — two words — that was all.

I want to be with you for the rest of my life, he answered awkwardly.

Then you must love me greatly, she said. And I will make your wife.

Two weeks later, they were married.

Now, Annie was once again singing, leading the family in a rendition of the old gospel Precious Memories. She held her hymnal close to her breast, but she didn’t need it; she knew all the songs in the book by heart. Precious memories, how they linger, how they ever sooth my soul, they sang.

The older children knew their parts and also sang very well, the product of many joyous hours of recital around Annie’s kitchen table and evenings on the porch.

Annie’s mother had moved in with them the year before, after her father’s passing. Grandma Emma’s voice was as strong and clear as her daughter’s. Even Lee carried a good tune, in a full, strong baritone.

And then, there was Lee and Annie’s youngest, little three-year-old Olin, sitting close to his grandmother in the back of the wagon. His head was thrown back, his mouth opening wide enough to swallow a jaybird, as he shouted the words of the old hymn loud enough to shake the acorns out of an oak tree, totally out of tune and absent any semblance of rhythm.

Somehow, in spite of Olin, the family continued to sing the old song skillfully.

His sisters couldn’t help but break into laughter from time to time when his voice screeched high enough to flush a covey of quail in the next county or when he shouted words that had nothing whatsoever to do with the lyrics of the ancient hymn.

Olin didn’t care that he knew neither the words nor the tune; he was having himself a fine time riding along with his family on a sunny Sunday morning, heading for the church meeting where, after the service, there would be buckets of fried chicken, potatoes, early string beans, pickled peaches, cakes, pies, and games to play.

The wagon approached a ford where the waters of Bloody Creek flowed across the rutted mountain road. Whoa Bill! Lee ordered strongly when they reached the water. Hold up there, June!

As the horses came to a stop, the family sang Amen, and the ancient song of hope and redemption faded to an end.

Daddy said, ‘Whoa, Bill!’ Olin shouted. Is that old horse gone deaf? he asked seriously.