Barns Are Whistling Down Mulberry Gap: Tales from the Appalachian Hills

By David Lee Fletcher

The story unfolds in the old Greenleaf Church where young Clay finds the hidden diary of Lamb Shepherd, a veteran of the Civil War. Through the stories, the boy immerses himself in those days of trial and tribulation, which profoundly affect him and his worldview.

From the tragic story of a mentally impaired Billy Watson to the hilarious story of Lem Brown’s still, the book chronicles the young boy’s exploits and adventures on his grandma’s farm down in Mulberry Gap and adds humor and spiritual insight into his emotional maturation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9781796024265

David Lee Fletcher

David Lee Fletcher is a poet, short story writer, and novelist. He has been published in The West Wind Review, Buffalo Music Hall Reviews, The Okanogan Natural News and other periodicals. A graduate in English/Creative Writing from So. Or. Univ., he was winner of the Dankook Award (96’) and studied under Oregon Poet Laureate Lawson Inada. He has worked on editorial staffs, as writing project consultant, and been a college writing tutor. He is an accomplished songwriter and musician as well, having played concerts throughout the Northwest. He has performed on NPR and PBS, benefits for libraries, co-ops, and historical societies and recorded on various albums as a studio musician.

Book preview

Copyright © 2019 by David Lee Fletcher.

ISBN:              Softcover                978-1-7960-2427-2

                        eBook                     978-1-7960-2426-5

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: 03/27/2019

Xlibris

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

793746

Contents

The Diary of Lamb Shepherd

His Children are Coming Home

Lem Brown’s Still

The Dream

I Meet Doctor Swindler

Bossy’s Ghost

I Lose My Head

Weiner Pigs of Sneedville

The Change

This book is dedicated in memory of

Grandma Myrtle Lambert

Born July 28, 1906                Died April 16, 1996

Psalm 23

The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou annointest my head with oil, my cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

Barns are whistling down Mulberry Gap

Greeting the old friends home

Down in the holler where the sweet bird sings

And the lifeblood flows over precious stones

Where sky and earth and the fiddle ring

with the sound of the Green Leaf bell

Amidst the twisted briar patch

where the angels of Mulberry Gap do dwell

And tales of the painter and black bear are heard

in the cottonwoods down by the creek

and the whispering prayers of the folks are said

in the voices of the humble and meek

Barns are whistling down Mulberry Gap

Greeting the old friends home

For the life on this earth is much too short

and the journey much too long.

The Diary of Lamb Shepherd

I’m going to tell you a story. Folks all got stories, most that some wouldn’t believe, and folks stretch them, just to make things more unreal and kind of interesting. But that’s the thing about stories, you stretch them so that people will listen, then maybe they’ll say, That really happened? and you’ll say Yeah, right down there under that big oak, or something, and that way they’ll believe, or at least consider the possiblility of believing and move their nappy heads around while they’re considering. That’s how we all became storytellers, everyone of us.

In 1964, when I was just a kid I went back to Appalachia to visit my Grandma’s farm that was on the Virginia-Tennessee line. There was a hay field on one side of the road with a barn smack in the middle that was fallen over, and the grey pine sticks whistled to the sky. Below that was a creek where the road ran through, and Seizmore’s store stood there plastered with rusted tin Coca Cola signs nailed up to the vertical plank board siding. The front step was a big rock that had been there forever and I thought the rock held the souls of all the people that had moved in and out of the place, and was maybe useful also so they could scrape the mud off. I figured that the rock was too big to move, so they had left it there like that.

Beyond the store the valley opened up a little and there was a mountain where people hunted coons and sometimes I could hear the coon dogs yelping when they’d treed one. Behind my Grandma’s farm was an old church with a bell tower, and the folks around the valley called the place Green Leaf because there were some big maple trees in front set up like a cathedral leading into the place. In back were some headstones, and that’s where my Great Grandma and Great Grandpa are buried. That’s where this story began, the day I went over and was digging around the old Green Leaf church.

I saw the rope was tied off to the bell, but figured I’d better not ring it unless I wanted all the folks in the valley rushing over to see what the trouble was. The doors were doubled up to let all the souls through, as though the gates of heaven or something, but one was latched shut and hadn’t been opened since before the last world war, and that was the last Sunday that folks came there and voices rang out through the stained glass and echoed over the hay field to the big stepping rock at Seizmore’s store.

The paint was peeling off the outside of the church, exposing the pine grooved siding, and rotting leafs were piled up near the door. They appeared like obstacles in a dream. Inside light shined through from the bell tower to a certain place in the oak flooring, and I figured that’s where they had buried him. Least they said that. Buried under the church, he was. 1903.

I had brought a hammer and a crow bar from grandma’s shed and slipped out through the pine grove so no one would see me, then followed the draw back in through the headstones and come around the side of the church. He built the church after the Civil War when he come back home. And he brought a pretty young gal back with him. They called her Liza.

Where’s Liza buried, Grandma? I asked.

Oh, Liza ain’t buried at all, she said, she’s still roaming around, and that made me wonder what she meant.

I worked at pulling the oak planks up, right where the streaks of sunlight were falling through, and I felt as if the eyes of God were on me, looking down on all I done. It wasn’t such a scary feeling as everyone would have you believe, it was more like he was just watching over my shoulder and that he didn’t approve or disapprove, but figured I was just a kid and kind of curious like.

Some of the boards splintered up when I pried them, so I worried about how I was going to get them back so no one would know I had been there. I got most of the boards up between the pews and about six feet down the aisle, and the light from the bell tower moved down into the hole, slow-like, casting shadows beneath the floor. There were stone steps leading down into a cavern and they were covered with a fine white dust from where the stone had been chipped away.

I lit a candle and followed them. They didn’t go too awful far, not like everyone said they did, just a few feet, and I saw where they had stacked stones to enclose