Sometimes C.J. Marcum, a friend of our family, paid the train fare to bring Talcott and me to Annadel. Annadel was seven wooden buildings put together so poorly they all leaned in opposite directions—Ermel Justice’s store, stable and smithy, three private dwellings, and two taverns. The main town straddled the forks of Blackberry half a mile from the Justice farmhouse. C.J. and his mamaw, Missouri, still lived at the farmhouse at that time.

Talcott and I loved to play with Isom Justice and his sister Pricie. We climbed the mountain behind the Justice farm to a cave overlooking the railroad cut. Inside, we crouched together, the rough stone wall chafing our backs where we leaned. Isom told haint stories. When he stood close to the cave’s mouth, framed by the sunlight beyond the darkness, the ridges and peaks of his curly mop of hair formed a silhouette like a miniature mountain range.

“Who-o-o!” he cried at the climax of the story. He rolled his head upon his neck and waved his arms. Pricie would scream with fear and delight. But Isom could never match the shrieking of the trains that roared through the cut and blew their whistle on the approach to Annadel. These were like the cries of evil fairies Mommy sometimes warned us about, the henchmen of the Unseelie Court seeking lost souls. Even I was frightened of the trains, but we couldn’t bring ourselves to abandon the cave above the tracks.

Often we would swing across the fifty-foot precipice on grapevines. The vines, gray and scaly, creaked like an old wooden floor as they bore our weight out over the cliff. We launched ourselves from a moss-covered root, and if we misjudged our return, our bodies slammed into the broad oak that harbored the vine. Too shaken to swing out again, we must wait to be hauled up to safety.

I helped with the blacksmithing, taking turns with Isom cranking the blower. The blower kept the fire roaring, the fire where Ermel laid his slender lengths of black iron. The hot irons glowed orange and appeared fragile and clear as glass. Ermel plucked a length of iron with his tongs, laid it across the anvil and tapped it into a graceful curve with his hammer. Then he dipped it into a tub of cold water where it sizzled and spat before surrendering in a cloud of steam. A line of finished horseshoes hung beside the tub.

“You remember, boys,” Ermel said, “anything will bend if you put enough fire to it. You remember that.”

Sometimes C.J. and Ermel took us squirrel hunting. Isom and Talcott were better shots than me. Talcott, Ermel claimed, was the best he had seen. Besides the squirrels, we shot rabbits, and possums for baking with sweet potatoes. I would take some dressed back home to Mommy. It was the only meat we got except bacon and an occasional chicken or ham on holidays.