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Back Storming Heaven
Chapters (38)
  1. Cover
  2. ALSO BY THE AUTHOR
  3. Storming Heaven
  4. DENISE GIARDINA
  5. Copyright
  6. Dedication
  7. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  8. Contents
  9. Part One
  10. One
  11. Two
  12. Three
  13. Four
  14. Five
  15. Six
  16. Seven
  17. Eight
  18. Part Two
  19. Nine
  20. Part Three
  21. Ten
  22. Eleven
  23. Twelve
  24. Thirteen
  25. Fourteen
  26. Fifteen
  27. Sixteen
  28. Seventeen
  29. Part Four
  30. Eighteen
  31. Nineteen
  32. Twenty
  33. Twenty-one
  34. Twenty-two
  35. Twenty-three
  36. Twenty-four
  37. Twenty-five
  38. AFTERWORD

Eighteen: CARRIE BISHOP

Nineteen: RONDAL LLOYD

Twenty: CARRIE BISHOP

Twenty-One: RONDAL LLOYD

Twenty-Two: CARRIE BISHOP

Twenty-Three: RONDAL LLOYD

Twenty-Four: CARRIE BISHOP

Twenty-Five: CARRIE BISHOP

AFTERWORD

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Part One

One

C. J. MARCUM

THEY IS MANY A WAY TO MARK A BABY WHILE IT IS STILL YET in the womb. A fright to its mother will render it nervous and fretful after it is birthed. If a copperhead strikes, a fiery red snake will be stamped on the baby’s face or back. And a portentous event will violate a woman’s entrails, grab a youngun by the ankle and wrench a life out of joint.

Me and Dillon Lloyd spoke of such things on the night Rondal was borned. It was eighteen and ninety, the year the railroad come in and took up the land, two year before the land was give out from under us to the coal company. Dillon seen it coming. We perched out on the hillside and spied for shooting stars, while Dillon told me how Rondal, his brother’s first child, come into the world.

“Hit was fast for a first youngun, and the granny woman was too late. Clabe werent back from fetchin her down from Raven. Werent nary a soul to help birth him but me. He cried out when I smacked him but then he got real quiet. I held him up and he looked me right in the eye. Wouldnt look away. Them’s blue eyes he’s got, long and down-turned.”

Dillon carved on a slab of hickory, fashioning the slender neck of a banjo for the baby. I caught curls of wood as they fell and flung them out into the moonlight.

“How you know he’s goin to take to the banjer?” I asked. “Maybe he aint got the gift like you.”

“I seen them hands. That one will be a picker. Them fingers was curved and he was movin them back and forth slow like. He’s goin to love the feel of this here neck. And the strings will be soft. I’ll git the guts from that old tabby in the barn. And I’ll tan its hide for the head. Hit’s too old to mouse these days.”

“How can you pick on them strings when you know where they come from?”

“Dont bother me none. I wisht I could be put to some use when I die, stead of moulderin in the ground. My skin for a banjer, my bones for a scythe or a flail to clear paths in this here world.”