The Holler

They lived hard lives but didn't know it.  You can never know what is not there.  They worked and ate and took their pleasures from each other in the night.  Behind the house was a river.  On the other side was a woods that ran for miles.  He hunted in the woods for rabbits and squirrels, the meat of which they ate.  She hunted mushrooms and brought home hickory jacks bigger than the frying pan.  Her grandfather had a small farm with cows and pigs and chickens, so there was always some side fat and maybe an egg or two.  And vegetables.  In the fall, they canned for days.  Those jars went into the root cellar behind her mothers house, a shallow cave in a lump of hill that stayed cool all summer.  It smelled of "must" and housed mice and spiders and an occasional snake.  Up the hill just off the highway, a cousin owned a diner where the truckers stopped.  Jenny ran the diner and fell in with the truckers from time to time which ended up ruining her marriage.  Most of the holler was related to one another in some way, so there was that.  Speed, his second cousin, had a coon dog that had been sick and needed to  be put down, but Speed couldn't bring himself to do it himself.  So Speed came up to the house and asked if he would help.   Without thinking, he said yes and took the dog down the road where Speed would not be able to hear and shot the dog in the head to put him out of his misery.  Then he dug a hole and buried the dog in ditch next to where it had fallen.  The next day, the dog was back at Speed's house acting healthy and dancing around like a pup, but two days later, the dog suddenly dropped.  That spooked Speed bad.  

He had gotten off the farm when he was drafted into the navy.  After that, unlike most people in the holler, he liked to travel.  A year after they married, he drove her north where they rented a little cabin by Lake Michigan.