Okay, so I’m pretty excited about this. Tributaries, Indiana University East’s Journal of Creative Writing has finally come out, and my story “A Kentucky Courtship” won 1st prize for fiction. I decided to post part of it here, as kind of a teaser. If you want the whole thing, you can order it from the Tributaries website: http://www.iue.edu/tributaries/. Also, I think it might be free (although I could be wrong. It’s happened before). Even if it’s not, you’ll not only get my story, based on John and Rose Mullins, my dad’s parents, you’ll also get another story of mine about them, a non-fiction essay by me, and some really, really good writing by some people way more talented than me. There are stories and essays that’ll make you laugh, make you cry, possibly make you scratch your head and say whuuuuut? but they’ll make you think. There are also links to sample stories on the website if you don’t want to take my word for it (and who could blame you?).

Anyway, with no further ado, here’s the teaser for “A Kentucky Courtship”.

 

A Kentucky Courtship
By
Lloyd Mullins

Romance is for the birds. That was my first thought after the bullet took my hat off. Well, not quite; my first thought was, “Shit!” My reflections on the nature of romance followed, just as soon as I’d found a suitable tree to hide behind. It was romance that had brought me to this pass, and not even my romance. My brother Elvin was hunkered down behind a log, one hand over his eye while the blood poured out. “God, please don’t let him die, I don’t want no feud with anybody this handy with a gun, or this free with ammunition,” I prayed.
*****
My name is Alvin Cross, and I was fourteen years old in the fall of 1919. The trouble had all started when my older brother Elvin had taken to courting Rose LeRoy, whose father had some good bottomland right next to our farm. Rose was pretty enough, but that acreage was really what Elvin was in love with. Elvin was already a prosperous man, but if he could add that land to his own, he’d be the biggest landowner in the county. Between that, the dry-goods store in town, and the four stills he had hidden away back in the hills, and Elvin would be a man to be reckoned with. A man with that kind of money could write his own ticket. (And by the way, if you think Elvin and Alvin sounds ridiculous, how do you think our sister Alvinia felt? Our folks were good people, but kind of unimaginative in the naming department.)

Unfortunately, Rose wasn’t in a hurry to get hitched. To tell the truth, I think she scared most of the young fellers to death. I know she scared me. She worked in the fields as hard as any man, and took no guff from anybody. She was tall and strong, and she had a fierce kind of personality that made her even more intimidating. She didn’t seem too impressed with Elvin’s flashy ways, and she was death on drinking, so him running so much ‘shine wasn’t making it any easier.

“Alvin,” Elvin told me, “I ain’t never seen a woman so down on a man making a living. Men are going to drink. At least the ‘shine I cook is good, and not that busthead swill that killed her brother.”

Then the war ended, and John Andrews came home. Rose and him had had an understanding, until he’d left for France with Pershing. She’d given him up when his rare letters stopped coming altogether, especially after the news about the Marne, and Belleau Wood. Everybody just assumed he was dead, right up until he stepped off the train in Cumberland. Rose was some put out with John, but when Elvin heard through the grapevine that John was going to call on her anyway, he sent me along to spy things out and make sure she was as mad as she seemed.

“Get up close enough you can hear, but don’t let them see you,” Elvin said. “I ain’t looking to get on her bad side, but I want to know where things stand.”

So that was how I come to be hiding in the bushes along the side of Rose’s daddy’s yard when John Andrews come to call. He come walking down the road in his uniform, with a couple important-looking medals hanging off him, looking like Black Jack Pershing himself. He wasn’t big, not more than half-again bigger than me, and I was scrawny in them days, but he seemed to take up an awful lot of space for such a little feller. He come sauntering along with a bunch of flowers in his hand.

Rose was sitting on the porch with her momma and daddy, and John walked right up to the bottom step. “Evening Rose. Evening Mister and Missus LeRoy.”

“Why daddy, look who it is. If it isn’t John Andrews the heroic Kentucky fighting man. We all thought you were dead, John. Either that, or taken up with one of those fancy French gals. Why else would you stop writing, and after all we’d said before you left.”

“Rose, darlin’, I just didn’t think there was any way I was going to survive. I felt like you was waiting on a ghost, and so I gave you up. But I’m back now, back and in one piece.”

“Don’t you ‘Rose darling’ me, John Andrews,” said Rose, coming down off the porch like a scalded cat and stepping up nose-to-nose with him with her fists on her hips, “I’m not your ‘darlin’, not anymore, and it’s your own fault. I’d have waited until hell froze over for you to come back, but you couldn’t even bother to write, over there, having your big adventure. When you stopped writing, was it me you were thinking of, or was it those French maddymoselles?”
“Now you need to stop that line, before you make me mad,” John said, as he took a step back. “You know there ain’t no woman for me but you, not then, not now, and not ever. I was too busy trying not to get shot or gassed or bayonetted, to have time to think about women.”

“Well, I know one woman you should have taken time to think about!” she snapped, stepping right into him. Now everyone in those mountains knew that John Andrews was a hard man, but it was him that backed away. Like I said, Rose was an intimidating woman. “You think you’re going to waltz in here with a few medals on your chest, and I’m just going to come running, well you’ve got another think coming. You’re not the only bull in these fields, you know.” She kept right on walking into him, backing him up, right toward where I was hid out, so everything they said got clearer and clearer.

“Well now, what the hell are . . .”

“Don’t you think that kind of salty language will work on me! That sort of thing may impress those half-wit friends of yours, but it carries no water with me!”

“Now Rose, I didn’t mean . . .”

“I know what you meant, and I don’t care. I cried myself to sleep for weeks over you. Well, I’m all cried out. Now I’m just mad, so you’d better get used to it, or stop coming around!”

I looked up toward the house to see how Rose’s folks was taking this. They were drinking sweet tea and enjoying the show.
Out in the yard, Rose was still going after John like a hound after a coon, and he was starting to look as eager to get away as that coon. As he backed away, he said, “Now Rose, don’t go saying nothing you’ll be sorry for later . . .”

“The only thing I’ll be sorry about is that I’m too much of a lady to tell you what I really think.”

Well, there’s only so much abuse a man can take, and he’d had enough. He stepped forward and grabbed hold of her, and pulled her toward him to kiss her quiet, like I’ve seen them do in the pictures. The only thing he accomplished was to add velocity to the knee she fired like a mortar shell into his . . . well you get the point. John certainly did. He let out a high-pitched groan as his eyes rolled back in his head, and he changed from pulling her to him to clinging to her for support. Like I said, she took no guff from no one.

Despite myself, I let out a groan in sympathy, but they were so intent on each other that neither noticed. I didn’t reckon he’d be much competition to Elvin, at least not for a while.

John had recovered himself enough to let go of Rose, and stood gagging and retching, hands on his knees. “Good God Rose,” he gasped, “if you hate me that much, couldn’t you just shoot me?”

“I don’t hate you John,” she smiled, as she petted his back like he was her dog. “I just don’t want you thinking you can just waltz in here like Douglas Fairbanks and sweep me off my feet. If you want back in my good graces, you’ve got some work to do. You can start by walking me to church next Sunday.”

So John Andrews staggered down the road and up the mountain to his cabin, those flowers wilting in his hand, and Rose LeRoy stood there watching him go. Then she turned and stared daggers at the brush where I was hiding. She didn’t say nothing, but I tell you, that look made my blood run cold. I wanted no part in getting on the bad side of that woman. Eventually, she went off to work in the garden, humming to herself as she hoed weeds from the rows of corn.
Once the coast was clear, I slid out for a rondeevoo with Elvin. He laughed and laughed when he heard about that kick.

“Hot damn, Alvin boy!” Elvin gloated. “You know who the big bull in these fields is, don’t you? Old John Andrews better hunt himself up another heifer, or this bull’s going to give him the horn. ‘Course, from the sound of that kick, she may have done pulled his horns in for him already.”

“They say he’s a bad man to cross, Elvin.”

Elvin rolled his eyes, “Hell, boy, you heard Rose. He ain’t got nothing to offer but some army tinware, and she ain’t impressed. She knows he ain’t got a pot to piss in. I won’t have to cross him. It’s him should worry about crossing me.”
I wasn’t so sure. Elvin hadn’t seen the way she looked at John when his back was turned, walking away.

 

Okay, so you know you want more. So go the the Tributaries website and get more. You’ll be glad you did.