by Ninie Hammon
The knobs that stood sentinel in Callison County set it apart from surrounding counties where thoroughbred colts played tag in paddocks guarded by miles of pristine white fences. That’s what the tourists came to see; that’s how the world pictured The Bluegrass State. But Billy Joe knew the real heart of Kentucky beat in its center, right here in Callison County. And he felt genuinely sorry for the rubber-neckers who missed it, who drove down the interstates gawking at horse farms and blew right by the take-your-breath-away beauty just a few miles away, snuggled up next to country lanes like Glen Cove Road.
A tattered wisp of morning mist lingered just above the trees on top of the knob high above Billy Joe’s head. Glen Cove Hollow spread out before him like a just-completed oil painting with the brush strokes sparkling wet in the morning sun. He felt a sudden lump in his throat and an ache of inexplicable longing—for what, he couldn’t say.
A sea of oak, sumac, hickory, maple, dogwood and redbud trees lapped up the sides of the valley, their varying green hues a dappled mosaic in the morning breeze. A picture frame of chocolate-brown, just-tilled earth bordered two fields of burley tobacco that had ripened early, with broad leaves so bright lemon-yellow they were almost fluorescent. Dense, tangled soybeans cuddled up beside corn stalks standing at attention in rows of military precision. Spotted Holstein dairy cattle grazed in one pasture; sheep stood out like white polka dots in another.
Meandering down Glen Cove like a lazy snake, the north fork of the Rolling Fork River was wide and deep here, spanned by a walking bridge near the road. Wooden steps, sun-bleached a shiny gray, led up 15 feet to a landing where a narrow, slat bridge with rope handrails hung swaying in the wind.
Billy Joe’s daughter, Kelsey, had walked from their trailer house on the far side of the river across that bridge every day to wait for the school bus that pulled off the road to pick her up just about where he was now standing.
The trailer wasn’t there anymore, of course. After they moved out five years ago, it had sat empty for a long time. Then he drove by one day and it was gone. Apparently, someone had stolen it. Billy Joe figured if they wanted the thing bad enough to haul it two miles downstream to the gravel bar to get it across the river, they were more than welcome to it.
He’d bought it used right after he and Becky got married 15 years ago, snagged it at an auction in Bowling Green. Two tiny bedrooms, a combination kitchen/dining room/living room, and a single bath—with running water. The Callison County Water District lines hadn’t come this far out, but there was a spring on the back of the property. The RECC, Rural Electric Cooperative Corporation, had provided electricity, but they didn’t own a television set. No phone, either. South Central Bell had quoted them a price to run a line from their nearest neighbor on the other side of the knob, but the figure was far more than they could pay. There had been no sewer system, either. They couldn’t afford to dig a proper septic tank, so Billy Joe had laid a pipe from the trailer that emptied into the river downstream.
Billy Joe squeezed his eyes shut for a moment to ease the strain of squinting into the morning sun and the images were just as vivid in his mind as out there in the real world. But with his eyes closed, the trailer house was still there on the other side of the walking bridge, a flower garden out front and a vegetable garden out back with a nearby clothes line where Becky always left a pair of his old overalls hanging to flap in the wind. She said it helped keep the birds and the deer out of the garden.
He could see Becky, too, washing dishes beneath the window with red chintz curtains the night he came home from the tavern in Crawford after his first meeting with Bubba Jamison. She was singing along with Dolly Parton on the radio, “I-I-I will always love you-oo-oo,” her belly so big with Bethany she couldn’t get close enough to the sink to keep from dribbling a trail of water with every dish she handed him to dry.
Becky was a beautiful woman, wholesome, like her picture belonged on the front of a cereal box. Short, honey blond hair that curled around the pink “chipmunk cheeks” she hated, big brown eyes framed by lashes so long and thick they looked artificial, and a small, slender, delicate body—well, most of the time it was small. And when she was pregnant, there was a glow about Becky that took Billy Joe’s breath away. In fact, he’d been staring at that glow as he wiped plates with the red checkered dish towel, drying each dish slowly while he tried to figure out how to tell her what had happened to him that night.
“What?” Becky had cocked her head to one side. “What’re you staring at? You got the funniest look on your face, Billy Joe. Is somethin’ wrong?”
“I’m staring at you ’cause you’re so da-gone pretty, that’s what.” He leaned over and kissed the tip of her nose. “There’s nothing wrong.” A heartbeat pause. “But … ” Then he took a deep breath and launched into the story.
He’d stopped in Crawford at the tavern for a beer after he got off work from his part-time job stocking groceries at Brewster Market. Crawford was a town of 500 to 600 people about six miles from their trailer. The tavern there had a hard-earned and well-deserved reputation for being the roughest bar in the county. Brawls were a fairly regular occurrence. Squire Boone’s customers were tough men who worked and drank hard, smoked, spit, and didn’t fancy strangers.
Billy Joe had gone there a couple of times with his daddy when he was a boy and the place had changed little in the 20 years since.
Same 10-point buck trophy hanging behind the bar, its cloudy marble eyes staring at everything and nothing, its rack knit together with a fine lace of dusty spider webs.
Same lame jokes about the trophy: “That buck sure musta been movin’ when it hit that wall!”
Same quarter-sawn, white oak bar, worn smooth by four generations of elbows; same bar stools with seats worn shiny by an equal number of backsides.
The sturdy-as-an-anvil wooden tables and mismatched chairs had survived decades of mayhem to rest on a floor where food and beer had been spilled every night for more than a century. Boone maintained that one of these days he aimed to pry up a piece of that floor, take it home to Martha and get her to put it in a big pot of hot water and make soup.
Boone’s family had owned and operated the tavern since it opened sometime in the late 1800s. Though the family wasn’t related in any way to the famous Kentucky frontiersman, Boone’s parents had named him Squire, after Daniel Boone’s father.
A stout, ruddy man whose fiery red hair had gone pure white, Boone’s claim to fame was a glass eye—courtesy of a broken-beer-bottle fight—that he pretended to gouge out and then pop into his mouth like a breath mint whenever strangers happened into his establishment. His only son had been killed in Vietnam when the Bardstown National Guard Unit lost 45 men in a firefight on June 9, 1969. He proudly displayed the boy’s picture in uniform on the wall by the pot-bellied wood stove.
“Evenin’, Squire,” Billy Joe said as he stepped up to the bar and politely removed his University of Kentucky cap. Billy Joe bled Wildcat blue. “Guess I’ll have me a Bud.”
The inn-keeper reached for a mug. “Martha was serving at St. Dominic’s fish fry Thursday and we seen you and Becky. That girl looks like she’s ’bout ready to pop.”
Billy Joe’s smile planted dimples in his cheeks so deep you could have scooped grits out of them. “It’ll be another couple of weeks yet. We’re hoping for a boy this time.”
Somebody plunked a quarter into the juke box and selected Alabama’s latest hit. “Oh, play me some mountain music, like grandma and grandpa used to play … ” wailed from the machine in the corner as he paid for his beer.
Billy Joe made his way through the haze of cigarette smoke toward the back of the bar where the music wasn’t so loud and took a seat just as the conversation about movies ended with the comment, “My wife dragged me to Bardstown to see that movie, E.T. Now don’t you laugh, but when them kids on bicycles started flying, I’s so surprised I liked to a’wet my pants.”
Then the group of men around the table started talkin
g about dope. Marijuana was a topic of endless discussion in Callison County. Almost everybody knew somebody who was involved in it. Or pretended they were involved. Or pretended they weren’t.
“A fellow got busted last week for growing dope on the back of my brother Roy’s farm,” said a beer-bellied man wearing a greasy John Deere cap. He lifted the cold mug of beer to his lips with his good left hand. The right had been mangled so badly by a threshing machine when he was a teenager that it hung limp and useless from his wrist. “Scared the bejeebers out of Roy. He figures the law’s bound to come knockin’ on his door any day now, but he didn’t know nothin’ ’bout that dope being there.”
“Or he made out like he didn’t know,” said a little man in a red-and-black checked shirt who was always angling for a fight.
“It’s a big farm. A fella can’t keep track of ever inch of it.”
“’Pears to me,” drawled an old man with white hair and big ears, in a Georgia accent as thick as it had been the day he left Macon for Kentucky sometime during the Eisenhower administration, “that the dopers is gettin’ thicker ’round heah than ticks on a hound dog.”
“Ya think?” sneered the man in the checked shirt.
“I seen in the paper where the sheriff found a whole field of dope, more’n two acres of it!” the man in the John Deere cap continued. “Said the deputies cut it down by hand—musta took ’em a couple of days—and hauled the whole lot of it to the landfill and burned it.”
“Bet half the teenagers in Callison County was standin’ down wind.” Billy Joe said.
There was a beat of silence before the old man brayed a donkey laugh that spewed beer out his nose and mouth all over the hostile little man’s face and checked shirt. He jumped up, so livid he was dancing in place, spitting cuss words the way a welding torch spits sparks. The others burst out laughing at his response and pretty soon everybody on that side of the room was roaring right along with them.
When the laughter finally died down, the conversation heated up.
“I’m here to tell you, those boys raising dope are making so much money they’re out burying suitcases full of $20 bills in the woods ’cause they can’t spend it all,” a fat, blowhard townie from Brewster said. The Crawford boys wondered how come he drove all the way to Boone’s two or three times a week just to have a beer, but Billy Joe had figured out why. He’d met the man’s wife; that woman had a face would curdle new milk.
“With pot selling for what it does on the street in Louisville these days”—the townie had no idea what pot sold for in Louisville, but he fancied himself an expert on everything—“they don’t have to grow a whole lot of it to make a killing. Ain’t no police goin’ to find every single plant.”
“I don’t see what all the fuss is about,” Billy Joe said. He was addressing the men seated at his table but the tavern was crowded that night and the dope conversation had drawn the attention of just about everybody there. “Dope money spends the same as your money and my money, don’t it? I haven’t seen any businesses turning it down. Have you?”
The men shook their heads. No, they hadn’t seen anybody in the county turn down dope money, no matter who was spending it or what they were buying with it.
“From where I’m sittin’, with a baby on the way and last year’s tobacco crop gone to black shank, making some easy money don’t exactly sound like a sharp stick in the eye.” Billy Joe took a sip of his beer and smiled his dimpled smile. “Shoot, I’d do it if I had the chance.”
“Now, don’t you be talking like that, B.J.!” the man in the John Deere cap snapped. He’d been a friend of Billy Joe’s father. “Blowing smoke about dopers and growing marijuana’s all well and good, but it’s something else again to talk about joining ’em! This here’s dangerous bidness. If the law don’t git you, some other doper will. I don’t reckon any of them boys is likely to die of old age.”
The conversation washed back and forth after that. By the end of the evening, most of the men had argued both for and against the county’s burgeoning marijuana industry. Billy Joe’d decided a long time ago he didn’t see any harm in it. His daddy hadn’t owned a still, but in his day he’d certainly bought more than his share of white lightning from those who did. The government was all the time trying to tell people how to live their lives, making first one thing and then another illegal. Growing marijuana was no different from making moonshine; you couldn’t blame a man for doing what never should have been against the law in the first place.
Billy Joe finally stood and set down his empty mug. He’d been nursing the same beer all evening; couldn’t be drinking up his paycheck with a baby coming. He said his goodbyes and stepped out into the warm night, hoping he wouldn’t have to go back in and get somebody with booster cables to jump-start the engine on his pickup. The truck needed a new alternator, but until he sold this year’s tobacco, he couldn’t afford one.
“You mean what you said in there, Billy Joe?”
The voice came out of the darkness. Billy Joe was so startled he whirled around ready for a fight. Heart pounding, he watched as a huge man moved out of the shadows next to the building and into the puddle of light cast by a lone bulb hanging high on a pole above the gravel parking lot.
If even half the stories about him were true, Bubba Jamison was one of the biggest dopers in the county. Billy Joe had never so much as exchanged a howdy-and-shake with the man and was surprised Bubba knew his name. He was even more surprised at Bubba’s size. Dressed in clean overalls and scuffed work boots, he was taller, broader and—well, meaner looking—than when Billy Joe had seen him at a distance.
“What I said about what?” B.J. stammered.
Bubba reached into the pocket of his chambray work shirt, pulled out a plug of Red Man chewing tobacco and bit off a hunk. The stillness around the big man gathered and settled. The air thickened, like the breath of a storm before the rain hits.
“I need men like you.” Bubba’s deep voice rumbled in his broad chest like it was bouncing around in an oil drum. He cocked his head toward the tavern. “There’s not a one of them farmers in there could pour water out of a boot if the instructions was on the heel. You’re a smart man. I’m looking for smart men.”
Billy Joe didn’t know what to say so he just kept his mouth shut. What had he ever done that had caught the attention, that had impressed someone like Bubba Jamison?
“Here’s what I’m offerin’. I teach you how it’s done so you raise good weed and don’t get caught. I’ll pay $500 a week starting out, more as we go along. End of the summer, you get a cut of whatever makes it to market. Anytime you want out, say the word and we’re quits.”
Bubba stepped up to him. Billy Joe was 6’1”, but Bubba towered over him. The huge man leaned so close Billy Joe could smell the wet Red Man on his breath. “I can make you a rich man, son. Richer’n your wildest dreams.”
Without another word, Bubba turned on his heel and crunched heavily across the gravel toward his custom Ford XLT Lariat pickup parked in a dark corner of the lot.
“You think on it and let me know when you make up your mind,” he tossed over his shoulder as he walked. Then he stopped and turned around, his face lit by the solitary light high up on the pole. “You don’t want the money, Billy Joe, I’ll find me somebody else who does. It don’t matter to me one way or the other. What you need to understand is that I can make a fortune with your help. And I can a fortune without it.”
Billy Joe got into his ancient Chevy pickup truck, sank down in the hole in the seat and banged the door shut three times before it caught. Then he sat in the silence that followed, trying to get his mind around Bubba’s proposition and what it could mean to his family’s future.
Billy Joe had not been born poor. He’d had college and career plans before he found himself with a wife and baby to support at age 18. With no marketable skills, he’d become a farmer. It was all he knew. He’d certainly never intended to spend his life barely eking out a living, but every year, his fin
ances were worse than the year before and Billy Joe could see no way to dig himself out of the hole.
He let out a big, shaky sigh and smiled a little. Ever since he was a kid, he’d heard folks talk about once-in-a-lifetime opportunities, but he’d never personally run across one. Until five minutes ago. With his heart hammering like a lunatic woodpecker in his chest, it was all he could do to grab hold of his excitement and rein it in so he could drive home at a reasonable speed. The tires on his truck were bald as a newborn baby’s butt; wouldn’t do to have a blowout. Not tonight!
As he told Becky the tale, he studied her face, but he couldn’t read her reaction. When he finished, she just looked at him, then reached out wordlessly, took the towel he was holding and dried her hands with it.
“What do you think?” he blurted out. “Five hundred dollars a week! That’s dang near more’n I make in a month.”
“No.”
That was all, just that one word hanging out there in the still air between them.
Not a soul who knew her would have described Becky Reynolds as a strong woman. She’d been 16 when she got pregnant and she and Billy Joe’d “had to get married.” She’d never spent a moment of her life standing on her own or thinking for herself. She hated confrontation and had only one time in their nine years of marriage failed to sail right along with whatever Billy Joe wanted to do. When he’d suggested they move to Louisville or Cincinnati or Nashville so he could get a factory job that paid better than farming, she’d been absolutely adamant. Callison County was home! Period.
Becky’s lower lip began to tremble and words tumbled out. “Billy Joe, I don’t want you to do this. Please tell me you’ll say no, that you’ll tell Bubba Jamison to go find somebody else to turn into a criminal and leave you and your family alone!”