Tachycardia and Other Tales
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14 Written by Carl Perkins, released 1954
15 Written by Dave Bartholomew, Peark King, Anita Steinman, released 1957
16 Written by Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman, released 1962
17 Written by Mark James, released 1969
18 Written by Jerry Reed, released 1968
19 Written by Fred Rose and Zeb Turner, released 1961
20 Written by Richard Mullins, 1971
21 Written by Dallas Frazier, released 1971
22 Written by Bill Gaither, released 1971
23 Written by Mosie Lister, released 1960
24 Written by Stuart K. Hine, released 1966
25 Written by Richard Howard, released 1960
26 Written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, released 1956
27 Written by Elvis Presley, Vera Matson, and Victor Young, released 1956.
28 Written by Don Robertson, released 1963
29 Written by Aaron Schroeder and Sydney Wyche, released 1958
30 Written by Dennis Linde, released 1972
31 Written by Hugo Peretti, Luigi Creatore, George David Weiss, released 1961
32 Written by Paul Anka, Claude Francois, Jacques Revaux, released 1971
Pocahontas Purgatory
Pocahontas County, West Virginia is a remote and rugged place, especially by back East standards. Founded as part of Virginia in 1821 and named after Powhatan’s daughter and John Smith’s fabled savior, its geography made it a natural dividing line when West Virginia seceded in the midst of the war in 1863. With a population of 9,000 people spread out over 940 square miles, it is three times the size of New York City and 2,500 times less populated while over sixty percent of its land owned by the federal or state government. It has the highest average elevation of any county east of the Mississippi and is known as “the birthplace of rivers” given that eight waterways have their headwaters within its borders. All of this space makes for some unique features and folks.
The National Radio Observatory in the town of Greenbank uses enormous telescopes to listen for signs of intelligent life in our universe while blasting Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” into the cosmos as the opening to an eight minute “Welcome to Earth” message that has been looping since the fifties. To increase the effectiveness of intergalactic communication, the government created the National Radio Quiet Zone which limits radio reception and cell service throughout the surrounding area. This lack of connectivity adds to the experience of tourists seeking solitude while creating angst amongst teenagers prevented from posting selfies on the slopes of the nearby Snowshoe ski resort. It is the birthplace of Pearl S. Buck, the 1938 Nobel Prize winner for Literature and the author the 1932 Pulitzer Prize winning work, “The Good Earth.” The county is the resting place of William Luther Pierce who penned “The Turner Diaries” which became the manifesto for The National Alliance, his white supremacist group that he headquartered from his home in Hillsboro until his death in 2002.
Some of the more remote parts of the county are within the Monongahela National Forest and accessed only by the Highland Scenic Highway, often impassable in the winter months. The road has a series of overlooks with pull- offs that provide scenic views for motorists and motorcyclists and are quite popular with viewers of fall foliage. Among the most beautiful stops is the Big Spruce Overlook, which has an expansive view of backcountry conifers and hardwoods. It also has a steep drop with dense foliage that obscures a clearing that is a few thousand feet below where there is a very old forest service cabin that on this particular winter night is being pounded with snow. Inside this cabin is Purgatory. And there in Purgatory together- are John Brown and Sid Hatfield.
“If someone is going to come, they won’t come out in this” said John to Sid who was standing at the window, smoking a hand rolled cigarette while watching the snow pile up outside. “Why don’t you join me at the table for some scripture reading?”
Sid Hatfield, who was murdered in 1921 at the age of 28, had been here for 97 years, suspended at the age he was at the time of his death. He turned away from the door and smiled a beautifully awful grin of gold and rotten teeth which had earned him the moniker “Smiling Sid” when he was alive. He was short and slight, 5’ 7” and 140 pounds, but seemed even more so without his ever-present twin side arms that gave him his other nickname of “Two-gun Sid” when he was the sheriff of Matewan in Mingo county. Hatfield, who was not kin to Devil Anse and who was more found of drinking and gambling than reading stated, “No thanks. How about some cards?”
“You cheat too much” replied the 59-year-old Brown who was sitting at the table in front of his Bible which was open to the book of Psalms. Rawboned and lanky, he always looked as if he barely fit in the chair and his high forehead and long beard, enhanced by the light from the oil lamp on the table, accentuated his height. His suit jacket was too short in the sleeves and his pants were too short in the cuff. He often thought back to the first seventy years that he was here in between worlds, when he had the cabin to himself and had more time for his studies, but he had taken on saving Sid’s soul as an extension of the callings he heard before his hanging in 1859.
“We can study Revelations, if you like,” he stated knowingly after a century of developing dysfunctional patterns that it was Sid’s favorite.
“Oh, Johnny, you know what I like,” Sid quipped, “but not now. Tonight, I am longing for whiskey and women.”
He made his way across the 12’ by 20’ foot cabin, tossed his tobacco pouch onto his bunk, and turned to the table where he sat across from John who replied, “Well, I can’t help you there.”
“What about a Christmas story?” Sid asked, “especially with it being so close and all.”
“What makes you think it is Christmas time?” John inquired.
“The days are short, but still getting shorter, so it’s damn near the solstice which is right before Christmas. And you Christians stole the holiday from the pagans” reasoned Sid.
John sat back in the chair, closed his Bible, and went in on this topic one more time.
“You are assuming that we are in the northern hemisphere, but according to Dante Alighieri, who wrote the most descriptive secular account of Purgatory as part of his “Divine Comedy” back in 1300, we must be in the southern hemisphere. When Lucifer fell from Heaven, he fell with such force that he when he struck the Earth at Jerusalem he continued falling until he hit the center of the Earth creating the nine levels of Hell. The bedrock that he displaced with his fall created a mountain on the opposite side of the Earth, and this mountain makes up the nine levels of Purgatory. The first two levels of which are for those excommunicated from the church and for those who repented on their deathbeds. The next seven are dedicated to the seven deadly sins, which are……”
“Pride, Envy, Anger, Sloth, Gluttony, Avarice and Lust” monotoned Sid.
“That’s correct. After traversing the nine levels of Hell, Dante who is accompanied by the Roman poet Virgil, is marked on the forehead with seven P’s, one for each peccatum, or sin. These are wiped away by the angels as they ascend through each level of Mount Purgatory together until Virgil leaves Dante with his beloved Beatrice and together, they continue through Paradiso together,” recited John in a cadence he unconsciously slipped into when preaching.
“I got so many problems with that story” stated Sid. “The sun rises over there, so that’s East, no matter where you are in the world. Right now it’s the dead of winter and Orion is over there, just like it was, low in the sky late in the year back home, so that’s gotta be South. That ridge over yonder looks like a goddamn Appalachian mountain to me and not your Mount Purgatory. We are down in a holler, not far from home!”
“The Appalachians are beautiful mountains and made for insurgency” stated Brown
. “My plan was that after we captured the arms at Harper’s Ferry that the slaves would rise up. I would then lead them, along with the abolitionists, in a guerilla campaign using those mountains as cover to extend the battle while we could gain political support against our enemy.”
“Well, you started the war alright, and the mountains were the only place the Union could win early on. Hell, even McClelland won battles up in the mountains, and he always wanted to politic more than he ever wanted to fight. Yup, the Rebs got their asses kicked up there, even Bobby Lee!” remembered Sid.
“Robert E. Lee. He was formidable” recalled John, “he defeated us soundly there in the firehouse near the armory.”
“Well don’t worry, brother” they were writing songs about you before they started building statues of him!”
A smile came across John’s face and he leaned in like Ilsa Lund asking Sam to play it, “Sing it for me once will you?”
“Sing that song that you said the soldier’s used to sing about me!”
Sid sat upright, started swinging his right arm while holding his cigarette like a drum major holds a baton and broke into “John Brown’s Body”,
“John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave”
“John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering…..”
“Hey! Whoa! Stop!” John yelled while waving his long arms wildly. “We have talked about this remember?!? I am most certainly not a-mouldering in any grave. I am here. With you. Start on the second verse! And leave out the part about my pet lambs too, I was a terrible farmer!”
“Sorry, I forgot,” went Sid without losing any enthusiasm and continuing to swing his arm like a fool, while he went straight into the next verse.
“He’s gone to be a soldier in the Army of the Lord”
“He’s gone to be a soldier in the Army of the Lord”
“He’s gone to be a soldier in the Army of the Lord”
“His soul is marching on”
“Glory, glory, hallelujah”
Glory, glory, hallelujah”
“Glory, glory, hallelujah”
“His soul is marching on”
“Thanks!” exclaimed John Brown as he leaned back in the chair and reflected on the only venture of his adult life that was remotely successful. It was also successful in getting him killed.
“Now back to this Allegro fellow” said Sid.
“Alighieri!” corrected the Captain.
“The only hole I went down was a coal mine and it creeped me out so much that I got the hell outta there. I was in there long enough to get some coal dust on my forehead, but nobody ever wrote the letter P on it! The mine spilled out at the base of a mountain that I knew was paradise because Jessie lived up on top of it. Do you expect me to believe that there is a giant hole in Jerusalem when all you ever read about in the Bible are folks going up on mountains? And last I heard, there ain’t nothing in the ground over there in Palestine that you can burn for fuel, so why, in that part of the world, would there be a big hole in the ground! Could you imagine how screwed up the middle east would be if there was a run on mining or drilling like we had back home?”
“And as for this place, it don’t seem to me like we are climbing anywhere! All I know is that I have been sitting here, with you, for a hundred damn years. And Jessie, my Beatrice, ain’t nowhere ‘round!”
He went on with the last part of escalating rant, “That’s the problem with you religious types! You will believe anything written down in any old book!”
Captain John Brown erupted as he rose to his feet, “Dante Allegro, I mean Alighieri, was a secular author who wrote a comedy! Not in Latin, but in his native tongue. And it is certainly not the word of God! Only the Bible is the word of God!”
“Then what do the preachers say about it?” yelled back Sid.
John sat back down and took a moment to compose himself and then began. “The most complete work on Purgatory from the church comes from The Treatise on Purgatory from Saint Catherine from Genoa. She was a nun who lived at the turn of the 16th century and given that women of the day were not allowed to create scholarly works for the church, her writings were hidden during her life and discovered forty years after her death. Once they were found, the were reviewed by Vatican scholars and used to drive her canonization. She felt that souls in Purgatory were placed there by God without the ability to reflect on why they were there. She wrote that the souls of Purgatory are clean, yet merely covered with the rust of sin that will be worn by the fires of Purgatory as she thought rust was removed by the sun in the physical world. Souls in Purgatory are free of sin at the actual time of their death and merely keep the essence of their sins on them as opposed to those in Hell who have sin in their heart at the moment of their death. These souls remain in Purgatory, longing to please God, until the rust is burned away, and they are able to join the kingdom of Heaven.
I can even recall her prayer” he said before beginning in prayer,
“O Most compassionate Jesus, have mercy on the souls detained in Purgatory, for whose redemption Thou didst take upon Thyself.....”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, that’s enough there preacher man,” interrupted Sid.
“So, the best stuff they have was written by a woman who had to keep it quiet while she was alive. And her whole deal was that the sun knocks off the rust and has to be burned off. Maybe that’s why that damn fire over there never goes out” he said pointing to the fireplace that never burned out nor needed new wood.
“I certainly feel like you and I have been here reflecting on all the shit we did, and all the people we killed, even if it was for a good cause or if it was fighting for folks who couldn’t fight for their ‘selves. And you mean to tell me, that if I had died that day in Matewan when I blew that Baldwin’s head off, instead of the day they gunned me down on the courthouse steps over in Welch, that I’d be in Hell?! And what about you? You’d be in Hell if you died the day you were murdering folks in Harper’s Ferry instead getting strung up, over in Charlestown, after a trial? Covered in coal dust, I mean covered in rust?!”
“ I am not a murderer!” screamed John Brown.
Sid pulled from his cigarette. The only thing he liked about Purgatory was that like the fireplace, his cigarette never burned out either. He took a long draw, exhaled, and stretched a five syllable word into ten.
“Pottawatomie” he said at John Brown.
John Brown leaned back and closed his eyes and went to a place in his mind that he had been compartmentalizing for over 160 years. When he reopened his eyes, Sid Hatfield felt the same power that has compelled people to die for his causes, write songs and essays about him, paint his likeness on walls in the Kansas statehouse and put him on album covers.
“Bleeding Kansas and Potawatomie Creek were a very unique time” John Brown rationalized, “and should not be taken out of context. They attacked us first and I was not satisfied with the abolitionists retaliation. Everything I did there I did for the oppressed and in the name of God. Besides, I didn’t kill anyone in Kansas.”
“You did one better” said Sid, “you directed folks to kill other folks. Hell, you told your own boys to pull men out of their homes and chop ‘em up with broadswords! And then, AND THEN, you shot ‘em!”
“The men at Pottawatomie were already dead when I shot them.” said the Captain with a straight face.
“What the…?” Sid stuttered, “that don’t make no sense!”
John Brown repeated his statement as if he was back on the stand in Charlestown, “They were already dead when I shot ‘em.”
“Well then, what about Harper’s Ferry?” How many lives were you responsible for there?” Seventeen?
“That’s right, seventeen people died at Harper’s Ferry and two of them were my own sons. But everything I did at Harper’s Ferry was for the oppressed in the name of God! I did it in the name of the Lord!”
“What about George Washington?” asked Sid. “Didn’t you take George Washington’s nephew as a hostage? And when you found out he was wearing George’s sword, you took it from him and wore it on your hip while you were barking out orders for your gang to fend of Robert E. Lee and his boys?”
“ I did take President Washington’s sword for my own in the fog of the fight. I thought it might feed the spirit of my men” confessed Brown.
“Or your ego, perhaps?” questioned Hatfield.
“ I committed atrocities on behalf of those oppressed in the name of God. It is no secret that I did. That is why I hanged! And that is why I remain in a place like this, with the likes of a heathen like you! I killed people for a noble cause in aggression not sanctioned by the state! That is why I am in Purgatory! The powers at be have yet to reconcile that concept, for me and for those who will come after me! It is clear that they have yet to figure out how to manage divine violence because if they had come to a conclusion I would be in Heaven. Or Hell. But I would not still be here with you!”
Sid sat down and stared off into space. Somehow, after a ninety-seven-year relationship he had heard a new argument and he was yet sure what to make of it.
Brown was on a roll and he kept going. “At least I am not a murderous atheist and adulterer like you!”
“Wait a minute you old bastard,” went Sid, “I killed people who were messing with my people! Some of my people were local folks, some Dego, some of ‘em were Black and even Polack. People I was sworn to protect! I gave those Baldwin- Felts every chance to get out of town and when they didn’t, me and my boys got ‘em.”
“So, you are saying you directed other men to commit murder while you accuse me of doing the same?! While you yourself murdered three people?”