The Fire on Poteau Mountain by Stan Duncan

Author:Stan Duncan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Adelaide Books

DANCING TO CHURCH MUSIC

A NOVELLA

ONE

PANNY MINTON WAS BORN IN A RIVER. In the beginning it wasn’t really a river, just a trickle, then a creek, then eventually it wound its way down the mountain and became a river. It was like the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God, through the middle of time, and into the streets of Heavener. On one side there were trees of fruit that were picked and cooked and canned and given away to friends and family and folks at church as gifts of love and grace and gratitude for the bounty of the river. On the other side were trees of life, whose leaves were made for healing. When the stream passed through them it twisted in and around the valley for about a half a mile further until it merged into the Poteau River and together they both poured into the valley and came out right along the back side of Panny Minton’s parents’ house, where he came to be born.

Panny’s mother, Mary, had inherited that property, and she always loved it. It ran up the side of Standpipe Hill and looked down over the valley. From where their house stood, not far off in the distance they could see the west end of Hontubby Falls, buried today by decades of growth and neglect, but it was part of a wilderness playground when she was young and childless and very much in love. It would probably have been considered a valuable location if you were rich and could build a big house on it, but it was awful for farming because the hill was too rocky and the land by the river was too marshy and sandy. What redeemed it for Mary was the river itself which was shallow and wide where they lived, and she could wade out through it, and bathe in it, and she even fished out of it with a set of trot lines that she ran across it during some of their long burning summers. She strung them from a tree on the far side of the river to their boat dock on this side, which was part of the reason why Panny came to be born there.

Mary loved that river. Her parents had moved out by it when she was just a child, and the depression was driving people down from the city. It often was her only companion when the roads were too muddy or flooded or rutted. All her life she could imagine living nowhere else but on the river, even when she grew old enough that she could have moved away. It had a claim on her that was almost erotic, and no matter what she did each day, or how cold it got, she always managed to find some time to at least sit on the dock at the edge of the river and touch it and feel it as it passed.

Bobby Minton had never known anyone like Mary.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.