Photo of the author's great-grandmother and great-great-grandmother, undated

My in-progress batch of family-inspired historical fiction stories tracks a clan of Blue Ridge mountaineers across generations, including this account from Virginia “Jincy” Clatterbuck (approx. 6,600 words, unpublished).

Excerpt from

THE CORNSHUCK DOLLY

by 

M. Jane Taylor

Lady stamps her feet and flares her nostrils like it’s another storm a-coming, though the sky ain’t show no sign as of yet. Git-up! I tell her and pop the reins, and then her and me and the baby set forth down the rimy hillside towards the ice-capped eastern ridgeline and the frigid yeller sun what is finally jist now a-rising, whilst it’s been light out for well-nigh two hours.

We pick our way southwards along Copperhead Crick Road, a narrow and winding trail what hugs tight to the side of Widders Ridge, from whence it snakes down, down, down through Clatterbuck Gap, down towards Whistlepig Holler, with the hill on the one side, and the deep gorge on t’other, and here the road twists up and down and up agin, then down and down round Horseshoe Bend—whither I call out to Lady, Whoa girl! Who-a! and steer her leftways to the middle of the path, or anyways what I divine to be the path, as the passage here can prove troublesome enough to navigate by wagon, beast, or foot even when it is not all mired by snow, and many a poor traveler has tumbled to their doom upon the jagged rocks below where the icy crick flows and they say that haints abide.

Snowdrifts blanket the holler, whilst the air swirls with powder crystals, and the barren trees glisten with hoarfrost. All sound is muffled. The drumbeat of the woodpecker. The prattle of the crick. The trill of the cardinal, a flash of red … and erelong the memory of Gramaw Sooky comes back to me, a-crooning and rocking me in her chair by the fire, and I sing to myself and the baby as we ride—

Will the circle be unbroken

By and by, oh by and by?

***

Photo of the author's uncles with shotguns, circa 1946

Jincy’s ten-year-old son Elvin receives a special gift (approx. 6,000 words, unpublished).

Excerpt from

CAP’M POTSHOT

by

M. Jane Taylor

Go on shoot it! Pap shoves the gun at me.

Shoot it where? I ask.

Pap’s a-chugging whiskey from his jug. Anywheres, he answers. O’er yonder there—he says, pointing towards Abe atop the shithouse—that old boy ’tacked me agin and cut up my thighs, when I goed to shovel out the henhouse t’other day! Go on murder that sonabitch!

I have never fired a shotgun, but I know how to shoot and have shot Pap’s hog rifle a number of times, and so I take and shoulder Cap’m Potshot and pull the hammers to full cock. But Cap’m Potshot is bigger and heavier than the hog rifle, and I am too small to wield it properly, I have got to tilt way back and try and balance it with the buttstock braced aginst my upper arm, where there is not much meat for cushion.

Hold ’er steady, Pap instructs me. Don’t put no death grip on it!

I drawl a breath in and point the barrels at the shithouse, then settle the bead smack-dab on Abe’s red cockscomb.      

***

Photo of the author's mother (third from left), aunts, and uncle in fodder field, circa 1945

Elvin’s eldest child Tildy weaves this tale of rural electrification in Southwest Virginia (approx. 3,500 words, unpublished).

Excerpt from

APPALACHIAN POWER

by

M. Jane Taylor

The juice don’t never git tard!

Daddy has got the Sears catalog open to the warshin' machine ad.

And this here Maytag, he tells Mama—tapping the page with his bony finger—why it’ll do all the work!

Mama shakes her head. She is mending my blue dress what got snagged and tore on a juice-pole splinter. You know we canny ’ford no warsher, Elvin! she sighs. We canny ’ford no fifty-cent pot to piss in!

Us kids, meantime, is jist having ourselves a ball as we flip the light switch off and on and off and on and off and—

Stop that! Mama and Daddy both tell us at the same time.

So I flip the switch back on agin, and then I stand in the middle of the floor in my petticoat and gaze upwards into the nekkid lightbulb what dangles down from a ceiling beam, till hot-scorching teardrops trickle down my cheekbones, and the ember phantom of the orange glowing wire is seared onto my sore and itchy eyeballs.

Daddy shuts the catalog and goes outside to smoke.

***

Photo of the author and her mother, circa 1973

Tildy’s daughter Cricket is pulled between worlds as she reckons with her family’s legacy (approx. 11,000 words, unpublished).

Excerpt from

MAMA SNAKE

by

M. Jane Taylor

When I was a baby just learning to walk, my family rode out to visit my brother Kyle who was incarcerated at a forestry camp for male juvenile offenders, and along the way, we stopped at the Devils Backbone overlook along the Maryland-West Virginia line. This was my first time viewing the mountains, and I was so enthralled by the sight of those dusky blue peaks that I tore off running across the rocky outcrop and disappeared into the overgrown weeds and brush. My mother went hysterical—yet she could not bring herself to go after me for her dread of snakes—and to this day she likes to recount this story and warrants that if my father hadn’t tracked me down and snared me, then I sure as shit would have been struck by a timbler rattler or plummeted to my death off the ridge.

Years later, I did get bit by a snake when Danny and me were exploring a tumbledown barn off Whiskey Bottom Road, and I thought it was just a bee sting until we got back to Danny’s pickup truck and I pulled down my sock to reveal two crimson holes in my calf. It bled and swelled some, but it wasn’t too bad. I figured it was probably a ratsnake. Then the next day, I happened to mention it to Danny’s stepfather who hunts and all, and he had a look at the wound and informed me that it was from a venemous snake, likely a copperhead or a cottonmouth. It turns out that pit vipers have a limited supply of venom and will sometimes chomp with what they call a dry bite, wherein no poison is injected.

Anyhow, I guess I got lucky.

***