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Bean Pole
My hometown was like any other. During summer, a highway fair would set up in the local K-mart parking lot for three days. Everyone shopped at the strip mall clothing store Clark’s. A river ran nearby and the only bridge that crossed it was a train trestle. Teenagers dared each other to cross. Broke fathers jumped off it. The local library was a room inside a building next to the gas station by the four-way stop sign downtown. The school closed so the kids rode a bus to the next town over. I rode the ferry to the church by the branch, unless the river was too high or frozen over. State penitentiary boys ran the ferry. They say it’s the longest, oldest running business in the area, and the first dollar hangs by a rusty staple on railing. The gas station was also the store, where we bought Yoohoos and beef jerky sticks. Down the ridge behind the store was a place called Murder Cave. You couldn’t find it unless you waded through the weeds and you ended up with at least fifteen ticks. That’s one reason why I always wore jeans in the woods, even in summer. Especially in summer. The best swimming hole was near the big rock we called Buster after an old dog jumped off and never surfaced. The agricultural runoff was mostly downstream; we just had to watch out for the foamy patches on shore. We swam in the branches, never the river. The river swallowed a refrigerator whole, and two children, twins, named Mickey and Ock. Mickey was a girl and Ock was short for something. They never found the bodies, so the best place to tell haint stories was also by the river by the old rope swing that someone kept cutting and someone else kept rehanging each year. Teaberry Trail has the sweetest teaberry, and Papaw O has the best blackberries growing wild out past his cow pasture. But they’ve got thorns. Elta Lynne grows the prettiest daylilies, and her neighbor Charlemagne hates her for it. Everyone knows everyone else’s business, even when no one says anything. In winter, we don’t stay inside because it’s just as cold inside as out when everyone’s got a daddy like that, the kind who visits the double-wide down by the river too many times per week. The spoons are all missing, so we use our knives.
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Kentucky poet, folklorist, and naturalist Sarah McCartt-Jackson‘s work has appeared in Bellingham Review, Indiana Review, Journal of American Folklore, The Maine Review, Tidal Basin Review, and others. She has served as artist-in-residence for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Catoctin Mountain National Park, and Acadia National Park. She is the author of Stonelight (Airlie Press), which won the Phillip H. McMath Award, Weatherford Award in Poetry, and Airlie Prize.