Pike County        wholly reworked from Paradox of Plenty (as of  2:45 pm CST, 2/24/12)

Pike County
 
"This continent teemed with manifold projects and magnificent purposes.  
All of us are called...to create the first great American Century."
 
        —Henry Luce, in Life Magazine: February 14, 1941
  
Maude was born and women tended Matilda Ellen’s birthing wounds.  
Coal- sooted men sat around, ravenous, swapping stories from the mines.
In far off New York, at that very hour, Anne Edson Taylor, a teacher,
became the first human to survive going over Niagara Falls in a barrel.  
Strange that folks had to go to such lengths to defy death.  In Pike County,
   
quicksilver fog pooled, the sun slow to rise. Often, Maude bravely scrambled
to the top of an east-facing hillside, scanning crest to crest. Daydreams were  
more colorful from there.  A teen, Maude had lost two young brothers.  
To typhoid. Then two sisters to men who hovered like bees to a blossom.  
Maude was playing on the porch, singing some plaintive song the afternoon  
Devil John Wright killed her uncle, Gene. Who, at 16, might have said:  
 
I reckon it’s a good day to bleed out, Devil John.  
Saying ‘good night’ to your Sarah Mae this morning,  
I was thinking, Tomorrow I’ll be a miner.
You spared me, spared my back from workin’ a 38” seam.  
And you spared Sarah Mae from being my first.  
 
Albert Newtown Horn, Maude's father, was a Methodist Circuit Rider.
He mined for souls. And spat when he spoke of "Forty Gallon Baptists."  
Said it’s hard to count a soul, any soul, as redeemed when black lung bit.  
Black lung took the sinners, those Albert saved. According to Albert,
 
Lord, it’s a hard task you’ve set before me, preaching  
in this scarred land.  Father, I know you love them,  
much as Matilda Ellen loved her brother, Gene.  
But I will keep on ridin’ Lord, cause Heaven’s  
all they’ve got, and they will be there soon enough.”
 
Maude would become a schoolteacher and marry another.  Together,
they envied the take-home wages of a single miner. Maude fashioned
candles from tallow and beeswax, lighting them nightly on a small table.  
The two planned their next day’s lessons. And their lives. Their children,
Neva Mae, Ernest Newton and Robert Lee came in quick succession.
Maude and Percy Lee polished their precious gems, their children,  
with teaching, God’s fire. Their ticket out of eastern Kentucky.  
 
Their last “ticket” took Maude and Percy Lee to New Lebanon, Ohio.  
Maude led Percy by a withered arm, after a stroke had severed him down
he middle. For years after, Maude spoke to others the words he mumbled.  
Translated. Later, when cancer came for her legs, she didn’t cry out.  Rather,
she climbed to the top of an east-facing hill. Morphine and dreams washed  
over her. Last breath slid from lips. And, into that fog, she disappeared.