: John Mitchell Johnson
: Kudzu
: BookBaby
: 9781543928181
: 1
: CHF 6.30
:
: Erzählende Literatur
: English
: 236
: DRM
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
'Kudzu' opens on a sultry July afternoon in 1987, as thirty-eight-year-old Lewis Ray Jacobs is driving from his home in Nashville to his native Stone Coal in Eastern Kentucky, to attend a funeral. He reflects on a similar hot summer day in 1962 when he and his best friend, Travis Wicker, sneak into the wake of a recently departed neighbor, and twelve-year-old Lewis Ray, on a dare, reaches into the coffin to take hold of the corpse's hand. Things don't go as planned. Thus begins our introduction to two friends whose stories are humorous, engaging and poignant. We follow them through pubescent pranks, emerging sexuality, complicated relationships, a life-changing accident, the realities of young adulthood, and now, nearly two decades after Lewis Ray has left Stone Coal, a funeral.

Chapter One

July 24,1987

It was an awful day for a funeral, as if there could be a good one as Mamma Lou was fond of saying. The temperature was hovering around ninety-six and the humidity made the air feel as thick as the kudzu that choked the very life out of the Eastern Kentucky landscape. The air conditioning in my ’81 Dodge Colt was blowing just a wee bit cooler than the outside air, but at least I could keep the windows up and keep my hair from blowing. Quite a trade-off, sweat for hair, but Mamma Lou always made a deal of a man’s hair. It was the least that I could do today, have good hair. Mamma Lou liked the boys. And I guess the boys likedher.

The Colt strained and groaned at pulling the long grades of the Kentucky mountains, and each incline seemed to steal a little more cool from the already laboring air conditioner. The mountains were beautiful, and from the four-lane highway that traced the tops of the ridges, I couldn’t see the mobile homes and beer joints and junkyards that followed the meandering paths of the county roads which lined the streams and valleys below. Except for the occasional horrible surgical scar from a long-forgotten strip mine operation, the mountaintops looked as peaceful and stately as sleepinglions.

I had left Nashville at daybreak. It seemed a lifetime ago. I had dreaded this trip for a while now, a journey I knew was looming. Nashville, Bowling Green, Elizabethtown, and Lexington, where I stopped for lunch: a Diego salad, Miller High Life, and an order of fried banana peppers at Columbia’s. The peppers weren’t as hot, the beer not as cold, nor the salad as crisp as I had remembered. Then Winchester, Campton, Jackson, and Hazard, and with each passing mile the dread building within me. It was indeed a bad day for a funeral, as if there could be a goodone.

July 8,1962

“In that deeeaaaruh old village churchyard, I can see a mossy mound . . .

There is whereuh myuh mother’s sleeping, in thee cold and silentground.”

Travis Wicker and I sat under the splitting mimosa tree in the side yard of Jonathan Waddles’s house. Jonathan’s wife Zelda could be heard w