Kentucky Blues

by Derek Robinson

Genres: Historical Fiction

Synopsis

Rock Springs, Kentucky. A backwater miles from civilisation, but so far upstream that the riverboats can go no further, and with plenty of farmland there for the taking. Among the pioneers who choose to build their homes here are the Hudds and the Killicks, two families destined to spend the next century despising one another. Kentucky Blues is a powerful, unsentimental depiction of life through several generations, widely considered to be Robinson's most ambitious work. Told with his trademark dark humour, it is an epic tale of one small community's journey from its foundation in the 1820s, through the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, to the dawn of the modern age.

Release date: June 19, 2014

Publisher: MacLehose Press

Print pages: 640

Sample

His wife said, ‘Be sensible, now,’ and Joe Killick ignored her. He took a pistol from the wagon and loaded it. His rifle was in its saddle-scabbard. ‘At least leave me the blessed map,’ she said. ‘You get killed and I’ll never find my way out of this wilderness.’ He rode off and left her with the wagon, four slaves and a dog.

Judith Killick was nineteen, married less than six months, on the trail nearly half that time, except it usually wasn’t trail, it was mostly animal tracks or dried-out streambeds. And rightly speaking the map was hers. She’d given Joe the twenty dollars to buy it.

No point in trying to argue with him when he was angry. She knew he was raging as soon as he saw smoke further up this valley. Back when they found the valley, he had been happy; jubilant. He had said: Now it’s just a matter of picking the best land. Then, up ahead: smoke. Not a wisp from a camp-fire. Big smoke, black.

Killick left her and followed the river for a mile or more, and then he heard the chink of axes. The sound led him another mile, to a clearing. A dozen slaves were felling timber, hauling logs, burning out the stumps. The sight astonished and infuriated him. Nobody knew of this valley except Killick and the old trapper who’d sold him the map. That was why he’d sweated and toiled all the way from Virginia. Now look: he was cheated. Robbed.

Unless these niggers were runaways. Fugitives. Outlaws.

One way to find out. Use the damn gun. See if they keep running.

He fired at a crow. The bang bounced off the hillsides. Everyone stopped work. Nobody ran. ‘God damn you all to hell,’ Killick said. There had to be a white man somewhere. Sure enough, in the shade of a big old oak, getting onto a horse, cantering into the sunlight, waving his hat at the slaves, ordering them back to work.

Killick knew he had to go and meet the man. If he didn’t, if he turned and went back to the wagon, the bastard might follow and kill him. Of course that might happen in any case. This day was rapidly falling to pieces. He walked his horse forward.

They both stopped when there was still forty yards between them. ‘Henry Hudd,’ the man called. ‘This is my land. Was that your shot?’

‘Saw a bear. Scared him off.’

‘We get all sorts of beasts in these woods. Some dangerous. Some not.’

Killick thought about what that might mean. He nudged his horse and it ambled closer. From what he could see, this Hudd fellow carried no weapon. ‘Joe Killick,’ he said. ‘I got a piece of paper here says I got first claim on any land either side of the upper Flint River.’ He took out the old trapper’s map and held it high. Maybe Hudd couldn’t read. Plenty men couldn’t.

‘That so.’

They were close enough to get a good look at each other. Killick saw a big-chested man, relaxed, sure of himself, about his own age, twenty-two. Hudd saw a man tired from too many weeks in the saddle, wearing a permanent frown. ‘Wish I could help you,’ Hudd said. ‘Fact of the matter is, you got the wrong river. This is the Cameron.’

‘Cameron.’ Killick looked at the map. ‘Where am I?’

‘Dundee County, Kentucky. Any further south, you’d be in Tennessee.’

Killick took off his hat and tucked the map inside the lining. His face looked as if he’d just bitten his tongue.

‘I don’t know of any Flint River,’ Hudd said. ‘Upper, lower or middle. Never heard of one.’

Killick took a good look around. Level ground, no rocks, dirt as black as soot. ‘I guess you took the best land here.’

‘Well, Providence was kind. Seemed the right thing to do.’

Killick looked at the toiling slaves, sweat gleaming on black skin. ‘Providence decides to drop a thunderbolt smack on top of you right now, then I guess all these niggers and all this land would be mine.’ Killick had his hand on his pistol. All he wanted was for Hudd to laugh. Smile, even. Just give an excuse. Killick had his gun and his anger but he needed help.

Hudd didn’t help. ‘Providence put my brother up in the branches of that oak tree there, with a rifle,’ he said. ‘Just to guard against thunderbolts.’

Killick went back to his wife and his wagon. He found the second-best stretch of land – sandy in some parts, marshy in others – and set the slaves to clearing it.

That was in 1832. He didn’t speak to Henry Hudd again until 1840, when he needed to borrow a slave. By then he knew that Hudd never had a brother, in or out of an oak. Something else he could never forgive Hudd for.

The Cameron valley was so fertile that the second-best stretch of river bottom land should have made a good farm. The river was big and the valley floor was flat. Even in the longest summer the river never failed. When it was in spate it looked like cold beef soup, there was so much rich muck in it.

Joe Killick boasted to visitors that his land would grow anything. Anything. Plant a row of laces, tomorrow you’d get a crop of shoes. ‘See them trees?’ he said. ‘That’s where I fenced a field with green timber. Posts began to sprout in a week. Now look: I got a line of oaks fifty feet high.’ They weren’t oaks. Joe Killick never made much effort to understand the land he farmed or the stuff it grew. He didn’t see himself as a farmer. Landowner, that’s what he was. Leave the work to the slaves, leave the crop to the dirt, which was how God intended, otherwise He wouldn’t have given them both to the Killicks. It was a seductively simple formula. Often it failed. When the visitors had left, Judith Killick said, ‘We got trees for supper tonight. How you want yours? Fried or boiled, with a little sawdust on the side?’ Joe sniggered, but his crops that year were no joke and they both knew it, and his wife made him suffer for it.

When it came to making things grow, Joe had only one, small talent and he worked it hard. Judith bore him seven children, not counting a few that failed the course. For the first half of their married life she was almost permanently pregnant. It wasn’t pleasant, but Judith knew she had to breed if the farm was to survive. Joe could help with the breeding. He couldn’t do much else. Especially, he couldn’t make his land grow slaves.

The Killicks – father and sons – sowed beads of black sweat in plenty, but they never harvested a fresh crop of niggers. The opposite, in fact: year by year they lost slaves through sickness or exhaustion or sudden death, which sent Joe to the auctions down in Tennessee. He begrudged paying top price for a new nigger when he blamed an old one for dying on him, so he always came back with poor stock. There were never more than twelve Killick slaves. Upriver, Henry Hudd never had fewer than twenty. Killick hated that. It was common knowledge in the valley that Hudd got the work of thirty out of his twenty. That deepened Killick’s hatred. He kicked and whipped his slaves as hard as any man, and still Hudd got all the luck. That rubbed Killick sore.

Henry Hudd’s luck was based on sound husbandry. He treated his slaves like animals, and he treated his animals well. Stupid to buy a good cow and feed it bad hay. Foolish to have a fast horse and not tend it if it went lame. Same with slaves. Henry Hudd allowed his stock of slaves enough plain food, and he doctored them, outside and in, whenever an ailment weakened them. He stabled them in dry cabins, clothed them warmly in winter. ‘A nigger can’t shiver and work both at the same time,’ he told his son. ‘Ain’t made that way. You can whip him, of course. That warms him up some, gets him moving. But it don’t stop the damn weather, and soon he gets cold again, thickens his blood, gives him the shivers. Another thing to remember: all that time you spent whippin’ him was lost time, no work got done then, except by you. So you give your nigger a wool coat, pants an’ hat, a good pair of nigger brogans, keeps the wind an’ rain out, pays off handsomely in the long run.’

Food, shelter, doctoring, clothes. That wasn’t good nature, it was good husbandry. Joe Killick was too cheap to understand the difference.

Geography makes history. About midway between the two farms, the Cameron broadened and yet – by some trick of the ground – the river kept its depth from shore to shore. When the first steamboat explored, in 1842, this was as far as the captain cared to go. From here on up, bluffs and cliffs crowded and cramped the river. A sidewheeler needed space to turn. If a boat couldn’t turn, it had to back downstream until it found space. Awkward, slow, dangerous. This bulge in the Cameron was God’s gift. A place like that deserved a name. They called it Rock Springs.

On its next trip, the steamboat carried a bunch of pioneers, including a man called Flub Phillips. He was a failed pig-farmer from New Jersey, slim and good-looking and glib, and he had drifted through Delaware and Maryland, into Virginia and Tennessee, making a living out of courteous bigamy. He gave each new plain and dumpy wife a memorable honeymoon and then moved on with her savings. He felt it was a fair exchange. But he became like an actor always playing the same suave role in the same play. He needed a change. Newspapers said there was gold in Oregon. Should be good opportunities there.

When the boat slowed and turned and eased into the bank, he was the last man down the gangplank. ‘Which way’s the town?’ he asked a deckhand. All he could see was brush and forest.

‘Any way you like. Ain’t built yet.’

‘I was expectin’ a hotel, or somethin’.’

‘Yeah, sure, hotel, that would be nice.’ They moved aside to make space for stores being unloaded. ‘I guess these folks brought tents to live in while they stake out their farms, if that’s what they’re aimin’ to do. You could sleep in a corner of a tent, maybe.’

‘Good Christ.’

‘Keep your boots on if you do. Snakes everywhere.’

The settlers hauled their stuff away, taking a narrow track through the brush. Nobody showed any interest in Flub, and he was too dismayed to ask for help. The steamboat cast off and churned downriver. He took his bag and sat on a fallen tree and pictured the hotel he would be staying in if this place had a hotel. After a while he realized he was looking at a small white boy, very dirty, wearing torn cotton pants and a tattered straw hat that rested on his ears. Flub was dressed in a seersucker coat and pants to match, French cuffs, a bootlace tie and a curly-brimmed beige hat with a high crown. The way the boy looked at him, he felt like the king of Spain. ‘Hey,’ he said.

The boy said nothing. He was the Killicks’ eldest child, George, nine years old, scrawny body, no expression, never been more than three miles from the farmhouse in his whole life. Flub was the most colourful creature George had ever seen, and that included six Cherokee that went up the valley three years ago. At least, pa said they were Cherokee. George had his doubts about pa. To pa, anything in bright feathers was either Cherokee or kingfisher. Saved a lot of argument.

‘This is Rock Springs, right?’ Flub said. No response. ‘Where’s the rock and where’s the springs?’ Flub asked. George picked his nose while he thought about that. ‘Forget it, kid,’ Flub said. ‘The answer’s not up there. Which way’s Oregon?’ Foolish question. But it made him check the sky. Afternoon was wearing on, sun was going down, making the Cameron glitter. West was beyond the river. He was on the wrong bank. ‘Hey!’ he said. ‘Where’s the damn ferry?’

‘Ain’t none,’ George said. He felt pretty sure about that. He had a voice like a young crow.

‘You got a home?’ Flub asked. George nodded. He was absolutely certain of that.

They went to the farm. Judith Killick said Flub could stay for 50 cents a night, grub included. ‘You share a bed with George,’ she said. Flub agreed. Anything was better than sharing with snakes.

Joe showed him the farm, starting with the house. The chimneys were stone, the rest was wood. Squared-off logs for the walls. Few windows, and they were small. ‘Keeps the weather out,’ Joe said. Began with just one level, then children kept coming, so he put a second level on top of the first. ‘I’m what you’d call potent,’ he said. ‘Go forth an’ multiply, the good book tells us. I must be the most Christian man in Dundee County, Kentucky. You got family?’

‘Possibly.’

There wasn’t much else to see. Additions had been tacked onto the back and sides of the main building. It looked more like a cluster of barns than a home. The slave cabins were downwind, out of sight. ‘Don’t want to see ‘em, an’ I sure don’t want to smell ‘em,’ Joe said. ‘Niggers are a lot of work, don’t let anyone tell you different. They got more ways of goin’ sick than warts on a warthog.’

Flub was surprised. ‘You ever see a warthog?’

‘Saw a picture, once.’

They sat on the porch and sipped home-brew whiskey.

The children watched and scratched, fought and whispered. ‘You met George,’ Joe said. ‘He came first. Then there’s Dan, Stanton, JoBeth – she’ll look better when she gets some teeth – and Jessica’s inside probably, she’s still at the tit. More on the way. I ain’t done yet.’

‘Quite a family.’

‘George is the smartest. Gets that from me. George can whup a nigger just like a grown man. I showed him how. Has to use a half-size bullwhip, y’understand. I made it special.’

‘You have a lot of trouble with your slaves?’

‘Oh … they need remindin’, time to time. That boy’s a great help. I seen him whip a black ass so clean, criss-cross, you could play tic-tac-toe on it.’

‘Remarkable.’

‘Want to see him do it? I could fetch—’

‘Thank you, no. Black flesh…’ Flub touched his stomach and winced.

‘Yeah.’ Joe poured more whiskey. ‘Causes a man to wonder. The Almighty made slaves, He got that right, so why’d He make ‘em so goddamn ugly?’ He raised his drink to heaven. ‘No offence meant, Lord. Oregon, you say.’

‘That’s where the gold is. So I’m told.’

‘Must be the worse part of two thousand miles. And you haven’t crossed the Cameron yet.’

‘Steamboat people said this was a terminus, so I reckoned there must be a stagecoach I could use.’

‘Stage? In Kentucky? Nothin’ but creeks an’ mountains. Come winter, we haul everythin’ by sled.’

‘Well, I certainly don’t reckon on walking to Oregon. There really is no ferry?’

‘Nope.’

They watched the sun go down.

‘Course, you could always build one,’ Joe said.

‘I wouldn’t know where to start.’

That was all. The sun vanished as if swallowed. They went inside and ate.

The steamboat was back again in five days.

Henry Hudd heard its whistle, so distant that it got lost on the wind and he had to listen twice before he was sure. ‘Saddle up,’ he told his son. ‘I’ll show you what a side-wheeler looks like.’ Charles was twelve, and he never left the farm except with his father. This trip excited him.

There was one job to be done before they could go. They rode into a field and Henry said, ‘Fetch me a nigger. Any nigger.’

Charles stood in his stirrups. Nine or ten slaves were working, chopping weeds. He knew them all, could recognize each one, even far off, just by the back of his head. ‘What’s wrong?’ his father growled. ‘Can’t you count up to one?’ Charles pointed.

‘Adam,’ Henry called. The man straightened up, looked, laid down his hoe, walked towards them, taking care not to tread on the crop. Henry opened his mouth but he was too late; Adam was already taking off his shirt. He reached them, and stood where he knew he must stand, a tall, thin, grey-haired negro, and without dismounting Henry Hudd whipped him across the back, three strokes each way, making the leather crack like a snapped branch. The weight of the lashing forced Adam to this knees.

They rode away. The chink-chink of hoes had never stopped.

‘What was that for, sir?’ Charles asked.

‘Nothin’. I like to discourage idle thoughts in the others while I’m away. Keeps them busy. Now tell me: what is your book at present?’

‘Just started The Last of the Mohicans, sir.’

‘Very sound. Cooper knows about Indians. What else?’

‘Last week I finished the Book of Job, sir.’

His father laughed. ‘That’s more than I ever did. Too much belly-achin’ for me. I admire the style, it’s plain and simple like good furniture, but Job was good for only one thing and that’s failure. Some men make a career of it.’

They talked about books all the way to Rock Springs. Charles Hudd was proud of American writers and he planned to introduce his son to Longfellow and Washington Irving. He kept in touch with British writing too. ‘There’s a man called Dickens who’s making a mark. I’ll get his books. And Sir Walter Scott’s. They’ll teach you about chivalry and honour and suchlike. Remarkable man, Scott. Owned a publishing house but it went bankrupt. Read about that in a newspaper, years ago. Enormous debts, hundreds of thousands of dollars. Scott wrote books until he’d paid off every last cent. Didn’t sit around and bleat about his bad luck, like Job. No, sir. Scott valued his name and reputation. Knew what was right. Sense of decency. True gentleman.’

Henry Hudd spoke of other authors, and his son nodded dutifully, but he was thinking of Sir Walter Scott, a knight in shining armour, going about and defending decency so that people said, ‘Sir Walter Scott is a true gentleman.’

The steamboat was unloading when they reached Rock Springs. Young Charles went to stare at it. Henry looked at the passengers. A scruffy bunch. After a while he noticed another man watching them, a man dressed for the city; so he went and introduced himself.

‘I was hoping there would be a ferry,’ Flub Phillips said. ‘I’m aiming for Oregon.’

‘My advice is get on that boat and go back and start again.’

‘No, I can’t do that.’

Hudd nodded. It was impolite to ask a man his reasons for not returning somewhere. ‘You won’t find much excitement here, Mr Phillips. See these people? Runts of the litter.’

‘What lies beyond your farm, Mr Hudd? Upriver?’

‘Virgin forest.’ He looked at Flub’s polished boots. ‘I could lend you an axe.’

‘I need a regiment of engineers, to build a ferry.’

Henry Hudd lost patience with Flub’s helplessness. ‘I hope you find a way to Oregon, Mr Phillips,’ he said, ‘and I hope these dregs follow you. I know their sort. Atheists and agitators. I don’t need them upsetting my slaves with their blasphemous opinions. My farm is an island of peace and obedience in a wicked world, and I intend to keep it so. Good day to you.’

He found his son. Charles was fascinated by the size and smell and mechanical ingenuity of the boat. They stayed long enough to see it depart in a lather of foam and triumphant whooping from its steam-whistle, a performance that left Charles speechless. This amused his father.

Flub Phillips went back to the Killick farm.

‘I’ve been thinking,’ he said. ‘Now the steamboat’s on a regular run, people on the other side of the Cameron will need a ferry to get them across to here so they can … See what I mean? Trade both ways. Running a ferry would be an honest living for someone.’

‘You need a big strong raft,’ Joe Killick said. ‘You hire two of my slaves, a dollar a day each, they’ll build you the biggest, strongest raft in Dundee County.’

Nine-year-old George chose the slaves and walked them to Rock Springs, slashing at their legs with a switch from time to time. ‘You got to remind them,’ he told Flub. ‘Otherwise they forgets.’ At Rock Springs he gave Flub the switch. ‘Don’t take no lip,’ he said. ‘They give you lip, you lay it on ’em strong. On the legs is best. But don’t bust ’em up. Pa says if you bust a nigger you pay for him. Niggers ain’t cheap.’ Then George went home.

It took a week to build the raft. The two slaves preferred working for Flub. He waved the switch a couple of times; that was all. Years of hog-farming had cured him of any wish to draw blood.

It was as big and strong a raft as Joe had promised. The slaves poled it across the Cameron, and Flub landed. Within ten yards he was knee-deep in swamp. He struggled out and they poled him upstream and he landed again. More swamp. Went downstream. Swamp again. Everywhere he tried to land: swamp.

Joe Killick was not surprised. ‘Always thought that land looked kind of wet. Too green to be true. You see any alligators? Heard tell there’s alligators over there. Better get them pants off and check your legs for leeches. You owe me fourteen bucks.’

‘Now I know why the steamboat lands on this side and not on the other,’ Flub said.

‘I could’ve told you it was all swamp over there,’ Joe said, ‘if you’d asked me.’

The lack of a ferry made a difference to Rock Springs, good and bad. It meant the place could never become a crossroads town. As much as the Cameron brought travellers, it also stopped them moving on. Swamp to the west, cliffs and gorges to the north, bad trails to the east, Tennessee to the south. They’d just come either from the east or from the south, and they had no stomach for going back that way. So they mostly settled at Rock Springs. Within a year Flub Phillips was teaching school and serving hooch. Sometimes at the same time. Sometimes to the same people.

The first building in town was an inn. When Flub ran out of money to pay Judith Killick he took up teaching. That wasn’t much choice: he couldn’t find anyone worth marrying, and educating children seemed slightly less distasteful than raising hogs, the only other thing he knew to do. He taught in the open air, until winter came and he moved his class of seven into the inn. There was nowhere else to go. The owner, a failed lawyer named Slattery, had no objection, and Flub picked up an occasional extra pupil when a customer wandered over to watch a lesson and stayed to learn the alphabet. Slattery had no objection to that, either, provided the customer kept on drinking. Slattery didn’t enjoy his work. Building the inn had pleased him. Running it bored him, therefore he expected his customers to drink hard, otherwise Slattery was wasting his time by being there. Often he said to hell with it and went hunting in the woods.

When that happened, Flub ran the bar and taught class at the same time. ‘A whiskey, a pickled pig’s knuckle and a plate of grits,’ he told his pupils. ‘How much is that? Write it down, add it up.’ Spelling and sums and bartending, all combined.

Late the next spring, a wolverine was ripping into a deer carcass when Slattery came around a bend and startled them both. Slattery was four times its size but the wolverine had a mouth like a black bear and teeth like a timber wolf and it feared nothing and nobody. Its growl was as deep as a groan and the hair on its back rose in a thousand fine spines. It moved forward. Slattery’s legs were empty. He tried to turn, stumbled, dropped his rifle butt-first and it shot him through the head.

The wolverine waited for a minute and then got on with the deer. Eventually it went and sniffed the other body, but decided it could eat no more; so it turned its back and raised its tail and sprayed Slattery with a liquid so disgusting that now only a wolverine would touch this meat. Then it ambled off to find a place to sleep.

A couple of trappers found the body. The stink persuaded them to bury it where it lay. By general consent, Flub Phillips inherited the inn. Nobody else really wanted it.

That year, Rock Springs began to take shape. It got a general store, a blacksmith’s shop, a place where you could have teeth pulled or boils lanced or horses doctored, and two houses. The steamboat company built a landing. Next year someone opened a laundry and bathhouse. Flub sold the inn to a woman called Maggie, and built a schoolhouse. A corn and seed business arrived. You could buy clothes in Rock Springs. It had a Main Street, which was mud and horseshit, and sidewalks, which were not. Flub missed the warmth and noise of the inn. He gave the schoolroom to his oldest pupil, who was fourteen and ready to shave, and told him he was the teacher now. A rooming-house had just opened. It wasn’t full of drunks, and you could get food that wasn’t pickled pig’s knuckle. Flub became manager. Soon there was a bank, a church, a gunshop. One day, Flub opened the front door and looked out and saw strangers who were obviously at home. It came as a little shock: there were more people living in Rock Springs than he could easily know. Now it was a town.

The first elected mayor of Rock Springs was Joe Killick. His wasn’t much of an election, but then he wasn’t much of a mayor. The job paid nothing. Nobody else wanted it. Joe gave away a lot of whiskey and a show of hands did the rest.

‘Flim-flam,’ Henry Hudd said when his son told him.

‘He got elected, sir. It was legal.’

‘Votes don’t change a man. It’s like suds and beer. Suds rise to the top, don’t they? But they’re still just suds.’

‘Cream rises to the top, too,’ Charles said. He was fifteen, and an inch taller than his father, and beginning to have opinions of his own.

‘Cream.’ Henry laughed. ‘You don’t know the Killicks, do you? Joe has failed as a farmer. That’s why he wants to be mayor. He’ll fail again, you’ll see.’

‘But …’ Charles was still too young to enjoy cynicism. ‘They reckon he’s best man for the job, sir. He deserves a fair chance.’

‘Deserves? A man deserves what he earns. Killick fails because he’s more comfortable with failure. It doesn’t demand so much. From the day he came through those trees and saw I’d got here first, taken the best land, he decided he’d been cheated. What could he do? Had a choice. Could work twice as hard, got the most out of what God gave him, create a place, not as good as this, but still a place to be proud of. Or he could sit on his ass and bellyache about poor crops, which makes him feel better because it proves he got cheated. So now it’s my fault.’ Henry Hudd turned his head and spat. ‘See? Killicks give me a sour mouth.’

‘Is that why you never ask them to visit us, sir?’ Charles asked. Henry nodded. ‘Seems strange,’ Charles said. ‘Two biggest farms in the valley, not visiting. Not speaking.’

‘Killicks and Hudds don’t talk the same language.’

Charles thought: Father feels good when Joe Killick fails. He likes to be superior. But he was not brave enough to say so. Instead, he said, ‘Would it not be a Christian act to offer the hand of friendship, sir?’ He had been reading the Letters of St Paul. ‘Nobody is so low that he can’t be raised.’

‘So I’ve heard.’ Henry Hudd was tired of talking about the damn Killicks. ‘If you want to do some raising, go ahead. New mayor probably needs a clerk. Go and offer yourself, see if you can improve the man’s manners. But don’t bring him here.’

Charles was away for a week. Henry was lonely without him. His wife was sick and often bedridden. She’d never been strong after the boy was born, certainly not strong enough to bear any more children, whereas the Killicks had bred like rabbits. Henry felt badly let down by his wife.

Charles came back after a week. ‘Mr Killick needs no assistant,’ he told his father, ‘because he does no work. He’s always in Maggie’s tavern. Just drinks whiskey and plays cards.’ He was frowning like a hanging judge.

Henry pretended to be surprised. ‘That’s too bad. What about the hand of friendship? Any luck there?’

‘He accused me of spying on him.’

‘An unkind remark.’

‘He was foul-mouthed. He lied, and he cheated, and he tried to humiliate me. So I left.’

‘Well,’ Henry Hudd said, ‘now you know.’

The Hudds despised and ignored the Killicks, and the Killicks hated and blamed the Hudds, and they went on doing this for the next fifteen years. This would have been a great test of silent endurance and perseverance, but for the Ridge between them.

It was more than five miles by water between the two farms, less than two if you climbed over the Ridge. The Cameron was that sort of river, curling like a snake. Nobody ever climbed over the Ridge. It was that sort of Ridge.

Even to save four miles, nobody would take on such a climb. It wasn’t just the steepness and the undergrowth – chest-high and stiff with thorns and briars – and the deep, sudden streambeds that slashed across your path and forced a change of direction; it was also the animals. Hudd Ridge belonged to bear and panther and rattlesnake. Always had. It was true wilderness up there.

Everything separated the Hudds from the Killicks – wealth, competence, ambition, taste, education, manners – but the best barrier was the Ridge. It did a fine job of keeping the peace.

But nothing lasts for ever.

In the fifteen years that passed after Joe Killick got elected mayor, everyone changed. Everyone always does. Joe got kicked out of the mayor’s job. Rock Springs was growing into a prosperous little town with two bars and a lawyer and a weekly newspaper, run by Flub Phillips. It didn’t need a mayor who was drunk by noon and couldn’t button his fly properly when he was sober. Joe went back to the farm, where he had three boys he could boss about. They were not nearly as respectful as Henry Hudd’s boy had been, and that annoyed Joe. With the years, this problem got worse.

And always, the H