SCREAMING WITH THE CANNIBALS

by LEE MAYNARD

Overview

In this sequel to Crum, Jesse Stone is still on the move. He finds himself in a holy-roller church in Kentucky, on the other side of the Tug River from his native West Virginia, "screaming with the cannibals." From Kentucky he heads to Myrtle Beach, where he gets hired as a lifeguard, although he can’t even swim. Of course, trouble follows Jesse Stone. And so he is always in a hurry to leave—and he doesn’t much care where he is going. Throughout this tale, Jesse anxiously continues his search for a freedom and a future that he knows exists outside of his familiar world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781935978497
Publisher:	West Virginia University Press
Publication date:	04/01/2012
Edition description:	1st Edition
Pages:	262
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.60(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Lee Maynard was born and raised in the hardscrabble ridges and hard-packed mountains of West Virginia, an upbringing that darkens and shapes much of his writing. His work has appeared in such publications such as Columbia Review of Literature, Appalachian Heritage, Kestrel, Reader's Digest, The Saturday Review, Rider Magazine, Washington Post, Country America, and The Christian Science Monitor. Maynard gained public and literary attention for his depiction of adolescent life in a rural mining town in his first novel, Crum, and received a Literary Fellowship in Fiction from the National Endowment for the Arts to complete its sequel, Screaming with the Cannibals.

An avid outdoorsman and conservationist, Maynard is a mountaineer, sea kayaker, skier, and former professional river runner. Currently, Maynard serves as President and CEO of The Storehouse, an independently funded, nonprofit food pantry in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He received the 2008 Turquoise Chalice Award to honor his dedication to this organization.

Read an Excerpt

Screaming with the Cannibals

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By Lee Maynard

West Virginia University Press

Copyright © 2012 West Virginia University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-935978-49-7

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CHAPTER 1

The night that lightning struck my great uncle, Long Neck Jesse, he had just come out of the hardwoods up on the high end of Black Hawk Ridge. He had taken the shortcut back to his cabin, down through the sodden graveyard, sloshing along through the blackness of the storm, the rain running in a hard stream from the brim of his floppy hat. He must have been picking his way carefully among the gravestones and the leaning wooden crosses, right next to the old slab-sided Baptist church. He was carrying a potato sack over his shoulder with fifteen quart jars of raw moonshine in it.

They tell me you could hear the explosion for miles.

Bits and pieces of tombstones, wooden fence parts and shards of Mason jars slammed into the church and sliced through the thick woods. The blast scorched the weeds and the early summer grass and ripped a gaping hole through the side of the church. They found a jagged piece of headstone with one word on it stabbed through the end of the pump organ. It said "... POSSUM".

But they never found Long Neck. Not a drop of blood, not a speck of flesh. They found one of his shoes, the leather burned and twisted, the thin rubber sole melted and bubbled. And a belt buckle. And a pocket knife. And that's all.

I got back to Black Hawk Ridge late the next day, mud sucking at my shoes as I walked the old rutted wagon road that twisted up from the holler, then through the trees and past the church. I had just come from Crum, down and away across the back end of the county, where I had been living with some cousins and going to Crum High School. I had graduated and hitchhiked out of town before the ink dried on my diploma. I left the diploma in Crum.

I had only come back to Black Hawk Ridge to say goodbye to Uncle Long Neck. And then I would be gone again.

I didn't know about the explosion.

It was still raining. Some of the Black Hawk men were standing in the graveyard, motionless, their hands stuffed into the pockets of their heavy, wet overalls, silent sentinels over the dead buried at their feet. When they saw me coming they looked away, or looked down, or looked anywhere except straight at me. And I knew something bad had happened.

My cousin Dorcas was standing there. "Howdy, Jesse," he said. "Saw you acomin'. You ever git that rifle fixed?"

I had been gone three years. I had not set foot on the ridge in all that time, had not thought of the old rifle with the broken firing pin, not even once. But for Dorcas, it was only yesterday. Time, on Black Hawk Ridge, was a relative thing. And the son-of-a-bitch never said a word about Long Neck.

We all stood around in the graveyard in the misting rain, looking at the blasted earth and the hole in the side of the church. The breeze and the rain couldn't erase the smell of something scorched, something blackened, something hell-burned and vaporized there in the middle of the ridge against the close and hard side of the old Baptist church.

There had been some sort of explosion. I wondered, where was Uncle Long Neck? If any man up here on the ridge would know about explosions, it would be Uncle Long Neck.

And that is when I realized, without anyone telling me, that Uncle Long Neck was the explosion.

I had come back to Black Hawk Ridge from Crum to say goodbye to him one last time. And I missed it.

Long Neck Jesse was six-feet-four, as thin as a fence rail. When he walked, the various parts of his lanky body moved like links in a chain, each link jiggling and shaking, but connected to all the other links and eventually settling down to where they wanted to go. His shirt sleeves were always too short; his wrists and hands jangled out inches beyond the frayed cuffs. He had eyes the color of the sky at dusk and his voice rumbled up from his stomach like the sounds of a gathering storm, his Adam's apple bobbing high above his shirt collar.

I loved him. I could watch him for hours, be with him constantly. I was just a lump of a kid, barely out of the one-room school down on Turkey Creek, tagging around after the men, trying to find out what everything was all about, looking for lessons, waiting for words. I hung around Uncle Long Neck as much as I could, and what he taught will always be inside me. He was one of those men who could teach by doing. He could set examples just by living, just by going about his daily business, his big head bobbing at the end of his skinny neck, long-fingered hands stuffed into the side pockets of his faded overalls. The only clothing I ever saw him wear that was too big were those overalls. I never knew where he got them, those long yards of flapping denim with the brass buckles on the end of the straps that were always slipping off his shoulders. When he walked through patches of sunlight with the breeze behind him the overalls would billow out in the front and Uncle Long Neck would become a faded blue ship, gently setting its sails on a course to the moonshine still. The legs of the overalls were too long, even for him. But he never cut the legs off or had one of the women hem them up. When he got the overalls new he just wore them, the cuffs dragging on the ground until they simply wore off at exactly the right length.

I loved Uncle Long Neck like, maybe, no other man.

He made the best moonshine in three counties.

I only wish I had been there when the lightning struck.

CHAPTER 2

Jesse.

That's what they named me, those folks up there where I was born, on Black Hawk Ridge, at the head of Turkey Creek, in Wayne County, West Virginia; those folks who had lived on those ridges and in those hollers and on those creeks since just after the Revolutionary War, some of whom left that country only to fight in wars they didn't start and didn't understand and then came home to fight wars they did start, tight little wars of their very own. Others had never been out of the county, never been off the ridge, never knew where Turkey Creek came out or where it went when it did and would never go looking for the end of it.

But I would.

If you go far enough into any piece of woods, you come out the other side; eventually, there has to be an end to it. But not Turkey Creek. They used to say Turkey Creek was so far back into the mountains that there was no other side, that things just ended there, stopped, died. They said that Turkey Creek began as a trickle of sweet water coming out of a tiny spring at the foot of dark trees at the edge of the world and as long as it ran our people would be there and way down there in some other county where the creek ended up was no good place for any of us. We knew where we belonged.

And Black Hawk Ridge was farther back than Turkey Creek.

If you hiked a mile or so toward the far end of Black Hawk you could find the ridge's highest point. The holler below the ridge widened, gradually unfolding into a lush, shaded valley that stretched down and away, only to be lost again among the tangle of other hollers, other ridges that rolled far and forever across the Appalachians, a hopeless tangle of changing heights, dim shapes, knurled wood and broken stone that might have been dropped by God on a bad day during the creation of the world.

At the side of the high point a shelf of rock jutted out over the valley, one of the few places on the ridge where the view was not cut off by the thick stands of hardwood trees. The view went out in all directions, the heavy green ridges rolling up through the thin mists of the valleys and standing in the twisted formations of thousands of years, all the ridges exactly like the one I stood on. And all the ridges different.

On good days when I stood on the weathered rock I could see the bright green patches where the men of the ridge had cleared small hard fields to grow hay for the plow horses or corn to be stored in the cribs and fed, hard and dry, to the pigs that rooted continuously against the sides of hills. Now and then dancing plumes of smoke rose from the trees and twisted away across the valley, smoke that came from stone chimneys leaning against the sides of cabins and small clapboard houses. Our houses. Our smoke. Everything on the ridge was ours. We were all a family there, one way or another.

But even then, even on Black Hawk Ridge, I knew there was something beyond those ridges, something that waited out there, something that pulled me. Somewhere, the ridges stopped. I was sure.

Just below the weathered rock is where Long Neck hid his moonshine still. I used to follow him up there, high on the ridge, hiding in the bushes and peeking through the dense thickets, all the time trying to find out what Long Neck did there. I always hid in the same spot, watching silently. He always knew I was there. He never chased me away, but he never let me come near the moonshine still. The still was his, only his, and I never got near it. Not really.

He would sit and tend his still and read the tattered books that he always seemed to produce from the deep pockets of his overalls. And then one day I found one of the books in my hiding place, lying there on a small stump. I turned the book over in my hands, trying to figure out what Uncle Long Neck wanted, then realizing that all he wanted was for me to read the damn thing.

And for all the months of all the years when it was warm enough for me to hide out near the moonshine still, there were books. It would have looked strange, if anyone had known or seen, if anyone had ever found us, just sitting there, apart and yet together, the big man never acknowledging that I was there, me "hidden" in the brush nearby, both of us just sitting and reading. It would have looked strange, and they wouldn't have liked it, seeing us that way. The men weren't supposed to take the young'uns to the stills. So Uncle Long Neck would never let me near the coils and the vats and the fires, but he wouldn't chase me away from my hiding place. It was a good trade.

But no one ever saw us. No one ever knew.

Jesse.

They named me after Long Neck, they said. But that was no big honor, Long Neck said. They named a lot of people Jesse, both boys and girls. It was a name they liked, a name that went back into the far layers of the family, a name they strewed about as easily as they would dribble corn into the rows at planting time. They liked the name Jesse ... and Amos and James and Mary and Minnie. And I had cousins named Elijah, Hester, Garfield, and Inis. And Dorcas.

But there were a lot of Jesses. To tell us apart, they gave most of us nicknames. Great Uncle Jesse was "Long Neck". My cousin Jesse, five-feet-five and two hundred fifty pounds, was "Stumpy". We even had "Black" Jesse — nobody would ever say how he got that name. And "Barkin'" Jesse, the best squirrel hunter on the ridge. Barkin' Jesse liked to tan squirrel hides and sell them, so he didn't like any holes in them. He would only hunt with his .22 rifle, and he wouldn't actually shoot the squirrel. He would shoot the tree limb, just beneath the squirrel's head as it clung, frozen at the sight of him, to the tree. The concussion of the bullet and the explosion of tree bark up into the squirrel would usually knock it unconscious. "Barkin' a squirrel," they called it. Barkin' Jesse would just pick it up and knock its head against a rock.

And then there was "Hangin'" Jesse, a justice of the peace somewhere down in the lower end of the county. I don't think he ever actually hanged anybody. But then, in Wayne County, you never really knew for sure.

On the women's side there was "Red" Jesse, because of her hair; "Caner" Jesse, a stern and unforgiving woman who could lay a stick across your back so fast you wouldn't know it was coming until you hit the ground, the welts rising against your shirt. And there was my third cousin, "Slick" Jesse, who could suck the rust off a railroad spike. Slick Jesse, so the men said, would fuck anybody, anytime, and they called her "Slick" because that's the way the insides of her legs got when she was in the mood. Which was most of the time. So the men said. Of course, no one called her "Slick" to her face. Wouldn't have been polite.

It was Slick Jesse who first taught me what was up a woman's skirt, and how to get there.

We were sitting in the open door of the hayloft in Long Neck's barn, our feet dangling out into the near darkness, gently swinging over the ground below. All I had on was my overalls — not even a shirt — the ragged legs barely coming down to my ankles, the hot blue air feeling good against my skin. I watched her bare feet swinging next to mine, her full skirt shifting slightly. The skirt was old, worn often, and the thin material rounded out with the fullness of her legs. We had watched the sun go down behind the ridge and then the rise of an early moon, something we had never done before, something I didn't even know she liked to do. We were not touching, at least not at that time.

"Where does Long Neck keep his still?" She was some years older than me, and her voice was husky. I had never thought about taking anyone to Long Neck's still. I had never thought about women with husky voices.

"I never been there," I muttered. I told myself that that was true — I had never actually been to the still, only to the bushes just out to the side of it.

"I want to go to Long Neck's still. I ain't never seen a still."

"I can't take you. I never been there."

"Liar." She said it flatly, a statement of fact.

"I can't. I just can't. Long Neck would ..."

And then she had her hand inside my pants. In a single swift motion she had unfastened the big brass button at the side of my overalls and slid her arm in all the way to her elbow. And like most of the kids on Black Hawk Ridge, I never wore any undershorts. She grabbed my dick.

I was so surprised I didn't know what to do. I just fell over backwards and lay flat on the hayloft floor, my legs still dangling outside. Please, God, I said to myself, don't let her take her hand away.

"I'll pay you. In advance." Her hand moved slightly.

"Huh ... how ... how ..." It was the only word I could push out of my mouth.

"Well, it'll be better than you jist hidin' behind the barn, jackin' off," she said softly. Her hand moved again.

And then she had both hands up on my overall straps. She unfastened them and whipped my overalls down past my hips in one smooth motion, just like stripping the skin down off the ass-end of a dead rabbit. She snapped the overalls over my feet and flung them out into the night.

I don't remember moving. I just watched her rise above me and raise her skirt, her long legs glowing in the fresh moonlight. As the skirt got higher I could see the dark triangle at the top of her legs, and then her navel, and then I realized she wasn't going to stop. She peeled the dress over her head, sat on me, and drove me into her.

My legs were dangling out of the hayloft door and I couldn't brace my feet against anything so I could push up into her. But I didn't have to. She did it all.

Each time she drove against me my body slid just a little more through the open door until my hips were scraping over the edge, suspended above nothing but warm night air. Her ass was out there, too, stuck solidly to mine, and I thought about someone standing down there in the barnyard looking up at us, seeing one set of dangling legs and two asses sucking together, suspended in the near darkness. If one of my relatives were down there, I thought, they'd just stand there and wait to see what hit the ground first.

I tried to mutter something about falling out the door but every time I opened my mouth she leaned forward and put a breast in it. I spread my arms out wide, hoping to find something to grab, something to stop my slide. But there was nothing. My God, I thought, she's going to fuck us right out the hayloft door, right out into the night, right down into the barnyard. They'll find both of us there in the morning, stuck tight together, fucking dead.

And then the world turned blue and the moonlight turned liquid and somewhere in my mind some little lights went off against the back of my closed eyes and she was lying completely forward on me, her weight pinning me to the floor, holding me.

"Cousin Jesse," I whispered, "if you get up, I'm going to slide out the door. I'll probably die, down there in the cow shit, naked."

"If you don't promise to take me to the still, I am for sure going to get up, and right now. And you will look very bad, laying in your coffin, covered with cow shit." She shifted her weight and I slid a little more through the door.

"Goddamn, Jesse. Okay. I'll take you. Only don't move no more, okay?"

"I've got to move. At least just a little."

And she did. Moving and moving and moving.

Then she slid forward on me, raising herself so that I could pull my ass and legs back through the hayloft door. I rolled her over on her back.

I knew I wasn't going to fall out of the barn and die. Even so, it would have been worth it.

"And one more thing," she whispered. "When we're alone, you can call me Slick."

Later, we went out to the moonshine still. We didn't take our clothes.

We went out to the still a lot of times after that. I don't think Long Neck ever knew. But I'm not really sure.

Jesse.

I was the only one who was just plain Jesse. Nothing else. I was big for my age, strong from setting fence posts, blond hair tangling in the blackberry briars that grew at the edge of the fields. But I really just looked like a lot of the others in my family, nothing special, nothing odd. I had all my arms and legs and my eyes were in the right place and far apart and looked straight ahead when I wanted them to. So before they could figure out what to call me, before they could figure out what I would really be like — before they could decide much of anything about me — they sent me off to Crum to go to high school.

Going to Crum for education. Sort of like going into a coal mine to study daylight.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Screaming with the Cannibals by Lee Maynard. Copyright © 2012 West Virginia University Press. Excerpted by permission of West Virginia University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

•Foreword
•Part I
•  West Virginia
•  Black Hawk Ridge
•Part II
•  Kentucky
•  Screaming With the Cannibals
•Part III
•  South Carolina
•  Bleeding on the Sand

Editorial Reviews

[Maynard] once again succeeds in delivering a devastatingly, soul-searching, scabrous and very funny literary experience."
Michael Shannon Friedman, The Charleston Gazette

"Between the first and last pages of Screaming with the Cannibals are characters so real you can see them bleed, smell their sweat, hear their cries of libido-provoked frustration, wallow with them in the darkness of their spirits and — God help us all — laugh when they die the most horrible deaths."
Dave Peyton, Charleston Daily Mail

From the Publisher