Lost State of Franklin

The place outside Jonesborough had been slept in by three presidents. From 11E it looked like an island of old trees locked in acres of wheat fields. Ancient cedars gnarled along the drive, there was a hemlock, two or three warped oaks tall and dead. After the people's son got shot down at twenty by a dealer the place got away from them. The gutter dropped on the wrap-around porch, diverting rain into the ceiling, the porch roof failed, it's box-beam collapsed. By the time I showed up there were pieces falling in every day. That was the State of Tennessee.

The man's name was Lynn Lloyd. I am writing it down so that I don’t forget it. A boy named Dallas and I filled up two dumpsters with wood turned to mulch. I absorbed every inch of the shell of that house. I wore out three two-ton jacks and a broke-dick car-lift. I wrestled the old columns back together with a gallon of glue. I used mason’s string to lay everything out, I framed the whole thing with a hammer. I ran off every red-neck that was sent to help me. I sweated off hangovers in the summer, shading at lunch time in the wheel-barrow. I brought Halloween candy to the grandkids, I waved to the family who ran threshers over the hay. I shit in the old barn with the chickens, getting out from the snow. I did some of my best work I have ever done alone, in the snow. I never did work in Jonesborough again.

The first weeks that summer the light would change around four. Something about how it came through the trees, the place just got still. I felt watched from every window, there was one corner I never did like to go, I tried to speak to whoever it was,

“It’s okay, I'm trying to help.”