the mayor

the next character to stop by the holler was the mayor himself. not the mayor of the town or anything. someone much more important. butch is known to all the residents here as the mayor of mark haley. he too came ambling by in a big truck, green and rumbling. considering that the man for whom this road is named managed to pack more curves into a three mile stretch than your average mountain pass, big trucks are an unsurprising trend.

at any rate, my folks and i were just about to pile into our own trucklike monstrosity and head into town when butch passed and took the opportunity to introduce himself. he is a remarkably young-hearted old timer: gray haired, weathered, skinny- legged, and beer gutted, but free with his good will. the first words out of his mouth were to offer me a beer (an appendage, it seem, that butch is never really without) and the question, "do you like farm-fresh eggs?" well, my family eats enough eggs to spike the national cholesterol average by about twenty points, so of course i told him yes. immediately he fetched three dozen beautiful brown eggs from his truck, some complete with red feathers still stuck to them like tiny mohawks. part of the label "farm fresh" means you have to wash them before you crack them. but still, i wasn't about to look a gift-egg in the... i was going to say mouth, but never mind.

like our laundry benefactors, butch had noticed a we lacked another critical piece of machinery. highly critical in light of an almost acre and a half of yard: a riding mower. over a can of busch, he offered joe (my husband) a loan of his "spare" until such time as we could procure one of our own. evidently the men on this stretch share a common belief that one can never have too many lawn tractors. butch was insistent. he wouldn't take no for an answer. it took us a week, but eventually we took him up on the offer.

butch's house was easy to find. it is at the end of the road. out here in the hills, most rural roads don't actually intersect, but simply dwindle. and butch's farm is the dwindling point for mark haley, appointed beautifully with a two story, tin roofed log home that butch built with his own two hands (borrowing the two hands of several of his friends as well), a pole barn, and a flock of scatterbrained guinea hens. when joe did go down to inquire about the mower, he involuntarily crashed a party, but these welcoming folks were unfazed. instead of evicting the party crasher, they invited him and all of us to their next party: a fourth of july bash the next night.

the party was fun. there was good food, free flowing busch beer, and charlie got to chase chickens with mary's boy and get stomped on by snowball, a chow/retriever cross who thinks he ought be a lapdog despite his noble bulk. i watched some of the gang play drunken cornhole, a game played with beanbags and ramps with hole near the top. the rules are similar to horseshoes, but the injuries sustained when a drunken player tags another with a bean bag are much less severe than those that would result from being hit by u-shaped pieces of heavy iron. joe took a four wheeler ride, and then there were fireworks. sort of. they were more of a sad display of inebriated men launching weak bottle rockets, but entertaining just the same. charlie lost patience with the loud noises not necessarily connected to brilliant showers of light, and we had to take an early leave, but all-in-all, i think we felt we'd been well and truly welcomed to the neighborhood.