Grave Goods

Coal is dead. Those jobs are gone. It's heart-wrenching, but there it is. You can put your faith in snakes or speaking in tongues, but you really have to move on. Just step off the bus. It's easy, give up everything, empty your pockets, put on a blindfold and let that old cur take you somewhere. Small game season opened, so there are people in the woods with guns. I wear an orange vest when I walk outside, not to be mistaken for a rabbit. There's a dog (there's always a dog, this time of year), a sleek Blue-Tick that begs the question about having a dog. She's clearly smarter than me, and I spend an hour with her while her owner comes to retrieve her, feed her some cracklings and give her some water. I love the hounds and curs, they're such beautiful animals. They process the world through their noses. And them floppy ears. She (Sister was her name) heard her owner's truck long before I did. Her ass was quivering. I told her to be still, in Anglo-Saxon, and she seemed to understand. Ridiculous that a dog would understand Old English but I was watching her tail, and she did seem to get the point. Tone, right? Language is largely inflection. Old guy and an old pick-up truck, I missed his name because he had a mouth full of chewing tobacco. He came in for a "snoot" of whiskey, and slipped a twenty dollar bill under his glass when he left. Sister, as I suspected, was a valuable dog, he sold her pups for hundreds of dollars each, and she had a beautiful voice. These dog guys don't so much hunt as to listen to the dogs. I used to sit out on the porch, in Mississippi, with Roy, listening to his nephews run dogs along the creeks, and he would know which dog was doing what, just from the sound. I read through a book of Chinese cooking. A couple of the seafood recipes I want to try, so I'd picked up some shrimp paste and fermented black beans. Clear sailing, in my future, I'd say.