My Daddy always liked to say
“The Blue Ridge Parkway
is the prettiest place
on God’s green earth.”
‘Course his heart
calls that part of the country home
so you have to allow for some bias.
He said it again
the day my cousin Tim drove us
crazy fast,
flipping us around
hairpin switch backs
on a one lane
unpaved country lane
that stepped like stairs
up the side of a round top mountain
not more than nine miles
from the spot my Daddy was born
and his own Daddy dropped dead.
“This is the cutest little church
you ever seen,” Tim is saying
‘cause he’s a preacher
fresh out of bible school
and he got himself an old country church
he wants to show us real bad.
The road just stops,
butts right up to Blue Ridge Bible Baptist,
like the road was just a long
twisted ribbon of driveway.
The church is one, cavernous
brown room
with dark pews down
both sides of a central isle
leading strait to a pulpit.
Tall windows
along the sidewalls
with dried glazing
and cracked panes
let the
honest
God-fearing
mountain air
blow straight through.
Tim stands up front,
strides around,
his tennis shoe stomping pretty good
sending echoes off the walls
telling us this and that
about his plans
for the souls
of the dirt farmers
who gather to learn the wisdom
that my twenty-two year old cousin
has to offer.
After a time we pop the trunk on his car
and pull out a squirrel gun
Tim called it a “four ten twenty-two over under”
Which I know now
means it had two different barrels for two kinds of ammo
stacked one on the other.
Behind the bible church
we drag an old log
across a gully
and line it with the rusted
tin cans we find
lying around
plus the fender
off an old motorcycle
that quit running
decades earlier
and was left to rot.
I stand with my back to the church
close one eye
line-up down the barrel
and fill the mountain top
with thunder.
That first shot kicks,
I stumble over
fall on my ass
in wet leaves.
I stay there,
in the wet
looking up at the sun
the canopy swaying
over head
as the boy preacher
and my Daddy laugh and laugh.
