Episode 1: Old Number Seven: Barlo, Kentucky 1917: Part One

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I won't easily

leave these dark valleys

where I can't stay now in the lands unknown.

In the easy hills,

I will walk so often.

I can feel the winds now on your ghost.

Chapter 1 Barlow, Kentucky, 1917.

It used to be a schoolhouse.

Well, in its day, it was a place of windows and sunlight, rife with the small winged things of spring singing through them like tiny comets.

These days the front steps sag like a bespoiled altar, bowed and warped by seasons because we have those here.

Fall, rich with rot and the sodden burn of flame-kissed leaves, twilights of mist and rain and fair nights that leave everything soft.

Winters that will reach into your joints and teach all of us what getting old is about.

Spring and eventually summer, months of stinging flies and nights of open window dreaming.

The only condition of the air is it peeing blanket-like.

Now all of these conspire to dissolve the only schoolhouse in Barlow, Kentucky, like a cherry sucker you'd get at the bank.

A long and slow process where the temptation to bite is almost too much to bear.

The air here is heavy.

If you breathed it too long, your lungs would fill with a fetid floral sweetness and you'd probably be sick.

There are no school books.

There's a Bible mouldering in the bottom desk drawer of the wreck of a thing at the front of the room, but that's it.

The chalkboards still haunt the walls.

The ghosts of any lessons taught long since consigned to the wisdom of the owls who nest here.

The floor creaks hungry and unsteady, and the number of snakes that have called that underdark home are legion.

So step careful.

The ceiling is

not.

The room opens to the rafters and to the holes in the tar of the roof.

This place is a rotting tooth in the mouth of the holler, but it is the only molar remaining.

The town of Barlow has been gone for over a hundred years, and town is a generous word for what Barlow was.

Collection of a post office, a dry goods store, a church, a school, school, bank, and two or three other businesses that were concerned more with paper and signatures than actual work.

Outside of what was half-jokingly called the square were the modest tract houses and older dwellings that the local folk built themselves.

And up the road and around the mountain were the mines.

The mines were the only reason anyone was here.

Central Appalachia as a whole was a closed hand to most of the country.

We had our God and our our land, and that was just fine with us.

White, black, native, Melungeon, as long as you mined and kept to your own, Sunday would come and the creek would stay where it was.

When the northerners started coming, talking about mineral rights and offering up what seemed like literal buckets of money, that closed hand opened right up.

Mines went in,

deep and dark, and seeking.

Coal was what they wanted, and coal is what they took.

It was coal that started taking us as well.

Everybody knows you don't climb into the dark earth without her swallowing a few of us whole, her dark kiss planting seeds of decay in our lungs and blood.

You do not take from the mother without her taking back.

It was fair trade though.

She fed her kids, built newer, nicer houses, and paid more per hour than we could ever hope to dream of.

And all she asked in return is that we die slowly without complaint.

A lot of us are pretty sure the mines are what started it.

See, the places we dug were places that had ever been opened.

The things that were there had never seen the sunlight and were never meant to.

That's for later, though.

The low things, the deep things.

There's time for them.

Just not right now.

Right now, we have to talk talk about the school.

That's where it started.

There were 15 little babies, as Annie Messer would call them in her first through eighth grade class at the Barlow Schoolhouse in the summer of 1917.

When they were just a few days out of summer and into the school year, when the worst mining disaster to ever happen in the state of Kentucky heralded the doom of Barlow.

The number seven mine up on Greasy Creek, which had been on strike for the past month, had vomited gas and fire and 62 souls were lost.

Some grumbled it had been a blessing that most of the men who died in the explosion and the eventual collapse had been scabs, non-union workers who'd come down from Cincinnati and other places not here and crossed the picket lines to do so.

The fact that 51 of these scabs were black men who'd come here looking for work made the loss all the lesser to the inhabitants of Barlow.

It's hard to believe you could segregate a place so small, but there you are.

There's no way to describe what was left of the men pulled from the mine, but

we will try.

Flesh was charred.

Bones splintered like busted kindling.

The faces of the men who died furthest from the blast were melted into slag.

Teeth were blackened.

eyes reduced to a viscous running of gelatinous tears.

If the Bible had had the number seven disaster in it, hell would have been a lot more convincing.

When the undertaker ran out of coffins, the bodies of the black miners were dumped two and three at a time into rough-cut crates and lowered into unmarked graves well outside of town.

If digging too deep into the mines was the first mistake,

this was the second.

Somewhere in the underneath, a barrier cracked.

Memories awakened.

Bones and flesh defiled, burnt

and offered.

An invitation.

An invocation.

Worship.

A darkness stirred and the path to the world of men stood open.

The schoolhouse had rocked and swayed with the force of the explosion and the rattling of the earth.

Children had raced outside to see the plume of smoke erupt over the ridgeline.

Cries of fear and worry tearing from all assembled.

When the men of your family work underground, you pray for the earth to stay cool and steady, for the dark to remain tranquil and clean.

This was the worst case scenario that every wife and child feared.

Mothers came running to the schoolhouse.

Children was collected and families went up to the mines.

Praying beyond prayer, their husbands and daddies would emerge soot-faced and shaken, but alive.

Every miner who was walking the picket line that day lived.

In fact, very few were even hurt.

Two of the striking miners, Ed and Pinky Avery, tried to go back in in an ill-fated rescue attempt and were never seen again.

They were hailed as heroes.

Fools, but still heroes.

The residents of the town counted themselves relatively lucky that day despite the body count.

The mine was cleaned up, and the dead, such as they were, were grieved and life went on.

10-year-old Sarah Avery,

daughter of the late Pinky, hadn't been back to school since the disaster.

This was hardly unexpected, Miss Annie thought, as the little girl had lost her daddy and might not be ready to come back to school, or her mama might need her at home full-time to help with chores now that Pinky was gone.

Pinky Avery, by all accounts, was not a bad man.

A quiet man, perhaps.

But when you had the sort of crushing stammer Pinky had lived with his whole life, quiet was understandable.

The Avery family lived way back over in Goshen Creek on the far side of Barlow.

So far over, in fact, it could barely be called Barlow.

Goshen Creek, or just the creek, as most people called it, was backwoods and isolated.

The Avery's and the Holbrooks were the only two families who stayed up that way, and the Holbrooks were just about gone.

Isaac and Norma being the last two up there, and they barely even come to church anymore.

The Avery family was Pinky and his wife Carol Ann, their daughter Sarah, and Pinky's uncle Ed.

They had a cabin up on the hill overlooking the creek, and they kept to themselves mostly and didn't care for church.

If Pastor Garvin wanted to make the trip all the way over to the creek to witness to the Avery's, well he never seemed to get around to it.

But with Ed and Peaky gone though, someone needed to look in on the Avery girls.

It took a little convincing but after a day's hard ride in the pastor's cart, Garvin and Annie arrived at the house in Goshen Creek.

Carol Ann greeted them at the edge of the yard where she swung, bloated and purple, the end of a roughly tied noose.

Flies buzzed about her face and bulging eyes, and the contents of her bowels stained her house-dress and ran down her leg to mark the earth beneath her.

The yard looked as though horses had ran through it in the middle of a thunderstorm.

The earth churned and ripped, and what grass was left was coated in a greasy black residue that Annie could only think of as wet soot.

The house had been ransacked.

It looked as if animals had torn open the front door and destroyed and befouled the house, the windows and the walls smeared with excrement and what looked like fungus.

Annie began to call for Sarah, praying that the child was in one piece and that whoever or whatever had done this had not found her.

Sarah Avery had never been scared of much.

She hadn't been scared when her papa died and she saw his body all bloated and fat in a box.

She hadn't been scared when there were tracks in the yard that didn't belong to a dog and were too big to be anything but a bear.

She wasn't scared now as she ran through the woods behind her house.

The sound of whatever had come through the front doors and the window and the chimney echoed behind her.

She felt like a rabbit being hunted by her daddy's old blue ticks, but the sounds she heard behind her sounded nothing like dogs.

Still,

she wasn't scared.

She was angry.

She was confused, and she was hungry.

None of those things were the same as scared.

Sarah ran and ran and ran some more until her heart was a panicked mouse inside her chest and her breath came cold and burning.

The noises had stopped.

This did not mean she was safe.

The things that came in the house were not something you could see, she didn't think.

It was like the light didn't know what to do with them.

So instead of wrapping around them and showing her whether they were dogs or dog-shaped or animal-shaped or whatever, they seemed to be not quite shadows, but bent light.

Like the light you'd see bounced off a mirror glass, except for the size of a small horse and apparently hell-bent on catching her.

She had woken up that morning to find her mama in the tree out front.

She knew her mama, Mr.

Daddy, something awful, and figured she just went to find a way to be with him, and Sarah sort of understood that.

She also wanted to yell at her mama, too, because who was going to feed her now and take care of her, but what could she do?

She wasn't going to be scared, that was one thing.

Sarah moved as quiet as she could back to the main road in hopes she could just find a grown person to help her.

She could hear someone calling for her, and if she could just get to him, she might be all right.

She started up the road,

and that's when she saw her daddy.

Her daddy was walking up the road, covered in soot and ash, and partly on fire.

This last part didn't seem to faze Pinky Avery as he lurched and limped toward his only daughter.

He sugar pup,

he slurred, his mouth partially burnt, partially melted into what was left of his teeth.

Don't look so scared.

It's just your old daddy.

The thing that was not daddy laughed at this, black smoke wheezing out of the various holes burned in his body.

You just come home with me now and I'll get you home to your mama, it said, forgetting to stammer this time.

Mama's dead, said Sarah.

Well, ain't that a shame, said the thing that wasn't daddy.

I can still get you to her, though.

She'll be right glad to see you.

And with that, the thing lunged for her, and Sarah screamed.

There is a curse upon my everywhere,

and

I cannot escape.

Old Gods of Appalachia is a production of Deep Nerd Media.

Our intro music is written and performed by Landon Blood.

Our outro theme is by those poor bastards.

The voice of Miss Annie was Alison Mullins.

Today's story was written and narrated by Steve Schell.

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Join us next time for Barlow, Kentucky Part 2, The Schoolhouse, here on Old Gods of Appalachia.

Coach, Coach, the energy out there felt different.

What changed for the team today?

It was the new game day, Scratchers, from the California Lottery.

Play is everything.

Those games sent the team's energy through the roof.

Are you saying it was the off-field play that made the difference on the field?

Hey, a little play makes your day, and today it made the game.

That's all for now.

Coach, one more question: Play the new Los Angeles Chargers, San Francisco 49ers, and Los Angeles Rams Scratchers from the California Lottery.

A little play can make your day.

Please play responsibly, must be 18 years or older to purchase, play, or claim.