Black jack hills roll into Tennessee
Where toughs bounce Mississippi boys
In honky-tonk parking lots,
A Saturday night sport.
“That’s the curve where he lost it.
Just too durn drunk to know what hit him
Jumped four strands of barbed wire and flipped in that gully.
Junior was thrown free,
But it sliced his head off just above the eyebrows—
Sheet metal and brains,
Just sheet metal and brains.
Kept the casket closed at the funeral.”
You don’t want to know where that smoke comes from
Drifting out of hidden hollows.
“One time, me and Joe Frank went squirrel hunting
Way back beyond the old Sullivan Place. Ya’ know, up behind Dostie.
Well, we tramped around ‘bout three hours that afternoon
And run up on this here still.
Must ‘a been twenty feet of coil, an old Buick radiator, and fifty gallon drums—
Coals still smoking under the cooker.
Under the lean-to, stacks of sugar sacks and corn, and fourteen boxes of fruit jars.
We could feel the itch of the shotgun between our shoulder blades.
Never been so scared in all my life, so we skedaddled.”
Sunday morning—
Dusty cars and pick-ups crowd hill-top clapboard churches.
While waiting for the preacher, old women in wash-worn calico talk quietly
While their menfolk hunch down in stiff new overalls, scratch,
And complain about the weather and crops.
“Well, Bubba is a good boy. Just gotta let of steam now and then, that’s all.
Had a good ‘ujn at the Ole Hickory Hut the other night.
Chipped off four of his teeth, but he laid the SO—guy open with his Case knife.
Took twenty-eight stitches in the Savannah hospital to sew up his belly.
But he come at Bubba with a chain, y’know.
Yeah, sat up with him most the night his teeth hurt so bad.
But he’s gonna be all right.
Wish you could see him now. He’s grown up into a fine lookin’ man.”
Tennessee tonks still rumble,
Drunk boys still lose it in curves,
Smoke still rises from hidden hollows,
And mammas still brag on their sons grown to be men.
About Emory Jones
