I grew up in a strange place. Let me tell you about Exway.Exway is named after the intersection ("x-way") of State Roads 1005 and 1153. There's little more to it. To give you some idea of just how small the place is, consider:* The county seat, Troy, has a population of under 3,500 as of the 2000 census.* Pekin, a subdivision of Troy, is considered a "populated place" by federal standards.* Exway is a further subdivision of Pekin.* Exway residents consider Pekin more cosmopolitan because the service station in Pekin--the service station that defined Pekin, really--had two gas pumps and sold kerosene.I'll tell you more about Exway and Pekin in time. What's important for now is that you understand that Exway, small as it was, represented most of the world as I knew it when I was a little boy. Keep that in mind as you read my stories, and you might start to understand me better.Exway is a very out-of-the-way place, and I don't really mean geographically. It's surrounded by Highways 73, 731, and 220. I mean it's out of the way in a more outré sense--a strange place, like I said. To illustrate: My story for tonight concerns the tin shanty my great grandparents raised a family in.Tin shanties are actually very common in Montgomery County, particularly around Pekin and Exway. These buildings are usually wood frames built around a chimney stack, and the walls and roofs of them are sheets of tin. Exway not being a city, there isn't much in the way of city housing codes to enforce. The shanties are a necessity thanks to the poverty that chokes the county, but they're part of Exway's legacy as well.You see, the primary appeal of the land around Pekin in the early 19th century was its cheapness. Landowners could buy up inexpensive plots, send a few caretakers and slaves to toil there, and earn a little incremental profit off their yields, usually cotton, tobacco, and poultry. Abolition made farming a more costly investment, and the Pekin area's appeal faded. The landowners sold off their properties to their caretakers, and the caretakers took to subsistence farming to survive. Being unable to pay property taxes on the modest plantation houses, the new owners abandoned them to dereliction and built cheap shanties to actually live in. It's not uncommon to see relatively grand houses in ruin mere yards from these shacks.By accident or design, my great grandparents settled in Exway in the early 20th century and took up residence in such a shanty. Theirs was quite a bit larger than some and boasted amenities like a porch and even a little carport for their Model A. This building sat rotting and rusting behind my maternal grandparents' home, choked by weeds and brambles, hidden away between the woods and a dusty cornfield. My family warned me away from it, saying it was dangerous to play around, and I never had much interest in it anyway.But when I was 10 or 11, a long drought had killed off most of the growth around the house, and my cousin Brandon and I found an opportunity to explore it. The Model A still sat outside, and we figured that even more treasures waited within.The shanty stood about a few feet off the ground on thick wooden legs. The underside was a favorite hiding place of my grandparents' dogs. To get inside, Brandon and I had to climb up. It was fairly dark inside despite the afternoon sun, and the floor was littered with old papers and broken toys. I found a stash of old war comics from the late '60s and '70s rotting in a box nearby and deduced that my mother and her brother (my uncle, Brandon's father) must have spent some time out here at some point. The remains of the toys were contemporaneous with the books, and the two of us were pretty excited to have found such potentially valuable relics.As we moved through the litter, we started noticing how...claustrophobic the floor plan was. There were only two rooms in the building: a living space with a front door that opened onto the porch and a "kitchen" centered on an old wood stove and fireplace. The rooms were separated by a partition. It was a unique partition, though, in that a portion of the walls on either side of the door had been cut into something like picture windows. The partitions here rose to about head height on us, and looking up, there were beams cutting across the tin A-frame ceiling.And from one of those beams, right in the middle of one of the partitions, was a thick, braided noose.The shanty stood far from the house, so no one heard me and Brandon scream. We ran all the way back, though, and breathlessly reported what we had discovered. We'd never heard of any lynchings in Exway, never mind in our family, and we demanded some answers. After a lot of protest, we finally convinced some of our male relatives and farm hands to come take a look.A couple of hands got up into the building with us, but our family kept their distance. One of the hands, an older fella who had been working for my grandfather longer than I'd been alive, nodded as he regarded the rope."That there's a Shiloh hitch," he said. "This here rope was made for killin'."The noose, as it turns out, had been used to string up game and livestock for slaughter in the kitchen. It was meant to suspend rabbits, squirrels, and such by the hind legs so that their throats could be cut, and the blood would collect in a bowl on the shelf built atop the partition beneath. But this particular one, on account of the shanty being larger, had been rigged to hold cows and even horses "arount the head so as y'could bleed 'em without 'em pullin' away." As the family, even with children and guests, sat down for Bible study, someone in the kitchen could kill supper, its bleating cries too loud to ignore.And the shanty had been specifically constructed with this in mind.
3/18/2008 9:33:34 PM
words![Edited on March 18, 2008 at 9:37 PM. Reason : and a mildly interesting story is hidden in them]
3/18/2008 9:33:48 PM
hey look, Froshie's back
3/18/2008 9:34:16 PM
3/18/2008 9:52:08 PM
3/18/2008 9:57:19 PM
well you gotta have a killing shed, that's for suresomewhere to dress the meat away from the rest of the placethis is very nice creative (non-)fiction, thoughcongrats on developing into a good writerI feel twinges of pain when I consider that I pursued theory and academic writing rather than creative writing but I love theory and it helps me to grow so I suppose I can defer my dreams for a while longeruntil it swells up and explodes
3/18/2008 10:00:05 PM
]
3/18/2008 10:02:04 PM
3/18/2008 10:08:35 PM
hey! hey!the gangs all here!
3/18/2008 10:09:54 PM
pics or it didn't happen
3/18/2008 10:11:18 PM
HOLY FUCK [WORDS]ok that's kinda weird[Edited on March 18, 2008 at 10:15 PM. Reason : ]
3/18/2008 10:11:34 PM
this thread is frightening because of internet wizardry. you're the devil BO[Edited on March 18, 2008 at 10:25 PM. Reason : asdf]
3/18/2008 10:17:51 PM
well written
3/18/2008 10:23:22 PM
A Golden Opportunity!
3/18/2008 10:29:13 PM
This is an awesome thread.
3/18/2008 10:40:02 PM
I didn't live too far from there
3/19/2008 1:59:13 AM
This here's the thread for that there story.
3/19/2008 2:40:46 AM
3/19/2008 6:31:38 AM
lies
3/19/2008 6:46:59 AM
a regular Sherwood Anderson
3/19/2008 6:51:12 AM
i support this thread.
3/19/2008 6:56:56 AM
A++ WILL READ AGAIN[Edited on March 19, 2008 at 9:01 AM. Reason : ]
3/19/2008 8:56:38 AM
MOAR
3/19/2008 8:59:36 AM
3/19/2008 10:00:32 AM
On the subject of unexpectedly ringing phones: When I was little, I had this fear that people who dialed wrong numbers sometimes dialed the wrong number. Like there was a secret line to the FBI or an old missile silo that no one was supposed to know, and merely calling it could set some catastrophic event in motion, like black-suited goons removing you or the detonation of a nuclear warhead.Mostly, I imagined that somewhere out there were grizzled government workers in yellowed rooms with dirty tiled floors and buzzing incandescent lights. Just tired dudes in white shirts and wrinkled slacks with mugs full of cold coffee and grounds, smoking unfiltered cigarettes while sitting at slanted draftsman's tables, slide rules and graph paper ready for calculating missile trajectories, maybe a dusty chalkboard on the wall behind them. One solid black rotary phone for each man, with those heavy, ominous rings....I used to sit out in the field next to my grandparents' house and listen to the hum of the electrical substation on their property, and I'd imagine that at the moment, the whole world was buzzing with telephone calls. All I really knew were those rotary phones, no concept of the Internet or anything more wireless than the radio. Aside from the substation, it was so quiet that I'd imagine that if I closed my eyes and listened hard enough, I could hear a phone ringing in someone's house miles away, and that if I waited long enough, I'd hear hundreds of phones, maybe every phone in the world, maybe even the conversations on the wires and underground.It'd made sense to me that communication was important, and I figured that the most important and top-secret people and things would still have phones. I wondered whether, if you followed all the phone lines, you'd find all the big secrets, like ripping up runners to find the weeds. I'd imagine myself walking for miles alongside series of telephone poles, finding the wires that seemed to lead down to nothing, and digging the wire up with my bare hands so I could follow it to hidden bunkers and abandoned offices. But I knew that if I found the wrong people that way, they could find me by the phone lines, too.I would marvel that there must be thousands if not millions of phone calls going on all over the world at any given moment, and I'd reason that eventually, someone would dial a wrong number that would turn up a fantastic secret. I might try to call my grandparents or my mom at work and slip up, and instead of their hellos, I might hear, "Yes, Mr. President?" It was thrilling and terrifying.
3/19/2008 3:15:17 PM
^haha awesomeyou got anything new akin to the commentary on furries and second life?
3/19/2008 3:28:54 PM
wtf
3/19/2008 3:29:22 PM
My fam is old times.I told you in the first post how Pekin and its surrounding areas were mostly just cheap land in the antebellum South. My maternal grandmother's branch of the family goes way, way back to that.Some of my ancestors on that side were Parsonses, Howells, and Baldwins. Pretty close to my old home on 73 is Parsons-Howell Cemetery, a bunch of old family plots.It's a decent stretch of highway between Parsons-Howell and signs of civilization. It's all trees out there, and most of the homes in that area sit far back on private dirt roads that spider deep into the woods. You wouldn't expect a cemetery out that way, so it's easy to overlook. The only sign of it is a low brick wall and a sign. A little road leads up to a "gate" of close bricks, and past that, it reaches up a tree-lined hill. Here's a Google Maps link so you can see for yourself: http://maps.google.com/maps?ie=UTF8&ll=35.134377,-79.845484&spn=0.000661,0.001462&t=h&z=20The cemetery proper sits atop the hill, giving it the character of a burial mound. A clearing opens suddenly towards the top, and the road circles the summit. In the center lies the graves, all arranged neatly in a little square distinguished by stone benches. The tombstones are chipped and mossy, and the earliest dates back to 1896. Twenty four of my kin are buried there, among them the very elderly (Mary Anna Parsons, 93 years) to the very young (Infant Parsons, a single day). The oldest of the graves are covered by great stone slabs, with a smaller one for the infant. I used to wonder whether the slabs were to keep scavengers out or to keep the dead in.Parsons is quiet day and night, except the occasional car that passes out on 1005. It's exceedingly creepy after nightfall, especially when fog settles on the road, but even in the day, it seems like there hasn't been human life in those parts in years. I have no idea who keeps the place anymore. The last burial was in '94, but someone is going out there to cut the grass, leaves flowers, and pick up condoms.There is a little bit of a legend about one of the cemetery's caretakers, though. Naturally, no one can remember the guy's name or even when this allegedly happened, but people say he was kinda mentally disabled and real devoted to his job. He lived nearby with his mom and would ride his bike to Parsons whenever he needed to mow. By and by, his mother died, and he was left alone. He wasn't disabled enough to go into state custody, and he actually became executor of his mother's estate. He wanted her buried in Parsons, but the family wouldn't allow anyone who wasn't a relative. So he made private arrangements, and nothing more was said.A while later, the caretaker went missing, so they checked the cemetery first. They found his bicycle there, and the door to the caretaker's shed was open. They found his body inside, apparently knocked dead by a shovel falling from overhead...and a glass case containing his mother's preserved corpse.Every time I've ever been to Parsons, the door to the shed has been open. I've never gone near it.
3/21/2008 9:37:49 AM
creeeepy
3/21/2008 9:46:26 AM
then someone dug up a grave and there were EGGS INSIDE
3/21/2008 6:13:36 PM
i used to be the same way about radio waves. when i was little i would try to break my FM radio out of the constraints set on the dial, and imagined that once i got up somewhat higher than 107, i could hear the airplanes talking to air traffic control.funny thing was that they actually were on ~120mhz... wonder if i really did it!!1once i got into high school and worked my little 20-30 hours a week, i started buying scanners and CB radios and shit. my first HUGE ($500+ haha) purchase after high school was a nice ass scanner with "trunk tracking" that picked up the 800mhz trunked stuff (which was the shit at the time)the best part is that now i work with both radio frequencies and maps, my 2 favorite things to fuck with when i was little. I HAVE ARRIVED]
3/21/2008 6:24:10 PM
Ooh, I'll have to type up the pointless anecdote about the time Brandon and I took a CB radio handset on a camping trip![Edited on March 21, 2008 at 6:26 PM. Reason : quotation marks made me sound gay]
3/21/2008 6:26:06 PM
your voice makes you sound gay too
3/21/2008 6:27:40 PM
you'd sound gay too with all these dicks in your mouth
3/21/2008 6:28:39 PM
ooo nasthy~
3/21/2008 6:33:32 PM
I've started making some crude maps of the places I talk about in this thread. Here's one now.This is my grandparents' old house and the surrounding properties. The house and workshed/birdhouse/chicken coop are marked by the red circle, and the blue circle marks their pond. I'm gonna speak a piece about the western field between the two.There's a well in the field that was contaminated some years ago. It hadn't been in use since before I was born, but it was still a potential health hazard, so my grandfather intended to have it treated or filled in. The field was full of tall brush at the time, though, so getting to it was difficult and dangerous. Rattlesnakes would often come up into the yard out of that brush, so he figured there must be a nest or nests in there somewhere.He got his huge diesel tractor and mowed most of the brush down, then he enlisted a lot of the family a few weeks later to pick up old tree limbs and other debris that the riding mower couldn't finish off. He even got us grandchildren to pitch in, promising that if we built a big pile, we could have a bonfire out there.Though you can't really see it in the image, there's a line of old pecan trees between the pond and the house. Several of their branches had been knocked down in a recent thunderstorm, so we cleared those first to start the pile. After that, we cleared the half of the field closest to the pond so my grandfather could start mowing. By the time he was ready to bring the mower out, we'd made a big enough pile to start burning, so he lit it.As we started working back up towards the yard, we saw dark shapes slithering around underneath the felled brush. Worried that they were snakes, Brandon and I--the eldest--ran to the shed to get some pitchforks in case we were right.But when the shapes reached the edge of the field (where it met the grass of the yard), it turned out to be dozens of rats trying to escape the lawnmower. Apparently, they'd moved in after the tractor had driven out the rattlesnakes. Not such a big deal...but they were heading for the house and, perhaps more importantly, the chicken coop.What do you think happens when you tell a bunch of kids armed with pitchforks to "stop them rats"?It was pretty horrifying stuff, in retrospect. Panicking, we ran down the vermin and skewered them, but after we wracked up two or three apiece on the tines, the shrieks and the writhing got pretty near overwhelming.What do you think happens when a bunch of kids who don't know what to do with the rats on their pitchforks remember the big bonfire in the field?I don't want you to think this experience was typical. It stands out in my memory as an odd response to odd circumstances. We weren't as a rule intentionally cruel to animals; in fact, we didn't even hunt. But something had to be done quickly, and we used the tools at hand.To this day, when I hear something tossed on a fire start to hiss and whine, I think about those rats burning, bleeding, and twisting.
3/24/2008 12:47:20 PM
Yoknapatawpha
3/24/2008 1:01:01 PM
Faulk no.
3/24/2008 1:09:01 PM
MAN I AIN'T HIT UP THIS THREAD IN A DAY OR TWOBUT I'VE GOT MORE COMIN'KAYSLAY!
3/28/2008 9:54:13 PM
you know your story about exway, you should look up WHY, ARIZONA
3/28/2008 10:00:46 PM
maybe then i can hit up new zealand
3/28/2008 10:06:34 PM
keep them coming and keep them creepy
3/28/2008 10:23:51 PM
back
6/20/2009 12:03:14 AM