Something Appalachian

though something was looking at me. Then, on the edge of my pillow, something began a rhythmic patting. It was just exactly the way a cat would do if it put its paw up and playfully patted at my pillow. This happened several times, pat-pat-pat-pause; pat-pat-pat-pause, before my throat unfroze and I could scream. Daddy jumped up and lit the coal oil lamp on the table. There was nothing in the room that we could see. I have always believed it was the same big cat which Daddy had seen that night playing with a bind of golden fodder in the moonlight. I liked the way Daddy said, "You never know." I must in all honesty say that I still believe there are supernatural entities, spirits, just as I believe there are physical laws and spiritual laws which we know nothing about yet. But our lack of knowledge does not keep them from operating. If it is possible for man to use natural laws to send ships into space, for men to walk on the moon, and send Voyager ? into space to explore incredibly far away planets, then it is possible that those laws extend into infinity. Perhaps physical life, as we know it, is only the tip of the iceberg. As Daddy said, who knows? Something Appalachian (for Ethan) There's something Appalachian in the way you lean against your schoolyard tree, your thumbs hooked loosely over the front pockets of your designer jeans, taking in distances of windbome mist, white as Queen Anne's lace, weed-dense and floating in low air. It's like you're thinking up the hoard of perfect words You'd listen to if things were right between us. Rainshadows that shuffle with on-again, off-again sunlight over an eyeful of mountains, heap on heap, are in the ache of your gaze which neither chides nor loves me, but holds back something never to be told-not by you, and never to be asked for by me. It is strange: I, a flatlander, have a mountain son, whose moods are snaky, hard to understand as the Big Sandy when it can't decide whether or not to flood, and ends up lying surly just inside its banks. I look at you a hundred times a day, not letting your eighteen years of absence get the best of me. It could be you're a child of the dark of the moon when a man can't find his hand in front of him. That may explain this scurvy circumstance of you and me-not at odds, but strangers. Your mountain mother's blood would roil if she knew I was setting all this down on paper. She'd say, aghast, "Something so private . . ." and turn away. I speak for myself: there's something Appalachian in the way I feel. -Charles Semones 49 ...