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Chris Holbrook 549 Chris Holbrook “First of the Month” Chris Holbrook is an award-winning young writer who grew up in Soft Shell in Knott County, but he has lived long enough to see and chronicle the changes that have come to Appalachia in his time—some good and some not. Many of his characters leave home to find better jobs and lives elsewhere, then return hopefully to a reality of unemployment and springs poisoned by runoff from strip mines. Sometimes the people who stay behind must compromise to survive, some living from one welfare check to the next. h I despise the first of the month. You can’t get on the road for the welfare cases. I see Dougie Johnston at the mouth of Brushy Creek. I try to just cruise on by, like I don’t see him standing there in his black turtleneck sweater and oversize camouflage pants and chewed up Reds cap stuck backwards on his head that he found in the middle of the road somewhere. He stares me down, not even holding his thumb out, just standing there, pitiful, waiting. I go on by for a ways, make it almost, but then I look in the rear view mirror and my foot hits the brake in spite of what I want, and he comes running up to the pickup and hops in the cab like my long lost pal. “I didn’t think you seen me for a minute,” he says. “I sure do appreciate you stopping.” “Yeah, man,” I say. “No problem.” “Where you headed?” he asks. “County Market.” “That’s lucky for me.” He sits crouched up, hands on his knees, looking straight ahead. He doesn’t move the whole ride. But he talks. That’s how he gets around you. “Your wife all right?” he asks. “Why wouldn’t she be all right?” I snap. “There ain’t been nothing in the paper about her not being all right, not that I know of.” “I reckon,” Dougie says. I don’t speak again for a while. I’m remembering Roberta when we were first married. I’m remembering the secondhand trailer we lived in the first five years, how we went without water when the pipes froze, without electricity when I was out of work. I’m thinking how what got us through was 549 550 The Kentucky Anthology having to pull together so hard just to scrape by. I’m thinking about us now, how we come and go, say “hello” and “thank you” and “excuse me” to each other like strangers. We ride up Polk Mountain, lay over for a loaded down Mack we meet in a switchback curve. The driver pulls his horn. I recognize the name “Black Cat” painted on the truck’s door, wave my arm out my window, and yell, “Hey, Patton.” Near the mountaintop I pull off to view the strip site. This is one of John Winfrey’s biggest operations. Half the mountain, two thousand acres, has been honed down. I sit for a while and watch the D-9 dozers and backhoes gouging up coal, the endloaders scooping it into the Mack trucks. The smell of diesel fuel rises on a little breeze, and I can feel the rumble of heavy equipment right in my chest. “Sure is something,” Dougie says. For a second I’d forgot he was in the truck with me. I don’t answer, just put her in gear and head on down the mountain. We drive through Palestine, row on row of tiny box-frame houses propped on stilts on the hillside above the old C&O railway spur. Each one is like the other, two windows to a side, no porch, rusty metal stovepipes sticking through gray tarpaper roofs. A few of the houses that are still yet lived in have been kept up, but most of them are falling in on themselves. There’s talk of opening up a section of the old deep mine, restoring the company commissary and a few of the old houses and running tours through. I’d like to get in on that. We bypass the county seat and head out on Highway 1 to the County Market. The parking lot is filled with rolling wrecks, just bits and pieces of cars, not one of them whole. I find a space next to the war monument, a World War II Howitzer, shut her off and start to climb out, but before...

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