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Jimmy Stewmeat's Easter William McGowan Push play and record at the same time. There she goes. Hello! This here's Alva (Pop) Smiley talkin to you on this-here tape recorder from my room at the Happy Hills—by grannies, that galls me every time I say it—Retirement Home. It ain't a home, either. It's an old hotel and cafe turned into a kind of kennel for old folks to be kept in. But that's all right, I reckon. This-here tape recorder came in the mail Wednesday from my grandson Roy Combs and his wife Jessie for my birthday , which is next Tuesday, which is April Fool's Day, and I've taken right smart kiddin about that over the years. I'll be eighty-two next Tuesday if I make it that far, which there's no guarantee when you reach my age. Or any age, I don't guess. They said to tell about when I was young and all so their kids—which is Roy Junior and Sallie—can get to know their great-grandpa which they never get to see, Roy Combs bein in the service and all, and livin all over the world and never comin within a thousand miles of this place, seems like. So I'm tryin it out for the first time. It's six-thirty in the mornin and it's Palm Sunday and it's rainy and cold and kinder dark outside. I've been listenin to a preacher on the radio since six o'clock on account of there's nothin else on and nothin else to do, cause breakfast ain't till eight o'clock on Sundays, which is pretty damn dumb considenn all us old folks wake up early if we wake up at all, but the help has to go kick up their heels on Saturday night so we don t get breakfast till eight. A half-hour of that Bible-thumpin on the radio is all I can take and TV is even worse. Why, I saw a woman preacher on TV one time had so much makeup on she looked like she'd been hit in the face with a pie and them fake eyelashes long enough for a bird to light on. They 25 wouldn't have allowed her in a church when I was a boy, let alone have her preach. Anyway, whenever I hear them carryin on about "born again" and such as that, it makes me think about Jimmy Stewmeat, who was a friend of mine when I was a boy, cause we saw him kinder get born again right there in front of us—or really over us. So I'll tell about that. This feels funny talkin to a machine, not knowin who's gonna hear what comes out, so I'm gonna play like I'm talkin right to you, Roy Junior and Sallie, you hear? This all happened a long time ago, Roy Junior and Sallie, about nineteen and thirteen as best I recollect, when I was fifteen and Jimmy Stewmeat about thirteen . I was born and raised at Guthries —it was really Guthrie's Ford, but nobody ever called it that—on the Swift Fork of Glifty River right where it comes out of the gap between Big Piney and Blue Mountain and starts to spread out down the valley. There wasn't but eight or ten families livin around there cause there wasn't all that much to do to make a livin except a little loggin and a little farmin and such as that. The mines were further up the mountain and the sand and gravel pits way on down the river. So we had Mr. Hugh Guthrie's store and Owen Morgan's sawmill and the schoolhouse and the blacksmith and old log church where the circuit rider came once a month and the covered bridge where the ford used to be, and a few garden patches and pastures and the railroad trestle and the little river and the mountains and forest and that's about it. But it was a mighty fine place to grow...

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