Whippoorwills Only Sing at Night
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Suddenly Dad stuck the point of his knife blade at Buck's belly button. "You've gone too fur, Buck." Dad's face was beginning to turn red and I could see his hand trembling. "I'm not goin to stand here and let yuh talk thataway about a good man like Vertries Mulberry. Yuh better take back what yuh just said--and I mean right now." Buck looked down at the knife blade pointing at his gut. "I don't want no trouble with you, Matt. I know you've been drinkin. Put that knife back in yore pocket before somebody gets hurt." The other men watching stood as in a trance. The sight of Dad threatening a man with a knife seemed beyond belief for everyone. But no one appeared to know what to do. For the first time in my life, my father seemed to me a total stranger. "Dad, don't!" I yelled. I ran up and grabbed his hand holding the knife. "Put that knife down! You don't want to cut Buck!" As if in a daze, Dad let his knife slowly drop to the ground. He looked down at me, like he didn't even recognize me. Then he put his hand on my shoulder. " Oh...uh...what's the matter, boy? Me and Buck here wuz just havin' a little argument...Ain't that right, Buck?...I guess I lost...uh...I didn't mean no harm." He looked at the whittling stick he was still holding. "What happened to my knife, son? I must have dropped it somewheres around here." I reached down and picked up the knife, closed the blade, and handed it to him. "C'mon, Dad, let's go home," I said, tugging at his hand. "Yeah. You're right, boy. We need to git home." As we walked away, I could hear Buck say: "I know that wasn't Matt actin' like that. It was the likker in 'em makin 'em do it." As I walked down the steep slope of the church grounds between the trucks and wagons with Dad staggering along beside me, I just wished we both would fall into a big sinkhole and disappear. Dad never said anything during the long walk back home. That suited me fine. I didn't feel much like talking anyway. He seemed to be in deep thought--if a drunk can think. I doubted if he even knew what he had done and said. That probably was just as well. My thoughts were more of Mom. I knew how hurt she would be when she found out what had happened. Pulling a knife on a man on the church grounds while drunk would be getting awfully close to committing the unforgivable sin in her mind. What would people think about my dad now? And would Mom ever be able to hold her head up again in church? Would my friends make fun of my dad behind my back? It was the first time in my life I was ashamed of my father.
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Whippoorwills Only Sing at Night
Tray’s father, Matt, is a close friend of Vertries. He promises to stand by him even if he is indicted for murder. Matt believes a man has the right to shoot a horse thief. After all, one couldn’t make a living on the hard-scrabble farms in south central Kentucky without a team. When Tray tries to tell his father what he heard Check say, Matt does not take it seriously. But a few weeks later Belinda confesses to Minerva, Matt’s wife, that she did indeed have an affair with Check and is carrying his baby. And that, she says, is the reason Vertries killed Check.
Now Matt must decide whether to tell the law what he knows, which could send his best friend to prison, or to keep silent and live with a guilty conscience. Matt’s moral struggle, coupled with his heavy drinking, that leads to nearly knifing a neighbor following an argument over the killing, diminishes his standing in the eyes of his son. Tray has always wanted to grow up to be like his father--the best teamster in Cleary County. Now he begins to have second thoughts. When they bury Check Spriggs, they are burying more than a philandering bootlegger. They are also burying a little boy’s innocence.
Selah Ridge, Ky., in 1939 could have been a Third World community: Mud roads. No electricity. Radios rare. No telephones. Travel done mainly in horse-drawn "jolt" wagons. Deaths announced by the tolling of the church bell. Water drawn from hand-dug wells. Food came from the land. Poverty was the great equalizer. But the hard times were lightened by revival meetings where sinners got saved and young people did some heavy courting, Decoration Day celebrations, all-day singings and dinner on the ground, and chilly fall sorghum "stir-of fs" where crowds gathered to scrape the huge boiling pan with their "lickin’ paddles." Young boys often spent Sunday afternoons playing "cob war" in the barn lofts. Times were hard but even difficult days can be a delight when leavened by love and spiced by humor and grace.
About the Author
Veteran journalist James L. Adams grew up during the Great Depression and W.W.II in the foothills of the Cumberland Mountains in south central Kentucky--the setting for his first novel. He attended a one-room school in the first grade, a two-room school from second to eighth grade and a four-room high school – all in Kentucky. The Adams family moved at the end of W.W.II to Cincinnati. Adams received a Certificate in Journalism from the University of Cincinnati Evening College in 1950. Following two years of military service with the U.S. occupation forces in Frankfurt, Germany, Adams enrolled at Ohio State University in 1953. He received his Bachelor of Arts in Journalism in 1955. He was awarded a Fellowship to the Washington (D.C.) Journalism Center at American University in 1967. He won a Medill Fellow scholarship to the Urban Journalism Center at Northwestern University in 1973. Adams began his journalism career at suburban Chicago newspapers in 1955. In 1962, he returned to Cincinnati to join The Cincinnati Post staff as a general assignment reporter. He later became an assistant metro editor and city editor, retiring as associate editor-columnist in 1991. He has written two non-fiction books: The Growing Church Lobby in Washington (William B. Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, Mi., 1970), and Yankee Doodle Went to Church, (Fleming H. Revell Company, Old Tappan, N.J., 1989). He and his wife, Phyllis, are the parents of three daughters and one son. They also have one granddaughter.