Finley
One arm of the Finley tumbles out the mouth of Goss Cave bout a mile or so northeast of my parents place, there off K highway in Webster County. She flows southwest as a trickle, a temperamental little one for the first ten or so miles. Her other arm rises from an unnamed spring south of Seymour. Shorter, this arm is far and away the stronger.
Just about a mile in, she pours herself over the Falls. Along her course to meet her brother the James over in Stone County, she cuts cold through red clay and limestone and fallow fields. Shallower now than when we were kids, but still quick in places.
Finley Falls used to be nigh on a twenty-foot drop, slick with algae and roaring in spring. Gravel road goes straight over it—bare dolomite, white and black and purple and carved smooth through eons. Small twisty holes here and there and fossils exposed now court truck tires and runoff.
Impassable half the year, floods come quick and stay. They’ve broken the rock, rerouted the current, turned the drop into a staggered slip. Twelve feet now. Maybe fourteen if she got dredged. She won’t. But I still remember when it was whole.
Downstream from the falls is a little flat. Lined in shale and river rock, dotted with sycamore, black willow, and the old myrtle trees that curl low to drink. It’s quiet there. Or it was. That’s where we’d go—me, Chad, Cameron, and Byrl.
Not to swim, really, and not to shoot. Just to play.
We were twelve and Chad was eight and we’d strip to shorts and wade out far as we could. But the edges is where the crawdads live and that’s where we stayed most. Turn over rocks slow. Catch em. Learn their colors, their claw markings, the ridges on their shell and how they pulled water through them wild little gills a theirs.
Up here she holds Ozark and Golden and Spothanded Crayfish. I learned the names later. Back then we just called em crawdads. But the Ozark crawdad has cute lil dots all over his claws and the Spothanded has one biggun at the base. The Golden shines in the light.
No matter the hands they showed, we held them all the same. Set em back soft in the current when we were done. We weren’t told to be gentle—we just were.
You could learn care in a place like that. You could hold something living without squeezing. Could run without hitting. Could chase without hurting. And I think we could’ve grown different, if we’d been let.
But then Gary Hale died. He owned the land around the falls—had forever—and let everyone through who wasn’t the law or an asshole. After he passed, an out-of-towner bought it up.
Fenced it off. Even across the river, which ain’t legal. But he did it anyway. The pigs don’t care and the state ain’t never stopped him and they won’t.
The trees all got purple markings on em head high and signs say No Trespassing. And most folks don’t push past signs with rifles behind em. The river’s still public, but that don’t mean much. You gotta get to the water to stand in it.
Back then, before the world took it from him, Cameron was soft. Not weak—just kind. He held them little critters like they mattered. Like his body knew not to crush.
Byrl went off a few years later and come back quiet. Twitchy. Scars up both arms. And eyes that wander. I don’t know what happened. He don’t either, not in words. But I know he wasn’t always like that.
Now the falls are broken and fenced, the flat’s off-limits, and the water runs lower than it should.
You can feel the absence in your knees.
What got took wasn’t just land. It was a way of learning—how to be in a place, how to touch without taking, how to grow without hardening.
And what replaced it is fences. Signs that say no. Closed gates. A state that won’t stop a man from choking off a river.
That’ll let you teach your boys how to shoot before you ever teach em how to hold.
Mama
It starts at the throat. Rope knotted just under the jaw, tossed over a low limb—white oak, not cedar. You want a tree that grows out before it goes up. My mama stands below it, one hand grippin the rope, the other slick from the cut.
She’s short, used to be five-four and keeps on shrinkin. Real dark-skinned and a brow true like mine. Silver most and black and some brown too, pulls back to keep the sweat off. It’s always been harder for her to pass. The world doesn’t let you forget it.
There’s a mark next to her nose—some call it a mole, but on her it’s beauty. Nothin else. Her eyes are deep brown. The Inces come with a German name, but my mama’s mama’s mama was from the Pine Ridge. Kicked out for bedding a white man. You see it plain in her. Not in me. My eyes are blue. Not like the sky. Like ice and rape and centuries of change.
You ready son?
I nod.
The buck lifts stiff and Mama’s pullin. His crown tips back, brushing at his back. He’s got the grey in him. Purple tongue lolls. His legs scrape the ground til they don’t. Deer paws slice and they dance in the dust there as he tips and yanks. I take the knife and run it just under the rope, where the skin’s thinner. Get it goin. Then I pull, steady, while mama keeps on lifting. The hide strips down like it wants to come off—until it snags. It’s a pair of coveralls stuck to sweat. But you work with it. Not against. That’s something she taught me, though not with words.
Peeled about the shoulders, we pause and tie the buck off tight. Mama takes a set. Lights a cig. Used to be Pall Malls and Winston but now they’re the 24/7 Reds. Money’s tighter. The rest stayed put. And I get to slicin at the elbows. Crack the legs at the joints, run the blade up the bone. Toss them feet off to the side and keep goin.
Arms peel like sleeves. You don’t cut more than you have to.
The body’s built to come apart, if you know where. If somebody showed you.
We’d done gutted him cause it makes the liftin lighter. She held the body out and at the femur while I reached in.
Watch the stomach. That’s where the stink is.
Guts come out whole. Warm. Steam in the air if you do it right. They hit the ground hard and burst—slick with grass and berries he’d been working through. Juniper and honeysuckle. Fescue, cause I reckon it’s rough times around. Hackberry, sweet and rotted, like dates left too long in the sun.
When we’re done, Mama picks back up where she left off on that cig. Leans on the tree like she’s done this a hundred times, cause she has.
Get the hose. I’ll grab the ice.
Dad
Dad worked for the companies that make stills for the companies that make drugs. For people whose bodies hold pain like his does. And I guess one benefit of working for companies that got no problem being the baddies is that stainless builds just as good a still for moonshine.
He’s always been artistic, but he was born left-handed, and that got punished in a world too small to hold his difference. He grew to be ambidextrous and put it to work. And when he’s not at the factory, he’s building things out back in the pole barn.
He made the stills first—three of em, mix-and-match. Moonshine’s made from damn near any sugar you toss in and Bourbon’s harder, but the stills don’t waver. Then he built a mailbox stand that curves every which way. Recently, he built this big ole fish that spins in the wind. About three feet across, he hung it up in the sycamore that grows next to the septic, out back. The body turns wild cause he twisted the steel just so. Tail and nose catch wind and the whole thing shudders like it’s alive. It hollers when the gusts come heavy. They come often nowadays. He’s got ball bearings to put in it, just hasn’t had time. Says after he retires, he’ll make a whole bunch more sculptures.
He’s sixty-two. Lord, I hope it comes soon.
The pole barn sits there like they all do around here—no floor, just chat and dirt tamped by boots and wheels and rain. Tin walls thrown up over a weekend. Some hired help, but Dad won’t pay a rich man’s price in money. The rest comes out the body.
He keeps his welding gear in there. Knows the space down to the dust. Above the tanks hangs this poster, I dunno how old, with men standing cuffed next to a pile of rifles and bows. Their clothes are few and deerskin and they carry feathers about them, white paint for faces and black for the eyes. Comanche don’t look like Cherokee, not really. But the brow don’t lie. In bold letters: Turn in Your Weapons. The Government Will Take Care of You.
My father was born small, so he figured he could make a living contorting himself into spaces other men couldn’t reach. He did that at Mueller for twenty-five years, crawling through pipes, laying welds where no one else could. And it worked. But it cost him.
Now there’s a big chunk outta his nose. Die grinders spin at twenty-three thousand RPM, and when they glance, they jump. Bone, skin, cartilage; none of it evolved to hold against electricity and steel moving faster than human thought. His wrists don’t hold like they used to. Neither does his back or his knees. Springfield’s an hour out and Mueller’s work took too much from him. So now he’s at Hutchens. It pays less, but it’s close. He punches holes in fifteen thousand pieces of metal a day and gets home before dark.
Paul Mueller, Hutchens, or any place in between: they all got specs about what kind of gap is too much. Dad never trusted manuals. Trusted the managers even less. Said a weld could pass inspection and still fail in the field. Inspectors don’t crawl pipes. They check the checklist, mark it clean, then drive on out. State’s just a stamp these days. The rest’s on your back. What matters is what you can’t see unless you know how to look.
See, when you’re welding pharmaceutical, they fill the pipe with argon. Dad calls it star stuff. It ain’t. Greek for lazy, he told me once. Won’t bond, won’t burn, won’t lie. That’s why it works.
If you do it right and shield it clean, argon will keep a weld from scorchin. Keeps air from sneaking in and stops the sugar from forming. Sugar is what welders call it when the back of the weld bubbles and burns, crystals up like sand. Looks fine on the surface. But months later it oozes and snaps under stress.
When it’s done right, the metal turns white. Not silver. Not shiny. White.
I remember him hunched over that little screen, cigarette in his mouth, watching like it was a heartbeat monitor. Reading stress through the grain. Looking for what’s coming apart. What wouldn’t show till too late. In his face you could see time and care pulled tight through the nose.
Cigarette gone. Wrist worn. Eyes trained on the things that don’t show yet, but will.
Cameron
Cameron and I were fixin to go rabbit hunting. Mama and Dad were at work and it was Christmas break. Maybe thirteen or fourteen, after I had stopped having seizures for a while and felt safe in my body again. He hadn’t ever been trained, but he moved like he had. Quiet feet. Eyes that knew how to scan. Two Marlin model 55 Glenfields. Fifty-six inches from butt to tip. Bolt-action and slow. Dad had em cause they was cheap and easy, and he never wanted the best—just what he could afford and keep running. He taught us to be fast cause they weren’t gonna be.
Out on Gary Hale’s land there next to the Falls from when we was boys. A hundred and twenty acres that was the back of my hand and I wanted to show off. It’s all exposed limestone and it holds prickly pear cactus and copperheads run thick. Moccasins stay down in the river, dancing with crawdads and red eye. But we was up on the flats, and it’s all greenbrier and Osage orange and honey locust, and back then, multiflora rose hadn’t quite taken over, so the land held goose and blackberry and devil’s walking stick crowded out at the seeps. Round forty-five degrees out, and you could just barely see your breath. That used to be rare in December, but it ain’t no more.
But we could just see our breath, and that’s good for knowing which way the wind blows. Sure you can lick your finger and feel it, but seeing is better, and breath carries on the wind like fog down a holler. Rabbits aren’t smart but they ain’t dumb neither and they smell better than we do. So we got to runnin after the hares.
Rabbit meat tastes like if a chicken got wild. I never cared for it much, but it’s fun to run and shoot. You don’t kill anything you can’t skin, and so when we came home with twenty rabbits, my dad didn’t know what to be most pissed about: that I’d taken Cameron without dad teaching him safety, or that we were gonna have to skin so many fucking rabbits.
Cameron killed about fifteen of em. I hadn’t told him to aim for the head, so they was shot to shit. We hadn’t choked the barrels right neither. Doesn’t matter. Most of the meat was wasted.
He and I stood over the sink, rabbits in a pile on the counter, takin em apart at the chest with paring knives. Rabbits got abs just like we do, and you gotta work tender through em—press too firm and you’ll slice the guts up. Stay slow. Keep the water cold. Blood won’t set and everything pulls clean.
Dad and Mama were pissed. Took off walkin, left us there to cut. We kept the guts whole, but nothing good came of them rabbits except soup. And it weren’t cold enough for soup.
A couple summers later and his arm got wild. He’d always been a good catcher, but he moved behind the mound and it was electric. Seymour hadn’t beat Mansfield in something like twenty-five years, and we finally done it. Cameron pitched submarine style. I’d never seen nothing like it. There’s no Catholics in these hills but the windup crosses high then across like a ritual. The ball leaves the hand below the knee and climbs. Good luck.
He’d been adopted by the closest thing Seymour had to a liberal-upper-middle-class-family, and they had cable, so he saw all the games. I got to watch what I got to watch. Looking at that windup from center field was gorgeous and strange in one motion. And it worked, cause most boys like me ain’t never seen it either.
He pitched us to regionals and we did lose, but following on him, a few of us got invited to try out for ju-co’s. I did well and got some offers. He got more. Some of em real ones.
And then fall came.
Seymour High never had any money. We got taught God made the earth in seven days instead of some fucking theory—but they’d got cameras back over the summer. Just before regionals, when Cameron was on homecoming court, somebody done it.
We come out of shop class fixing to go to lunch, and there it was, hanging in his locker.
The noose.
We all seen it. Cameras caught it.
Cameron didn’t say a word. He reached up, took it down, and stuffed it in his bag. Closed the locker. We walked to lunch. I don’t remember what we ate.
I didn’t say anything. Not to him. Not to nobody.
I didn’t laugh like some of them did. But I didn’t rage. Didn’t swing. Didn’t scream. I looked down at my tray like it was full of glass.
I’ve beat people for less. But that day, all I gave him was silence.
He never said nothing about it. Not then, not ever.
He lives north of town now. Works been hard to find since the factories left. Subsidized housing. Kids that don’t look like him.
And I think sometimes: I was the one who took him hunting, all those years ago. I put a gun in his hands before I ever gave him safety. He gutted rabbits like it wasn’t nothing. And then I watched him carry that noose out of the school like the world already taught him what happens if you flinch.
Burney
I had seen it settin there since forever, Caterpillar yellow, 40653 pounds, plus Burney. A hair over six foot tall, he was a second father to me for a time. And he took me with him once. Just once. Snow on the ground, half a foot maybe, still comin down steady. Said he gotta clear out there near the faggot camp, with a chuckle. Said it like it was just another road sign. 14-223 don’t get sunlight til mid-afternoon and if we don’t hit it now, somebody’ll slide off down inta Bryant here soon.
Burney wasn’t hateful. Truth is, he was better than most. But that kind of talk gets passed down like a tool. He didn’t mean it cruel. Just knew it was how men around here speak when they’re close. Thought it’d land. Didn’t. I let it fall.
I dunno if all the 14G Cats got a cab made of grease and tobacco. A chaw cup in the drink holder and my hands gripped tight round a thermos older than me. The heater I guess you could say come on but it was sound more than heat. Buzzin.
He let me ride middle, close up there gainst him and near the shifter, his size thirteen steel-toes knocking against the maroon and black Nikes I hauled hay all summer to buy. I was never gonna play varsity, but aspirations start young. Neither of us was fit to have fancy stuff but a man has to buy a pair of boots. He was right and today when I look down at mine, I see him smile.
And the blade made that clean scrape, steel on rock. Iron-red clay and pink quartz grit peeked out from the snow. Roubidoux sandstone and Gasconade dolomite dragged and sang—a racket loud enough to cover the quiet. Burney wasn’t never a talker. Just worked the angles, leaned into the curve like he was settin fence. Said you can’t rush it. Said if you don’t feel it under you, you’ll never know when you’ve gone too deep. I watched the snow roll off in waves, tumble down into ditch and river, pile up on the sides in the flats. The back window fogged, and I watched the road hold its shape behind him.
That was the day he said it. Slow and low, and just: You keep things movin long enough, folks think God done it.
Him and Norma was the first folks I met didn’t believe in God. Didn’t go to church, not even just on Sundeys. Their daughter Amber was my first love. I was hers too, though maybe not as much. Truth is we weren’t well matched, but we tried—far as teenagers can. We fumbled through it one afternoon, clumsy and full of hope, on a borrowed blanket while Norma was in town, stitchin, and Burney was off gradin road. Both of em loved Amber true, and she loved me as she could, in kind. She ended it junior year, and Burney and I talked some ’til I went off to grad school in 2013.
Sometimes when I go in to town I’ll see Amber down at the Murphy’s gas and cigs and her mid-aughts Buick Regal is plum to the brim with six younguns. Most of em got the red that Burney, Norma, and Amber share. But them alleles are recessive, and they ain’t all got the same dad. Don’t matter.
They all’ve got the freckles about the nose Amber carries and taking a look at em there, I think on what could have been.
Norma
Norma’s hands always outpaced mine, and she made sure I knew it. She stitched like she cussed—fast, sharp, with no room for error. Worked both sides of that old feed store on the square in Ava, then split between Pierson Upholstery and the flower shop I got no idea the name of. Today the flower shop is gone. Replaced by black windows. Ava’s the biggest town in Douglas County, but like everywhere else, its guts are slippin out the seams.
The building is white everywhere inside and back then her bench set closest to the back door, where the brick was chipped from generations of boots and beams that used to hold grain. She’d prop a truck seat up on the table, dig through bins for hog rings, foam, thread cones in mustard and maroon.
She taught me how to tuck and roll, how to topstitch, how to feel when the tension was wrong even before it showed. If a line came out crooked, she’d make me tear it loose. Called me shitass when I got it wrong and son when I got it right. Not sweet—just true. She didn’t flatter. You earned what you got with Norma.
Burney was the quiet one, always had been, but Norma filled the room. She told stories, gossiped about town, sang old songs off-key, laughed hard at her own jokes. She and Burney had Amber late—forty and forty-two—and they quit drinkin so she wouldn’t grow up in a house full of fights. That’s a kind of love most folks don’t clock. They didn’t get sober because of church or recovery or some turning point. They just decided not to fuck their kid up. Norma didn’t leave silence in any room to settle. Stitchin or cussin, she kept a line movin. Her fingers were corded from years of sewing vinyl tight to foam, and when she cut, it was always clean. She wore jeans, and one of them smock aprons I see on Mexican abuelas now. At the time, they were hers alone and she tied her hair back, never wore gloves. Just kept moving.
There ain’t no services in the Ozarks that ain’t about Jesus. And the state don’t give a damn. So it’s Christians or nothin. They pulled out and called it freedom. Cut the budgets, closed the clinics, left it to churches and luck. Out here, you get saved or you go without.
And Norma didn’t believe in God, but she believed in people, so she went anyway. Volunteered down at Heart of the Hills—food pantry, thrift store, church all rolled into one. She stocked shelves, handed out coats, kept her mouth shut when they prayed. I was still evangelical then, bowed my head and meant it. She didn’t mock me for it. We went for different reasons. I went cause Jesus said to. She went because somebody had to. And over time, it was her reason that stayed.
Her eyes were blue but dark, not light like mine. Her face was worn—creased by years in the sun and every kind of work it takes to make a life out here. She says back when she was a youngun, they didn’t talk about sunscreen, didn’t know cancer like we do now. Skin just broke down like everything else. But Norma held things together. Chairs, bench seats, jackets, people. She never passed for soft. But she knew where every seam was, and how to make it hold. Norma holds what she can. Always has.
Eagles
Eagles Lodge #3748 sets about a mile and a quarter there off highway 14, northwest of Ava on your way over to Depew and Sparta, farther on. It don’t have windows—never did. Not to hide anything, just wasn’t built for show.
It was stacked and built by hand in 73’ from cinder block and painted heavy. White inside and out. What happens inside stays there—under ceiling fans that wobble and tick, under string and florescent lights, under the weight of everything them walls have seen and kept. Now its innards are tan, the color of smoke and time and breath. You can still spot old paint behind the dartboards and in the corners where the stools don’t reach. The air hangs thick. Nothing moves fast here, but everything holds, like it always has. In hands and rooms and the work it takes to keep things from falling through.
It’s a members-only lodge in form. Forty-five a year. But in function, they’ve been open to the public for the better part of a decade now. Most folks round here can’t spare it. It’s against Grand Aerie rules, but rules don’t keep the lights on. So they do what they gotta. Turkey 101’s 3.50 a pour unless you’re a member, then it’s 3.25. I’ll take a double.
Amanda runs the place. Secretary, keeper-of-minutes, bartender, liquor orderer, cash counter, first one in and last one out. Four days a week for the public and Wensdeys just for members. We hold on to what we can. She’s five-two, all freckles and straw-blonde hair. Chain-smokes Winstons. Wears them jeans with rhinestones on the ass. Knees worn threadbare from fifteen years of kneeling. She’s got six kids and mostly raised them alone. Now she’s with Mason, who loves her best he knows how. But like most men round here, he wasn’t taught to hold things soft.
Their boy, Tater, is two. Don’t talk yet. When Mason brings him in, he goes straight to Amanda or one of the handful of women who know how to hold without asking. I’ve held him too and gotten stares. Cause in the Ozarks, men don’t hold younguns unless they’re theirs. And even then, not often. That kind of care don’t get taught. It gets practiced. Quietly. By women. Like always.
I try to hold Tater when he’s there and me and Schuy are too. He don’t squirm, but he reaches. Not away from me, exactly. Just toward the women. Toward what he knows will be soft. That bothers me more than I let on. Not cause I think he’s wrong, but cause I see it’s already set in him—this thing the Ozarks demands and instills in its sons: you learn quick what kind of body knows how to hold.
These roles ain’t abstract. They live in the flesh—even his, not yet three.
Amanda pours heavy so I usually just set and sip a pour a Turkey by the pool table and watch Schuyler chase him. He loves it. Yells and runs, then chases her back round the tables. She laughs. It echoes. And for a little while the place don’t feel held together by scarcity. Just breath and wood and motion and joy.
We don’t bring younguns, cause we don’t have to. And Schuy and me come with money, even if we don’t show it. That buys a kind of lightness. Lets us laugh louder, stay later, drink without counting. Lets us chase a child we didn’t raise and won’t. That freedom isn’t shameful—but it ain’t free. It’s bought in hours our parents worked and we don’t. Bought in distance, education, luck, or the fact we get to leave.
Saturday nights, Kat runs karaoke. The wifi signal cuts out half the time, so folks bring in hotspots and patch it in through their phones. Everybody makes it work. Sound crackles through old speakers on stands that wobble like loose teeth. You feel it in your chest. Chairs groan. Metal frames, cushions over chipboard gone soft from years of sweat and spilt beer and time.
Most lodges’ve got kitchens for fish fries and potlucks. Ours don’t. The kitchen fan’s been broke so long nobody remembers who installed it, and you can’t legally run hot food without a vent. So we don’t. We serve frozen Tony’s pizzas from the Walmart freezer, slid into a scratched-up oven behind the bar. They’re fine. Hot enough.
There’s five taps on the wall, but they haven’t poured beer in years. Past president had a taste for threats and liked to remind the beer guy who was in charge. Now the only man around who can fix the system don’t return calls no more. So we serve bottles.
End of the night, mop water turns grey. Amanda hauls it out back. Dumps it near the spot where the dumpster don’t set right. Smells like bleach, old smoke, and something close to memory. Somebody always sweeps, even if nobody sees. Amanda locks the doors. Hand welded from carbon steel. Heavy and severe, you gotta reach up in it to unlock a padlock hidden from sightline. Two AM is dark, but she knows it.
Benediction
Burney died a couple years back. Cancer and kidneys and more. By the end, didn’t much matter what exactly. He went slow. Long pain. And by the last few months, he said he was ready. Didn’t want prayers. Just stillness, maybe. Just wanted the hurting to stop.
He’d worked near every day of his life. Didn’t call it noble. Just called it what you do. And it got in him like rust in steel. Quiet at first. Then all at once.
They buried him out there in Loftin Cemetery, near the banks of Rippee, just before she meets her sister, the Bryant at the conservation area couple miles downstream.
Four and a half miles down the busted gravel of 14-327. Perched there on the side of a hill, it’s just graves and a little chapel abandoned to time. At the edges, century-old Eastern Redcedar press in beneath a canopy of shortleaf pine and white oak, with dogwood and sugar maple threading through. No preacher, just Norma and Amber and a few others. I didn’t go. I was in Mexico, or maybe just wasn’t ready. Burney felt like the kind of man who ought to outlive the world. But pain don’t work that way.
It settles in the weld.
It waits.
The body’s built to come apart. If you know where. And this world always does.
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Seth R. Merritt says this about his writing: “I write about survival, memory, and the lives built in the aftermath of collapse. My work moves across the rural Ozarks, central Spain, the highlands of central Mexico, and drought-stricken California. I’m a member of the Western Cherokee Nation of Arkansas and Missouri—a tribe erased by recognition, but still living in the hills I come from. I’m a writer by practice and a sociologist by training. I work through interviews, oral history, and archives to trace how people endure when the systems meant to sustain them disappear or stop working. I live with my wife between the Ozark hills of southern Missouri and Colonia Guerrero, in Mexico City. Some of what I write is about love. Some of it is about land. A lot of it is about what remains when institutions and intimacy fail together.” For more, visit sethraymerritt.com