| General Fiction posted January 12, 2022 |
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A new friend tempts me to join her in mischief.
Down the Slippery Slope
by BethShelby
~ Family Story ~ (fiction) Contest Winner
‘Turnip Joe’ showed up at our door that humid August afternoon with a bag of wormy, green apples and two dirty looking cantaloupes. He never came without some kind of offering, but what he really wanted to do was be the first one to tell us the latest news around the neighborhood. I didn’t answer the door when he knocked, because Mama would make me be polite, and I found his simple-minded babbling irritating.
“You know they’s some folks movin’ in that old Peterson place. I see’d ‘em when I come thru there, this evenin.’ I thought I’d go by there in the mornin’ and brang ‘em sum greens.
My antenna went up. I moved a little closer in order to hear what else he might say about them. No one had ever lived in that house that I could remember. The house was big and looked like it might have been nice at one time, but now it was falling apart. Who would move into a dump like that? I wondered.
“You didn’t get to meet them, Joe?” Mom asked.
“Naah, I hated to bother ‘em. They wus busy movin’ stuff in. I’ll go back tomorrow and take ‘em sumpin. I’ll see if I kin find out a little more about ‘em. I saw a girl, what looked to be 'bout ten or twelve”
Now I was really interested. She might be my age. No one even half my age lived within miles of us. Maybe there was the prospect of making a new friend before school started.
Joe was back the following afternoon with a few pears and some fresh dug peanuts. This time he told us more. They were the Sullivan family and they’d moved up from Smith County. The parents were an older couple, with a girl and a younger boy. There'd been trouble with the school, and they wanted the kids to start the year off in a different school. Joe had told them about me, and the girl informed him they would be coming down to meet me.
Sure enough, they showed up the following day. Jo Ann was twelve and would be in seventh grade with me. Her brother was ten. She wore cut-off shorts, a halter top and sandals. Her straight, sandy-blonde hair was cut in a shoulder-length bob with bangs. Tommy wore short pants and a tee-shirt and no shoes. His hair was in bad need of a trim.
Unlike me, she wasn’t the slightest bit shy about meeting strangers. She was full of questions about the school. She quickly put me at ease, and soon I was asking questions as well.
What I learned about her was that she and Tommy were the tail-end of family of thirteen children. That explained why Joe had described her parents as older. The rest of her siblings had left the nest for various reasons. Most of her sisters were married or divorced. She had three brothers in service, and two were serving time in the penitentiary. It wasn’t something I would have been sharing, but Jo Ann seemed rather proud of the fact her family wasn’t the typical American family.
“Hey, you must have heard of Sullivan’s Hollow, haven’t ya? Them’s my people. Everybody knows about Sullivan’s Hollow.”
I was shocked and bit in awe, because I had heard my Daddy talk about Sullivan’s Hollow. He’d said it was Mississippi’s own feuding answer to the Hatfield and McCoy families. Sullivan’s Hollow was known as meanest valley in America. Wow, not only did I have a new friend, but she was almost like a celebrity.
She regaled me with tales of her ancestor ‘Wild Bill’ Sullivan who was rumored to have killed seventy or eighty men, including his own brother. ‘Wild Bill’ was one of many sons of Tom Sullivan who was a legend of his own. The Sullivans made their own corn liquor and vowed to shoot the head off of any stranger who dared set foot on the land they claimed as their own. One traveling peddler was stripped naked and hitched to a plow and made to plow the field by these wild hoodlums. Another stranger, who dared venture into the valley, had his head trapped between two posts, near an active beehive.
I didn’t dare tell Mom the stories my new friend was telling me, for fear of losing this source of entertainment. Mom was glad I’d made a friend, and she encouraged me to do things with her. She never dreamed her sheltered daughter would soon be involved in questionable activities, like smoking rabbit tobacco and tasting the homebrew Jo Ann sneaked from her dad's supply. Jo Ann and I even figured out ways to torture poor Tommy, by not telling him the fence we crawled under was hooked to electricity, or that bull in the pasture would chase him if he threw rocks at him.
Our friendship might have lasted longer if Jo Ann hadn’t persuaded Tommy and me to dump a dead frog into Turnip Joe’s well and to go into his house to do mischief when he was away. Actually, he wasn’t far enough away, and he saw his perpetrators. Mom and Dad heard about it soon enough. Jo Ann turned on me and claimed it was me and Tommy who turned over the flowerpots and hid Joe’s clock. She wasn’t able to convince anyone she wasn't the instigator, but that didn’t keep me out of trouble.
When school started again, she found new friends to lead down the road to petty crime. Once again, I became a law-abiding innocent who stayed on the straight and narrow. Just before her family moved back to the Hollow at mid-term, Jo Ann’s last act of mischief was to present our new teacher a Christmas present of a giant bottle of partially used Garrett snuff, she had stolen from her dad.
The old house they moved from was never occupied again and was eventually torn down. She left me with memories of a time when I was so easily led down the path to degradation. My punishment for that time was more than enough to put me back into good graces with my parents.
‘Turnip Joe’ showed up at our door that humid August afternoon with a bag of wormy, green apples and two dirty looking cantaloupes. He never came without some kind of offering, but what he really wanted to do was be the first one to tell us the latest news around the neighborhood. I didn’t answer the door when he knocked, because Mama would make me be polite, and I found his simple-minded babbling irritating.
“You know they’s some folks movin’ in that old Peterson place. I see’d ‘em when I come thru there, this evenin.’ I thought I’d go by there in the mornin’ and brang ‘em sum greens.
My antenna went up. I moved a little closer in order to hear what else he might say about them. No one had ever lived in that house that I could remember. The house was big and looked like it might have been nice at one time, but now it was falling apart. Who would move into a dump like that? I wondered.
“You didn’t get to meet them, Joe?” Mom asked.
“Naah, I hated to bother ‘em. They wus busy movin’ stuff in. I’ll go back tomorrow and take ‘em sumpin. I’ll see if I kin find out a little more about ‘em. I saw a girl, what looked to be 'bout ten or twelve”
Now I was really interested. She might be my age. No one even half my age lived within miles of us. Maybe there was the prospect of making a new friend before school started.
Joe was back the following afternoon with a few pears and some fresh dug peanuts. This time he told us more. They were the Sullivan family and they’d moved up from Smith County. The parents were an older couple, with a girl and a younger boy. There'd been trouble with the school, and they wanted the kids to start the year off in a different school. Joe had told them about me, and the girl informed him they would be coming down to meet me.
Sure enough, they showed up the following day. Jo Ann was twelve and would be in seventh grade with me. Her brother was ten. She wore cut-off shorts, a halter top and sandals. Her straight, sandy-blonde hair was cut in a shoulder-length bob with bangs. Tommy wore short pants and a tee-shirt and no shoes. His hair was in bad need of a trim.
Unlike me, she wasn’t the slightest bit shy about meeting strangers. She was full of questions about the school. She quickly put me at ease, and soon I was asking questions as well.
What I learned about her was that she and Tommy were the tail-end of family of thirteen children. That explained why Joe had described her parents as older. The rest of her siblings had left the nest for various reasons. Most of her sisters were married or divorced. She had three brothers in service, and two were serving time in the penitentiary. It wasn’t something I would have been sharing, but Jo Ann seemed rather proud of the fact her family wasn’t the typical American family.
“Hey, you must have heard of Sullivan’s Hollow, haven’t ya? Them’s my people. Everybody knows about Sullivan’s Hollow.”
I was shocked and bit in awe, because I had heard my Daddy talk about Sullivan’s Hollow. He’d said it was Mississippi’s own feuding answer to the Hatfield and McCoy families. Sullivan’s Hollow was known as meanest valley in America. Wow, not only did I have a new friend, but she was almost like a celebrity.
She regaled me with tales of her ancestor ‘Wild Bill’ Sullivan who was rumored to have killed seventy or eighty men, including his own brother. ‘Wild Bill’ was one of many sons of Tom Sullivan who was a legend of his own. The Sullivans made their own corn liquor and vowed to shoot the head off of any stranger who dared set foot on the land they claimed as their own. One traveling peddler was stripped naked and hitched to a plow and made to plow the field by these wild hoodlums. Another stranger, who dared venture into the valley, had his head trapped between two posts, near an active beehive.
I didn’t dare tell Mom the stories my new friend was telling me, for fear of losing this source of entertainment. Mom was glad I’d made a friend, and she encouraged me to do things with her. She never dreamed her sheltered daughter would soon be involved in questionable activities, like smoking rabbit tobacco and tasting the homebrew Jo Ann sneaked from her dad's supply. Jo Ann and I even figured out ways to torture poor Tommy, by not telling him the fence we crawled under was hooked to electricity, or that bull in the pasture would chase him if he threw rocks at him.
Our friendship might have lasted longer if Jo Ann hadn’t persuaded Tommy and me to dump a dead frog into Turnip Joe’s well and to go into his house to do mischief when he was away. Actually, he wasn’t far enough away, and he saw his perpetrators. Mom and Dad heard about it soon enough. Jo Ann turned on me and claimed it was me and Tommy who turned over the flowerpots and hid Joe’s clock. She wasn’t able to convince anyone she wasn't the instigator, but that didn’t keep me out of trouble.
When school started again, she found new friends to lead down the road to petty crime. Once again, I became a law-abiding innocent who stayed on the straight and narrow. Just before her family moved back to the Hollow at mid-term, Jo Ann’s last act of mischief was to present our new teacher a Christmas present of a giant bottle of partially used Garrett snuff, she had stolen from her dad.
The old house they moved from was never occupied again and was eventually torn down. She left me with memories of a time when I was so easily led down the path to degradation. My punishment for that time was more than enough to put me back into good graces with my parents.
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Writing Prompt Fiction Story ~ READ ALL RULES!!! No vulgar words, sexual terms, murder, ghosts, or profanity allowed--no warnings No Stories about Christmas or Christmas Day/No stories about adoption of children OR a human in the hospital/hospice care with little time left to live MUST be about HUMANS Minimum of 400 and maximum of 450 words No writing on the ONE picture that's allowed /No animation with picture or music One color of font only |
~ Family Story ~ (fiction) Contest Winner |
 Recognized |
Loosely based on a true story.
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