R.H. Nicholson taught writing for forty years but is now (finally) focused on his own work which has appeared in Ignatian Magazine, Adelaide Literary Journal, Echo Ink, The Blue Lake Review, The Back Porch, Big Window Review, Magique Literary Journal, The Whistle Pig, Cool Beans, The Main Street Rag, and elsewhere. He is a short story writer, poet, and playwright. Justice House Shadows is his first novel. He and his wife live in a small town along the Ohio River with their geriatric cat Fezziwig. You can find a selection of his work at thecountyquirk.com.
Forward
I am what I call “Appalachian Adjacent.” My parents were born into and raised in the culture of mostly Scot Irish immigrants who settled in the Appalachian mountain regions of Kentucky, Tennessee, and the Virginias in the 19th century and isolated themselves in the hills and backwoods, creating a rugged, rich and complicated, largely closed society. These folks valued family, God, hard work, independence, and loyalty.
Later, many of them migrated north looking for work and a better life. My parents were among these migrants. They dedicated themselves to providing my sister and me with comfortable, safe, prosperous lives they never enjoyed. They sacrificed greatly. Our father sometimes held three jobs so our mother could stay home and attend our every need. They bought a nice home in the suburbs, added a swimming pool, and immersed us in culture via trips to museums, concerts, and the theater. I remember vividly sitting in a magnificent concert hall listening to the renowned pianist Van Cliburn, my father in his only suit jacket, traces of grease under his fingernails, moved almost to tears by such virtuosity. As well, I can recall the pride my mother felt the day our complete set of Encyclopedia Brittanica arrived.
In order to realize my parents’ plan for far better lives, we belonged to a racquet club, took ski weekends, and wore department store clothes like they never could. We attended a private school so as to have the best possible education. My sister and I attending college was a given, a point of great pride. And yet, our roots were in Appalachia. Our extended family, our cultural background, our sensibilities were of that people. We visited relatives there who did not have indoor plumbing, who considered an eighth-grade education to be sufficient, and who were highly suspicious of the outside world. Thus, while I never lived in this Appalachian world, I knew it well in a once-removed fashion.
This novel is written from that perspective. Many of the characters and events are based in truth, some are semi-autobiographical. Justice House Shadows is a tribute to those hard-scrabble folks and is intended to be a gentle homage to their simple but proud, complicated, vanishing way of life.
1954
Betty Brogan was, perhaps, the last true Southern Belle, a designation earned through her eccentric ways, odd, nonconforming behavior, and mysterious inner life. Betty was, in essence, the queen of Summitville, a small town in the Cumberland Gap on the southern border of Kentucky, Tennessee in the smoky distance. Summitville was isolated, depressed even in good times, surrounded by stunning natural beauty, rugged hills, rushing streams, hearty wildflowers such as crocuses, mountain-laurel, golden asters, and bird’s foot violets. Deer and wild turkey populated the vast woodlands, squirrels lived with jack rabbits and bobcats, black bears, raccoons, and beavers. The sparkling blue skies were filled with warblers, woodpeckers, bluebirds, and crows. The cardinal reigned alongside robins, sparrows, and finches. Roads twisted around hills and valleys like tangled garden hoses with hairpin turns and steep drop-offs. Settled by Scotch-Irish clans searching for freedom and homesteads, this land was both paradise and purgatory, largely hidden from the world, existing in many ways in a parallel world of its own.
The beautiful daughter of banker, war hero, and landowner Noble Brogan and his demure, fragile wife Martha Jane Marcum, Betty Brogan was born in the wake of World War II in an upstairs bedroom at Justice House, the striking three-story Georgian home the Colonel’s grandfather Augustus had built in 1855 after navigating a series of shrewd land deals and opening the county’s first bank. Justice House stood like a Sphinx at the corner of Third and Main and looked down upon Summitville like a benevolent parent, her tall windows like surprised eyes, twin chimneys raised like arms tilted toward God, the massive front door a hungry mouth. Constructed of locally cured Kentucky red clay bricks hauled in wagons up the hill, she stood as a beacon of stability and prosperity, so striking that visitors often noticed her long before the Greek Revival courthouse only two blocks away. The house was so renowned that Vice-President John Breckinridge spoke from her steps on his ill-fated presidential campaign tour. Weddings had been held on the plantation porch, grand receptions for local dignitaries hosted in the front parlor, and Augustus Brogan’s funeral conducted in the dining room under the Austrian crystal chandelier. A touring Shakespeare company had once performed A Midsummer Night’s Dream on the front lawn and several members of the Lexington Symphony had played in the music room while locals gathered under the windows to enjoy a little Bach. The house had entertained governors, witnessed a Civil War treaty signing, and served as a hospital during a 1919 Spanish Flu outbreak. Local legends abounded about the ghosts that roamed Justice House’s rooms, the hushed scandals, broken engagements, dying wishes of her occupants. She stood proud and silent behind a phalanx of oak and maple trees, guarded by a thick wall of shrubbery, cool and distant, mysterious and alluring.
In this glorious home Betty Brogan lived as an only child little touched by the Great Depression, which lingered in Summitville like a smoker’s cough. She was her father’s most prized possession, evidenced by the fact he catered to her every whim, of which she possessed many. Even as a small child she might demand Cora, their awkward, shy, secretive housekeeper, make strawberry tarts then claim she hated strawberries. She regularly refused to dress appropriately for church, once even tossing the taffeta dress her mother had selected for her out a window. And she insisted her father read Alice in Wonderland to her every night well past the age when a child should be read to at bedtime. She famously kicked the mailman one day when he dared not bring her any Christmas cards and terrorized her father’s employees, calling them “the hands”, laughing as they jumped to fulfill her fancies, open a door, fetch a butterscotch drop, or gather supplies so she could play “bank” at home. At school Betty behaved like a royal personage, the other children her subjects, the teachers merely her privy council. She dictated that she be cast as the lead in school plays, that her assignments be showcased on hallways bulletin boards, and that she be the May Day Queen every year. She once sneaked into the school library before an art contest and switched the prizes, awarding herself the blue ribbon, demoting Dotty Mason to second, then, when the exhibit doors opened, Betty rushed the Summitville Sentinel reporter to snap a photo with the visiting Commonwealth Superintendent of Education before anyone could correct the transgression. She was always the Virgin Mary in the church Christmas play, routinely led the Pledge of Allegiance at public functions, and tattled on boys who tried to look up her dress, guilty or not. And she was always accommodated, for to resist her was, frankly, too much bother and a lesson in masochism. A satisfied Betty promoted a peaceful world. Paradoxically, Betty could be quite propitious at the flick of a finger, giving and kind when the mood struck her, and was a furtive lovely, entertaining her imaginary friends in a covert language, maintaining her diary in an unbreakable cipher, smiling like Alice’s Cheshire Cat she so identified with as though she knew everyone’s darkest shame. Her parents, classmates, and neighbors found it was easier to simply acquiesce to the willful, secretive, pulchritudinous child. Thus, she ruled Summitville and the surrounding hills and hollows with impunity.
Betty’s magnificent ability to affect others surfaced quite early in her life, not like a supernatural force or otherworldly gift but rather via her highly developed knack for reading people, measuring their sensibility, their constitution, almost as if she could see through them and read their souls. And it set folks on edge. One of her early victims was Martine Grieve, a woman of 1950s certitude who believed in routine, predictability, regulation. Every Monday Martine stripped the beds in her simple ranch style home, started the laundry by 7:30, clothes hung on the backyard line by noon. On Tuesdays she vacuumed, dusted, brushed the toilet, scrubbed the tub. Wednesdays meant Ladies Bible Study, for which she made her celebrated pineapple upside down cake on the first Wednesday of each month, then molasses cookies, a cake, and a pie of whatever fruit was available for the fourth Wednesday. Thursdays found her at Main Street Market because that’s when the freshest cuts of beef came in, then she shopped the grocery for Thrifty Thursdays when coupons and specials were the best. Her husband Joe, after a long week at the button factory supervising shipping, bowled on Fridays, so she served supper early. Saturdays found the family convening for a ham or pot roast supper, and Sundays, of course, were the Lord’s Day. Service at 8:00, Sunday school after, fellowship lunch at noon. She oversaw side dishes and typically brought potato salad or Coleslaw. This continuity gave Martine a sense of calm and comfort in her life. It had always allowed her to stand steadfast in her certain Puritan beliefs, to construct confidence, and reduce anxiety. This certitude had served her well for sixty years, through family hardships, the Great Depression, and the war.
One Sabbath during Sunday School Martine’s nine-and-ten-year-old class found themselves discussing Jesus and his disposition toward children. They sang “Jesus Loves the Little Children” to reinforce this concept. Martine had read them a passage from Matthew and gushed over how kind and gentle the Messiah could be when Betty Brogan’s hand shot up, not so much to ask permission to speak as to inform the class she was about to. “Ms. Grieve, was Jesus white?”
“Pardon me,” Martine wasn’t sure she heard the question correctly because why would anyone ask such a ridiculous one?
“Was he white or colored? Because Mommy and Daddy bought an Encyclopedia Britannica, and I looked it up. He was from a place where people have dark skin.”
Martine knew, of course, where Jesus was from and his ethnic heritage. That he was most certainly a dark-skinned man with coarse black hair and dark eyes. But her mind’s eye from hundreds of Sundays of worship and Wednesdays of bible study saw him as a ruddy, angular man with reddish hair and piercing blue eyes just like depicted in the framed picture hanging over her shoulder and not unlike a young George Washington.
“What’s yer point, Betty?”
“I was wondering which drinking fountain he used, the regular one or the colored one.”
“They didn’t have drinking fountains back then,” Martine snapped back.
“But if they did, which one would he use?”
One of the smart-mouthed boys from town, because a country kid would never speak out of turn, called out, “I drank outta the colored one once. Tasted the same. My sister said I would turn dark, but it hasn’t happened yet.” Everyone laughed except Martine.
Betty pushed her burgeoning philosophy. “Seems to me if he was the Savior, he would use the white fountain, but because he was dark, he wouldn’t have been allowed. It doesn’t make sense.”
“We don’t always understand the Lord’s mysterious ways, Betty dear,” Martine grinned like a serial killer about to uncoil.
“And if Jesus said for us to forgive others, then why haven’t you talked to your sister who lives two streets over from you for twenty years?”
“I’m sure I don’t know what yer talkin’ about,” Martine could feel herself melting.
“Mommy and Daddy wonder aloud about it, about how someone stole jewelry from your momma and you both blame each other. Seems like twenty years is a long time to hold a grudge like that. Isn’t that what Jesus said not to do?”
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