Chapter 1

Jerry Donavan belly crawled through the mountain morning mist until he reached a large, uprooted hickory tree at the edge of a small clearing. Doffing his hat, he cautiously peeked around the tangled root ball. The black feral pig he had been tracking was in the clearing, its snout was busy furrowing up scallions. Jericho rolled onto his back, gently opened the bolt of his single shot Winchester 1900 and quietly loaded a .22 long rifle round. Bringing down a hundred-pound pig with a .22 was going to be tough but the chance to come home with something besides squirrels, quails or rabbits was too good to pass up.

Twenty long minutes later, the pig finally lifted his head and turned in just the right direction. Jerry lined up the iron fixed sights of his rifle and put a bullet through the pig’s left eye and into its brain. With an abbreviated squeal, the pig took one wobbly step and fell to its front knees. Jerry sprinted from behind the fallen tree and tackled the pig to the ground just as it was standing up to run.

Jerry quickly cut the porker’s throat and dragged the swine down to a small stream that cascaded down the mountain side. The stream spilled into Mulberry Creek near where County Road 53 crossed over the creek and the rail road tracks that serviced Pitchfork Mine. He stripped off his bib overalls and red plaid flannel shirt and washed the blood out of them. He then hung the wet clothes over a Mountain Laurel bush to dry. He field dressed the pig in the fast-flowing stream and wrapped the meat in a tarp he carried in his knapsack. He donned his still damp clothes and put on his pack. Then he slung his rifle over one shoulder, the pig over the other, and headed home.

Jerry grunted when he lifted the pig. He reckoned the porker dressed out at close to ninety pounds. It was a load, but it was enough meat to feed his family for a month, maybe more.

Jerry was rightfully proud of the hunting skills that he learned spending summers with his grandfather. He was an expert tracker, a superior marksman, and he could move through the woods as quietly as a gentle breeze.

The sun was well beyond noon when Jerry walked off the gravel county road and onto the coal clinker lane leading down into Chaney Hollow. Chaney Hollow was near the foot of the western slope of Pitchfork Mountain in Coker County, West Virginia.

There were four houses on Chaney Hollow Road. The first and nicest house belonged to Ben Chaney, his wife Elizabeth, and their daughter Alice. The Chaney family had been farming and raising cattle on their three hundred acres of bottom land for four generations. Alice Chaney and Jerry’s little sisters were best friends.

The second house belonged to Ben Chaney’s widowed younger sister Ida Flood. Ida taught English at Coker County High School.

Midway up the hollow was the Donavan place. The five-room frame house with the wrap-around porch was nestled into a twenty acre stand of old growth hardwood forest. Jerry’s father had built the house for his new bride after he mustered out of World War II. The house was freshly painted with a tidy yard and a thriving garden in the side lot. Jerry lived with his mother, Ester, and his younger sisters, Rachael and Ruth.

Near the top of the hollow sat the home of Hoke and Lottie Purnell. The Purnells were an older couple with grandchildren Jerry’s age. Hoke Purnell had the reputation of being able to fix dern near anything mechanical. Behind their dark stained cedar-sided house was a five acre field that was filled with the rusted remains of cars, trucks, tractors, farming equipment and even a couple of derelict airplanes.

Jerry hung the pig in the backyard on an iron tripod his father had built to butcher deer. Then he walked quietly onto the back porch. His mother was at the kitchen sink with her back to him washing dishes. She was wearing a blue calico dress, with her hair up in its usual braided bun. She was bare footed and her still slim body swayed side to side as she sang ‘Let’s Go Down to the River to Pray’. Ester had a pure and sweet voice that was perfect for the old spiritual. Jerry listened for a minute, then eased open the door. He slipped up behind her and tapped her on the shoulder.

Ester screeched and spun around, the cast iron frying pan she had been washing held menacingly in her upraised right hand.

Jerry nimbly jumped backwards and held up his hands.

“Whoa, Mama!” he yelped.

Ester jabbed at him with the frying pan.

“Land sakes, Jericho Earl Donavan, you gave me a fright! You need to quit sneaking up on me like that, or next time I’ll dent your pumpkin with this skillet.”

Jerry wiped the grin off his face. When his mother used all his given name, he knew she was serious, and she wasn’t one to make idle threats.

“Yes, Ma’am,” he said contritely.

Then the grin was back as he grabbed her arm and tugged her towards the door.

“Now come outside and see what I shot us for supper.”

Ester put the frying pan back in the sink and let her excited son drag her out onto the back porch. She saw the pig hanging on the tripod and cut her eyes to Jerry.

“Where did you find it?” she asked.

Jerry knew what she was really wanted to know.

“It’s wild, Mama. I ran across it over behind the old Spencer place. No one lives within a mile of there,” he replied.

Ester nodded her head. She knew her son didn’t tell her all that he got up to, but he would never lie to her face.

“Then the Good Lord was looking out for us this day,” she said as she took charge.

“Drag that picnic table over here, then fetch me the cauldron. Build a fire under the cauldron and fill it half up with water. We’ll butcher the pig, and when the water boils, I’ll render the lard,” Ester directed.

Ester watched her son scurry away to do her bidding, her pride tinged with a touch of sadness. Since her husband’s death, Jericho had shouldered the burden of being the man in the family. He had done an admirable job of it, too; but at the sacrifice of his youth. Her husband’s death three years ago was a still painful memory for Ester, because she had been hopelessly in love with John Roy Donavan since she’d was sixteen.

Ester Hatchett met John Roy Donavan at the 1941 Swain County Fair in Cherokee, North Carolina. She was a sixteen-year-old waitress at a restaurant owned by her uncle that catered to tourists visiting the Qualla Boundary Cherokee Reservation at the southern end of the Great Smokey Mountains National Park. He’d been an eighteen-year-old Civilian Conservation Corp enrollee from Murphy, North Carolina. John Roy was assigned to the Oconaluftee CCC Camp working in the Park. Ester was a tall slender Cherokee Indian. John Roy was a stocky, not very tall red head of Irish decent. Within a month they were talking marriage.

Then Pearl Harbor happened, and marriage plans were put on hold while John Roy went off to kick Hirohito, Hitler, and Mussolini in their collective butts. He went on to help punish two of the three in North Africa, Sicily, and Italy as a member of an engineer battalion.

In late 1943 he returned to Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri to train more engineers. Along with John Roy came his best friend since basic training, a fellow from West Virginia named Carl Blanchard.

One day on the rifle range John Roy was lamenting to Carl on the dearth of employment opportunities in western North Carolina.

“Dammit, Carl, when this war ends, I’m at a loss as to what to do. How can I go marry Ester if I don’t have a job already? I’m afraid that finding a good job to support a wife is going to take a while, and we’ve already been waiting nigh on to three years.”

Carl laughed and clapped John Roy on the back.

“Hell, John Roy, you musta’ read my mind cause I was gonna talk to you about that very thing today. See, I got me this idea that when we finally muster out, we go get a job with my uncle. He runs a coal mine up home, and I know he’d take us on.”

John Roy put on a dubious frown.

“I don’t know nothing ‘bout coal mining,” John Roy complained.

Carl’s perpetual smile got bigger.

“That’s the beauty of it partner, we won’t be miners, we’d be mine electricians. We need us some union cards, but we already know all about wiring, and generators, and such. I met the ole boy what bosses the union here on the post, and he said he’d fix us right up. Long as we pay our dues, our service counts against our apprenticeship. He even said if we pay back dues, we can count the time we served since we become engineers.”

John Roy laid it all out to Ester in a long letter that very night. In two weeks he had her very emphatic agreement.

A week after Ester’s reply, Carl and John Roy were members in good standing of Local 34, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW). It cost them fifty-eight dollars apiece to become apprentice electricians, with eighteen months training and experience.

The newly trained 373rd Construction Engineering Battalion shipped out for England in May of 1944, just in time for D-Day. Carl and John Roy were both Staff Sergeants in charge of construction platoons.

Before they shipped out, John Roy was granted a one week leave. He took a bus to Ashville, North Carolina and hitchhiked to Cherokee. After a tearful reunion with Ester, John Roy nervously presented himself to Ester’s father, Jericho Hatchett, to ask for her hand in marriage. John Roy was a little leery of Mister Hatchett because in two years the man had only spoken a dozen words to John Roy and had never cracked even the smallest of smiles. But he pressed on and presented his case to the taciturn man.

Hatchett frowned but nodded his head.

“So be it,” he said menacingly, “but if you ever hurt my daughter I will hunt you down, cut off your balls, and feed them to you!”

Looking Hatchett in the eyes, John Roy firmly replied, “Mister Hatchett, that’s one promise you’ll never have to keep.”

The 373rd Construction Engineering Battalion followed behind the D-day invasion of Europe and, as part of Patton’s Third Army, built rear area hospitals across Europe. They came under fire a few times, once from an infiltrated sniper and then the occasional artillery barrage, but John Roy and Carl made it through the war unscathed.

The battalion returned to the states in September of 1945 and was disbanded at Fort Devens, Massachusetts. Carl and John Roy mustered out at Devens and headed to Charleston, West Virginia, Carl’s hometown. Armed with letters attesting to their skills written by three master electricians with whom they served, the two friends took and passed their journeyman electrician’s test and became fully qualified members of Local 466 of the IBEW.