South of Shiloh Read Online Free PDF

and drove him through a rainstorm to the ruins of a honky-tonk on old Highway 45 going south of Corinth. Leets, a Primitive Baptist minister, was famous in two counties for his powerful pulpit presence, so, in lieu of the beating, he delivered a single scathing sentence:
    “Mitchell Lee, you got bad blood like your daddy.”
    After the rebuke, the preacher left him alone in the rain to think about it. Which is what Mitch did, hugging himself, meditating on that oil-slicked cement slab where his father’s blood had leaked out on another rainy night, two months before Mitch was born.
    According to the local lore, this was where Tommy Lee Nickels, a bootlegger and murderer, had been mysteriously gunned down. The authorities attributed the shooting to another of the fatal squabbles among the state-line mobsters who’d infested the region. But everyone agreed it was Alcorn deputy Clarence Beeman who’d killed Tommy Lee for reasons that would never be known. Old Clarence had gone to his grave neither confirming nor denying the allegation.
    The second event was much drier and more positive. The FFA oration banquet was held that year in the Corinth Coliseum. When Mitch’s turn came, he got up to the podium and recited a long passage from Faulkner. Even back then he had a great voice and could string out words soft and sly as clear water trickling over pretty-rock bottoms. Effortlessly, he captured the rhythms Mississippians remembered from their childhoods. And that night the perfect acoustics in that old hall showcased his precocious baritone.
    Sitting in the audience, banker Hiram Kirby had noticed the roughneck kid with the great speaking voice and the notorious family pedigree. The banker was given to quirky streaks and took an interest. That summer he gave Mitch work clearing brush to maintain the old battlefield on his Kirby Creek estate. The downside to this fortuitous turn of events came in the form of the banker’s son, Robert, who resented this smooth-talking redneck intruding on his summer and on his father’s affections. Mitch had acquired his first lifelong enemy.
    The banker’s vivid tomboy daughter, Ellender, however, had an opposite and more hormonal reaction to the interloper. She had inherited her father’s long jaw but also his earthy sense of humor. She initiated Mitch into the mysteries of shooting her dad’s antique Civil War rifles, so he returned the favor with a few mysteries of his own. When she gave it up, Ellender surmised that every Southern princess had to kiss at least one nasty old bullfrog to see if it would turn into a prince. “Ellie,” Mitch had replied in all sincerity, “this ain’t no frog.”
    “Don’t say ‘ain’t,’” Ellie had sighed tartly, “you aren’t in Theo anymore…”
    That was for sure. When Mitch peeled her pants off, it was on the heirloom horsehair couch in the library of the fine old antebellum house. But after that one time, just like a slumming princess in a fairy tale, Ellie Kirby danced beyond his reach.
    The banker arranged for Mitch to attend Corinth High School, where Mitch encountered his second lifelong enemy, who was Kenny Beeman, the son of the county cop Clarence Beeman who everyone said killed his daddy. Robert Kirby tended to fight with words he stuck in Mitch’s back. But Kenny Beeman and Mitch were destined to collide by events that occurred before either of them was born. They fought regularly to a draw, with their fists.
    So Mitch commenced on his twenty-year battle with gravity. Everybody in town was saying Hiram Kirby better watch himself sponsoring Mitchell Lee, that the apple don’t fall far from the tree. The constant drip of gossip only made Mitch more determined to fly that apple all the way to the big house on the hill at Kirby Creek.
    And that is exactly what he did by dint of hard work and after-hours schooling. He had risen to loan officer in the bank when he eloped with Hiram Kirby’s daughter, Ellender.
    Couple years back,