Bloodline

An Excerpt from Lee Clay Johnson's New Novel

This weekend, we’re pleased to share an excerpt from Lee Clay Johnson’s novel Bloodline, following Miss Becka as she tends to both the post office and the trout-filled waters of the Caney Fork River in Tennessee. Johnson’s precise, unhurried prose captures the rhythms of Appalachian life, where daily rituals intersect with family secrets and the weight of generational loss.

—The Editors

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The distant siren goes off at dawn, a warning that the turbines are starting and the water will soon be rising.

Miss Becka sits on her porch drinking instant coffee, an open journal in her lap containing notes of bird sightings. All the usual suspects this morning. Even the hummingbirds are zipping around. Then a surprise visitor, a little songbird the color of the sky, landing on a branch of the shadbush and picking off a larva. When Miss Becka lifts her mug, the bird shoots straight up into the canopy. A cerulean warbler. It traveled over three thousand miles just to be right here.

Today’s Monday. She keeps these morning hours for herself before going in to work. She’s been maintaining part-time hustles for so long that this provides a normal weekly rhythm that keeps her mind off the obvious and inevitable.

Weekdays, she goes to Carthage to the post office and sorts mail along with other part-time government employees. Snail mail’s down, with the usual Republican shitheads cutting full-time positions, and because she’s willing to work for close to minimum wage she fits into their desired demographic: a responsible older person with time on her hands.

Landing that gig was more than fifteen years ago, god help her, soon after she lost the mill — or gave it up, rather — and since we’re doing math she might as well admit that she’s sixty-seven years old. And sorting mail. Maybe all this real work in the real world has been good for her, though. Therapeutic, as the kids today might say. And she also gets to keep an eye on what’s happening around the village. She’s never opened anybody’s mail, but she doesn’t need to. Traffic court here, divorce lawyer there — she gets the obvious essentials.

After years of these mornings, she realized her evenings were beginning a little too early, with that chilled jug of Rossi making its appearance around three in the afternoon. So she talked with the lady who was running a tavern down behind the post office and asked if she could pick up a few evening shifts behind the bar. She’d poured a beer or two in her time.

When that lady asked if she was good with people, and she lied and said yes, she was given Thursday, Friday and Saturday and ever since has been covering those nights as well as most of the others. It’s fun, usually just babysitting grown men while pulling them pints to suckle, but sometimes she gets some college kids or professors who venture east from Lebanon instead of west into Nashville, and she’s gotten pretty good at talking with them. They like her because she once went to CU herself, and also knows a lot about the rivers and the land and all the history around here. She has roots in anti-Confed shit and used to protest Klan rallies with her dad, stuff their college is interested in now that they’re finally starting to reckon with their past. Back when she was a student, they couldn’t care less about any of that, but she did. She’s been talking about removing those monuments for a long time.

There’s this one young lady — what’s her name? — who’s been hanging out with Dustin, or rather getting followed around by him. She calls Miss Becka the Forest Warden, and Miss Becka kind of likes that. She might have taken up Green Studies, one of the college’s new progressive majors, if they’d had it back then. Forest Warden: she’ll take that. So long as folks don’t start seeing her as a crazy old local. She’s got these part-time gigs to keep from becoming one.

The owner of the lower building is a polite old racist belle named Madison Gentry, who wears bright colors, carries a big purse and paws at you like a cat while she talks. She hired Miss Becka because she agreed to work only for tips, no hourly wages, no taxes, none of that, if you please. Just the plastic piggy on the counter with the slot in its back for change. And it really isn’t that much work.

Also, she likes being around booze and not drinking. She could drink while she’s behind the bar, and sometimes she does, sometimes, but she prefers to wait until after her shift. A few more sober hours during the day will probably keep her kicking a few years longer. When she first started working the weekend evening shifts, she saw pretty fast that her eyes were clearer, her face was less bloated. And with the place literally down the stairs from the P.O., in this weird old basement-area that was built as a bomb shelter — that’s how the tavern got its name — well, who’d say no to the prospect of adding a few more lonely years onto your lonely life?

But she’s not thinking about any of that for the next two hours. Now is her time. She’ll sink into her morning here on her river, drink her coffee, log bird sightings. After leaving the P.O. she’ll do some fishing, then settle in with a pint glass of Rossi on ice. It’s Monday, after all, no work at the bar tonight. For dinner she’ll fry up one of those bass filets. Refill the pint glass. Talk to herself a little bit. Wander around with her hair hanging down like a witch. Go out into the water and weep at the stars. Then tomorrow morning wake up with a headache and remember why Tuesdays are the toughest.

Come back, cerulean warbler.

But it doesn’t.

Low ghostly fog comes rolling down the river. Through the trees she can see eddies deepening, boulders disappearing. That’s the cold water being released from the dam. She finishes the last of her coffee, walks down to the slick grassy edge and slips a foot in. That’ll wake an old girl up. She feels the silky mud coming up between her toes. When the water’s risen past her knees, she figures it’s about time for work.

Her cabin’s at the end of a rutted dirt trail. She drove down it a few times back when she was moving her stuff in but she didn’t have four-wheel drive, and after one rainy summer it was useless, so she just let it grow back up. To get to her car, she hikes the trail through the tall fern and nettle up to the county road, where she parks in a gravel pulloff. Anglers used to use the area for access, but she put an end to that with some private property signs. From here, it’s just a ten-minute drive into town. She steps over the new guardrail they put in despite her protests and gets in her old Camry. The shocks are gone so she takes bumps slow.

A little historical marker in front of the post office says it’s one of the few buildings that survived the war. The reason the Union didn’t burn it down — though the plaque doesn’t say so — is because many of the workers were Union sympathizers who passed along intel about rebel positions. Miss Becka likes to think that those were her ancestors, but honestly doesn’t know. She’s never done the research and doesn’t really want to. She parks in the lower lot down near the Bomb Shelter, climbs the outdoor wooden stairs and unlocks the second-story backdoor. Inside, she turns the alarm off and opens the side garage gate for the morning mail delivery.

There’s magic in this building after it’s been empty all night. Empty, but not unoccupied. She believes there’s a spirit here who reads the letters in the personal boxes. Sometimes she’ll find a letter’s been misplaced, a mistake she’d never make. And sometimes a letter will be torn neatly at the top. When a customer complains, she tells them it was like that when it arrived. If she told the truth, they wouldn’t believe her. “Good morning,” she says into the room. The air is dry and warm in here. No activity. She flips the overhead lights on.

Her mother worked as a cook at the inn down the street while her father ran the sawmill. She passed along to Becka her recipe for fish-fry batter — eggs, flour, corn crumbs and root beer — and sometimes while cooking in the evenings, Becka spots her reflection in the little window above the sink. With her hands covered in flour, she looks like her mother’s ghost. Her father had always wanted a son to take over the mill. “Only a man can work with wood,” he used to say, so she spent many years proving him wrong, until the day the Alcorns came along. Winston said he was looking for work, and she took pity on him and his children and his wife. What did she have to lose? So much, so much. She didn’t realize what he was up to. He was such a good liar — like he believed it all himself. Would she have been able to tell what he was up to if she’d been the son her father wanted? Well, she wasn’t, and when she’s being truthful she’ll admit that a bittersweet freedom came with walking away. But there’s still something wrong.

She’s never told her father what happened. He’s still alive, if you can call it that, over in the Second Wind nursing home. What would be the point in letting him know that his daughter turned out to be a girl after all. Sometimes she brings him a tin of sawdust to sniff. It keeps him thinking the saws are still running. It’s the same can every time.

She unlocks the front door of the post office at 8:59 and she’s in the back sorting through priority packages when she hears someone ring the bell at the counter. She comes out front carrying a roll of tape and sees a young woman standing there, waiting. She doesn’t have anything in her hands, nothing to mail. “What can I do for you?” Miss Becka says.

“I’ve seen you at the Shelter, right?” she says.

“You go to Cumberland. I recognize your face. What’s your name?”

“Shelly,” she says. “Can I ask you something?”

Miss Becka puts the tape down and reminds herself who this young lady’s been doing. Dustin Alcorn. Be careful now.

“I’m taking this class?” Shelly says. “And they want me to, like, interview a local?”

“Where’re you from?”

“Murfreesboro.”

“That’s local.” Miss Becka picks the tape back up. “Interview yourself.”

“They want, you know, a real local, and you’re sort of a legend."

“Oh, please.”

“Oh, yeah,” Shelly says. “Everybody thinks you’re basically the Bell Witch. So I was wondering if you’d take me fishing?”

“You can do that on your own.”

“Please, Forest Warden.”

“I’ve got to get back to work.”

“You could teach me about the land and the river and your family and stuff? Y’all are from here, right?”

“I do come from a long line,” Miss Becka says.

“That’s what I’m talking about,” Shelly says. “Most people aren’t rooted like that.”

Miss Becka can tell there’s something here besides a school project. “I guess I could take you on the river. You ever fished for trout?”

“Never,” she says. “That would be so cool. My paper’s due in a couple weeks.”

“But promise you won’t go showing Dustin Alcorn any of my spots, or his little brother. I know you’re close with them. You gotta promise.”

“Cross my heart,” she says. “Dustin’s leaving soon anyway.”

“That so?”

She nods, takes the pen chained to the counter, asks for a piece of paper and writes down her cell number. “Let me know when I can come over,” she says. “Just text me. This is going to be awesome.”

“How about next Sunday? That’s the only day I’m free.”

“I’ll be there.”

“You know where I live?”

“Course,” Shelly says. “Everybody does.”

When she’s gone, Miss Becka shakes her head. Hard to believe that girl’s tied up with the Alcorns. That’s the only reason she’s even considering taking her fishing. Get to know her. Get her to trust her. And then, if it’s not too late, help her.

She’s never taught anybody to fish before. River secrets are precious things, and so far she’s kept hers close. Folks will show up and ruin a hole. That’s just what happens. First it’s cigarette butts, empty cans and a fire pit, then you’ve got panties in the sand and a bunch of spooked trout. The kids start out partying at night, then hang around all day with a dozen rods stuck in the mud, treble hooks and chicken livers for bait. All this while what they need to be doing is anything else. And worse, they don’t keep what they catch, just take pictures of their girlfriends screaming with the fish in their arms. Then they tear out the hooks or sometimes just cut the line and let them go. That’s when you find catfish belly up.

This water needs her as much as she needs it.

The Caney Fork was a warm water river up until about 1948. Then the TVA built the dam, a nearly three-hundred-foot-tall wall of concrete and earth holding back a biblical flood of water. The river rushes out from the bottom, cold and clean, and Miss Becka helps keep her section stocked with trout — rainbows, browns, even brookies — right from her backyard breeding pond, a little spring-fed pool lined with mossy old river rocks. A small grove of hemlocks surrounds the spring and works as a kind of filtration system. The water moves fast enough from there to carry leaves away, and it’s covered by a net to keep out hawks and raccoons. Every evening after work she throws out a handful of feed and watches her little baby trout swarm and splash. Would Shelly maybe like to see that? She could help her write a killer paper about it. Somebody should.

Browns have held their own in the Caney since the dam was built, which makes them an enduring species, though still younger than Miss Becka’s family in this area. She tells the state that browns and rainbows are all she’s breeding, but lately she’s been focusing on brookies, too. They’re mysterious and ecologically fragile. Her hemlocks keep them alive. They’re the most beautiful thing to pull out of the water, nearly black with topographical maps on their backs and spots on their sides. Last fall she got a seven-incher from the leeside of a boulder out on the main river. It was bigger than any of the others she’d released that year, which is how she knows they’re surviving on their own.

Wild-born fish are smarter, which means fewer folks catch them, which means that soon enough Miss Becka won’t need to stock the trout anymore because they’ll be untouchable, except by her. And maybe by Shelly, if she listens. It’ll be a fine day when she fishes her stretch without any of these clown-hatches in Orvis gear whipping brand new stiff-tip fly rods.

When folks around here get wind of a recent release of stocked trout, you start seeing empty cans of sweet corn or cups of night crawlers all over the shore, and it’s obvious what’s been going on. Sure, it bothers her, all the bobbers, but mostly because of what it might turn into. She tolerates that trashy kind of tackle because that’s how people start. These Orvis guys, though, they don’t know why they’re throwing dry flies. Because some sales associate told them to? It’s okay to start in the mud, then move up to clear water. Just depends on how you’re raised.

Miss Becka would never kill a trout. Not even for Fishy Frydays at the Bomb Shelter. On those days she’ll bring in a cooler of bass filets and batter and help Charlie the cook whip it up back in the kitchen. Fresh Native Catch. Nothing’s more native than bass and cats. Even bluegills and pumpkinseeds are good eating. When she fishes hard, she hauls in enough to make herself some decent money on Frydays.

This cabin she lives in was built by her grandfather in 1907. It’s been years since she had any visitors — which is kind of embarrassing. The place is a postcard from a time long gone. A chiseled boulder serves as a natural stairway up to the porch made from cedar planks sawed at the mill. The rest of the house goes back into the hillside, like a cave, which keeps the temperature stable. People’s minds back then were ahead of their time. She runs electricity off a meter for a freezer and a little window unit she sometimes uses in the summer — mostly to fight humidity and mold — but that’s it. She’s never needed heat other than her woodstove, a double-door Grandpa Bear made of quarter-inch cast iron. With the firebricks, the thing weighs six hundred pounds. The mouth will take twenty-inch logs sideways, up to thirty inches if they go in at an angle. Get it roaring, then shut the eyes, and it’ll stay hot all night long and kick back up in the morning. She likes burning white oak, but she’ll settle for sycamore or beech or cottonwood when she has to. Cedar when someone comes over, which is never, but she keeps a stack out back just in case. It looks as beautiful when split as it smells while burning. Purple heartwood. If it’s cool, she’ll burn some for Shelly, with the doors open. Truth is, though, she burns mostly driftwood, which gets deposited directly in her front yard.

Her grandfather put the cabin where it is because it was land that the state gave to him. He delivered his son, Becka’s father, in the cabin, right in the corner opposite from where Becka keeps her bed, and he watched his wife die while giving that birth. They kept to themselves, so nobody saw what happened, but folks in town have told and retold their own versions of this story so many times that nobody wants to hear it anymore. There’s even a self-published version of it that’s been sitting on the bookshelf at the Goodwill for years. The flour sack hanging on the wall was used as her father’s birthing cloth. It looks like somebody spilled black tea on it. That’s the kind of story she herself’s interested in.

During a flood last year, some stuff got swept away, including her boat, her front door and her desk. The river gives a lot — stories, fish, peace of mind—but it also keeps a tab and comes collecting when it sees fit. And you never know when. One day at the P.O. Miss Becka listened to a professor from Cumberland tell her that the dam should be taken down to honor nature and the breeding habits of fish. Now, it’s true: undammed rivers are more hospitable to a diversity of species. No argument there. Look at the Duck River. But ask that professor — and this is where Miss Becka is at fault, because she didn’t — if he’s ever lived on a river. Ever made money off of a river, other than talking about it in a classroom. Undammed rivers are wild and flood all the time. That one last year reminded her of what her family used to go through every spring. She’ll take a dam and a pissed off college professor any day. And there’s another lesson for Shelly. Maybe she’s studying with this guy. Shoot, maybe that paper’s for him.

The Caney Fork is a medium-sized snaker that never stops flowing, not ever, so the water filling the reservoir back there builds and gets released, again and again. Build, release, build. All the water behind that wall, silently and continuously pushing. When Becka goes, that’s how she wants to: in a dam break, a sudden white rush with all her trout swimming and swirling around her. They’ll float every curving mile down to the Cumberland and get lost in the depths.

The thought of death by water has never bothered her, but she does worry about some of the youngsters, even that river rat, Dustin Alcorn, who was obviously running trotlines, and whose father snatched away a good part of her life. That boy and his little brother just run loose. Becka knows their kind. Lost souls. She should quit worrying about them. But she can’t help it.

A county cruiser drives past the front window and brings her back from wherever she just went. Both her hands are on the counter, pressing so hard the fingertips are white. What just got hold of her? Oh, she knows. It might be good to have Shelly come over on Sunday. Somebody to talk to. Maybe it’ll be cool enough to burn some cedar. That’s how she’d like to tell her stories. Over flaming purple heartwood.

Freshly unemployed in Kentucky, Winston Alcorn hauls his wife and two young sons deep into Tennessee, not in pursuit of a job, but of his rightful historic destiny. Thus begins a saga of mendacious transformations, as Winston moves from junk auctioneer to showboat radio host to self-styled Dixie-first politician whose greedy megalomania turns his bloodline into a noose. One son follows in his father’s footsteps, the other battles his delusional legacy in hopes of a decent life, and the women enmeshed in the Alcorn family attempt to claw back what was stolen away. Mesmerizing and darkly comic, Bloodline is Lee Clay Johnson working at the height of his lyrical powers.

Lee Clay Johnson was born and raised around Nashville, Tennessee, in a family of bluegrass musicians. He was kicked out of high school on the first day of classes, and soon thereafter began touring the country as a bass player in various bands. He attended Tennessee State University, then transferred up north to Bennington College, where he studied with free jazz pioneer Milford Graves and became the first person in his family to earn a college degree. He received an MFA from the University of Virginia, under the guidance of Deborah Eisenberg and others, and in 2016 he published his first novel, Nitro Mountain, which won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. His fiction and nonfiction works have appeared in County Highway, The Southampton Review, Ploughshares, Lit Hub, Oxford American, The Common, Appalachian Heritage, Salamander, Mississippi Review, and more. He served as a fellow at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. He now lives in Providence, Rhode Island, with his wife, the writer Sasha Wiseman, and teaches at St. Joseph’s University, New York, where he directs the Brooklyn Writers Foundry Low-Residency MFA program. Bloodline is his second novel.