Chapter 1: The Clear Or The Char

 



     "You bet, General Preston," grins Benjamin Reed to the impatient militia leader prancing on his white horse in the waning September sunlight. "I'll weld that worm to the pot and get it flowing before you can say Jack Robinson."

"Then go to it! My men are mustering at Draper's Meadow and we'll need that recipe when done with Ferguson and his redcoats. And by the by, I'm just a Colonel for my hunters and farmers."

     Twenty-year-old Benny just shakes his blackened face, red hair waving in the gloaming as he glances at the silvery flash of Bald Knob catching the last light atop the evergreen ridge of Clinch Mountain. "The clear or the char, Private?"

William Preston stills his horse and stares down at the wiry brownsmith beneath the spreading oak tree, dark eyes hidden in the shadow of a faded tricorn, pursed lips lost in a bushy beard. "Make that the clear, and your loyalties, young man, had better be just as impurity free."

"Always Major, just pick up your load under this here Tradail Oak at the new moon."


      The Reeds had been rebels of the non-aligned variety from time immemorial in the British Isles, holding out by hiding out from first the Romans, then the Vikings, and ultimately the English crown whose standing army and meting out of land to loyalists had forced many a Celtic clan to emigrate.  

     From tenant farming in Belfast to indentured servancy at the Jamestown colony to freedom in progressively more remote settlements, generations had survived on skills brought from the Scottish borders - smithing enough to forge a kettle, steering clear of governance, and, when in need of trade, distilling for the men, sewing for the women. 

     Benny's parents had continued the family pattern by following the Sappony and Cherokee trails along the rivers west through the Blue Ridge to squat for farm land in the newly claimed Valley of Virginia after the 1761 Treaty of Long-Island-on-the-Holston. It was in the Tazewell wilderness that Daniel Reed hoped his recently freed and olive-skinned wife could possibly pass for white.


     As soon as Preston's stallion disappears south into the fall woods, a tall dog with a hanging belly trots over to Benny's side. 

"Well Queen Charlotte, guess we'd better check out the progress of our latest recipe." 

They hightail it up the trace along a little creek, his stride racing the fading light. The chirping of crickets cranks up as he lopes up the steepening hollow. With each huff, he whistles a line of God Save The Queen, the words chiming along in his head. 

     The tan bands on Charlotte's legs catch the last light, leading Benny on as they pick their way up the rocky slope in the now pitch black night. True to the Reed proclivity to poetry, he breaks into song and her tail wags along:

Dog save all dressed in green
Long live our noble Queen
Dog save the Queen
Send her victorious
Happy and glorious
Long to reign over us
Dog save the Queen

At some point during this bastardized homily Benny realizes he'll need a score of oak barrels for the Virginia militiamen, but suddenly both the coonhound's march and his plotting of a trade with a cooper are halted by a raucous call up ahead.





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