The first written record of the Kennard family appears in Deed Book 4, page 212, of Halloway County, North Carolina. Recorded on March 11, 1798, it grants 640 acres on the waters of Salat Creek, including a high open tract called Bitterbald, to a man named Abselum Kennard. The land was paid for in old silver coin.
The clerk who recorded the deed, Josiah Meer, kept a personal daybook. He noted that Kennard was a tall, dark man of about 30 who would not sit down. He asked twice whether the grant included the open ground on top of the mountain, not just the timber below. When Meer went outside afterward to greet Kennard's wife, there was no one in the road. The horses and wagon were there, but no person was near them.
There is no record of Abselum Kennard before that day. He appears in no census, no ship manifest, no tax list, no church register. He simply begins in 1798.
The federal census of 1800 lists the Absalom Kennard household in Halloway County as containing 11 free white persons. The census of 1810 lists 11. The census of 1820 lists 11. The census of 1830 lists 11.
This is not unusual on its own. Large households were common. What is strange is the breakdown by age. The same brackets are full in every census. The same brackets are empty. Two males under 10 in 1800, and two males under 10 in 1810, and two males under 10 in 1820, and two males under 10 in 1830. One female of 45 and upward in every one of them. Children who are under 10 in 1800 should be under 20 in 1810. They should be under 30 in 1820. A household of 11 that never adds and never loses and never ages is not a household. It is a photograph that somebody keeps taking.
The 1830 enumerator for Halloway County was a man named Ambrose Dill. He climbed the mountain himself, which he complained about in writing. Beside the Kennard household, he left a note. It reads that he went up on the fourth day, counted 11 as before, was given dinner, and was well used. Then he wrote that he had set down what they told him, but he did not see 11 people on that mountain and would not swear to 11 in a court.
Bitterbald sits on top of a ridge called Salot Mountain. It is 61 acres of grass, round as a coin, with a clean circle of tree line around it. The grass is not native pasture. In 1974, a graduate student from the University of Tennessee named Paul Ostrander took core samples and pollen counts from nine southern balds. On eight of them, the pollen record tells a normal story of fire or grazing followed by grass. On Bitterbald, the pollen record goes down 11 feet and does not change. Grass all the way down. No fire layer, no stump horizon, no charcoal. Ostrander dated the deepest sample to somewhere between 4,300 and 4,900 years before present. It was grass then, and it was grass in 1798, and it is grass now.
Ostrander wrote in his paper that the site appears to resist succession by a mechanism not identified in this study. In his acknowledgements, he wrote one sentence that has no business being in a botany paper. He wrote that the author declines to return to site 9. Site 9 was Bitterbald. He never published again.
In 2009, a man doing an oral history project on Appalachian field science asked Ostrander about it. Ostrander said he had eaten his lunch on the grass one day. His wife had put a note in his lunch bag, something she used to do. He read it and put it back. A woman came out of the house on the bald and walked out to him. She was perfectly nice. She said, Mr. Ostrander, tell Ruth we said thank you. Ostrander's wife had died two years before the study. He had been carrying the same old note in that bag for two years, reading it every day at lunch. There was nobody in the world he had told about that. The woman on the grass thanked him for it.
The first outsider to marry into the family was a girl called Nancy Odell. She was 17 years old, from a family down on Salat Creek. She married a man recorded as Elias Kennard on October 22, 1841. She went up the mountain and never came down.
The Odell family kept letters. There are 41 letters signed by Nancy Odell Kennard, running from December 1841 to the spring of 1883. The first four are what you would expect from a homesick 17-year-old girl. She misses her mother. The wind is bad in February. She says her husband is kind to her and that his people are quiet. She says she is not used to how quiet they are and that at supper nobody talks.
The fifth letter, from December 1845, turns. She writes that her brother Fet came up in September and stayed one night. She writes that he was a good boy, but he was not easy, and she was not easy for him being here. She says it is better if she comes down, which she will do when she is able. She never came down. Not once in 41 years.
The handwriting in the letters gets better over time. Not steadier, not more mature. Better. By the 1870s, the hand is beautiful. By 1880, it is so regular that if you lay two letters written three years apart on top of one another and hold them up to a window, the ascenders line up. People's handwriting does not do that. It degrades. It picks up tremor and haste and arthritis. A woman of 59 does not write a cleaner hand than she did at 23.
In every one of the 41 letters, Nancy Odell Kennard asks after the dog Petit. Tell me is Petit well. She asks in the letter of 1842. She asks in the letter of 1851. She asks in the letter of 1864. She asks in the letter of 1879, 38 years after she went up the mountain, a dog that would have been dead for 30 years. She asks the same way every time, not as a joke, not as a running gag. The phrasing does not soften or turn.
The last letter is dated January 2, 1883. It is the same as all the others, and then nothing. Nancy Odell Kennard appears in the federal census of 1880 as a 56-year-old white female in the household of Elias Kennard on Salot Mountain. She does not appear in 1900. She has no grave that anybody has ever found.
In the fall of 1863, a home guard detachment out of Halloway County went up Salot Mountain looking for four deserters. There were 11 men in the detachment, under a lieutenant named Cordell Seep. They went up on October 12. They came down on October 14. Nine of them came down.
All nine gave statements over the years. They agree that the detachment reached the bald about 4:00 in the afternoon. They agree that there was no sign of the deserters. They agree that the Kennards came out of the house, women first, and were as hospitable as any people I ever met, and I did not like a minute of it. They agree that they were fed cornbread, dried beans, apple butter, and buttermilk. They agree that the Kennards would not eat with them but stood around the walls of the room and watched them eat.
They agree that Lieutenant Seep asked how many people live there, and a Kennard man said 11. They agree that they camped on the grass that night about 200 yards from the house. They agree that at some point in the small hours, every man in that camp woke up at the same time. Not to a noise. There was no noise.
Four of the nine say they lay there and went back to sleep and nothing else happened. Five of the nine say a man walked through the camp from the direction of the house and went out the other side toward the tree line, unhurried, not looking at anybody. Two of those five said the same additional thing. One said the man who walked through the camp was his brother Isham Wills, who had died at Sharpsburg 13 months earlier and was buried in Maryland. The other said the man was his father, who had drowned in 1851. Neither of them ever said the other one had said it.
The two men who did not come down off the bald were Lieutenant Cordell Seep and a private named Jasper Bohannan. In the morning, they were gone from the camp. Their blankets were there, their weapons were there, their boots were there. The men searched the bald all day. The Kennards helped them search, walking in a line across the grass, calling the two names correctly.
On the afternoon of the 13th, one of the men found boot prints. Two sets leaving the camp going north across the grass toward the tree line. Barefoot. The boots were still in camp. The frost had held the prints. The men followed them 140 yards, and the prints stopped at the edge of the spruce. There was no disturbance in the brush. Coming back the other way, from the tree line toward the camp, there were two more sets of prints in the same frost, laid down at the same time, the same feet. The stride was longer coming back. Considerably longer. One man paced it out and put it in his deposition five years later. Going out about a 26-inch stride, which is a man walking. Coming back about a 40-inch stride, which is a man running, except that the prints were flat-footed and evenly weighted. A running man does not print like that. Something walked back at 40 inches a step.
In the federal census of 1870, seven years later, the Kennard household on Salot Mountain contains 13 people. It never contains 11 again.
Dr. Hollis Truit was born in 1861 in Wilkes County, North Carolina. He took his medical degree at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia in 1886 and practiced in and around Fathergill from 1889 until he died in 1924. He was a compulsive note taker. His case books, 11 of them, cover 35 years.
On March 4, 1901, he was fetched at night. A man came to his door in Fathergill and said there was a child sick with fever on Salot Mountain. When Truit asked the name, the man said Kennard. Truit sat down on the step to put on his boots and thought for some while about whether he would go. He went.
The child was a girl he was told was 7 years old. The name in the case book is written as Sarilda. She had a high fever, a cough, and the beginnings of a rash on the chest and neck. Truit diagnosed measles with a probable pneumonia coming on. He explained the danger to the mother, who was called Ardith. She listened with attention and thanked him. She did not seem afraid. He writes that he had told perhaps 400 mothers in that county that their child might die, and he knows the sound a woman makes, and she did not make it.
While he was there, he examined the rest of the family. He examined nine people over those two days, including the sick child. The other eight read between 94.2 and 94.9 degrees Fahrenheit. Normal human core temperature is around 98.6. At 94 degrees, a person is confused and shivering violently. Truit writes that they are not cold to the touch in the manner of a chilled man. They are cool as a cellar wall is cool. There is no shivering. There is no confusion.
He counted radial pulses twice a day. At midday, the eight of them ran between 42 and 46 beats a minute. At dusk, on both evenings, the same eight ran between 88 and 94. On the second evening, he had three of them sit in a row and counted all three at once with his watch on his knee. He wrote that they are together. He counted three wrists, and they are beating together, and he could not make it come out otherwise, and he did it four times.
Every one of the nine had behind the ordinary lower teeth a second row of small teeth seated flat in the gum and not erupted. He describes them as like a row of shirt buttons under the cloth. He palpated the heads of the four children and found in all four an additional suture, a seam in the bone running across the top of the skull side to side where the human skull does not have one. He drew it. Beside the drawing he wrote that it is not a fracture, not a fontanel unclosed. It is a joint. It is meant to be there.
He writes at the top of the last page that he examined nine persons of this family of ages from about 4 years to about 60, being farming people who live by axe and hoe and fire on a mountain. And there is not one mark on one of them. No scar, no vaccination, no burn from a stove, no cut from a knife, no rope mark, no callous at the hand. He writes that he has never in his life examined a farmer's hand that had nothing to say.
The child Sarilda died on the morning of March 6, 1901, at about 4:00, with Truit in the room. He told the mother. She said, All right, and got up and put wood on the fire. He asked where they would bury her. The man he had spoken to at his door in Fathergill, whom he now names as Silas, took a moment to answer and then said, Out on the grass.
When he came out of that house at daybreak with his bag, there were 11 people standing in the yard. He had examined nine. There had been nine, plus the dead child, which is 10. He counted 11 standing in the yard in the gray light, and he counted them again, and he did not recognize one of them, a man of about 30, who was standing at the back and who nodded to him. He rode down. He wrote one more line for that day. I am glad to be off that hill.
Seven months later, on November 2, 1901, Truit was in the Fathergill store buying nails. A woman came in whom he recognized as Ardith Kennard. With her was a girl of about seven whom she introduced as Sarilda. Truit writes that it is the same child. The same eyes and the same mole below the ear on the left side and the same manner of holding her mouth. On the sixth day of March, he had laid a mustard plaster on that child's chest and raised a blister the size of a half dollar. It broke and he dressed it. That was eight months ago, and no blister of that size heals in a child without a mark. There is no mark. The skin of that chest is unbroken and even.
He asked the mother whether there had been another daughter of the same name. She said there was not. She said it kindly. She said, You come again if you like. You are welcome up there. You are the only one that ever come when we asked. Truit wrote that he does not intend to go up there again. He wrote that he has practiced medicine 15 years, that he does not believe in a resurrection outside of scripture, and that he does not believe he was mistaken about a death he sat beside. He wrote that he believes that family is not made the way we are made, and that it has been on that mountain a long time, and that it has been very careful all this while to be polite.
In the fall of 1918, with the influenza epidemic at its height, North Carolina mandated that every county keep a running census of households in quarantine. In Halloway County, the job fell to a woman named Ione Brashier, the county's only public health nurse. Her ledger survives. She went up Salot Mountain three times.
On November 7, 1918, she recorded the Kennard household as having 14 persons in residence, none sick, none dead. On December 19, 1918, she recorded 17 persons in residence, none sick, none dead. On February 4, 1919, she recorded 22 persons in residence, none sick, none dead. In 89 days, in the middle of the deadliest winter that county ever had, the population of Bitterbald went up by eight.
In the margin beside that February entry, Brashier wrote four words, and then she scratched them out so hard that the pencil went through the paper. Under a raking light, they can be read. They say, Where are they from?
She resigned her post on March 11, 1919, at the exact moment she was least needed. She married a man in Johnson City in 1921 and lived to be 94. Her granddaughter remembers one thing about her grandmother's nursing days, which is a rule she had about the front door. Ione Brashier would not have a visitor come in through a door and go out through a different one. If you came in the front, you went out the front. If you did it by accident, she made you go back and do it again the right way.
The man who was living up there and writing things down in 1919 was named Silas. He was born Silas Doggett in 1884 in Carter County, Tennessee. In 1909, at 25, he married Ardith Kennard of Halloway County. He went up the mountain and took her name. In 1911, the 640-acre Salat Creek tract was deeded to Silas Kennard, husband. The grantors were listed as the heirs of a Kennard. There were no first names for the heirs, no count of them, no signatures. Marks, 11 of them in a column. Every one of those 11 marks is a small circle with a line through it.
Silas Kennard kept a farm ledger from 1911 until 1934. It is 188 pages. The first four years are plainly farming. The first odd entry is June 22, 1915. It is four words long. 11 at supper. Nine slept. The August 29, 1915. 11 at supper, nine slept. November 14, 1915. 11 at supper, nine slept. He is counting the household at the table and counting the household in the beds and getting two different numbers. He has asked his wife about it, and she has told him he cannot count.
1916 has nine such entries. 1917 has 14. By the middle of 1917, he has started keeping the count in the margin of every page. The two numbers are never the same, and neither of them is ever 11 twice in a row after that summer.
On April 3, 1918, in the middle of a page about lambing, in a hand that gets noticeably smaller, he writes that he has been there eight years and six months. In that time, not one has taken sick, and not one has died, and not one child has been born in this house that he has note of. But there is more of them than there was. He writes that Ardith is 45 years old this month and looks the same as the day he came up here, and he is the one that is going gray. He is 34 years old when he writes that.
From the summer of 1918 forward, Silas Kennard kept a list in the back of the ledger. He redid it about twice a year for 16 years. Each time he dated it and wrote out every person under that roof by name, and beside each name he put a small mark, a check if he had seen them the day he wrote the list, and a dash if he had not seen them in a while but was told they were about.
The first list, dated July 11, 1918, has 14 names on it. Ardith, Elias, Sarilda, Ron, Cassander, Verlin, Mahala, Isham, Dell, Feba, Tolbert, Atwe, Junia, Cordell.
Sarilda is the name of the 7-year-old girl who died of measles and pneumonia in front of Dr. Hollis Truit at 4:00 in the morning on March 6, 1901, and who was standing in a store in Fathergill 8 months later without a mark on her chest. She is on Silas's list in 1918, 17 years later. Beside her name, in a note added later in the margin, he has written her age as about seven. She is also on the list in 1924 and 1929 and on the final list in 1934, where beside her name he has written about seven.
Isham is the name of the brother that Sergeant Doss Wills said he saw walk through his camp on the night of October 12, 1863. A man who had been dead in Maryland for 13 months.
Cordell is the name of the home guard lieutenant with the limp and the wife named Melinda who did not come down off Bitterbald in October of 1863.
Atwe was Silas's own brother, two years older, a barrel maker in Carter County, Tennessee, who died of a burst appendix in 1906, three years before Silas ever laid eyes on Ardith Kennard. On the list of July 11, 1918, beside the name Atwe, Silas Kennard put a check mark, which in his own system means I saw him that day.
On September 12, 1919, Silas writes that Atwe sat with him at the woodpile for an hour. He is his brother and he knows him and he knew me. He told me about the dog we had that got in the lime. Nobody living knows about that dog but me. I have not told a soul on this mountain about that dog. I asked him how he come to be here and he said the same as you. I asked him what he meant and he did not answer it. He only sat there and was pleasant.
On March 3, 1920, he writes that he has been putting it off. Atwe does not eat. He sets at the table and he takes up the fork and he don't eat. I have watched it now four times. Nor does Sarilda, nor Isham, nor the one they call Cordell. There is nine at that table that eats, and the rest of them keeps us company.
On June 19, 1921, Silas found Ardith in the barn and asked her outright. He said, Ardith, who are these people? And she was not angry nor put out. She sat down on the meal barrel and she said, They are ours. I said, They are dead people. And she said, They was somebody's dead people. Now they are ours.
On June 30, 1921, Silas wrote the longest single entry in the book. He writes that he has got it out of her at last. She says the grass on this bald don't grow trees because it is already growing something. She says it has been there a long while longer than her people and that her people did not start it and cannot stop it and only tend it the way you would tend a thing you found on your land that was bigger than you.
She says it does not take the dead. That is the part he has had wrong. It cannot go and get Atwe out of the ground in Carter County and it don't want to. Atwe is still in the ground in Carter County, and what is sitting at his table is not him brought back. She says it takes the missing of him. She says when a body grieves hard enough and long enough, that grieving is a shape, and the shape is as real as a plow or a wall, and most places have got no use for it, and it wears off a person in a few years like weather. But this ground has got a use for it.
She says if you carry a grief onto this bald, the ground will read it the way you would read a pattern for a dress, and then it will make the thing you are missing out of what it has got, which is dirt and grass and time. He said, That is not a person then. And she said, It is now.
He asked how many. She said as many as has been grieved for up here. That is why it wants a new one married in every so often. Her people are all made up here now and they have got no fresh grief in them. She says a house of made people goes thin after a while. It gets so they don't know how to want anything and then the ground has got nothing to read.
She says he was brought up here because he came to a burying at Dod's Chapel in 1909 with his brother 11 weeks in the ground and his mother 16 months, and she seen him across that graveyard and she says he was lit up like a lamp. He asked her did she love him any. She said yes. She said she has loved every one of them.
Silas Kennard did not stay put after that conversation. He went down and asked somebody in the valley for help. Her name was Perie Scholes, and in 1921 she was 52 years old and she lived on Wolf Fork about six miles from the foot of the Dover Gap Road. She had caught something over 400 babies. She laid out the dead. She kept the burying clothes for three churches in a cedar chest. And she did the other part of that job, the part that nobody in the mountains ever named out loud, which is that when a house had something in it that would not leave, you went and got Perie Scholes.
Silas Kennard walked down that mountain in July of 1921 and stood in her yard. She was in the yard with a wash. She looked at him a good while. Then she said, You are the one they took up in 1909. She had never laid eyes on him before. She would not let him in the house. She set two chairs in the yard, and they sat out there.
She told him that some ground grows trees, and that ground grows people because trees would not stay. She said her granny told her that a bald is a place the mountain keeps shaved so it can see out, and that there is a few of them along this range and most of them is only grass and one of them is not. She said the mistake everybody makes is thinking of it as a haunt. She said a haunt is a leftover. This is not a leftover. This is a crop, and a crop has got a season and a yield and a want.
He asked her if it could be got rid of. She said no, and did not soften it. He asked if a body could get off of it. She said that is a different question, and the answer to it is yes. If you are quick and if you do a thing, I will learn you, and if you do not go back.
She told him to name himself back. She said, When it comes at you, and it will come at you wearing something you loved, you do not argue with it, and you do not run from it while it is talking. You say your own name out loud. Then you say your mother's name, then you say her mother's name out loud so you can hear it in the air. She said that thing works by knowing you. It comes up through what you have lost. So you tell it out loud where you come from and every name you say is a fence post and three posts is a fence. She said three. Three and then you stop and you start over at your own name again. Do not go past three. Three is a fence and four is a gate. She said because you don't know who you are opening it to.
Then she pointed out what is wrong with it. She said, It only holds if them names is yours. He asked what she meant by that, and she would not answer it. She said, Hun, some people gets up that hill and finds out they was already in the crop and did not know it. She said, If you say a name and something answers to it, you shut your mouth and you go down that mountain. And I mean that night.
Silas Kennard went back up. His wife was up there. He stayed 13 more years. The ledger from 1921 to 1934 is a man practicing a survival ritual every single night while continuing to run a farm and record the price of feeder pigs. He begins ending days with a small notation, three tally marks and the letter N. Names three. Done. There are 900 and some of those marks over 13 years.
He barred the door of the room he slept in alone from 1922 on. His wife Ardith let him. There is an entry from 1926 that reads that Ardith put up 60 quarts of beans today and she is the best hand at it he ever seen and he does love her and he does not know what she is.
It fails once. On February 4, 1928, at some hour of the night, it came to the door. It was his mother. She has been in the ground at Doggett's Chapel since 1908. She stood at that door and she called him Sile, which is what she called him, and no other soul ever has. He said his name. He said Silas Doggett, and it stopped, and then it said Sile again, and it was crying. He said his mother's name, which is Emiline, and he could not go on because he was saying his mother's name at his mother. He sat there with his hand on that bar. It cried and it said Sile and it said let me come in out of the cold. I am cold. And every time it said a thing, it was right. It was the right voice and the right words. And it knew the songs.
What saved him is it got one thing wrong. It said, Sile, honey, it is cold out here. His mother never in her life said honey to a soul. She was not a woman for that. She would have said boy. She said boy to him until he was 24 years old. So he said Emiline Doggett out loud. And he said Vashy Combs, which was her mother. And he said all three of them over and over until it was light and his throat had given out and there was nothing at that door. But there was three feet of new grass grown up against the sill in the night, and he had to cut it out with a knife to get the door open.
The ledger stops in the middle of an entry on November 9, 1934. He writes that he has made up his mind and he is going out of there Tuesday when they go to the low field. He has $61 put by in the wall. He does not intend to say goodbye to Ardith because he does not think he could do it in front of her face. He writes a warning to whoever gets the book. Do not go up on Bitterbald in Halloway County. But if you have gone, here is the whole of what I know after 25 years of it. One, it cannot take you. It has got no hands. It can only be let in and it is let in by a person answering it. Two, it will come at you as whoever you have wanted the hardest and the longest and it will be perfect except for one small thing, and the small thing is always a reason, never a fact. It will know what she said. It will not know why she said it. Three. Say your three names out loud and do not never say a fourth and do not.
That is the end of the page and the end of the ledger. The remaining leaves have been cut out with a knife close to the gutter. The cuts are clean and old.
Silas Kennard did not leave on that Tuesday. He is on the 1940 census on Salot Mountain, aged 56. He is on the 1950 census on Salot Mountain, aged 66. There is no death record for him in North Carolina or Tennessee. His sister in Carter County received a letter from him at the turn of every year from 1935 until 1961. One a year, always short, always well. The handwriting in those letters is the same. The ascenders line up.
In 1936, the Works Progress Administration sent field workers to collect folk material county by county. The field worker for Halloway County was Vera Osgood. She filled six notebooks. Five were submitted. The sixth notebook was never submitted. It stayed in a trunk. The last 11 pages have been torn out.
The notebook contains nine items relating to Bitterbald. The first is a children's counting rhyme collected from three separate groups of children in the Fathergill schoolyard in April of 1936. It goes, One for the going and two for the come. Three for the fence and four for the door. Count them on the grass till your mouth goes numb and never tell them what your granny's name was for. Three for the fence and four for the door.
The second item is a piece of practical advice collected from a woman called only Mrs. B of Wolf Fork. They say if you must go on the bald, go in the morning and be off it before the dew. Not before dark. Before the dew. Because up there the dew does not come down out of the air. It comes up out of the ground, and whatever comes up with it is not water.
The third item is a fragment of a song, four lines. Oh, the Kennards, they are 11, and 11 they will stay, for what goes up on Bitterbald don't ever come away.
The fourth item is the interview. On September 19, 1936, Vera Osgood walked out to Wolf Fork and spoke with Perie Scholes, who was by then 67 years old. The transcript runs nine pages. Then the notebook ends. The next 11 leaves are torn out at the gutter. The tear pattern is consistent with the pages having been cut, not ripped, in the same way with the same kind of blade as the missing final leaves of Silas Kennard's ledger.
Osgood asked the sensible question, which is why the family had never been bothered by anybody. Perie Scholes said, Because they pay their tax and they don't sell liquor and they don't come to town but twice a year and they are the politest people in this county. Ain't nobody got a reason. And the two or three that did have a reason went up and got their reason attended to.
She asked what the family actually is. Mrs. Scholes said it is not a family. She said a family is a thing you are born into, and this is a thing you get planted in. She said you have seen a hornet's nest. It is not 100 hornets living in a nest. It is one thing, and the hornets is how it gets around. She said that ground is the nest.
She asked how it started. Mrs. Scholes said nobody knows. Her granny's tale was that there was people on this range before any white man and before any Indian, too. And that they buried their dead on the high open ground because the high open ground was already open, and that after a long enough time the ground got the habit of it and did not want to break it.
She asked whether it could be destroyed. Mrs. Scholes laughed for the first and only time and said they burnt it in 1894. Half the county went up with kerosene and rags, and they burnt 61 acres of it black in one afternoon. She said it come back green in 11 days. And two women that helped burn it lost a child a piece that fall, and both of them children was seen on that bald inside the year. And after that, nobody in this county has ever been able to get up a party to go do anything about anything.
Osgood asked the last question on the last surviving page. She asked Perie Scholes whether she herself had ever been up on Bitterbald. Mrs. Scholes was quiet a long while. Then she said she had been up there the one time in 1891, when she was 22 years old. She had lost her first baby in March, and she had heard what was said, and she did not believe it. And she wanted it not to be true so bad that she could not stay away from it. She said that is exactly how it gets everybody.
She said, I stood out on that grass at 10:00 in the morning in the sun with a whole valley of people at the bottom of the hill and I heard my baby crying under my feet. She said, I did not hear a sound. There was not any sound, but I heard it. She said, I turned around and I walked down and I have not been back and I never will. And I have spent 45 years telling people how to keep it off of them and every last one of them thinks I am an old woman with a story.
Osgood asked what she does now when she thinks of it. She said, I say my names. Osgood asked her to say them for her, and she did. She said, Perie Anne Scholes, Doia Marlow, Sarah Blevens. She said them the way you would say them if you had said them 10,000 times. Then she said, And now you know mine, and you go home and learn yours tonight before you go to bed, and do not ever tell them to nobody but a fool like me who is too old to use them.
Osgood asked what she meant by use them. That is the bottom of page nine. Page 10 is one of the 11 pages that is not there.
Vera Osgood left Halloway County in the second week of December 1936, three months early, without collecting her final payment. She took a teaching job in Forsyth County the next fall and taught for 34 years. Her niece, who donated the box, told an archivist in 1991 that her aunt Vera every night of her life, in the bathroom with the water running, said three women's names out loud into the mirror.
On May 3, 1954, a man named Ray Desart drove up the Dover Gap Road in a 1951 Chevrolet half-ton belonging to the Halloway County school system. He was the county's attendance officer. He went up because the household on Salot Mountain had never in the entire history of the county school system enrolled a single child.
Desart came back down that same afternoon. He made a verbal report to the superintendent, Frell Jud. Jud wrote it up. Desart reported that he had been received courteously. He reported that he had counted in the yard and in the house between 15 and 20 persons, of whom five or six appeared to be of school age. He reported that he had spoken to a woman who gave her name as Mahala, who told him that the children were taught at home. He reported that he had asked to see the children's work and had been shown a slate and a Bible and a McGuffey's reader, and that the children had read to him competently.
Then Jud wrote the fourth paragraph in Desart's own words. Desart stated that he wished not to go back up there and asked not to be sent, and asked also that no one else be sent. When pressed for a reason, he said the following. Mr. Jud, they knew my boy's name. I never said it. There was a woman up there asked me was Wendell doing any better with his reading. Wendell has been dead 9 years and he never went to school in this county nor any other. Do not send anybody up there.
Wendell Desart died in 1945 at the age of six of acute nephritis. He was Ray Desart's only son. He was sick from the age of four and was taught at home in bed by his mother out of a McGuffey's reader. He never once in his life sat in a classroom or appeared on any roll in Halloway County. There is no document anywhere that connects Wendell Desart to a school.
On the night of August 8, 1971, a Halloway County deputy named Bud Fentress drove up the Dover Gap Road in response to a call about a fire on the bald. He carried a portable cassette recorder in the car, his own idea. The tape from that night is 31 minutes long.
The first 19 minutes are a man driving up a bad road narrating what he sees. At about minute 14, he notes that he can smell it, and he describes the smell. He says it does not smell like wood smoke. It smells like a hay field, real strong, like cut hay in a barn. He says it twice, and he sounds puzzled and not yet afraid.
At minute 19, he gets to the gate. He drives through and comes out on the lower edge of the bald. There is no fire. He says so four times over the next minute in slightly different words. He gets out. At minute 21 to minute 26, he is walking on the grass with the recorder in his hand, describing what he sees. He sees the house with a light in it and the barn and a lot of grass and no fire and no burn and no smoke. He says the smell of hay is about to knock him down.
At minute 26, he says, There's somebody out here. At minute 27, a second voice comes onto the tape. It is a woman's voice at a conversational volume from perhaps 15 feet away. It is friendly and completely ordinary. She says good evening. She asks if he is looking for the fire. He says yes ma'am. She says there is not any fire. He says yes ma'am, I see that. She says there gets to be a light up here sometimes in a dry summer and it worries people down below, and she is sorry for it.
Then there is a pause of about four seconds, and she says his name. Not deputy, not officer. She says, You're Adah's boy. Bud Fentress does not say anything for 11 seconds. Then, in a voice that has gone flat and careful, he says, Yes, ma'am. And she says, She sings good. Present tense. Adah Fentress died in 1963. She sang alto in the choir at a church in Fathergill for 26 years.
The last four minutes of the tape are him walking back to the car. He does not run. About 40 seconds into the drive down, he starts talking again to the recorder in a rush. He gives his badge number, the date, the location. No fire. No evidence of a fire. There is nothing up here. Then, quieter, he says three names. Bud Fentress. Adah Ruth Seismore Fentress. Nola Jean Seismore. He says them once, then again, then again. The tape runs out with him still saying them.
Bud Fentress never filed a report on that call. He told the family at the foot of the mountain the next morning that it was heat lightning on the ridge and that he had checked and everything was fine.
In 1978, a physical anthropologist named Dr. Francis Oaks spent two summers in Halloway County studying isolated populations. Her subject was six extended families. The Kennards were one entry on a list of six. She got up to the bald four times in the summer of 1978. They were, as everyone always says, extremely polite.
She drew blood from 22 Kennards. Every one of them was type O Rh positive. That is unusual but not impossible. The serum protein work is where it comes apart. She ran electrophoresis on 11 serum proteins. In any human population, even a tiny inbred one, you expect variation in some of them. She got none. 22 individuals, 11 protein systems, and every single sample identical.
She assumed error and went back. She redrew all 22 personally, one at a time, in a room, watching. She labeled every tube herself. She split the samples and sent half to Chapel Hill and half to a second independent laboratory in Atlanta without telling either lab about the other. Both labs returned identical results. Both labs independently added an unsolicited note to the report. The Chapel Hill note said the samples had an unusually low proportion of nucleated cells. The Atlanta laboratory's returned report includes a handwritten annotation, apparently by the technician, which reads in full, What is this? These are not from 22 people. These are not from 22 anything.
Her dissertation was submitted in 1980. It has been restricted since 1981. The stated reason is human subjects concerns. The physical samples were destroyed in 1983 under a routine lab disposal schedule. Francis Oaks left academia in 1984 and became a hospital administrator in Delaware.
Karen Wadell was born in 1972 in Kingsport, Tennessee. She has lived within nine miles of the house she was born in for her entire life. Her father ran a parts counter at a Ford dealership for 31 years. Her mother taught fourth grade. Karen went to East Tennessee State for two years, ran out of money, came home, and took a job in medical records at a hospital in 1994.
Her brother was named Denny. He was three years younger than her and he was a heating and air man. He whistled constantly, a thin, airy whistle through his teeth with no melody to it. It drove Karen up the wall for 30 years. He knew it drove her up the wall. He called every dog he ever met buddy. He could not sit through the end of a movie. He would get up with 15 minutes left and start washing dishes. If you asked him, he would say he already knew how it went.
He died on March 14, 2017, at 42 years old, of a heart thing nobody caught, in the cab of his truck in a church parking lot in Blountville with the engine running and the heat on. Karen found the truck. She was the one who went looking when he did not show for supper.
She started doing genealogy about eight months after Denny died, the way people do, because she could not sleep. In April of 2019, she mailed off a saliva kit to a commercial DNA testing service. The ethnicity estimate came back the way those things come back for someone from Upper East Tennessee. The match list was where the problem was.
She had about 1,100 matches. About 130 were the usual unassignable rubble. And then there were 19. 19 matches, all of them substantial. The largest shared 182 centimorgans with her across seven segments, which is somewhere in the neighborhood of a second cousin. The smallest shared 51. The 19 all matched each other, too, and heavily. They formed what the hobbyists call a cluster. And that knot did not intersect a single one of Karen's four grandparent lines. Not one.
She wrote to all 19. Two of them wrote back. One of them, a woman in Ohio, added a line at the end. She wrote, My grandmother was a Kennard from North Carolina and that whole side is a brick wall. Nobody will talk about it.
All 19 matches were Kennard once she had the thread to pull. All descending on paper from four different Kennard men who left Halloway County between 1890 and 1924 and scattered to Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, one to Oregon. Karen did not have any Kennards in her tree. Her people were Wadells and Prathers and Seismores and Kellums out of Sullivan and Hawkins counties in Tennessee, 60 miles from Halloway County over two ridges and a state line.
The question that put Karen Wadell in the reading room of a converted dentist's office in Fathergill, North Carolina in October of 2020 was a very simple one. Which of my four grandparents was not who they said they were?
She drove up to the gate on the Dover Gap Road for the first time on October 22, 2020, at about 11 in the morning. She did not go past it. She sat in her car with the engine off for 11 minutes and then turned around. She said that the gate was cold. She had gotten out of the car and put her hand on the top rail of it, and it was the 22nd of October at 3,000 feet and it was 52 degrees and sunny and the metal should have been warm on the south side. It was not cold like shade. It was cold like a freezer handle.
She went back down to Fathergill, and that is where she met Dovy Prine. Dovy Prine was 68 years old in 2020 and had worked in the Halloway County Register of Deeds office for 31 years. She is the woman who brings the deed books out on the cart and tells you to use the gloves.
Karen said something offhand about there being a gate on the Dover Gap road and no way to tell who owned it. Dovy Prine stopped with a book half out of the cart and put it back on the cart and closed the drawer she had open and looked at the door to make sure it was shut. And she said, Are you going up there?
Karen said she supposed she was eventually if she could find out who to ask permission from. Dovy said, There is nobody to ask. There has not been anybody to ask since before I was born. If you are going up there, I am going to tell you three things and then I am not going to talk about it again.
The first one, do not say one of their first names out loud past the third switchback. You can say Kennard all you want. That is a word like any word. But do not say a first name out of one of those books. Not to yourself, not out loud reading a list. Not to a dog, not on the telephone. Above the third switchback. A name is not a word. It is a door knock.
The second one, whatever you carry up, you carry back down. All of it. If you take a bottle of water up there, you bring the empty bottle back. If you eat an apple, you bring the core. If your hat blows off, you go get your hat. Do not leave anything of yours on that grass. Not a wrapper, not a cigarette, not a hair out of a brush. And you do not take anything either. Not a rock, not a flower, not a piece of that fence. Nothing goes up that does not come down, and nothing comes down that did not go up.
The third one, and this is the one that matters. If you are up there and somebody says something to you about your own family that you never told a living soul. If they know a name you have not said or something your mother did or what you called somebody when you were little, you stop talking. You do not answer it. You do not ask them how they know. You turn around and you start walking and you do not stop walking until you are at your car. The second they know something about you they should not, that is not a conversation anymore. That is a hand on your arm.
Karen Wadell went up on Bitterbald for the first time on June 11, 2022, at 7:20 in the morning. She had been researching it for 20 months by then. She had the ledger. She had Truit's case books photographed page by page. She had Vera Osgood's sixth notebook on a flash drive. She had listened to Bud Fentress' tape 40 or 50 times. She had Dovy Prine's three rules written on an index card in the console of her car, and she had her three names, which she had said out loud in her kitchen every night for a year and a half. Karen Fay Wadell. Janice Seismore Wadell. Adah Ruth Seismore.
She parked at the gate at the fourth switchback and walked the remaining five and three-tenths miles. It took her two hours and ten minutes. She carried a daypack with two liters of water, a sandwich, a headlamp, a paper notebook, a mechanical pencil, and a small audio recorder, which she turned on at the gate and did not turn off.
The road above the gate is in better condition than the road below it. That is the first thing she says on the tape at about the 20-minute mark. The county stopped maintaining it in 1989. Thirty-three years of no maintenance on a 2,000-foot grade in a place that gets 60 inches of rain a year should produce a ditch with a road in it somewhere. Instead, the ruts are shallow, the crown is intact, and the drainage cuts across it are clear. Somebody has been keeping that road up.
At the third switchback, she stops and says out loud for the recorder, Third switchback, no first names from here. At the 11th switchback, the woods change. Below the 11th switchback, it is ordinary southern Appalachian high forest, a riot of blowdowns and brambles. Above the 11th switchback, it is clean. The understory thins. The dead limbs are gone. The blowdowns are gone. She writes in her notebook. Looks landscaped. No, it doesn't. Looks grazed. No, it doesn't. Looks swept.
At the 15th switchback, the birds stop. She notes the time. At 9:04, she stops walking and stands still for 2 minutes and 40 seconds. You can hear it. Then she says, There are no birds. There have not been any birds for a while, and I did not notice when they stopped.
She comes out onto the grass at 9:31. Bitterbald has no transition zone. It has a line. The spruce stops and the grass starts and the boundary is sharp enough to look like a photographic error. She walked a section of it with a tape measure. Over 180 feet of edge, the boundary varied by less than 14 inches.
The grass is 9 to 11 inches tall across the entire 61 acres, and it is that height everywhere. It is not grazed. There is no stock, no droppings, no trails. It is not mown. She got down on her hands and knees and looked at the blade tips through a hand lens. The tips are not cut and they are not bitten. They are simply that length.
The house is at the north end about 400 yards in. It is a two-story frame house with a stone chimney at each end and a porch across the front. It is not a cabin. It is a real house, far too large and too well-made for a place with no road. The house is in perfect repair. Paint intact, glass in every window she counted, 22 windows, no broken panes, roof sound, porch boards level. The grass around the foundation is the same 9 to 11 inches as the rest of the bald, growing right up to the sill with no gap and no bare margin.
Nobody has lived in that house since 1989. That is a matter of record. In the fall of 1989, the Halloway County Tax Office stopped receiving payment on the Salat Creek tract for the first time since 1798. The property went delinquent. It went to a tax sale in 1992 and there were no bidders. It reverted to the county. It is county property today.
In the intervening years, there have been three separate documented occasions on which someone from the county went up to assess it. All three assessments describe the house as vacant and all three describe it as in good condition. The 2014 assessment includes the sentence in a county employee's handwriting, Structure appears occupied but is not. And there are curtains in the windows. There were curtains in the windows in 1973. There were curtains in the windows in 1989. There are curtains in the windows in Karen Wadell's photographs from June 11, 2022, and they are clean.
She did not go inside. She walked the perimeter of the house at about 20 feet and photographed it from all four sides. What she did do was walk the grass for 4 hours in a grid, because she had read the 1996 survey and she had brought a steel rod. Every point she probed was soft all the way down. Four feet of rod going into that ground the way a knife goes into a cake, over and over across 61 acres at the top of a mountain where the soil ought to be thin and stony. She probed 104 points and she did not find one hard spot and she did not find one rock.
At 1:38 in the afternoon she found the ring. It is out toward the western edge about 130 yards from the tree line. She found it because she had flown a small drone from the lower edge of the bald that morning. In one of those frames there is a circle in the grass. A discoloration, a ring about 90 feet across where the grass is a slightly deeper green. The ring is perhaps 8 feet wide. Inside it, the grass is the same as everywhere else.
She walked to it and she found the stones. There are 11 of them set flush with the ground so that the grass grows right over them. She found the first one with a probe by accident when the rod stopped at 14 inches. The only hard thing she found on that entire mountain. She cut the sod back with her hands. They are river stones, water rounded, gray, about the size of a loaf of bread. There is no river within 2,000 feet of elevation of that spot. Somebody carried 11 river stones up a mountain and set them in a ring 90 feet across and laid the grass back over them.
She found seven of the 11 that day by probing along the ring. She stopped because she had been on her knees in the grass for an hour and a half and she looked up and the light had changed and it was 3:23 and there was dew on the grass. At 3:23 in the afternoon on the 11th of June on a clear day at 71 degrees with a light wind out of the west. Dew on nine-inch grass over 61 acres at 3:20 in the afternoon. She says on the tape, and her voice is quite calm, Okay, there's dew. It's 3:20. There's dew and I'm going.
She picked up her pack and she checked the sod she had cut back and pressed it into place with her boot. She checked her pockets and she checked the ring of stones for anything she had dropped. She picked up a hair tie she had lost in the grass and it took her 4 minutes to find it and she got it. She walked off the bald at 3:31 and she did not look back.
That night in a motel in Elizabethton, Tennessee at about 11:00 going through the day's photographs on her laptop, Karen Wadell found the thing that broke her. There are 241 photographs from that day. In 198 of them, the house has 22 windows. In 43 of them, all of them taken between about 11 and 1:00, all from the east side, the house has 23. Same house, same angle in several cases, minutes apart. 22, 22, 22, 23, 23. The extra one is on the second floor at the north end and it has a curtain in it. And in two of the 43, the curtain is not hanging the same way it is in the other 41.
Nine days later she went to see the old woman. Finding her took Karen 4 months. Perie Scholes died in 1952. She had four children. Three of them left. The one who stayed was a daughter, and that daughter had a daughter, and that granddaughter was named Audi. Audi Scholes Rand was 91 years old in June of 2022. She lived in a skilled nursing facility in Erwin, Tennessee. She had been a school cafeteria manager for 29 years. She had buried a husband and a son.
Karen wrote to her first. Audi Rand called her 4 days later at 7:00 in the morning. The first thing she said before hello was, Have you been up there yet? And Karen said yes. And Audi Rand said, Well, then you had better come and don't come on a Sunday. They've got singing on a Sunday and I can't hear myself.
Karen went on Tuesday, June 21, 2022. The recording is 2 hours and 51 minutes long. Audi Rand did not want the job. That is the first thing she says about it. She says it flatly without self-pity. I never asked for it and I never wanted it. And I have never been proud of it one day in my life. My granny had it and my mother would not take it. And so it come to me and the way it come to me was that I was in the room. That is all. I was 14 years old and I was in the room when granny was dying and there was three of us in there. And she looked at the three of us and she picked the one that was looking back.
Then Karen asked her what it is. And here is what Audi Rand said. Granny said some ground grows trees and some ground grows people because trees would not stay. She said that a bald is a place the mountain keeps shaved so it can see out. She said most of them is only grass and one of them is not, and the one that is not has been there since before anybody around here had a name for anything.
Now, here is the part that people get wrong. That thing up there is not evil. It is not the devil and it is not a demon and it is not a punishment. It is hungry and what it eats is a thing that nobody else has got any use for. You have lost somebody. Then after a while everybody around you gets done with it. They are kind about it and they are done. And you have still got the whole thing, the whole entire weight of it and you carry it around and there is not one single place in this world to set it down. Well, there is one place. That is what it is. That is all it is. It is a low spot in the world where that runs to and it makes something out of it. The way a bird makes a nest out of what's laying around and the thing it makes is real and the thing it makes will love you.
Karen asked her the question that anyone would ask, which is does it kill people. Audi said no. That is the other thing people get wrong. It has never killed one soul in 200 years. It has not got any hands. It has not got a mouth. It cannot do one single thing to you. It asks. That is the whole of its power. It asks. And it asks in the exact voice you would rather hear than any voice on this earth. And it will ask for as long as you will stand there. And it has got nothing else to do and nowhere else to be. And it will still be asking when your grandchildren are dead. Everybody that is up on that hill went up there on their own legs and said yes, every one of them.
Then she gave Karen the rules. One, say your names. Yours, your mother's and her mother's, out loud. So it is in the air, not in your head. Three and stop. Three is a fence and four is a gate and you do not know who you are opening it to. And do not say a fourth one to be safe. People do that. People think, well, I will say four, I will be twice as safe. That is how you let it in.
Two, whatever comes to you up there is going to be perfect and it is going to get one thing wrong. And the thing it gets wrong is never a fact. It will know every fact there is. It will know what your daddy said the night before he died word for word because that is in you and it can read it right off of you. What it does not know is why anybody ever did anything. So do not stand there checking it on facts because it will pass. Ask it why. Ask it why it did some little thing it always did, some habit, some foolishness, and it will answer you. And the answer will be a good answer. And it will be wrong because a reason is the one thing that never comes out of a person into the air where a thing like that could pick it up. A reason stays inside. That is the only door it cannot get through.
Three. Be off that grass before the dew. And I do not mean before dark. It don't come down out of the sky up there. It comes up out of the ground and it can come up at 3:00 in the afternoon in June if it takes a notion. And when it does, you have got about 40 minutes. And then you have not got any.
And then a fourth finger. And she said, And here is one my granny did not have and I have got because I have watched this happen twice in my life and she only watched it the once. Four. Do not go back up to prove something. Everybody it has ever got, it got them on the second trip, not the first. Nobody is fool enough on the first trip. It got them on the second when they had a plan and a recorder and a rule wrote down on a card and they was not scared anymore because they had been up there once already and nothing happened.
Karen asked her at the end of nearly 3 hours whether she had ever been up on Bitterbald herself. Audi Scholes Rand said, One time, 1959. I was 28 and my boy Ronald was 4 months in the ground. I got about 11 steps out onto that grass and I heard him fussing. He had a way of fussing before he cried. This little noise, hn hn, like that. And I had not heard it in 4 months. And I heard it out on that grass in the middle of the day. And I said, I, Rand, Doia Scholes, Perie. And I said it again. And I turned around and I walked off of there. And I got in the truck and I drove home and I got in the bed and I did not get out of it for nine days.
And I want to tell you something and then I am done. There has not been one single day since the 11th of April 1959 that I have not thought about going back. 63 years. I am 91 years old. I have got a pacemaker and a bad hip and I cannot get to the parking lot. And if somebody walked in that door right now and offered to drive me up there, I would go. I would go right now in this housecoat. That is what it is. That is the whole thing. It does not have to chase anybody. It just has to be up there and be patient and let us know it is there and we come to it. 63 years I have wanted to go back to the worst thing that ever happened to me. So when you go back up there, and you are going back up there, do not tell me you ain't. I have been looking at your face for 3 hours. You remember that the wanting to is not yours. That is the only weapon anybody has ever had against it. When you feel that pull, you say to yourself, That is not mine. That is his. He put that there.
In October of 2022, Karen checked the Seismore connection. Here is what she found. Karen Fay Wadell's mother is Janice Seismore Wadell, born February 9, 1948, at a hospital in Kingsport, Tennessee. Her birth certificate lists her mother as Adah Ruth Seismore, aged 36, and the space for the father is blank. That was not a secret in the family. It was simply a thing that had happened.
Adah Ruth Seismore died on August 22, 1971, in Kingsport, Sullivan County, Tennessee, of a cerebral hemorrhage, aged 60. The death certificate gives her date of birth as July 2, 1911, and her birthplace as Hawkins County, Tennessee, and her father as Otis Seismore and her mother as Nola Jean Combs Seismore.
Adah Ruth Seismore Fentress died on November 14, 1963, in Fathergill, Halloway County, North Carolina, of complications of pneumonia, aged 52. The certificate gives her date of birth as July 2, 1911, and her birthplace as Hawkins County, Tennessee, and her father as Otis Seismore and her mother as Nola Jean Combs Seismore. The informant is her son Ellis Boyd Fentress Jr., aged 25. Ellis Boyd Fentress Jr. went by Bud.
Two death certificates. Two states. Eight years apart. Same woman. Same birthday. Same county of birth. Same mother. Same father. Adah Ruth Seismore was living in Kingsport, Tennessee continuously from 1946 until her death in 1971. Adah Ruth Seismore Fentress was living in Fathergill, North Carolina continuously from 1936 until her death in 1963. For 25 years, there were two of her, 61 road miles apart, both raising a child, both known to their neighbors, both getting older.
Bud Fentress and Janice Wadell were half siblings and neither of them ever knew. Bud died in 2004. Janice is 78 years old and living in Kingsport, Tennessee, and Karen has never told her.
Now, where did Ada Ruth Seismore come from? There is no birth certificate. There is one Ada Ruth Seismore in the record before 1930, and she is in a family Bible. She was born July 2, 1911, and she died January 19, 1913, aged 18 months, of what the Bible calls the summer complaint. She is buried in a churchyard in Hawkins County under a small stone that is still standing.
In the 1930 federal census, in the household of Otis Seismore, aged 51, and his wife Nola Jean, aged 48, in Hawkins County, Tennessee, there is a daughter listed. Ada R. Seismore, aged 19, single, no occupation. Born, if you do the arithmetic, in about 1911. She is not in the 1920 census. She is not in the 1925 school census. She appears in the world at 19 years old in the spring of 1930 in her parents' house with a dead child's name and a dead child's birthday.
Nola Jean Combs Seismore in 1929, according to a church minute book, lost her last living son to a logging accident. Her fourth child gone. She was 47 years old and she had buried four of six. Nola Jean Combs Seismore was born on Wolf Fork in Halloway County, North Carolina, 11 miles from the foot of the Dover Gap Road. And she was a first cousin of a midwife named Perie Anne Scholes. She knew exactly what was up there. She knew the rules. She went up anyway.
Nola Jean Combs Seismore went up on Bitterbald in 1929 or 1930 with four dead children in her and she came down with a 19-year-old daughter and she took her home and she put her at the table and she never said one word about it to anybody for the rest of her life.
That is the answer to the question Karen Wadell had been asking since April of 2019. Which of my four grandparents was not who they said they were? The answer is the one who was not anybody at all.
In November of 2022, Karen persuaded her mother to test. Janice Wadell, 74 years old, who thought the whole thing was foolishness and did it because her daughter asked. Here are the results. The 19 unexplained matches all share with Karen a single continuous block on chromosome 8. Same start point, same end point in all 19. In 2019, that block measured 41.6 centimorgans in Karen. Denny had the same block, identical start, identical end. That is expected between siblings so far.
Janice Wadell, their mother, Adah's daughter, the person through whom that block must have come, does not have it. Not a shortened version, not a fragment, nothing. Karen's father, Denton Wadell, died in 2009, but he had two brothers, and both of them tested at her request in 2023, and neither of them has it, and neither do their children.
A genetic segment cannot appear in two siblings and be absent from both of their parents. That is not an unusual result. That is not a rare event. That is the thing that the entire structure of inheritance forbids. Every segment you have came from one of two people. There is no third door.
She thought it was lab error. She had her mother retested with a different company on a different chip in 2023. It came back with 6.2 centimorgans of it. Not zero. 6.2 centimorgans of the block that had not been there 14 months earlier, at the same start point, running the same direction, just shorter. And when Karen retested herself at the same time on the same day from the same kitchen table, the block on her chromosome 8 measured 58.9 centimorgans. It was 41.6 in 2019. 58.9 in 2023. She has tested twice more since. The current number is not public.
On March 2, 2023, at 10 minutes to 2 in the morning, Karen Wadell figured out what was wrong with her fence. Karen Fay Wadell. Janice Seismore Wadell. Ada Ruth Seismore. Three posts, three names. She had said them out loud every night before bed for 611 nights. And the third one had been made on that grass in about 1929 out of a dead child's name and a woman's four times broken heart. She had not built a fence. She had built two posts and a gate. And she had been knocking on it every single night for a year and 8 months out loud in the dark in her own house 61 miles away. And something had been on the other side of it. Listening to her do it and being patient the way it is always patient.
She went back up on the mountain 19 days later. Of course she did. The 21st of March 2023, she left Kingsport at 4:15 in the morning and she was at the gate on the fourth switchback at 6:05 and on the grass at 8:20. She had a plan. She was going up to finish the survey of the ring. She had found seven stones, and she wanted the other four, and to photograph the east side of the house at the same times of day as before, and to be down off that grass by 11:00 in the morning, and that was all.
She had one other thing with her, which was a folded piece of paper in her jacket pocket with four sentences written on it in her own hand. One, I have two posts, not three. Do not say the third one. Do not say it even to correct it. Two, if it comes, ask why. Not what. It does not know why. Three, the wanting to stay is not mine. Four, Denny is dead. He died on the 14th of March, 2017 in the Bell Chapel lot in Blountville. I found him at 6:40. That is true, and it stays true no matter what is standing in front of me.
The road above the gate was again in better repair than the road below it. The birds stopped again, and this time she was watching for it, and she gives the exact spot, 60 yards below the 15th switchback. She came out onto the grass at 8:20 and it was 38 degrees and clear. The house had 23 windows. She photographed it from the east at 8:31 and counted 23 and from the south at 8:35 and counted 23 and from the west and the north and there were 23 from every angle all day. And the extra one on the second floor at the north end had a curtain in it. And the curtain moved once at 9:40. In a way she describes on the tape as like somebody walked past it inside, not like wind. Wind does the bottom first.
She found the other four stones in 90 minutes. The ring is 11 stones evenly spaced, 91 feet in diameter, set 14 inches down with the sod grown over. And when she had the 11th one uncovered, she stood up and walked to the middle of the ring because that is what anybody would do. And she stood in the center of it and turned around slowly and looked at the 11 small patches of cut sod. And she said on the tape in a completely level voice, It's a table. And then about 4 seconds later, No, it's a fence. 11 posts. Somebody at some point in some century tried to build a fence around a piece of it.
She checked the dew at 10, nothing. She checked at 10:30, nothing. She had one stone left to photograph properly, and she wanted a scale marker in the frame, and she had left the folding rule in her pack at the edge of the ring, and she walked back to get it. And she checked her watch, and it was 10:51, and she was going to be off that mountain by 11:15, comfortably, early, ahead of her own schedule.
At 10:54, she stopped walking. You can hear it. Two steps and then nothing, because somebody was whistling. Denny Wadell whistled through his teeth. Not a tune. There was no melody in it ever in his whole life. It was a thin, breathy, tuneless sound up and down at random. The sound of a man who is not thinking about anything. He did it while he worked. He did it in checkout lines. He did it in the truck. It had driven his sister up the wall since she was 11 years old. You cannot fake that. It has no content. It is a texture. It is the exact grain of a specific man's idle breathing.
It was coming from behind her and to the left out toward the western tree line, maybe 80 yards off, and it was moving. On the tape she says one word and the word is no. Then 12 seconds of nothing. Then, quite steadily, Karen Fay Wadell. Janice Seismore Wadell. And she stops. Two posts. She does not say the third one.
And out on the grass 80 yards away, the whistling stops. And a man's voice, ordinary volume, slightly amused, says, You're missing one, Korn. Korn. Denny Wadell called his sister Korn from the time he was six years old until the day he died. Nobody else ever did. It was his, and it was 36 years old, and it died in a church parking lot in Blountville with him.
She did not answer it. He talks. That is all. He does not come closer. She says he stayed out there at 70 or 80 yards the whole time. A figure in the grass she could see well enough to know the shape of and not well enough to swear to a face. He talks about the shop where he worked. He talks about a job they did in Bristol where the roof fan came off in his hands. He talks about their father. He talks about her hip, which had been bothering her, which she had told nobody but her doctor.
And then at about the 4-minute mark, he says, Ain't you going to ask me anything? And Karen Wadell, standing in a ring of 11 river stones on 61 acres of grass at 11 in the morning, does the one thing that a woman in a nursing home in Erwin, Tennessee told her to do. She asks him why. She says, Why did you always get up before the end of a movie?
And there is no pause at all. He says easily in his voice with his exact rhythm. Cuz I already knew how it went. That is what he always said. Word for word. That is what Denny Wadell said every time for 30 years. When anybody asked him why he was doing dishes with 15 minutes left in a film, it is the correct answer. It is the answer any recording device, any relative, any friend would give you.
It is not the reason. The reason was that their father had died at the end of a movie, 1994. Denny was 21. They were all four in the room. And it was the last 20 minutes of something on television. And their father had gotten up to go to the kitchen and had not come back. And Denny was the one who found him on the kitchen floor. And after that, Denny Wadell could not sit through the end of a film. And he never once said that was why. And Karen had never once asked him. And she had simply known it the way a sister knows a thing. It was never in a word. It was never in the air. There was no way to get it off of her because it had never been anywhere but inside her.
She said on that grass out loud. That's not why. And the thing 80 yards away in the grass said nothing at all for 11 seconds. And then it said in a completely pleasant voice. Say your third name, Korn.
She has told me that what she felt in that moment was not terror. She said terror had been about 40 minutes earlier. She said what she felt standing in that ring was that she was being extremely rude. That she was standing on a mountain being spoken to kindly by her brother who had asked her a small and reasonable question and that she was refusing to answer it and that it was making her feel like a small, cold, ungracious person.
That is not mine, she says on the tape out loud to herself. That's not mine. He put that there.
And then she said the thing that got her off that mountain. She improvised it standing in a ring of stones in about 4 seconds. She said, Ada Ruth Seismore was made on this hill in 1929. She was not my grandmother. She was not anybody's grandmother. There is no third name. My brother is Denny Ray Wadell and he died on the 14th of March 2017 in the parking lot of Bell Chapel in Blountville, Tennessee. And I found him at 20 minutes to 7 and he is dead and I am not going to be talked out of it by a hill.
She did not build the third post. She did the other thing. She named the gate.
And that is when the dew came up. 11:03 in the morning, 41 degrees, clear sky, sun well up, a light wind out of the northwest, and every blade of grass on 61 acres went wet at once. She says it on the tape, and then she says it again about 6 seconds later in a different voice. The dew's up. The dew is up. It's 11:00. The dew is up.
Audi Rand had told her 40 minutes. She did not have 40 minutes to get to the car. The car was 5 and 3/10 miles down a mountain. What she had 40 minutes for presumably was to get off the grass, and the tree line was 400 yards away, and she went. She did not run. She walked at a good clip in a straight line southeast toward the notch where the road comes out, and the whole way across that grass she said two names. Karen Fay Wadell. Janice Seismore Wadell. Karen Fay Wadell. Janice Seismore Wadell. Over and over. Two posts and a gap where a post is not.
She got to the tree line at 11:21, and at the tree line she stopped and she turned around and she looked back because everybody does. There was nobody out on the grass. The house had 23 windows. The 11 cut squares of sod were in their circle, and the dew was on everything, and there was nothing standing anywhere on that bald.
And there was a line of flattened wet grass from the middle of the ring where she had stood to the place where she was standing at the edge of the trees. One track, her track, going one direction. And beside it, a second line of flattened grass coming from the tree line back out toward the ring, laid down at the same time in the same wet, going the other way, made by something that had walked out of the woods behind her while she was walking to them.
She photographed it. On the second track, the flattened patches are farther apart. Considerably farther apart. Not the spacing of a person running. Evenly weighted, both feet flat, no scuffing at the toe, just a longer step, much longer. Doss Wills paced out that same thing in the frost in October of 1863 and wrote down 40 inches. And 160 years later, a woman with a phone photographed it in the dew at 11:21 in the morning. And when Karen measured it from the photograph with the width of the sod squares as her scale, she got 39 to 41 inches.
The walk down took her 4 hours and 40 minutes. Going up she was on gravel and hard pack in the dry. Coming down, from about the 15th switchback to about the 11th, she was walking through mud. There had been no rain. There had been no rain in that county for 9 days. The road above the gate had been dry and firm at 6:00 in the morning, and at 11:30 it was, in her words on the tape, like walking in a hog lot. She sank to the ankle. It was wet from the 11th switchback to the 15th. Above the 15th, dry. Below the 11th, dry. Four switchbacks. About a mile and a quarter of road soaked through as if somebody had run water down it for a day in the exact section where the woods are too clean and the birds are not.
She got to the car at 4:02 in the afternoon. And there is one more thing on that recording before the door shuts. At about 2:30 in the afternoon, somewhere between the ninth and eighth switchbacks, walking downhill in dry gravel with birds audible all around her, Karen Wadell stopped saying her two names. And a woman's voice from up the hill behind her at some distance said, Karen.
And Karen said on the tape immediately without any pause at all in a voice like a door slamming, You are not my mother. And the voice said, I know, hun. I know. Come here a minute.
And that is the last thing on the recording that is not Karen Wadell breathing for 2,700 seconds all the way to the car.
She sat in the driver's seat with the doors locked for 11 minutes. Then she checked herself over because Dovy Prine's second rule had been in her head all the way down. Whatever you carry up, you carry back down. All of it. Pack. Water bottles. Both. One empty. Sandwich wrapper. Notebook. Pencil. Recorder. Camera. Folding rule. Steel probe. Towel. Headlamp. Phone. Keys. Hair tie. Jacket. Jacket pocket.
The folded piece of paper was not in her jacket pocket. Four sentences in her own handwriting. I have two posts, not three. Ask why, not what. The wanting to stay is not mine. Denny is dead. He died on the 14th of March, 2017 in the Bell Chapel lot in Blountville. I found him at 6:40. Her handwriting. His name. The date. The place. The time she found him. She had taken it out to read it at some point that morning at the ring in the wind and she had put it back, or she had thought she had put it back, and it was not in her pocket and it was not in the pack and it was not in the car.
She sat at that gate for a long time. She sat there for 31 minutes with the engine running, deciding whether she was going to walk 5 and 3/10 miles back up that mountain in the last 2 hours of daylight to pick up a piece of paper. And she said out loud alone in a car at the fourth switchback of the Dover Gap Road, That's not mine either. And she drove down.
She did not go home. She drove to Erwin, Tennessee, which is 110 miles the wrong way. And she got there at 8:07 in the evening. And visiting hours at that facility ended at 7. So she slept in the parking lot. 51 years old in a Honda in a nursing home parking lot in March with a jacket over her and the doors locked and she did not sleep at all.
At 6:00 in the morning, she went into the lobby and told the woman at the desk she was family, which was the first lie she had told anybody in 2 years of this. And the woman looked at her face and let her back. Audi Scholes Rand was awake. She was 92 by then, and she was in the chair by the window with the crossword and the ink pen, and Karen came in and sat down on the end of the bed and did not say anything. And Audi Rand looked at her for a while and then said, You went back. And Karen said, Yes. And Audi said, Did you say the third one? And Karen said, No.
And Audi Scholes Rand, 92 years old, in a housecoat with a pacemaker and a bad hip, 64 years past the 11 steps she took onto that grass in 1959, put down her pen and put her hand over her eyes and cried for about a minute and a half and then wiped her face and said, Well, then you are the first one I ever heard of that got asked and said no. Granny never was. I never was. They just leave, hun, they leave before it asks. You stood there and you got asked and you said no.
They talked for 5 hours. There are two things Audi Rand said that morning that matter. The first one was about the piece of paper. Karen told her about it, the four sentences, her handwriting, her brother's name, the date and the place, and the hour she found him. And she asked Audi whether it mattered. And Audi said, Hun, it don't need the paper. It had all that off of you the minute you set foot up there. What that paper is is a thing you left on purpose without meaning to, and that is different. And I am not going to lie to you and say it ain't. You know what a man does when he wants a bird to keep coming back to the yard? He don't chase it. He don't grab it. He puts out one handful of feed and then he goes in the house and shuts the door and he waits. That paper is not the feed. You are the bird. That paper is the door being open.
The second thing was the answer to the question of what it actually is. Audi said, I don't know and granny didn't know and I have quit being embarrassed about it. Here is the closest I ever got. You take a low place in a field. And the water goes there. It don't go there because the low place wants it. It goes there because it is low. And after a 100 years there is a pond. And after 200 years there is things living in the pond that would not be anywhere else. And if you was one of them things, you would think that pond had a purpose and a mind and a wickedness in it. That hill is a low place in something. I do not know in what. Sorrow. Maybe if sorrow is a thing the world has got a surface to and everything runs downhill into it and it has been filling up since before there was anybody here to notice and what is living in it now is not the hill. That is all I have got. I have had 92 years and that is all I have got. And if somebody tells you they have got more than that they are selling something.
Audi Scholes Rand died on March 9, 2024, of pneumonia in that same room. She was 93. Among her effects, her granddaughter found a spiral notebook with about 40 pages of names in it written in Audi's hand over what appears to be many years. Sets of three over and over, hundreds of them. Somebody's name, their mother's name, their mother's mother's name. Some sets have a date beside them, some have a check mark. She had been keeping them. Everybody who ever came to her for 60 years and their three names written down and held.
Karen Wadell's own three names are on page 31 in Audi's handwriting from June of 2022. And beside the third one, Adah Ruth Seismore, in the same ink in a 91-year-old woman's careful hand, there is a small circle with a line drawn through it. The same mark that 11 people made in front of a notary in 1911. She knew. She knew in June of 2022, sitting in that chair by the window, when Karen said her three names out loud in that room, she knew what the third one was and she did not say so. Karen has been asked why she thinks that is. Her answer is this. Because if she'd told me, I'd have gone up there that week, and she knew that. She wanted me to have another year first.
Karen Wadell is 54 years old and she still lives in Kingsport, Tennessee and she still works in medical records and she has not been up on Bitterbald since March 21, 2023. Here is what three years of it has done to her. She says two names out loud every night before she sleeps. Not three. Two, and then a pause where the third one is not. And then she starts over and she does it until she has done it enough.
She will not answer a door unless she heard a car. That is her hard rule and she does not bend it for anybody. If somebody knocks and she did not hear an engine and tires in the gravel first, she does not go to the door. She goes in and out of a building by the same door. She did not know why she started doing that. She talks about her brother in the past tense on purpose, out loud, deliberately, and she corrects other people who do not. If somebody at a family thing says, Denny always says, she will say gently, said. Every time. She told me why once. She said, It's the only thing I've got that it can't use. Every single time I say he's dead out loud, that's one less place for it to get a foot in. It works on what you won't say.
On the night of February 11, 2026, at about a quarter to 2 in the morning, Karen Wadell woke up in her house in Kingsport, Tennessee, because somebody was whistling in her yard. There was 8 inches of snow on the ground. It had come in the evening before and stopped around midnight, which matters because it means the snow in that yard was smooth and unmarked when she went to bed at 11:00.
She did not go to the window. She did not go to the door. She sat up in bed with her back against the headboard and she said two names out loud and she said them from 1:45 in the morning until a quarter to 8 when it got light. 5 and 1/2 hours out loud alone in a bedroom with her voice going out about halfway through so that the last 2 hours were barely a whisper.
The whistling stopped at some point that she cannot place. She says she did not notice it stop. At a quarter to 8, she got up and went to the front of the house. There were tracks in the snow. They came in from the road up the middle of the yard to the bottom step of her porch. And then they turned and went back out to the road. And the two lines were about four feet apart, one going and one coming. Bare feet. The ones coming in were an ordinary man's stride. The ones going out were about 40 inches apart, flat, evenly weighted, no scuff at the toe.
She photographed them, and then she went and got a broom and swept the whole yard, every track, for an hour and a half, in the snow, in her nightgown, and her coat and her boots, because she did not want to look at them, and she did not want anybody else to see them, and she did not want them there when the sun got on them.
And against the bottom of her front door, growing up out of the crack between the concrete step and the threshold in 8 inches of snow in Kingsport, Tennessee, on the 12th of February, there was a tuft of green grass about 9 inches tall. She cut it out with a kitchen knife. It took her some doing. She put it in a Ziploc bag, and she has it in her freezer.
There are exactly three Kennard burials in the record of Halloway County. All three are in the Fathergill town cemetery. All three of them are people who got off that mountain and died somewhere else and were brought home by in-laws who did not know any better. They are Ran Kennard, died 1931 in Johnson City. Mahala Kennard Prine, died 1944 in Bristol. And a man buried as C. Kennard with no first name and no dates, buried in 1958.
Ran and Mahala are both on Silas Kennard's list from July 11, 1918. Ran with a check mark, Mahala with a check mark.
In 2018, the state widened the highway that runs along the north edge of that cemetery by 11 feet. The Department of Transportation was required to do a ground penetrating radar survey of the affected margin. That survey covered 206 graves. Radar on a 100-year-old grave is not a mystery. You get a shaft, a rectangular disturbance in the soil, sharp sides running down five or six feet. 203 of those 206 graves showed exactly that.
Three of them did not. There is no shaft under any of the three Kennard stones. There is no disturbance. There is no cut. The soil beneath those three markers from the surface down to the limit of the instrument is continuous and undisturbed and reads the same as the ground between the rows. Three funerals, three obituaries in the Fathergill paper, three sets of pallbearers who are named in print and who all had families and who would all have noticed if they had carried nothing. Nobody was ever put in the ground under those stones.
In 2025, the Halloway County Commissioners voted 4 to 1 to put the Salat Creek tract up for sale again. It was advertised in April of 2025. There were no bidders. There is a new lock on the gate as of the fall of 2025, a heavier one. And there is a sign now, and the sign is not a county sign. It is a homemade thing, plywood with hand-painted letters, and it has been repainted at least twice. It says, Nothing up here. Go on home. Nobody knows who put it there. Everybody in Fathergill has a theory, and every theory is a different family.
In September of 2024, a man from Ohio, 68 years old, a retired postal worker whose grandmother was a Kennard from Halloway County, and who had lost his wife in the spring of 2024, drove down to see about family history. His car was found at the gate at the fourth switchback on October 11, 2024, locked with his wallet in the console and $11 in it. Halloway County searched that mountain for 4 days with dogs and a state helicopter and 80 volunteers. The dogs would not go out onto the grass. That is in the incident report in one line phrased as K9 units non-productive at the open field. They found nothing at all. There was no sign that he had ever walked onto that bald and no sign that he had walked anywhere else. The case is open.
Karen Wadell mailed a box in June of this year. It came UPS insured and it weighed 19 pounds. In it. Silas Kennard's ledger in an archival box she paid for herself. Photocopies of Truit's casebook 7. A flash drive with the Fentress tape, the Ostrander transcript, chapters 4 and 7 of the Oaks dissertation. 241 photographs from June of 2022 and 306 from March of 2023. And 11 hours of her own recordings. Vera Osgood's sixth notebook, which she had bought from the archives de-accession sale for $60. Audi Scholes Rand's spiral notebook with four decades of other people's names in it. Her own file of certificates and census pages and deed abstracts in order, tabbed. And a letter, two pages handwritten.
Here is the end of that letter. You asked me once why I gave you all this instead of writing it myself and I gave you a smart answer about not being a writer. Here is the real one. I have got exactly one thing keeping the door shut and it is that I say two names every night and I do not say a third one. And I have worked out that the way that works is that I have to keep on knowing all the way down in me that there is not a third one. Not believe it. Know it. And I am not sure I can go on knowing it by myself for another 30 years. So I would like some other people to know it too. Not for me. I don't need anybody to believe me. I have got a bag of grass in my freezer. I mean, I would like it to be known out loud in the world by strangers that Ada Ruth Seismore was made on Bitterbald in Halloway County, North Carolina in about 1929 out of a dead baby's name and a brokenhearted woman who ought to have stayed home. Because as long as somebody somewhere knows that, it is a fact. And a fact is a thing you can hold on to at 2 in the morning.
Do not use my mother's name if you can help it. She is 78 and she has never been up that road and she is not going to be because I take her to her appointments and I do her shopping and I will be driving her for the rest of her life and she is not ever going to have a reason to go anywhere near that county. Tell them the rules, all of them, even the ones that sound foolish because the foolish ones are the ones I would have skipped. And tell them the thing that Audi told me that I did not understand for a whole year, which is that the wanting to go is not yours. I still want to go. I want to go tonight. I have wanted to go every single night for 3 years and 10 and something days. And I expect I will want to go on the last day of my life. And it is not going to happen. And the reason it is not going to happen is that I know whose want that is. It is not mine. He put it there.
Karen spoke recently. She is fine. She sounded tired. She said the summer has been hot and that her mother has started using a walker and that she has been thinking about getting a dog. And she asked what day this was going up. And then right at the end, she said one more thing and she asked if it could be used and said yes. She said, There's one thing I never put in any of it, and you can have it, and then I'd rather not talk about this anymore for a while. When I was on that grass and it said, Say your third name, Korn, I want you to understand that I had already opened my mouth. I was going to say it. There wasn't any thinking about it. I had the breath in me and my mouth was open. And the only reason it did not come out is that I could not remember it. 611 nights I said that name out loud before bed and I stood on that hill and it was gone out of my head like it had been lifted out with a spoon and I stood there with my mouth open for about 2 seconds trying to find it and in those two seconds I got a hold of myself. So do not let anybody tell you I was brave. I was not brave. I was saved by forgetting a name. And I have wondered every day since whether I forgot it or whether somebody who has been dead 60 years and who was never anybody's grandmother and who used to sing alto in a church in Fathergill, North Carolina took it out of my mouth on purpose.
So 228 years and here is everything we actually have. A man who begins in 1798 with no past, paying in old silver, caring only about the grass. A household that held at 11 through four censuses without aging. A census taker in 1830 who was fed dinner by 11 people he did not see. 41 letters from a girl who never came down in a hand that got cleaner every year asking after a dog that had been dead for 30 of them. 11 men who went up in October of 1863 and nine who came down and two sets of footprints in the frost and a stride of 40 inches at a walk. A doctor's case book with a temperature of 94.6 in nine bodies and three wrists beating together and a drawing of a suture that is not in any anatomy book and a child he watched die in March standing in a store in November without a mark on her. A public health nurse's pencil ledger with 14, 17, 22 in the worst winter that county ever had and four words scratched through so hard the pencil went through the paper. A farm ledger that runs 23 years and ends in the middle of the word do not with the last pages cut out with a knife. A field notebook that ends in the middle of a sentence with 11 pages cut out the same way. A children's jump rope rhyme about a fence and a door. A dissertation that has been restricted for 45 years and a technician's handwriting on a lab report asking what these are. A cassette tape with a woman's pleasant voice on it saying, She sings good. Present tense, 8 years after the funeral. A botanist who ate his lunch on the grass and was thanked for something that only existed in his own head. Two death certificates for one woman, 8 years and two states apart with every field matching. A block on the eighth chromosome that two siblings have and neither of their parents do, and that is not the same size this year as it was last year. And a sandwich bag of grass in a freezer in Kingsport, Tennessee.
That is the file. That is all of it.
Here are the rules, all of them. Do not go up on Bitterbald. That is the first one. And it is the only one that works every time. If you go anyway, go in the morning. Be off that grass before the dew. And the dew comes up out of the ground, not down out of the air. And it can come up at 11 in the morning in March if it takes a notion. Do not say one of their first names out loud above the third switchback. Whatever you carry up, carry back down. Every bit of it. Check your pockets before you get in the car. Check them twice. A thing you leave up there on purpose without meaning to is a door left open.
If it comes, and it will come as the one you have wanted the hardest and the longest, and it will be perfect, do not check it on facts. It has every fact there is. It read them off of you the minute you set foot on that hill. Ask it why. Ask it why he did some small foolish thing he always did. It will answer. And the answer will be the answer he always gave. And it will be wrong. Because the reason a person does a thing never leaves the inside of them. And that is the one door it cannot get through.
Say your names out loud. So they are in the air. Yours. Your mother's. Her mother's. Three and then stop and start again at your own. Three is a fence and four is a gate and you do not know who you are opening it to. And know your names before you need them. Know them all the way down. Because there are people walking around this country tonight who have been saying three names into the dark for years. And one of those three was made out of somebody's grief on 61 acres of grass and they do not know it. And they have been knocking on a door every night before bed and calling it a prayer.
And the last one, which is Audi Scholes Rand's, and which she paid 64 years for. When you feel that pull, and if you have listened to this whole thing tonight, some part of you is already feeling it. You say to yourself out loud if you have to, that is not mine. He put that there.
Have you ever wanted to go back to the worst thing that ever happened to you? Not remembered it. Not been ambushed by it in a grocery store at 4:00 in the afternoon by a song. I mean, wanted it. I mean, caught yourself some night driving a route you had no business driving, or standing outside a building you used to go into, or scrolling back through the messages all the way back on purpose, knowing exactly what it would cost you and doing it anyway. Everybody does that. That is not a haunting. That is just being a person who has lost somebody.
But here is the question. When you feel that pull, how do you know it is yours?