In the fall of 1927, a Knoxville surveyor named Ossian Ketring was hired by the Caulfield Timber Company to map a tract of old-growth hardwood in Perry County, Kentucky. He was thirty-eight years old, a tall, lean man who had spent two decades walking hillsides. He did not drink or smoke. He kept two sets of notes: one in his field book, and a second, more personal record in a leather journal he carried in his coat pocket. That second journal is the reason this story survives at all. The timber company destroyed his survey report. The field book disappeared with him. But the leather journal stayed with Ketring until his death in a Chattanooga boarding house in 1961, and from there it passed into a historical archive.
The land he was sent to survey sat above the north fork of Peter Creek, in a rural stretch that barely registered on any map. There were two hills, a hollow between them, and a creek that split near the top. A family lived at that split. That much was known. The company had purchased the mineral and timber rights from a man in Frankfort who claimed he had inherited them from his grandfather. The family living in the hollow was never consulted. That was also known. What the company wanted from Ketring was a clear set of boundaries, a count of the trees, and a written statement that the area could be worked without complications.
The deed itself was a tangled thing. The land had come to Caulfield Timber through a second-rate Frankfort lawyer named Culpepper Weatherrow. He had inherited a file cabinet from his father, who had inherited it from his father, and inside that cabinet were papers going back to the early 1800s that no one had ever bothered to organize. In the spring of 1927, needing money, Weatherrow went through them. What he found was a document stating that his great-grandfather had purchased two thousand acres of Perry County hills and hollows in 1841 from a man calling himself Ephron Prydmore for ninety dollars in silver. The paper was signed. It had been notarized, after a fashion, by a justice of the peace whose signature was still legible if you held the paper to the light. Caulfield Timber accepted it as valid. They paid Weatherrow for the timber rights. Then they wanted to know exactly how much timber was standing on the land.
No one in the Knoxville office thought to ask a very simple question. If a man named Ephraim Prydmore had sold two thousand acres of Kentucky hills in 1841, and if the Prydmore family, whose name was still on the maps of that valley, had never once objected to the sale in eighty-six years, then who exactly had been living in that valley all those years, and what did they think they were doing there? That was Ketring’s job to find out. He did not yet know it was his job. He thought his job was to trace boundaries and count trees.
Ketring took the train from Knoxville to Hazard on October 3, 1927. From Hazard, he rode east in a wagon with a mail carrier to a place called Sims’ Store, which was a store and a post office and the last building on that road with glass in its windows. From Sims’ Store, he continued on foot. He had been told to ask for a man named Almond Craddock, who lived in a cabin two miles up the creek and would guide him the rest of the way for pay. Ketring found him easily enough. Almond Craddock was sixty-two that fall, but he looked older, as mountain men do when their teeth start to go. He was short, no more than five foot six, with a broad chest, small neat hands, and a mustache more yellow than white from smoking. He told Ketring he had been born in a cabin a mile from Sims Creek in 1865, in the last spring of the war. His father had come home from Virginia that summer missing his right foot and lived eight more years on a wooden leg carved by a neighbor. His mother lived long enough to bury three husbands and a fair number of hopes. Almond himself had married once, to a woman named Persis who died of fever in 1902, and he had not remarried. He lived alone in a cabin with a good stove, a rocking chair on the porch, and a hound named Bill, the fourth dog to carry that name in that place.
Almond Craddock knew every road, trail, and deer path in the western half of Perry County. He had guided surveyors. He had guided coal miners. Twice he had guided an old professor from Lexington who wanted to examine rocks. Once he had guided a preacher who wanted to carry the gospel into one of the hollows. Almond brought that preacher back after two days with a strange look on his face and a Bible he no longer trusted. Ketring would learn all of this in the days that followed. On the first morning on Almond’s porch, all Ketring knew was that the old man kept an unpolished rifle on display and had a way of listening to a question that made you want to answer honestly.
When Ketring spoke the words “Peter Creek” and “Prydmore” in the same sentence, Almond Craddock stopped rolling his tobacco and looked at him for ten seconds, which Ketring later described as long and unfriendly. Then Almond said, “Well, I’ll take you as far as the mill wheel. And then you’ll be on your own. There isn’t enough money in Frankfort to change that.” Ketring asked why. Almond said, “Because past the mill wheel is Prydmore land. And the Prydmore family keeps to themselves, and God doesn’t reach that place.” Ketring, the college-educated surveyor from Knoxville, wrote that sentence in his journal and put a small question mark beside it. In the days that followed, he would stop smiling at that question mark.
They set out the next morning at first light. Almond Craddock led, with a canvas bag on his back and a hunting rifle over his shoulder that he did not justify and did not apologize for. Ketring followed, carrying his surveyor’s box in one hand and the measuring chain in the other, his coat buttoned tight because the air in that valley was colder than it should have been in early October. Peter Creek runs north to south for about six miles from its source, and the last two miles are the split. Ketring carried, in addition to his instruments, a small canvas bag with two sandwiches, a tin cup, a notebook, three sharpened pencils, a folding knife, and the leather journal. He also carried a German compass in his breast pocket, close to his heart, because that was where he had learned in the war to put the things he could not afford to lose. He was not a nervous man. He was not a superstitious man. He had walked West Virginia hills at night in the rain, alone, and come back whistling. He noticed, as he set out that morning behind Almond Craddock, that his mouth was dry in a way that had nothing to do with thirst. He wrote that down later. He was a man who wrote things down.
Almond led him up the west side of the creek, away from the trail and through the trees, which Ketring thought strange but did not ask about. The old man moved like someone who did not want to be seen. They walked in silence for the last half hour. Almond was not a man for talking in the woods, and Ketring, who had begun to notice how sound behaved in that particular valley, did not want to break the silence. About halfway there, Ketring realized he could not hear his own footsteps on the leaves. He could feel his boots hitting the ground. He could see the slight displacement in the moss. But there was no sound under his weight. He looked ahead at Almond. Almond’s steps made noise. Almond’s steps made a distinct, light crunch on the leaves. Ketring’s feet made none. He did not mention it. He walked more carefully after that. By the time they reached the rise overlooking the creek, his boots had gone quiet again, or the world had gotten louder, and he could not tell which.
Late in the morning, they came to an open clearing where the creek widened and split. On the far side of the water, half-sunk into the ground, was a millstone. Beside it, hanging from what remained of a wooden frame, was a wheel. Ketring would write about that wheel more than once in the pages that followed. He would write that it was old. He would write that it was black with age. He would write that the millrace that once fed it had vanished completely. No timber, no channel, nothing. And yet, as he stood there holding his instrument bag in one hand and the chain in the other, the wheel was turning. Slowly. One full revolution roughly every twenty seconds. There was no water. There was no wind on it. There was nothing pushing it that he could see or hear. Almond Craddock did not look at the wheel. He looked at Ketring. He said, “This is as far as I go.” Ketring asked if he was afraid of the wheel. Almond said, “No. I’m not afraid of the wheel. I’m afraid of what makes it turn.” That was the last thing Almond Craddock said to Ossian Ketring that day. He turned and went back the way he came. He did not look back once. Ketring watched him until the top of his head disappeared beyond the ferns. Then Ketring took a careful deep breath and crossed the creek.
The first thing Ketring noticed after crossing was that his compass, a good German instrument he had carried for eleven years, no longer pointed north. It pointed at the hill above him. He held it flat in his palm and walked in a slow circle, and the needle turned with him, always pointing at the hill. He was close enough to a major coal seam or a massive iron deposit that could make a compass behave strangely, and that is what he told himself. That is what any experienced man would tell himself. He noted it as a possible explanation, closed the compass, and put it back in his pocket. He did not take it out again for the rest of that day. He would write later that after he crossed, the sound changed. That is the exact word he used in his journal. Changed. The creek behind him was still running, and he could hear it, but it sounded farther away than it should, as if he were hearing it through a wall. The wind in the leaves above was there, but it did not match what the leaves were doing. He tried to walk in a straight line up the west bank of the split and found himself drifting right, always right, no matter how carefully he placed his feet. He had walked hills his entire adult life. He knew what it meant when your feet drifted. Usually it meant you were tired. He was not tired. It took him nearly two hours to cover a distance that should have taken forty minutes. Sometime in the middle of the second hour, he began to smell wood smoke.
He reached the Prydmore cabin around 3:00 in the afternoon by his watch, though the light above did not agree with that. It was one of those short mountain days already fading, the sun held behind the hill, shadows stretching long across the yard. The cabin was not what he expected. Most cabins in that country face south, or face the creek, or face the road. This one faced none of them. The front door of the Prydmore cabin was set into the uphill side. The porch, such as it was, looked at the hillside. The back of the cabin, blank and windowless, was what greeted a visitor coming from the creek. You had to walk all the way around it to knock on the door. Ketring walked all the way around it. He knocked. The door opened before his hand came down for a second knock.
The man who stood in the doorway was thin, not gaunt, but thin. His skin was stretched tight over the bones of his face, his shoulders narrow, his hands folded quietly in front of him. He wore a shirt that had once been white and was now the color of soured milk. His trousers were held up by a single suspender. His feet were bare, though the porch beneath them was cold enough to hurt, Ketring guessed. He appeared to be somewhere between forty and sixty. It was hard to tell. He looked at Ketring with what Ketring later called patient attention, the way a person looks at a letter they have already read. He said, “Mr. Ketring, please come in. You must be tired.” Ketring had told no one in that valley his name. He had spoken to no one but Almond Craddock since Sims’ Store. Almond had turned back before they crossed the creek. And here was a man standing in the doorway of a cabin facing the wrong direction, speaking his name as if he had been expecting him all morning. Ketring would write in his journal only that he felt a chill go up the back of his neck, and that his good sense, the sense that had carried him up ten thousand hills in his life, told him plainly to turn around and go back to the creek. He did not go back to the creek. He went inside.
The man’s name was Amasa Prydmore. He said it once at the door and did not mention it again. Inside, the light was low and orange, and it took Ketring a long moment to take in what he was seeing. One room, or so it seemed at first, with a stone fireplace on the left wall and a long wooden table in the center. At the far end, a heavy wooden door stood slightly ajar into darkness. There were two other people in the room. A woman sat at the table, hands folded, eyes down. She was older than Amasa, or so she seemed. Though the light, again, made it hard to tell. Her hair was silver-white and pulled back, her dress gray, and she did not look up when Ketring entered. Behind her, in the corner near the fire, stood a younger man without moving. He was perhaps thirty, perhaps forty. He had Amasa’s thinness and still posture, and his eyes did not blink for long stretches. Amasa said, “My sister Verly, and my nephew Reddick. They don’t talk much with strangers. You’ll forgive them.” Ketring said something polite. He did not record what he said. He set his instrument bag by the door. Amasa gestured to a chair at the near end of the table, and Ketring sat.
From his seat, he could see without turning that the cabin walls were bare of most things you would expect in a mountain cabin. There were no tools, no tobacco pipes, no hats on pegs, no calendar, no almanac. There was one framed photograph on the wall above the fireplace. It was small and the light was dim, but Ketring, who still had good eyes, could make it out. It was a portrait. A man in a dark stiff coat, standing very erect, one hand on the back of a chair. Written on the bottom of the frame in a fine hand: “Prydmore, 1812.” He looked at that photograph for what he later thought was a very long time. The problem, as Ketring later wrote, was that photography as we understand it was not actually practiced in this country until the 1840s. Daguerreotypes appeared around 1839. What he was looking at, if the date on the frame was correct, was a photograph taken more than a quarter century before photographs of that kind existed. He told himself the date must be wrong. He told himself it was a later photograph with a wrong date written on it. He told himself many reasonable things. But the man in the photograph, with his small fine features, looked very much like Amasa Prydmore, not as an ancestor, but as the same man.
Amasa explained, in a low voice, that his people had lived in this valley since before Perry County existed, and that they did not like visitors, but the surveyor would be welcome as long as he understood the rules of the house. Ketring, being polite and being in a remote place he did not know, said he understood and asked what the rules were. Amasa smiled. Ketring wrote that it was a very small smile. Amasa said, “Don’t open the door at the back of the room after dark. Don’t go past the second hill after the light is gone. Don’t answer if you hear your name called in a voice you know. That’s the most important one. If you hear your name and it sounds like someone you love, don’t answer. We call that courtesy in this house. Do you understand?” Ketring said he understood. His hand in his coat pocket was gripping the compass. It was warm through the case, which it should not have been. Verly Prydmore, at the far end of the table, raised her head and looked at him for the first time. Her eyes were very pale, not blue, not gray, just pale, as if they had once had a color and it had been washed out of them. She said, in a voice as soft as her brother’s, “We’re glad you’ve come, Mr. Ketring. We’ve been expecting one of the Ketrings for some time.” Ketring did not know what to say to that. There was, as far as he knew, no reason for the Prydmore family of Peter Creek Hollow to expect anyone from the Ketring family of Knoxville. His people had come to Tennessee from Pennsylvania. They had no connections to Kentucky. He had never in his life met anyone named Prydmore. Yet Verly was looking at him with the kind of mild familiarity an aunt gives a nephew she has not seen since he was small. Amasa did not seem to have heard his sister. He was speaking again, quietly, about the land. He said the company in Knoxville had made a mistake. He said the deed the man in Frankfort claimed was not a deed. He said, and here he chose his words carefully, that the timber on this land was not for cutting.
Ketring explained, doing his job, that he was only there to walk the boundaries and count the trees. He was not there to cut anything. What the company chose to do later was up to the company. Amasa nodded slowly, as if this were a satisfactory answer, and said, “We’ll show you the boundaries in the morning. Tonight you’ll eat with us, and you’ll sleep in the porch room, and you won’t open the back door.”
That was Ketring’s first night in the Prydmore cabin. He ate a stew and did not know what kind of meat it was. He wrote later that it had a very distinct sweetness. He would think about that sweetness later more than he wanted to. It was not the sweetness of onions or carrots, though both were in the pot. He wrote that it was like the sweetness of something cooked very slowly for a very long time in a covered pot until the marrow had softened and the fibers had fallen apart and the flavor had condensed inside it. He thought at first it might be venison. He thought later it might be pork. Then he thought later that he did not want to know what it was, so he did not ask, and Amasa did not offer, and Verly did not look up from the fire, and Reddick in the corner ate nothing at all. That was a small thing he noticed and let go. Reddick did not eat. He drank spring water from a clay cup. Ketring answered Amasa’s quiet, careful questions about the road up from Sims’, about news from Knoxville, about the wheat harvest he did not follow closely. Amasa listened to all of it with the same patient attention. Verly did not speak again. Reddick, the nephew, did not speak at all, but Ketring caught him once, late in the meal, watching him from the corner, and Reddick’s expression was not curious, not hostile, not blank. It was, as Ketring later wrote, hungry. He did not know how else to write it.
There is a page in the journal dated that first night where Ketring tries to draw a floor plan of the cabin. He is a surveyor. Drawing plans is something his hand can do without much thought. But the drawing on that page does not close. The rectangle of the main room does not meet at the corner. He drew the far wall and redrew it three times, and in each drawing the far wall was about eight feet longer than the near wall, though his eye at the time had seen nothing to suggest it. At the bottom of that page, he wrote in a hand trying not to tremble: “I cannot make the walls match. There is something in the room that makes it longer inside than outside. Do not look at this in the morning.” He looked at it in the morning. He tried to redraw it and could not. He put the journal in his coat and did not open it again until two days later, when he was back in Almond Craddock’s cabin. And then, when he looked at the drawing, the walls had closed up neatly. He wrote beside it: “Cabin normal now on paper.”
The porch room was not on the porch. That was one of the strange things. Amasa led him after dinner through a small side door into a narrow room with a bed and a window and nothing else. The bed was neatly made with blankets that smelled of cedar. The window looked, or was supposed to look, out over the yard. When Ketring went to the window and pulled the curtain, he was looking at a wall of packed dirt. The room was dug into the hillside. There was no window. There was only a curtain hanging over a rectangle of dirt, as if the room had been dug rather than built. He turned. Amasa was still standing in the doorway. Amasa said, “Sleep well, Mr. Ketring. Don’t answer if you hear your name called.” Ketring said he would not. Amasa closed the door.
Ketring did not sleep. He sat on the edge of the bed for a long time in the dark, listening. The cabin was quiet in a way mountain cabins are not usually quiet. No sound of wood settling, no creaks, no wind. Only the sound of his own breathing, and a soft dry sound from somewhere above his head that he could not identify. It was, he wrote, like the sound of a hand moving across a wall in another room. Once, only once, he heard from somewhere outside the dirt wall behind the curtain a slow scraping sound, as if someone were dragging a shovel across the soil. The sound lasted perhaps three minutes, then stopped. He did not sleep that night. In the morning, there was no trace of digging in the yard. He looked. He circled the cabin twice before breakfast in the blue-gray light of the hour before sunrise, and the yard was packed, the leaves undisturbed, and the ground behind the cabin, where the room he had slept in should have opened onto the hillside, was flat and grassy and covered in old moss that no one had stepped on in a long time. He wrote later that he was not sure at that moment whether he was more afraid that someone had been digging outside his window all night, or that no one had.
Morning came slowly to the porch room. There was no rooster in that valley. There was no birdsong. The light in the room went from black to soft gray, and there was no way to know the time without checking his watch. When he took his watch from the coat pocket where he had left it, it had stopped at 4:17. He wound it. It started working. He wrote in his journal: “Watch stopped at 4:17. Wound it, working now.” He did not know at the time that this small detail would matter, but it did.
He did the field survey for two days. Amasa Prydmore walked the boundaries with him while Ketring ran his chain, set up his instrument, and took his notes. The acreage was smaller than the deed described, but not by much. The timber was good, mostly oak and chestnut, with some walnut in the hollows and some old white pine near the top of the second hill. From the company’s point of view, it was a valuable forest. Ketring could already see in his mind what the report would say. He could also see in his mind what Amasa Prydmore would do if the company brought in saws. He could not have told you why he was so sure. He just knew.
On the afternoon of the second day, they reached the top of the second hill, and Amasa stopped. He said, “This is the north boundary. From here, the land is not ours.” Ketring said, politely, consulting his notes, that the deed extended a quarter mile further north. Amasa did not answer. He looked past Ketring, up the hill, at a stand of tall pines that all leaned in the same direction, though there was no wind that evening, and Ketring had not felt any wind for two days. Amasa said, “We don’t go up there. If you go up there, don’t come back after dark.” Ketring, being a professional, went up there. He carried his instrument and chain alone. Amasa waited at the boundary. Ketring entered the pine stand, and the first thing he noticed was that the ground under his feet was soft in an unnatural way, as if the soil had been turned recently, though the moss on top was old. The second thing he noticed was the absence of birds. It was not just quiet. It was total. He realized that in two days in this hollow he had not seen a single bird, and only now was he beginning to think about it. The third thing he noticed was the smell. It was not a bad smell. Not a smell of death. Something older. Something like a cellar that had been closed for a very long time and had stored the same thing over and over for generations. He worked as quickly as he could. He set up his instrument at the far corner. He recorded his angles. He wrote his numbers. He did not look at the hill behind him, though he wanted to, because the feeling of something behind him watching him work was so strong it was almost a pressure between his shoulder blades. When he had recorded the last angle, he packed up and left. He did not run, but he did not linger. He came out of the pines and Amasa was still standing where he had left him. Amasa did not ask what he had seen. Amasa only said, “We’ll go back now. It will be dark before we reach the cabin.” Ketring said he thought they had time. Amasa said, “No, we don’t.” And he was right.
They walked back down the hill as the light left the place. By the time they reached the split in the creek, the sky was the color of old iron. Ketring’s watch, which he had not looked at all afternoon, read 6:10. Though by his estimate, the day should have been at least an hour longer. He wrote later that he was almost certain, as they walked, that he heard footsteps in the pines behind them. Not close, not fast, just present. One set of footsteps keeping pace with them, matching their speed exactly. When Ketring slowed, the footsteps slowed. When he stopped, they stopped. When he started again, they started again. Amasa did not look back. Amasa did not comment. Amasa walked with the same quiet, even gait he had walked with all day.
That night, inside the cabin, sitting at the wooden table with Verly at the far end and Reddick in the corner and the fire low, Ketring asked Amasa a question he had been carrying all day. He asked, “Mr. Prydmore, why were you expecting a Ketring?” Amasa looked up from his cup, and for the first time in two days, something like surprise crossed his calm, careful face. He said, “We were not expecting a Ketring, sir.” Ketring said, “Your sister said, on the day I arrived, that you were expecting one of the Ketrings.” Amasa looked at his sister. Verly was staring into the fire. Amasa said, slowly, “My sister sometimes says things that don’t fit this time. Don’t mind her.” Ketring was not ready to let it go so easily. He said, “Has my name been spoken in this house before?” Amasa was silent for a long time. Then he said, “There was once a Ketring who went up past the pines, a long time ago. He didn’t come back. We thought, when we heard you, that perhaps it was him. But you’re not him, so it doesn’t matter.” Ketring did not know what to do with that. His grandfather had lived and died in Pennsylvania, his great-grandfather in Delaware, and as far as he knew, none of his people had ever set foot in Perry County, Kentucky. He wrote in his journal that night, and this is a direct quote from that book: “They think I am a returning man. I am not a returning man, but they think I am, and I cannot convince them otherwise.” He also wrote, at the bottom of the page in a slightly shakier hand: “The wheel is still turning. I can hear it. There is no water in it. It has been turning without water for two days. It does not stop at night.”
He did not sleep that night either. He lay on the porch room bed in the room with the dirt window. And he listened. At a time he later guessed was around two in the morning, he heard, clearly, from outside the curtain, someone call his name. The voice said, “Ossian.” It was, he wrote, his mother’s voice. His mother had been dead for eleven years. Amasa’s warning came back to him then. Don’t answer if you hear your name called in a voice you know. Ketring did not answer. He stayed perfectly still. He stayed so still that his back began to ache and his hands went numb where he was pressing them into the quilt. After perhaps a minute, the voice came again. “Ossian, please.” And this time the voice was closer, as if someone had put their face right against the dirt of the wall behind the curtain and was speaking through it. He did not answer. He closed his eyes. He counted his breaths. He waited.
Between the second and third call, and this is something he did not write in his journal until months later, in a smaller hand on a page inserted between two other pages, he heard another voice. It was not a voice he loved. It was a voice he barely remembered. It was the voice of a young soldier from Ohio he had once heard in a hospital tent in France in 1918, who had died with his head in Ketring’s lap, and who had asked him in his final moments to tell his mother that he had not suffered. Ketring had told the mother in a letter what the boy had asked him to say. He had not thought of that boy in a long time. He had certainly never spoken his name aloud in this cabin. And yet, between the second and third call of his own name on the other side of the dirt wall, the boy’s voice said, quietly and clearly, “Tell her again. Tell her he didn’t suffer. Please.” Ketring did not answer. He did not move. He wrote later, on that inserted page, that this was the hardest thing he had ever done in his life, harder than the war, harder than anything he had done since. Because the voice on the other side of the wall was a boy who had died with his head in Ketring’s lap. And Ketring had loved him the way you sometimes love a person for one hour on the worst day of both your lives. And the boy was asking him for something simple. And Ketring, from the porch room bed in the Prydmore cabin in Peter Creek Hollow, refused to give it to him. The voice came a third time, fainter, farther away, defeated. Then it faded. There was no more digging that night.
In the morning, he told Amasa what had happened. Amasa nodded once, the way a man nods when the weather changes exactly as he predicted. Amasa said, “You did right. You’ll leave today. I’ll take you to the wheel. Past the wheel, you’ll find your own way. Don’t come back to this valley, Mr. Ketring. And write in your report, if you can, that the timber here is not good. That there is rot at the heart of it. That the land is not worth the trouble. If you can write that, I’ll consider your debt to us paid.” Ketring said he would write it. He meant it. They walked down together, and Ketring noticed as they walked that his compass, which he had not checked in two days, was now pointing south as it should, as if whatever had been pulling it toward the hill no longer cared. At the mill wheel, Amasa Prydmore stopped. He extended his hand. Ketring shook it. The hand was cold and very clean, not the hand of a man who had walked the hills for two days, not the hand of a man who cut firewood or carried water or did any of the things mountain men do. It was the hand of a man who, at his core, no longer needed to do any of those things. Ketring did not fully form that thought at the time, but he wrote it down that night at Sims’ Store by kerosene lamp, and reading it now in his journal, you can see where the pen pressed harder on the paper. Amasa said, “Go in peace, Mr. Ketring. Don’t come back. If a Ketring ever returns to this valley, we would like it to be the one we are waiting for. And that is not you.” Ketring said he understood. He crossed the creek. He walked up the west side alone. The wheel was turning behind him. He did not look back until he had passed the first bend, and by then, of course, the wheel was out of sight, and he could convince himself that it had stopped.
He reached Almond Craddock’s cabin at dusk. Almond was waiting on the porch, sitting in the rocking chair with a rifle across his knees. When Ketring entered the yard, Almond looked him over once, twice, and said only, “Well, well. So you’re the one who came back. Come inside. I have soup.” That night, Almond Craddock told Ossian Ketring three things. First, that in 1894, a survey party of four men had gone up into Peter Creek Hollow on behalf of a coal company from Louisville, and only one man had come back. That man had not been able to say what happened. He had signed a statement that the land was worthless, and he had left Kentucky and never returned. Second, that in 1911, a state forester named Ralston had gone up to classify the timber on that same land. Ralston had come back after three days, thin and silent, and had asked for a bed in Almond’s own cabin. He had died in that bed on the second night, with no cause the county doctor could name, though the doctor noted in his report that the man’s hair had gone completely white during those three days. And third, that Almond’s own father, when Almond was a young man, had told him that the Prydmore family had been in that valley for longer than anyone knew, and that no wedding had ever been held in the Prydmore family, and no birth had ever occurred in the Prydmore family, and no death had ever occurred in the Prydmore family either, as far as any preacher in Perry County could recall. Almond’s father had said that family was not quite like other families. They were more like something that wore the shape of a family because that shape was useful to them. Ketring wrote all of this down. He wrote it carefully. He did not feel, at that hour, like a man making fun of question marks.
Ketring returned to Knoxville. He wrote his report the way Amasa Prydmore had asked him to. He said the timber was rotten, the boundaries unclear, and the area could not be worked without the company taking heavy losses. He recommended abandoning the site. His employer, Mr. Halverson, was not happy. Mr. Halverson pointed out that Ketring’s field book, which he had submitted with the report, counted thousands of sound trees. Ketring said the field book was in error. Ketring said he had re-measured at the hill and found widespread rot. Mr. Halverson looked at him for a long time and then said, “Ketring, are you all right?” Ketring said he was not sleeping well. He asked to be transferred to another survey. Mr. Halverson agreed. He also, quietly, sent another man to Peter Creek in the spring of 1928. That man’s name was Fielder. Fielder was younger than Ketring, less cautious, more ambitious. Fielder never came back. His bag was found beside Peter Creek below the split, untouched. His instrument was found on a rock, still set up and aimed at a shot he had never taken. His rifle was found in the hollow of a chestnut tree a quarter mile above the mill wheel, with three rounds missing. Fielder himself was never found. The Fielder case was, briefly, a small item in a small newspaper in Hazard. A missing surveyor is just a missing surveyor. At first, it was assumed he had slipped off a bank, or been bitten by a snake, or found a moonshine still and been run off the mountain way. The sheriff’s men reached the Peter Creek split. They found the bag, the instrument, and the rifle in the chestnut hollow. They did not go past the mill wheel. The deputy who wrote the report, a man named Lester Yarber, who was later shot to death in a family matter in 1934, wrote that the area “cannot be safely entered,” and that his estimate was that a bear had taken the surveyor. There were no bears in that part of Perry County that year. Yarber knew there were no bears. But he wrote “bear” anyway. That is one of the reasons the report reads the way it does.
The company sent another man in the summer of 1928, a supervisor named Roy Holbrook, with three workers and a mule. Holbrook reached the mill wheel, looked at it, looked at the water that was not there, and turned his party around. He wrote in his report that the land was cursed. The owner of the company in Knoxville read that report, put it in a drawer, and dropped the whole matter. The land was never worked. The deed sat in a file cabinet in an office in Frankfort until the 1950s, when the building was demolished and the papers were destroyed. Ketring never practiced surveying again after 1931. He took a clerk’s job with the Tennessee Valley Authority, indoors, at a desk, no field work at all. He never married. He kept writing in his journal. He read a great deal and wrote long letters to a cousin in Ohio, sometimes about the news, sometimes about his health. Later, he wrote about his belief that he had begun to hear a voice calling his name at night in his room at the boarding house in Chattanooga, a voice very old and very patient, and no longer quite his mother’s voice. He wrote about that in his letters to his cousin in Ohio. He wrote about it in his journal. He wrote that he had begun to sleep with the light on, and that this was a foolish thing to do, and that he did not care. He wrote that he had begun to put a chair against his door, not because he thought a chair could stop what he feared, but because it would make a sound if it moved, and that sound would wake him, and he very much wanted to be awake if the door opened. He wrote that he had not answered when his name was called in twelve years, then fifteen, then twenty. He wrote that this was, in his opinion, the hardest kind of faithfulness a person could learn. Not to the ones you loved, but to the ones you lost, because answering would be giving them, or the thing that wore their shape, a way in. He had not answered, he wrote. He would not answer.
In 1970, when he was eighty-one, a copy of James Dickey’s novel Deliverance was left on the front porch of the boarding house by someone the owner did not recognize. Ketring read it over three evenings. He reportedly finished it, closed it, and told the owner that Mr. Dickey had been kind to those men. He said it in a voice that made the owner, who later told an archivist about it, not want to ask any more questions. Ossian Ketring died in his sleep on a Tuesday in November 1971. He was found sitting up in bed, the blankets drawn to his chest, his hands folded in his lap. The owner said he looked, when she found him, as if he had been listening for something in the moment his heart stopped. His journal was on the table beside the bed. It was closed. She noticed that it was still warm. That is one of the things she told the archivist, that the journal was still warm when she picked it up.
Peter Creek Hollow is still there. If you look at a modern satellite map of Perry County, Kentucky, you can find, high up a small creek feeding the north fork of the Kentucky River, a piece of land that no one on record owns. There is no road to it. There are no visible clearings. There are no cabins, no smoke, no signs of human use. There is, on the sloping ground at the split, what might be, if you look closely, a dark round shape near the water, half swallowed by ferns. It might be a rock. It might be something else. The last thirty years have seen three separate groups of hikers who reported, in trail journals and internet forums, that they had gone up into a hollow in that part of the county and come back with a strong feeling of having been followed, and with a strong reluctance to say what had followed them. One of them wrote, in a single sentence at the end of a very long trip report, and I will read it to you exactly as it was written: “The wheel was turning and there was no water.” Her account ends there. Or more precisely, her account has no further entries on that site after that date. I have chosen not to speak her name in this recording because she is still alive, and because a woman has a right to be believed without being contacted, and because I do not myself wish to add her name to any list that may already exist. If she wants to talk, she knows where to find me. If she does not, that is her right, and I will not press her. But I want you to keep that sentence in your mind. The wheel was turning, and there was no water. 1927. 2017. Ninety years. And a wheel that, as far as any living person knows, has no reason to turn at all. That is all she said. I have looked. I have found nothing after that sentence. Her account ends there.
There is a letter dated November 1969 from Ossian Ketring to his cousin in Ohio. In it, Ketring mentions that a young reporter had recently written to him from a magazine in Georgia, asking about a survey he had done in Perry County in the fall of 1927. Ketring writes that he does not know how the reporter got his name. He writes that he answered the reporter’s letter politely and told him nothing. He writes, at the bottom of the page, in the small precise hand he used when he wanted his cousin to notice something, that he suspects the reporter may be doing a favor for a novelist. He does not name any novelist. He does not need to. Dickey knew. He had heard the old stories. He softened them. He gave the horror a face and a name and a river you could reach the end of. In the real backwoods, the horror has no face you can name. It has a wheel that turns without water. It has a cabin that faces the wrong direction. It has a family in which no one was born, no one married, and no one was buried in the memory of any preacher. It has a voice in the dark that knows your name, and you do not answer it.