Family, you know things have never been what you’d call normal down in the holler, but starting in the winter of this year, things have started to go a certain off way.

Folk out berrying the brambles in the cricks and hollers have turned up missin’ – and been found by strangers wandering in the hills, gone simple. Among the spring calves more than should were born dead or.. wrong. Many spring sheep came stillborn.

There’s a bad air in the holler. The headman, Arthur Thoms has joined with Preacher Eskit to call folk out to watch.

We know, family… it ain’t gonna be the jumped-up headman who gets lost on his way to the public house, who’ll set things right. I’m too old now to go myself, but it’s you, you that know in your bones and in the dancing of the fetches on your porches that something wrong is underway.

No one has heard from old Ma Nettles, who by rights should be at the village advising but whose falling out with the minister years ago has kept her coming in only for midwifin her kin and sometime to meet traders up from the Carolinas.

It’s time to go out to her, to bring her back to the Holler for Sunday dinner, and for plannin.

Go on, Family, get out over the bridge, get down to Gallow’s Grove and past to Ma Nettle’s bone house. Bring her back or some reason not.

You feel it in your bones, family, I know I feel it in mine: it is you who’ll fix this or demand from St. Peter why not!