Wes Coffey

The key was hanging on a nail right above it.

I took the key and I opened the footlocker.

Inside were papers.

There were maybe 200 pages in there.

Some of them were ledger books, handwritten, going back generations.

Some were loose sheets.

Some were letters.

Some were in handwriting I didn't recognize.

And some were in my grandfather's hand.

And some, the oldest ones on yellowed paper, were dip pen ink with the blotches and fade you'd expect.

On top of everything was a notebook.

A simple spiral-bound notebook, the kind you buy at a drugstore.

It had my grandfather's handwriting on the cover, it said, in block letters, for Wes.

"'I'm going to skip ahead here.

I'm not going to tell you everything that was in that notebook, because some of it is family stuff, and some of it I still don't fully understand.

But I'm going to tell you what I understood by ten that night.'

sitting at the kitchen table with the wood stove going and the notebook open, and all those old papers spread around me.

The land wasn't ours, not really.

My great-great-grandfather, a man named Josiah Coffey, came into Fentress County in 1878.

He wasn't the first to live on that hollow.