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Building on a distinguished body of work celebrating and preserving mountain culture, renowned writer Billy C. Clark once again revisits his boyhood during a bygone era. By Way of the Forked Stick offers four fictional stories drawn from the author's childhood experiences of the 1930s -- tales that vividly convey the down-home spirit of a lost way of life.
Clark's youthful narrator introduces us to Apache, the charismatic termite exterminator who traded the boy a hound aptly named Sneakin. The narrator admits to his own share of sneaking -- past the watchful eye of the never-smiling Beulah Whitlock into her picture show, where the scent of popcorn drew rats up from the river in droves. He recalls being drawn himself into the world of cockfighting, where handler Blinddog Alley was said to be able to talk to roosters. And he relates how his brother Caleb's quest for girls led the boys into frequenting a church where "almost
