Favorite Sons Read Free

Ridge.

Chapter Two
    A t 8:30 a.m. on Monday, June 14, 1971, Deak Coultas tapped twice on the back screen door and walked into our kitchen. His face was freshly scrubbed, pink acne medication applied to his considerable eruptions, hair neatly parted, his khaki shorts cuffed and a pair of tube socks pulled up just below his knees. A Boy Scout knapsack was slung over one shoulder. I was still rubbing sleep out of my eyes and had pulled a ball cap over my uncombed hair. My last fried egg was congealing on the plate; I slid it between two slices of dry wheat toast and we headed down Second Street.
    My name is Hutchinson Van Buren and I grew up in the eastern Ohio village of Crystalton, which anchors a slight, southwest bend in the Ohio River. Crystalton was named for the glass and crystal business that thrived there from the mid-1800s until the Brilliant Glass Works closed in 1932, its doors slammed shut by the Great Depression. Around the turn of the century, there had been eight glass and crystal companies operating in Crystalton. All that remained of that once-booming industry were a few slag dumps, the stone foundation of the Brilliant Glass Works, and the Upper Ohio Valley Glass Museum, which was a meager display of fallow photographs, canning jars, and bowls occupying a second-floor room of the village hall. Admission to the Upper Ohio Valley Glass Museum was free, but you had to ask the village clerk for the key, which hung on the wall behind her desk next to those for the public restrooms. Crystalton had about sixteen hundred residents, an electric generating plant justsouth of town, a sand quarry, and the headquarters of the Belmont Coal & Gas Company. We had a high school that was much beloved by generations of graduates who never left town, a hardware store that sold bunnies and colored peeps at Easter, a drugstore with a marble soda fountain, and the usual assortment of mom-and-pop diners, dry cleaners, and grocery stores. Although we had a name that evoked beauty and style, there was nothing that set Crystalton apart from the other dusty, industrial communities lining the river. However, it was a wonderful place to be a kid. We had ball diamonds, hills to explore, creeks and a quarry to fish, a community swimming pool, and the Big Dipper Ice Cream Shop, where Edna Davis gave you a free double scoop of your choice if you made the honor roll. On grade card day, kids would be lined up to the street, proof in hand, awaiting their rewards.
    A heavy fog had rolled off the Ohio River that morning and shrouded Crystalton in a damp cloak that stretched from the water’s edge to a hundred feet up the Appalachian foothills that rimmed the town in a huge semicircle. Deak and I cut through the alley behind the drugstore and across the Little League field, where the ground was still soggy from the previous day’s rain, to the Lincoln Elementary School playground. Behind the monkey bars, concealed by a row of blue spruce trees planted by the PTO, was the beginning of the hunting path that led to the crest of the encircling hills, known as Chestnut Ridge. Deak and I could hear the voices of our friends float through the fog long before they came into view. Our classmate Adrian Nash and his younger brother Eldon, whom everyone called Pepper, were sitting on the first rung of the monkey bars, their arms wrapped around the second rung, giving the appearance they were strapped to a crucifix. As we walked out of the fog, Pepper said, “Low man buys the Cokes? How about it, Hutch? You in?”
    â€œSure, works for me,” I said.
    â€œHow about you, preacher, or is that too close to gambling?”
    It was said in fun and Deak took it as such. “I’m in.”
    Deak’s real name was Dale Ray, but he was so devoutly religious that we gave him the nickname, Deacon, which over time had been shortened to Deak. We joked that he was the perfect child—he was a good student, rarely cursed, had earned more merit