Kinflicks Read Online Free Page A

circled the original hexagon. The farmers, who had come into Hullsport every Saturday of Ginny’s childhood in their rusting Ford pick-ups to sell a few vegetables and buy supplies and swap gossip down by the train station while squirting brown streams of tobacco juice through crooked teeth, were no longer in evidence. The railroad and the river shipping business had gone bankrupt, victims of competition with long-distance trucking. The red brick train station, with its garish late Victorian gingerbread, was deserted and vandalized, with obscene drawings and slogans painted all over the interior walls by the initiates of the Hullsport Regional High School fraternities. The station served now as a hangout for the town derelicts and delinquents and runaways, who congregated there at night to drink liquid shoe polish.
    Nor had the town fathers, specifically Ginny’s grandfather, anticipated the Dutch elm disease, which had killed off most of the big old trees within the hexagon proper and had left Hulls-port looking like a raw new frontier town, baked under the relentless southern sun. Nor had he imagined that six times as many people as he had planned for would one day want to leave the farms and mines and crowd into Hullsport, and that clumps of houses for them would ring the hexagon in chaotic, eczema-like patches.
    Hullsport, Tennessee, the Model City, Pearl of the Crockett River valley, birthplace of such notables as Mrs.. Melody Dawn Bledsoe, winner of the 1957 National Pillsbury Bake-Off, as a banner draped across Hull Street had reminded everyone ever since. Spawning ground of Joe Bob Sparks, All-South running back for the University of Northeastern Tennessee Renegades — and prince charming for a couple of years to Virginia Hull Babcock, Persimmon Plains Burly Tobacco Festival Queen of 1962. Ginny was prepared to acknowledge that time spent as Persimmon Plains Burly Tobacco Festival Queen sounded trivial in the face of personal and global extinction; but it was as tobacco queen that she had first understood why people were leaving their tobacco farms to crowd into Hullsport and work at the Major’s munitions plant, why there were no longer clutches of farmers around the train station on Saturday mornings.
    The plane was making its approach now to the pockmarked landing strip that Hullsport called its airport. Ginny could see the shadow of the plane passing over her childhood hermitage below — a huge white neo-Georgian thing with pillars and a portico across the front, a circular drive, a grove of towering magnolia trees out front which at that very moment would be laden with intoxicating cream-colored blossoms. It looked from a thousand feet up like the real thing — an authentic antebellum mansion. But it was a fraud. Her grandfather, apparently suffering the bends from a too-rapid ascent from the mines, had built it in 1921 on five hundred acres of farmland. It was copied from a plantation house in the delta near Memphis. The design clearly wasn’t intended for the hills of east Tennessee. Hullsport had expanded to meet the house, which was now surrounded on three sides by housing developments. But behind the house stretched the farm — a tobacco and dairying operation run now by none other than Clem Cloyd, Ginny’s first lover, whose father before him had run the farm for Ginny’s grandfather and father. The Cloyds’ small maroon-shingled house was diagonally across the five hundred acres from Ginny’s house. And at the opposite end, in a cleared bowl ringed by wooded foothills, across the invisible Virginia state line, was the restored log cabin that Ginny’s grandfather had withdrawn to toward the end of his life, in disgust with the progressive degradation of the Model City.
    As she swooped down from the clouds to take the pulse of her ailing mother, Ginny felt a distinct kinship with the angel of death. “I couldn’t ask the boys to come,” Mrs.