These fourteen funny stories tell the tale of a beleaguered boyhood down home where the dogs still run loose. As a boy growing up in the tiny backwater town of Forty-Five, South Carolina (where everybody is pretty much one beer short of a six-pack), all Mendal Dawes wants is out. It's not just...
But whatever spy gadgetry might have existed in 1974 South Carolina, it would not make it to the town of Forty-Five until decades later. When I got my driver’s license legally, at the age of fifteen, there were still party lines for all of our residents, and I’m pretty sur...
The woman introduced herself as Sally Renfrew and claimed that the chalcedony vein below Andrew Jackson Prep—her son Stan’s school—finally “ored out.” Sally Renfrew said that she had run a fake arrowhead business for fifteen years; that she now understood Malthaus’s notion of supply and demand; t...
Harold Lumley needed to check out his mother’s reported lapses in judgment. He had received a call from the executive director of the Calloustown Community Center—a place where Ruth Lumley had volunteered for the past six years reading to the children of migrants, offering English lessons to the ...