Eight-year old Bobby Bruce and his siblings visited their mother for the last time while she lay dying by her own hand. As a motherless child in Appalachia in 1925, Bobby was thrust into a life beyond his experience and imagination. Moonshine and bootleggers, the Temperance Movement and religious evangelists, and the quirky, colorful residents of the small mountain community of Belspring all contributed to the man Bobby would become. This story, told through Bobby's voice, is not only a narrative about a young boy, it is also a stockpile of now largely forgotten accounts of a slice of life from the little southwestern Virginia communities of Belspring and its near neighbor, the coal mining town of Parrott, and also of Bobby's days and years living among the rascals and saints of those places. While today's world is shaped by TV, cell phones, and immediate communications, those did not yet exist in the Belspring of the 1920s. Other than the occasional automobile, newspaper, or the Norfolk & Western Railway down by the New River, life was insular, shaped by family and neighbors, church and schoolhouse. But once upon a time, Belspring and Parrott-like many other small places in bygone America-teemed with folks of all ages. They were lively villages boasting shops for car repair, house-fronts on which doctors hung their shingles, a schoolhouse and rail depot within walking distance of every child and adult, general stores that sold dry goods and groceries, a shoe repair shop run by two booze-hounds, a hot dog stand, and a barber shop on a back porch where hair was cut by the most famous cow-pasture baseball pitcher in those parts. All those people are dead and gone, but a bit of their memory lives on in the tales that Bobby told about them in their out-of-the-way part of the world. Told through anecdotes that are humorous and moving, sorrowful and tragic, encouraging and audacious, Bobby shares his memories of the long-ago people and places who inhabited the home of his heart - that magical village along The Belspring Road.
