“Iron Bridge Sunday and Other Stories” by Les Brown

Reviewed by Jeanne Malmgren

If anything is synonymous with Appalachian heritage, it’s the art of storytelling. For generations, highlanders have sat on front porches and under trees, spinning yarns that are sometimes true, sometimes a little “stretched.”

When Les Brown was a boy, he listened keenly to the oral history of his forebears—and now, in his eighties, he still remembers. In this endearing collection of short stories, Iron Bridge Sunday and Other Stories (Redhawk 2024), Brown mines a rich vein of memory and love for the North Carolina mountains where he grew up.

Brown’s alter ego, Billy Fletcher, is the third-generation son of a farming family who have lived for decades in the fictional Sycamore Cove. Billy grew up in the 1950s, enjoying a free-range childhood of outdoor play in the hills surrounding their homestead—but also performing farm chores, practicing old-time religion, and witnessing his father’s descent into alcoholism. Billy and his friends cook up all kinds of hilarious misadventures: midnight frog hunting, wrestling a caged chimpanzee, getting hopelessly lost on a dark mountainside during a Boy Scout hike.

Before we dip into Billy’s life, though, Brown takes us further back in time to the era of Billy’s grandfather, a godly man who ruled his large family with an iron hand, doling out discipline steeped in religious beliefs and at times, shockingly cruel. The story titled “Bastard” is the hardest read in the book, detailing the day Elihue Fletcher forced his own children to beat their sister so hard, she suffered a miscarriage of her illegitimate baby.

Then there’s Billy’s father, Jehue, a gentle man with a love for music whose unhappy marriage gradually eroded his joy in life. “Jehue and the Hammond Organ” is a heartrending tale about his habit of slipping into the local Methodist church late at night to play “Stardust” on the organ, fueled by sips of bourbon and deep-seated melancholy.

Brown doesn’t shy away from some of the other harsh realities of early twentieth-century mountain living. Blacks and women were second-class citizens. Domestic violence was common, and kept hushed up. The world Brown’s characters inhabit was full of hard drinking, mule plowing, corn shucking, hymn singing, and the once-a-year thrill of fireworks on Christmas Eve.

Iron Bridge Sunday offers plenty of humor, though, and that’s where Brown’s genius for storytelling really shines. One of the tales, “Poker Game,” features a cast of characters straight out of Mayberry RFD. Every Saturday night, the men—Coot Rankin, Vernon Pate, Elmer Noblit, and Basil Smoot—gather in the woods behind Homer Waycaster’s General Store for some cards and a pass-around bottle of Old Crow. On this particular night, their poker game devolves into accusations of cheating and a debate about sin, capped off by a drunken do-it-yourself baptism under a full moon in the nearby creek.

Throughout these rollicking stories, Brown displays a deft hand with the peculiarities of mountain dialect:

 “I don’t really put no stock in wooly worms. Now

the Farmer’s Almanac and the signs is what I go by. It’s

done right by my crops for years. My momma made me

do everthing by the signs. I got to doin’ it that way and

it’s worked right by me so far.”

Brown is also a master at giving his characters the kind of unforgettable nicknames people get saddled with in a tight-knit community where everybody knows everybody: Spud Ollis, Anvil Burch, and a sheriff named Nub Sparks in honor of his missing middle finger, which was accidentally sliced off by his little brother while they were slaughtering a chicken.

Brown helps us visualize the citizens of Sycamore Cove with his own black-and-white sketches, hand-drawn and simplistic, which are scattered throughout the book. He also provides lengthy descriptions of each person’s physical features. Those descriptions are clever and detailed, but he tends to download the entire description upfront, as a character takes the stage.

Near the end of Iron Bridge Sunday, we have a front-row seat at Billy’s baptism in Laurel Creek, just below the Iron Bridge. Then we witness as he stumbles nervously through a makeshift sermon at church, ending with a mangled version of the Lord’s Prayer:

“Let us pray!” he said.

“Our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy

name, thy kingdom come, what will become, forgive us

Lord our daily bread and give us our trespasses that lead

us beside the still water. Deliver us from evil, for thine is

the kingdom, the power and the glory, I pray thee Lord

our soul to keep forever and ever. Amen, Amen!”

In the final story, Billy and three other high school boys cram into his friend Jack’s souped-up Oldsmobile 88 and careen at high speed down the switchbacks of a curving mountain road. Eventually, the boys scatter to their individual fates far from Sycamore Cove—the Air Force, jobs, Vietnam—and Billy is left to cherish his memories of a bygone era in a place he’ll always love.

How fortunate we are that Les Brown decided to preserve those memories. Iron Bridge Sunday and Other Stories, a nostalgic and good-humored ode to his childhood, is a treat from beginning to end.

Les Brown

Les Brown is a native of the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. A retired biologist, Les has poetry, art, and short stories published in journals, including Kakalak, Pinesong, Iodine, Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel, Moonshine Review, Appalachian Heritage and Now and Then. A Pushcart Nominee, Les’s book of poetry, A Place Where Trees Had Names, focuses on his Blue Ridge farm heritage with its serenity, and family and coming of age struggles. Les lives with his poet wife and cat in Troutman, NC.