Grannies

Old Gods of Appalachia is amazing for a lot of reasons, but one of them has to do with how common all of the elements are to anyone who lives in country/mining areas. 

My family is from Arkansas, another place where mining was huge. My father's grandfather lived with and died from black lung. There were parts of their community that you just didn't go to. Too easy for things to cave in. 

My mother's father's grandmother (to give clarification) always kept a crow with her. She would bury jars in the yard with nails in them and keep bottles in the trees 'for safety reasons.' This sort of thing was passed off as eccentric. Thankfully. It's said she was very charming and if anyone suspected she was a witch, they brushed it off as superstition.

My grandfather was her favorite. WWII was going on at the time, and he told her that when he was old enough to join, he wouldn't be returning to the area. His older brother was abusive to him and everyone else. He was tired of the violence and felt it was best to just get as far away as he could. 

They had kept her other grandson's violence from her, otherwise, things might have changed earlier.

My grandfather told me that he remembers how after they had that conversation, she cried until he explained just how bad things were between him and his brother. He said she stopped crying then.  She hugged him. Told him to get on home. 

There was a mining accident later that day. My grandfather's brother was the only casualty. 

My grandfather did not believe in witchcraft. He was socially Christian and to call someone a witch would have been disrespectful, at the very least. But I could tell he wondered about it, wondered what happened to his brother, and wondered if something could have been done earlier if he would have said something. 

Did he feel guilty about it? No. Not at all. His brother was truly horrible to him. The only law enforcement in the area was his father and if he wasn't going to stop things, how could anyone?

Maybe sometimes these things just sort themselves out.