This randomly appeared in my email some time ago. It was the first of what I assume will be many increments in a much larger story. I was tempted to delete it immediately, especially after the anxiety I went through over the Silent Hills email, but it was almost as if something was compelling me to read it through. I feel the need to share it here. Read at your own risk.
The small town of Coyote Hollow sits a good half hour west of Macon, GA.
Perpetually stuck in times past, Coyote Hollow is the kind of town people don’t notice even as they drive through it. It’s a relic; a living, breathing museum of the industrial boom of the early 20th century and an unfortunate side effect of the technological boom of the 21st.
Once occupied by the Creek injuns, it now serves as a home to the kind of Southern folk you might expect to see in a novel by William Faulkner or Flannery O’Connor.
There’s Miss Foster, the owner and head waitress of the Chattahoochee BBQ. Although renowned for her Brunswick stew, banana pudding and pulled pork sandwiches, it’s her personality for which Miss Foster is most known. On most days she’s as mean as a wet cat, and sporadically she’s even meaner. The staff of her restaurant live in a constant state of anxiety, worried about calling down her wrath. It’s said that if a person doesn’t quit their job at the Chattahoochee within six months, then they’d be apt for induction into the Spartan army.
William Bostwick, affectionately known among the locals as “Billy Boy,” is a fireman for the local brigade. It’s an open secret that Billy Boy has a thing for Miss Foster, but he’d have a better chance at kicking a river uphill. For the longest time, despite the stress of his profession, Billy Boy always seemed to have a beaming smile on his face. Anybody who was his friend, which was pretty much everybody, could expect a firm handshake or a bear hug any time they’d see him. Unfortunately, after what many of the locals refer to as “that thing that happened,” Billy Boy has somewhat retreated into himself.
It all goes back to the Tennisons.
Ephraim Tennison, otherwise known as E.T., was one of the wealthiest people in Crawford County, which made him the richest man in Coyote Hollow by a long shot. He’d spent his entire life farming chickens, inheriting the business from his old man, who died of a stroke in his 80s. The business was already considerable but under E.T.’s leadership it grew into one of the single most successful independent chicken farms in the tri-state area. Many, many times the big monies tried to buy out E.T.’s farm and many, many times he told them where they could put their regulations and production quotas.
In 1990, Ephraim and his wife Cora welcomed a baby boy into their lives. What should have been the happiest moment in the lives of a couple proved to be an ill omen for what was to come. Their son took a lot more effort to be born than normal, and as he was taking his first cries, Cora nearly died of an aneurysm. She was clinically dead for one minute, but quick action from the doctors saved her life. It was always clear from that time on that Cora felt uneasy about her child. She doted on him like any mother would, but if you were perceptive enough, you’d see how she looked at him with disdain, as if she expected him to try to kill her again.
The boy, who was was known by everyone in town as J.T. despite his full name being Jeremy, proved himself quite apt at the job of his father and grandfather. When they weren’t homeschooling the boy, they had him out there in the fields, learning every little trick of the trade. The kid was a natural.
Unfortunately, that’s about where the good things you can say about the boy end.
One of the the stereotypes about small town America is that everyone knows everyone else’s business, which isn’t entirely true. People in small towns often think they know everyone else’s busines, but only the most practical of them realize that everybody’s playing the grown version of the telephone game. A stubbed toe can become an amputated leg in six degrees in a small town.
However, once in a while, the truth is apparent enough for everyone to get it instantly, and it was known by everyone in Coyote Hollow that Cora’s subconscious fear of her boy Jeremy was justified. The kid was a bad seed and everyone knew it, although nobody ever said so in more than a whisper.
Whenever Cora brought the boy with her to the grocery store or whatever, the clerks would inevitably find candy bars and bubblegum missing from the checkout counters. Gradually the boy moved from that to putting M-80s in the toilets. Thankfully nobody ever got hurt, at least not in any serious way.
Of course the Tennisons tried to discipline their kid, but it only seemed to make things worse. People like to speculate on why people do the things they do; the people of Coyote Hollow certainly loved suggesting that J.T. was the way he was because of his mother’s odd treatment of him, but in the end it was only that: a suggestion. The truth is often a lot less interesting. Some people are the way they are just because that’s the way they are. As Freud put it, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. J.T. did what he did because he enjoyed it, and even if he didn’t get away with it, it was worth the trouble he’d get into.
As is usually the case, things got worse as J.T. got older. M-80s in the toilet turned into calculated arson. Nobody was ever caught, but everybody knew who was responsible. When Mr. Green’s corner store caught fire, it spread to a local hardware emporium and damn near put seven people in the hospital. Despite understandably increasing tension from everybody, the police department’s hands were tied. No evidence, no conviction. Most of us weren’t sure if the frustration came out of the police’s inability to do anything or the Tennisons’ unwillingness to do anything to punish their problem child.
Then, at the age of 19, the boy’s luck finally ran out. One of the other restaurants in town, the Tailgate, caught fire and when the fire department arrived and put out the flames, they found an unharmed but shaken Jeremy Tennison cowering in the kitchen; the boy had somehow managed to get himself stuck inside the place instead of sneaking out as he usually did. This time, there was no denial to be had.
People had to admit the truth: J.T. may have been a punk, but he was a tough one. No matter what they tried, the police couldn’t get him to admit to any of the other crimes they suspected him of. In the end, Jeremy only got 24 months in prison for the one fire they could try him for.
Around this same time, bird flu struck the Tennison farm like a Mack truck. Three quarters of E.T’s birds died off and the ones that didn’t had to be burned alive just to make sure the disease didn’t spread. The insurance E.T. had taken out on his chickens helped a bit, but between the loss of revenue and the costs for his son’s court case, it seemed like the Tennisons were in dire financial straits for the first time in a while.
In 2011, Cora Tennison died of a heart attack. Most of the town was in tears if not shock. We all knew that after over twenty years of her son causing her grief, something had to happen. I don’t know if anyone was prepared for something that tragic, though. E.T. certainly wasn’t. If the loss of his flock had cost him his fortune, the loss of his wife cost him his spirit.
I haven’t realized until now that I haven’t really talked about the Tennisons at length. Sorry about that. It’s funny, you know, because when most people think of wealthy folks, they think of them as sort of snotty, stuck-up and always showing off but the Tennisons were the exact opposite outside of Jeremy. Ephraim himself had always managed to remain humble. He had a good sense of family history and he remembered that his success came from the hard labor of his forefathers. He also took great pride in the fact that his ancestors had been one of the few families in the area that refused to take part in slavery during the antebellum era. Ephraim was a man who had earned his success, and he never took it for granted.
All that went out the window when Cora died. Cora had been his soulmate in every way. She had the look of a prototypical Southern Belle; lovely and long flowing hair, beautiful eyes, a smile that could light up half a block and a body desired by every pubescent boy in Coyote Hollow. In testament to how good of a guy Ephraim was, he always knew the other guys in town took a peek at his wife’s behind every time she walked by, but he didn’t care. Cora only had eyes for her man and her man only had eyes for her. Without his wife by his side, poor E.T. became only a quarter of the man he used to be. He was rarely seen in town and when he was, he never said a word. The only thing people knew was anytime they saw him, it was clear the man had gotten into a losing fight with his pal Jack Daniels.
That same year, Jeremy was released from prison. E.T. went to pick up his son and it was the first time anyone had seen him sober since his wife’s passing. And then, just like that, the two of them seemed to drop off the face of the earth.
This is where good old Billy Boy finally comes back into the picture.
About a week after E.T. and his boy seemed to disappear, the Tennison home caught fire. Before the fire department even had to chance to arrive, the building had become an inferno. The smoke was seen for miles and miles and ironically enough it was Mr. Green who first saw it and called 911.
It took Billy Boy and his fellow smoke jumpers nearly three hours to get the blaze under control and a week after that just to get things ready for the house to be taken down.
It was on the second day of that week that Billy Boy trudged into the Chattahoochee BBQ, not even bothering to look and see if his darling Miss Foster was anywhere in sight. He just plopped down into one of the booths, staring off into space like a ‘Nam vet who’d seen one battle too many. One of the waitresses made her way over to his booth to get his drink order. Took her three repeats of “Can I help you, sir?” to get his attention. He only ordered a sweet tea.
It so happened that Mitchell Redd, a good friend of Billy Boy, was eating his lunch at the Chattahoochee too. He saw his buddy walk in, saw the look on his face, and made his way over to the booth to see if he was alright. He knew deep down that Billy Boy wasn’t alright at all, but what kind of friend would he be if he didn’t at least ask? Mitch asked his buddy if he could sit down and Billy Boy gave him the slightest of nods.
When Mitch asked again if Billy was alright, Billy raised up his head and Mitch was taken aback to see tears welling in the man’s eyes. The waitress came back and sat a fresh glass of sweet tea in front of him and Billy wasted no time in reaching into his back pocket for a flask of ol’ Jack.
For the third time, Mitch asked Billy if he was alright, even though at this point it was just downright stupid to ask. It was clear Billy Boy was pretty far from alright. He added a bit too much of the Jack to his sweet tea and told Mitch everything that had happened.
Earlier that day, they’d been working like crazy to get the burnt out husk of the Tennison home taken care of. Nearly every damn man from that engine company was out there sweating their asses off when the cop cars pulled up. Some detectives had come out there to try and figure out just how the hell it had happened. They’re tooling around in what used to be Ephraim Tennison’s living room, trying to find signs of arson. They figured, like everyone else, that Jeremy had waited ‘til his dad was asleep and set fire to the house. When they pulled E.T.’s body out of the house, they said he looked like a piece of bacon burnt to the crisp. No sign of Jeremy. They guessed the little bastard had taken off, gone on to somewhere else to indulge himself in whatever trouble he could get himself into.
Apparently one of the detectives had a thermos on him and offered his buddy a swig of the joe. He handed the thermos to him and it slips right out of the man’s sweat-covered palms, spilling coffee all over the place. Just when the detective’s about to say “Aw, shit,” he sees that the coffee is seeping through the burnt out floor. By pure chance, the man had found what turned out to be a hollow spot.
They called over a few of the firemen, who proceeded to tear up what was covering up that hollow spot. Underneath all that scorched wood they found a door carved into the cement foundation, sort of like how certain people build a storm shelter out in their backyards. With their warrant signed and stamped, the detectives opened up the door. Billy Boy said everybody around it took a step back. The smell was so damn bad that somebody started joking about needing a hazmat suit. It took a bit of gearing up but eventually the detectives and a few men, including Billy himself, made their way down the staircase underneath the door.
At first it looked like an ordinary man’s basement, if that man was a wine collector. It was half wine cellar, half woodshop. A whole rack of expensive bottles lining half of the wall opposite the staircase, and next to that a bench, and on top of that bench a handsaw, a circular saw, a yardstick and the like.
Billy Boy had been the first one to turn around. He said he only saw it for a few moments, but the sight still haunts him whether he’s awake or dreaming. He almost immediately ran back up the staircase and threw up all over the place.
There, welded into the back wall of the basement was a chain, and on the end of that chain was the corpse of something that had once been Jeremy Tennison. He wasn’t burnt at all, but he was still almost unrecognizable. His body was covered in welts and cuts and bruises; one of his eyes was still swollen shut. His hair was missing in patches and what hair there was was filled with lice and maggots. In front of him were two metallic mixing bowls; one filled with water and the other filled with what they later realized was cooked chicken innards. In the corner they found a week’s worth of human waste all in one big fly-riddled pile.
Underneath the boy’s head was a pool of blood and just over the boy’s unswollen eye was a bullet hole. The back of his head was almost entirely missing and the wall behind him had a splattered blotch of blood and brain matter all over it.
The story that the detectives pieced together was as follows: after the imprisonment of his son, the bird flu wiping out his livelihood, and his wife dying, Ephraim Tennison had completely lost it. Although he never would have said it out loud, he blamed Jeremy for the tragedies he’d experienced, as if the boy’s nature had called the wrath of God down on him. He waited until his son was released, took him back home, and chained him up in the basement like a vicious mutt. He then spent the next week taking out years of quelled aggression on his boy, beating him like an animal. It was later discovered that some of the tools on his workbench had blood on them, so it was decided he’d used some of them on his boy as well. The police figured that, somewhere in all this insanity, E.T. must’ve had a moment of clarity and decided to do him and his son a favor. He went into his bedroom, took a .44 out of his sock drawer, went back down into the basement and shot his boy point blank in the head. He then went upstairs, covered everything he could in gasoline, and lit a match after laying in the bed that he and his beloved wife had once shared.
When someone asked why Jeremy had never been heard screaming for help, the police bluntly answered that he simply hadn’t been able to. His tongue had been cut out at some point.
Billy Boy will never be the same. As time went on, he managed to get his wits about him to some degree, but I don’t think anyone can see anything like that and go back to 100%.
Those of us who knew the Tennisons still talk about them from time to time. The one answer I guess we’ll never get is how such a nice and well-to-do family can descend into something so horrible.
But then, I guess that’s the way with a lot of things.