From Enslow’s, Lawrence and I drove out of Trace Fork and up Harts Creek to find the home of Turley’s aunt, Roxie Mullins. We stopped to see Louie Mullins, a grandson to Uncle Peter, who said Roxie lived just up the creek and to the right, kinda down under the road. We thanked him for directions and drove on until we turned off onto a rough driveway with jutting rocks and an intimidating grade leading down to a small wooden dwelling with a chicken house built almost against it. We had found Roxie’s.

     At the front door, Roxie and her daughter Violet greeted us and told us to come on inside. As we made our way, Lawrence motioned toward me and told Roxie, “This man would like to talk to you for a few minutes about my dad if you can tell him anything. He wants to know from me and I tell him that I don’t know anything about Ed Haley.”

     Violet said, “Sit down over there on the couch Mommy and he can sit down with you and talk to you and that way you can hear him.”

     I planted myself beside of Roxie — a tiny wisp of a woman weighing no more than ninety-five pounds who was dressed in an old-timey brown dress with a white butterfly collar.

     I told her, “I just want to know everything I can find out about Ed Haley,” and, thinking that I was Lawrence, she began to talk to me in a high-pitched, thick mountain brogue.

     “Well honey, I don’t know too much about him. I just know he was Ed Haley. And Emmy Mullins, she was my daddy’s half-sister. And Milt Haley married Emmy Mullins and she and him was Ed’s father.”

     I asked Roxie if Emmy had any children aside from Ed and she said, “I don’t know as she had any other child. I reckon that’s the only one they had. If they ever had any more I never heard nothing about them. Milt Haley was his daddy. They was Emmy and Weddie and Peter was my daddy’s half-brothers and sisters. And Emmy was Ed’s mother.”

     Roxie told a slightly different version of the story about Haley’s blindness than what I had heard from Lawrence.

     “When he was a little boy, they said it took some kind of a fever. I don’t know whether it was the typhoid fever, brain fever or what. And said its daddy took it to the creek and busted the ice and put it under the ice and that made him go blind. That’s how come him to be blind. They wasn’t no doctors then. We never heard tell of a doctor till I was grown. And he had such a fever, he thought that’d kill his fever, you see, and it went to its head, you see, and put his eyes out.”

     Lawrence didn’t hesitate.

     “I get different flavors why Milton Haley did this to Ed,” he said. “I get the flavor that he did it because he was trying to stop a whiny kid from crying continually. You think he did it because he was trying to break his fever?”

     Violet said, “That’s what we always heard. My grandmother always told he had a fever.”

     Lawrence said, “That’s a better explanation,” seemingly preferring that version of the tale to that of his own.

     Roxie said, “There is men does their children like that. I don’t think he’d a done that. I don’t know.”

     Lawrence said to Roxie, “You know, the only thing I could get from Aunt Liza about my grandfather was that he come from across the mountain. He was a stranger here in this area until he met Emma, my grandmother. Can you tell me anything about that?”

     She said, “I don’t know a thing in the world about him.”

     I asked if he was a musician and she said, “I don’t know about that. Ed was a real musician. I don’t know whether your grandfather was but he was awful bad to drink they said and he kept a Winchester loaded and sitting right by the side of his door they said. People was trying to kill him and he was trying to kill people before they did kill him.”

     I’d never heard that Ed’s father was killed, so I asked Roxie if she knew who killed him.

     “I don’t know that,” she said quickly. “Whether the Brumfields killed him or the Conleys… I know the Conleys killed John Brumfield, Cecil’s daddy. My sister’s husband’s daddy. And then they shot Hollene Brumfield. She was on behind her husband. Shot her through the jaw, and that hole was in her jaw when she died. Some of them killed Milt then I think. Milt Haley, he was took… Now you’re getting me into it just right. Him and McCoy was captured and took in a house ’round here over on Smoke House where Sallie Dingess’ home is. They was took in there and put upstairs and kept till supper. And when they got their supper ready, they brought them down to eat their supper and Milt looked over at McCoy or McCoy looked over at Milt and said, ‘Eat a good supper, Milt.’ Said, ‘This is the last supper you’re gonna ever eat.’ They kept them there at that house and they give them their supper and they played their last tune on their fiddle, they said, and they took them to Chapmansville and killed them. And Grandma’s the one told me this.”

     I was blown away. So was it Ed’s father or this McCoy who played the fiddle before being killed?

     “Milt, I guess. I never did see him. I was born before he was killed, but I was little. And they said when they took them in the house to kill them, they told everybody to go out. And they was a little girl or a little boy one — I forget which Grandma said — hid in behind the stove and they killed them men and throwed them out in the yard and that little young’n run out right over the top of them and run and hid and got away.”

     We told Roxie what little we had heard about Emma’s murder at the mouth of Harts Creek and how we had no idea about Milt’s murder. She had never heard of Emma’s murder but seemed sure that Haley and McCoy were killed together.

     “They said Grandma went to see them put away,” she said. “They was both buried in one casket — their caskets right side by side in one grave, I mean. Grandma went and seen them bury them.”

     While trying to digest Roxie’s story about Milt Haley, I asked if she knew anything about the rest of Ed’s family — starting with his mother, Emma. Roxie said Emma died young — “she died before I’s ever born, honey,” which was 1905. She didn’t know of Ed having any brothers or sisters but said, “Now Uncle John Adams, he had a house full of children. He was Grandma’s child but he was them boys’ half-brother. My daddy knowed a whole lot about Ed. He traveled around a whole lot with Ed. And Uncle John Hager, he traveled with Ed and made music. But now Milt… You see we didn’t know nothing about him. We was all little when Milt was killed.”