Along the way, we stopped and picked up Billy Adkins, who guided us to Jake’s home on Big Branch. Jake, we found, was a little skinny fellow, somewhat quiet, and — I was told — a decorated World War II veteran.

I asked Jake if he remembered the first time he ever saw Ed.

“I don’t remember that,” he said right away. “I was born in 1916 but I didn’t stay at home like the rest of my family. I’d slip off from home here when I was a little bitty fella and maybe stay a week or two before I come back or they’d come get me or something another. Then after I got up in years, I joined the Army and I stayed over four years in the Army. I was in there nineteen months before they bombed Pearl Harbor. So I didn’t stay home like the rest of the kids.”

A little later in the conversation, Jake made it clear that he remembered more about Ed and his family than he realized.

“He stayed with Mother and Dad a lot, Ed did, and them young’ns,” he said. “She was a music teacher, the old woman was. She was from out of Kentucky and he was off’n Harts Creek. They had about five, six children.”

I asked Jake how long Ed usually stayed with his father and he said, “Aw, he might stay a week. They’d go up there at the courthouse at Logan and play music, him and her, and she had this little boy tied to the rope so she could draw him in you know out on the sidewalk. And somebody give him some pennies and he had them pennies you know and he dropped them and she started drawing them in. He ripped out a big oath, ‘Wait till I get my money!’ You know, they couldn’t see what they done or nothing.”

Sometimes, Ed left his kids with Dood when he was playing in Logan.

“Now them kids, they was pretty mean, but people most of the time helped him correct them,” Jake said. “They raised one girl, Mona. That girl, she was a bad one. She’d run up and down the road with them boys if Dad didn’t get after her. She was just a young gal, you know. Ed, he didn’t care if you corrected them kids. If you busted the hide on one that was all right.”

Jake didn’t remember much about Ed’s appearance other than that his eyes were “milky-looking.”

When Brandon asked him what it was like to hang around with Ed, Jake said, “He talked to Dad a whole lot. He said to my dad one time, ‘Dood, where do you think hell’s gonna be at?’ Dad said, ‘I never thought about where it’s gonna be, Ed.’ He said, ‘I have an idea where it’s gonna be. I believe it’ll be on the outside of this world.’ He was a good ole man in a way, but he was bad to drink in a way.”

Oh…so Jake remembered Ed drinking.

I asked him if Ed drank a lot and he said, “No, I never did see him come to Dad’s drunk. Dad didn’t allow no bad stuff around his house, even when he wasn’t a Christian.”

Jake thought for a second, then said, “Ed was a healthy eater. He’d come in there — get up for breakfast — he’d say to my mother, ‘Nary, have you got ary onion?’ And she’d get him an onion. He’d eat an onion head for breakfast. My mother was a person that would feed anybody that came along. It didn’t make no difference whether he was a drunk, a hobo, or what he mighta been, Mom would feed him. We had a big long table with a bench on one side and about ten people to eat off of it besides who come in. We kept Bernie Adams half the time. He was the puniest feller that ever you saw — a plumb weakling he was — and he’d stay with Dad for maybe two or three weeks.”

Jake tried to describe his memories of Ed and Dood playing around the house.

“We just had an old log house,” he said. “A door over there and one here and one room and Dad had a lot of trees around here. They’d sit out there in the yard. They’d start in on Saturday evening and they’d be a sitting right there when Monday morning come with a half a gallon of moonshine playing music. They’d fiddle that long.”