{"id":1489,"date":"2019-09-23T01:21:35","date_gmt":"2019-09-23T01:21:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/?p=1489"},"modified":"2019-09-26T01:18:57","modified_gmt":"2019-09-26T01:18:57","slug":"she-owned-a-restaurant-up-in-bend-by-james-kelly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/2019\/09\/23\/she-owned-a-restaurant-up-in-bend-by-james-kelly\/","title":{"rendered":"She Owned a Restaurant up in Bend by James Kelly"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

James Ross Kelly lives in Northern California. Mr. Kelly is a U.S. Army Veteran (1967-1971), Mr. Kelly was in the Army Security Agency and served in Eritrea, East Africa, where he was a teletype intercept operator. He has been a journalist for Gannet, a travel book editor, and had a score of labor jobs \u2014 the in-between, jobs you get from being an English major. He retired as a writer-editor for the Forest Service, where he spent the a decade in Oregon and Alaska respectively. He started writing poetry in college on the GI Bill, and after college continued and gave occasional readings in the Pacific Northwest during the 1980s. His poems and stories have appeared in Westwind Review, (Ashland, Oregon), Open Sky (Seattle), Siskiyou Journal (Ashland, Oregon), The Sun (Chapel Hill, NC); Don\u2019t Read This (Ashland, Oregon), Table Rock Sentinel, (Medford, Oregon), Poetry Motel (Duluth, Minnesota), Poems for a Scorpio Moon & Others (Ashland, Oregon), The Red Gate & Other Poems, a handset letterpress chapbook published by Cowan & Tetley (1984, Vancouver, B.C.). In the past three years Silver Birch Press (Los Angeles) so glad is my heart (Duluth, Minnesota), Cargo Literary, (Prince Edward Island, Canada), Fiction Attic, Rock and Sling (Spokane, WA), Edify (Helena, AL) and Flash Fiction have all featured one or more of his stories. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n


She Owned a Restaurant Up in Bend<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cEver\nsee a hanging Ernie?\u201d  Jack asked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYep, my folks took me to one in\nJacksonville,\u201d Ernie said. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI was about nine or ten. Spent the\nnight, had a picnic. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018I expect this will teach me a valuable\nlesson,\u2019 was the feller\u2019s last words.\u2019 Ernie said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI don\u2019t remember what he did,\u201d Ernie\nsaid. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cErnie did you ever see a Grizzly\nbear?\u201d  Jack asked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cNope, they was all kilt out by my time.\u201d\u00a0 Ernie said, \u201cKnew an old\u2019 timer from Jacksonville that had been mauled by a grizzly bear, he said he was out with three fellers and he got attacked. The bear bit on him, and bit on him, and bit on him, then he played dead and the bear went away. He said the other fellers found him and started haulin\u2019 him back to town through the brush, but he just hurt too bad. \u2018Fellers,\u2019 he said, \u2018jest lay me on top that there gray brush and leave me be\u2014I\u2019m a goner.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSo, Ernie said, \u201cthey left him there\nfor dead. He said he stayed there on top of the gray brush for a long time,\nthen got to feelin\u2019 better and walked back to town.\u201d  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHow many whore houses were in Medford\nErnie?\u201d  Jack asked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSix! There was six whorehouses in\nMedford.\u201d  Ernie said. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMolly\u2019s was my favorite.\u201d  Ernie said. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMolly\u2019s was right above the Hubbard\nBrothers Hardware store. I saw Molly about twenty-five years ago. She owned a\nrestaurant up in Bend, still serving the public.\u201d  Ernie said. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWere you born in this house\nErnie?\u201d  Jack asked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cNope, across the Highway next to the\nroad that goes up the hill to the mine. We had a two-room house there. The mine\nstarted to pay, and my parents built this house closer to the barn and the\nriver. This here house was built in 1900. I barely remember the other place.\nThis is mostly where I’ve lived except for the War. Lonely since my wife died,\nhad to stop driving last year. Mrs. Ownby, gets me anywhere I need to go. My\ndaughter comes down once a year from Salem. What? Oh, yeah, I fished a lot in\nthe summertime, limit on trout? Oh, it was a hundred back then. Lots of times I\ncaught one-twenty-five!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhat did you do in the Great war\nErnie?  Jack asked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMachine gunner,\u201d Ernie said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMowed ’em down til they stopped\ncomin\u2019,\u201d Ernie said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cEver climb Mt. Thielsen Ernie?\u201d  Jack asked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSix times,\u201d Ernie wheezed, from an\nabrupt old man kind of certainty, and then he held up one hand with fingers\nextended and an upward thumb from the other hand to only waist height, and then\nlet them down in an exhaustion of age.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cLast time was 1975,\u201d Ernie said,\nlooking off the precipice of his front porch, \u201cI was 79.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

James Ross Kelly lives in Northern California. Mr. Kelly is a U.S. Army Veteran (1967-1971), Mr. Kelly was in the Army Security Agency and served in Eritrea, East Africa, where he was a teletype intercept operator. He has been a journalist for Gannet, a travel book editor, and had a score of labor jobs \u2014 … Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1489","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pa867U-o1","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1489","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1489"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1489\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1519,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1489\/revisions\/1519"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1489"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1489"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underwoodpress.com\/ruescribe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1489"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}