The country
This story happens in a small piece of the earth: two river systems, three states, and a hundred miles end to end. Most of it happens within twenty miles of Logan's courthouse. Here is the lay of the land, so the names in the book come with a place attached.
A schematic, drawn for the lay of the land — not to scale. Rivers simplified; the dashed line is the road of the story, from Abingdon to Logan.
Logan County, West Virginia
Logan ★
The center of everything: the courthouse, the jail, the firehouse, and 41 High Street. Lawrence Carey policed this town — constable, fire chief, chief of police — and died at his own trial's noon recess in May 1927. Aracoma Cemetery, on the town's edge, is where he and Malissa rest.
Ten miles north of Logan
Chapmanville
Up the Guyandotte from Logan. The Carey family was living here in January 1920, in the census — working country, before the High Street years in town.
Across the Tug Fork, Kentucky
Pikeville & Pike County
McCoy country. In a Pike County register in July 1865, William Carry and Jenny McCoy were married with one line of ink — the line this whole book grows from. Perry Cline practiced law here; Randolph McCoy's country lay in these hills.
On the Tug Fork
Matewan & Williamson
The Tug Fork towns: Hatfield country, where Jennie McCoy's people and the Hatfields were neighbors, kin, and enemies across one river. Williamson is Mingo County's seat — Mingo was cut out of Logan in 1895, which is why the family's paper lives in two courthouses.
The far end — Virginia
Abingdon
A hundred miles southeast, and a century earlier: here Abner Vance was hanged in 1819, before a crowd the papers put in the thousands. The story opens with his scaffold speech — and with the silence that followed it, the first of the book's long silences.
The water itself
Two rivers
The Tug Fork made the feud's map — Kentucky on one bank, West Virginia on the other, families on both. The Guyandotte made Logan's: coal came down it, and the town Lawrence policed grew up along its banks. Follow the rivers and you have followed the story.
Distances are road-rough and given the way the family gives them — in miles from Logan's courthouse. The full build adds the Guyandotte valley towns and the Kentucky side in the same form.