Herbie Reed has been fishing, and the catch was plentiful. The 75-year-old pulled in about 30 crappie from a nearby honey hole, a continuation of his family’s recent run of good fortune. It is late afternoon, and he has poured himself a Woodford Reserve on the rocks and sits down at his dining room table with his shirt unbuttoned to his belly, ready to explain how he arrived at this impossibly blissful moment in time.
“I came up by myself,” he starts.
Unwanted and uneducated, Herbert Ray Reed says he walked out of an Appalachian hollow as a child in the 1950s and never went back. His mother had died when he was 5 years old, and the family structure unraveled after that. Hitching a predawn ride on a cattle truck at 9 years old led him away from dark times in Pecks Creek Hollow in rural Powell County to this town of Versailles, where he showed up unannounced at his aunt’s house. “My God, honey,” he recalls her saying to him. “How did you get here?”
