Our forefathers sensed the increased gravitational pull that brought weariness to even the simplest of chores. They had named the place Jupiter, not for its celestial, but for its oppressive qualities. And they knew the river. They had named it the Great Muddy. To later generations who discerned no greatness, it was just the Muddy.

The river used to be the first thing you'd see when you came to Jupiter, but the new road comes in from another direction. Thirty miles from the Interstate. Forty miles from the closest Walmart. Other than the new road, little has changed in Jupiter. Drive past the dilapidated gas station, the Bullets & Booze liqueur store, a diner that was already seedy when it first opened forty years ago, what passes for a small food store when the refrigeration is working and a bait stop when it is not, the Sears Catalog store that has stood vacant for the last twenty-five years, a small building that houses the mayor and sheriff's office, and you've had your tour of main street.

Four hundred and twenty people with three last names and you've had your tour of greater Jupiter. The Jupiter the world lost, perhaps never found, and probably never will. The Jupiter that has gone to great lengths to stay hidden.

Jupiter sent no citizens to the Civil War. None had owned a slave, or for that matter had given a damn. You couldn't grow cotton or tobacco in Jupiter. You didn't need slaves to distill whisky. And Jupiter stood far from the roads traveled by Confederate armies moving north or Sherman's horde of locusts moving south.

No citizen went to the first world war. The news had gotten late to Jupiter. A half dozen men volunteered for the second one, and two more went to Korea, but only with the understanding that they state a different location as their home town. No one went to Viet Nam. By then Jupiter had seen enough of war.

Jupiter has no zip code. Jupiter has not been counted in a census in over a hundred years. There was the census taker who found the town in 1960, the one most folks fled from and some thought of killing until he counted, and then courted, Ellie McMurty, my father's second cousin, twice removed. He never reported the census but decided to stay and marry Miss Ellie. By coincidence, his last name was also McMurty, so Jupiter was able to increase its gene pool without an increase in surnames while Ellie was able to keep her last name without marrying a cousin. No mean feat in Jupiter, where family trees that look like shrubbery drunk on white lightening must be carefully traced before any marriage is condoned. Not that all marriages are, love being love and all.

For generations, the traditional wedding gift from the mother of the bride has been a quilt that traces the family trees through the bride and groom. Odd looking quilts that are strangely beautiful in their complexity, and an extreme necessity in a town where records are lackadaisically registered and where a beaux who is your second cousin, third removed on the Barclay side might sneak up as a first cousin on your Lee side.

So Jerome McMurty, the ex-census taker, was perhaps the only newcomer to Jupiter in this century. Oh, one of Bram Lee's boys married a girl from the low hills of Luthertown a couple years ago, but Luthertown is pretty primitive even by Jupiter standards. The population here has remained fairly stable for more than a century. A few leave, usually those who started by going to the Community College up in Alderton first. This wanderlust started over a century ago in 1889 when one Tyrome Buxtome Lee started a hike up the banks of the Muddy to find its headwaters. He wasn't heard from for two years until a postcard arrived from California. Never said if he found the headwaters, but folks knew enough about geography to know the headwaters couldn't be in California.

And we have our share of dying. Besides the normal old age and sickness, we also lose some of the young before they start raising families. There was my cousin's boy Tim who died last winter of whooping cough. And of course there were the two Lee boys, cousins, and young Bill Barclay, only a third cousin to me, who died in that terrible truck wreck on their way back from Alderton. Skunk drunk. But they were a mean, ornery lot and most folks were only glad that they had already made their delivery of Jupiter produced whiskey sealed with revenue stamps printed in the backroom of the Bullets & Booze.

And just last summer, Jerome and Ellie McMurty's youngest daughter Lilly drowned while skinny dipping in the Muddy. Strange, that, I had always thought her a good swimmer. They found her alabaster body floating face down in the dark brown water in a side eddy of the Muddy. Hannibal Rex Lee, our sometime sheriff, described her as a marshmallow bobbing in a mug of hot chocolate. Just sixteen, seven months pregnant, and very unwed. The would be father never stepped forward, though folks had their suspicions.

My wife took it pretty hard. You see, I married Lizzy, Jerome and Ellie's oldest. Second cousin, third removed on one side and not even related on the other. She's pretty and has twenty digits evenly distributed between her hands and feet. Doesn't get much better than that in Jupiter.

We got married seven years ago. It was two weeks before the Fourth of July picnic where old Miss Thelma Barclay, some sort of aunt to me, raised such a controversy with her book, The Twelve Greatest Ways to Fix Possum. Now her possum ribs soaked in pure molasses, rolled in bread crumbs, then bar-be-qued was an absolute delight. And her possum stuffed with onions, carrots, and wild herbs and then baked in a medium oven with heavy bastings of Worchester sauce, though a variation on an old standard, was delicious. But it was universally accepted that four of her recipes were virtually inedible. Unkind words were spoken. But in all fairness, perhaps there are only eight great ways to cook possum, and Miss Thelma merely stretched a tad too far.

Anyway, Lizzy and I have been married for seven years and it has been good. We have three kids. I'm thinking you should come and visit us sometime here in Jupiter. Take the road south from Alderton for nine and a half miles and then go west on the small, unmarked country road. You will drive for about thirty miles through rolling hills, pastures, fields of yams and okra, and low but verdant green forest. You might stop by the wayside and look at the deep purple lupine and hot pink sweet peas that will probably be in bloom. There won't be any signs, but you'll know you've hit Jupiter when you see the Bullets & Booze just after the gas station. Stop in. If I'm not there buying a beer, they can tell you how to get to our house.

You might pick a Saturday like today. There was already the sweltering heat of Jupiter at ten when I took my oldest boy to the food store for ice cream. Well, the refrigeration was out so we passed on ice cream and instead bought a hunk of ripe bologna for bait. Now we're sitting under a tree with our lines cast out, through an opening in the cattails, into the Great Muddy. The wife's got the two youngest up at her folks where she, her mom, and several aunts are sewing the quilt for Lydia's, Jerome and Ellie's middle daughter's, wedding. By early afternoon, my son and I will have caught enough catfish for dinner. Life can be good in Jupiter.