Chapter Text
Situated just south of the wide, muddy Ohio River, the population of Rosewater, Kentucky, has fluctuated over the years, but since the middle of the last century, that fluctuation has mostly been on a downward trend. Not much work exists there now but farming—and even then, farming is concentrated to only a few families who’ve been doing it forever—and things like teaching, food service, and a little bit of retail. Not a lot of people leave, but not too many move in either.
The town is in some ways so different from other little southern towns and in other ways exactly like the rest. Settled from unincorporated land by a group of countercultural artist types wanting to live off the land in the 1950s, its residents are more open concerning some issues than others. Hardly anyone would bat an eye at you if you walked down the street holding the hand of a lover of the same gender, and not everyone in the town is Christian.
Still, most of them are. The artist community only survived for a couple of years before art became no longer lucrative. Some of the original settlers left for larger cities, and those who stayed married the farmers who’d already been living there for some time. More churches and a diner were built. A school was established. Children were born and raised.
Rural life could harden anyone. The free-spirited artists of the 1950s who were so ahead of their time in some ways joined with the times and largely stayed there as they made ends meet for themselves and their families. Walking the quiet, cracked residential streets of Rosewater on a warm spring evening, it’s not at all uncommon to hear the snap of a belt, the whack of a paddle, the whoosh of a switch, the crying of some unruly young person.