A grocery store. A post office. Two churches, both Baptist.
A park. Jones Fork. A dark streak called coal.
A wooden bridge. The mountains. The folks from Right Beaver.
All this was waiting for Michael David Moore just inside the door of a bank in Greater Dallas.
A mountain man
When the Garland, Texas, police officer entered that bank Feb. 15 amid the urban sprawl of north Texas, he was as good as back home in rural eastern Kentucky.
As a boy, Mr. Moore, 32, roamed the rugged hills of Knott County, which just this Christmas got its first-ever stoplight. Motorists at the intersection of Kentucky routes 80 and 160 in the county seat of Hindman don't have to worry so much about smashing into one another anymore.
Knott County is in the heart of Appalachia, stained by a history of torment and struggle. Here, in the Lotts Creek and Clear Creek area, Ollie Combs once flopped down in front of a bulldozer to stop surface mining.
A mine explosion in Topmost on Dec. 7, 1981, killed eight men.
As a child growing up in the town of Mousie, Michael David Moore grew to love this land. He roamed the hills along Ky. 550, clomped along the wooden bridge across Jones Fork and attended family reunions in the William Hicks Cemetery beside the Mousie post office.
By the time Mr. Moore walked into the Texas bank, the robbery already was in progress. Kenneth Mosley, caught in the act, leveled his gun at Mr. Moore's chest and dispatched officer number 184 back home to the hills of Kentucky.
Cleaning the gravestones
The mountains call to their own. Eastern Kentuckians are always coming home.
Family's strong in the hills, and blood dark as coal continues to bind Appalachia even now that the failing mines cannot. There have been great out-migrations of people looking for jobs. But for those who retire, and for those who die, there is almost always the coming home.
Appalachia has more than its share of small, family cemeteries, says Susan Abbott-Jamieson, a professor of anthropology at the University of Kentucky. So the pull is strong: to come back and be buried here; to come back for family reunions held in the cemeteries.
They bring food and clean the gravestones and set out flowers and sing. Mr. Moore, who once crossed the wooden bridge over the Jones Fork to visit the family cemetery on Memorial Day, was in Knott County just last June for a family reunion.
This year his parents will clean his gravestone along with those of his grandparents.
Badge number 184
They brought Mr. Moore's body to Mousie after a detour to Middletown, Ohio, where his parents live.
On the trip south toward home, toward Mousie, police officers from towns and villages along the way turned out to line the route and hail a hero.
The funeral was something to behold. A 21-gun salute. A U.S. Marine Corps bugler playing ''Taps.'' The dark range of the Appalachians as a backdrop.
They buried Mr. Moore beneath a flat patch of land in the little family cemetery beside the Mousie post office, near his grandmother and grandfather. About 40 of his comrades from the 287-member Garland police force attended, driving into eastern Kentucky on a Greyhound you could have fit most of Mousie in.
Garland is a Dallas suburb of nearly 200,000 people. Mousie, on the other hand, doesn't even have a motel - a minor inconvenience which forced the Garland officers in attendance to stay at the Holiday Inn in Hazard.
After the funeral, the family fixed lunch for all the officers at the First Baptist Church. Badge number 184 was nowhere to be found.
Rob Kaiser is The Enquirer's Kentucky columnist. His column appears on Sundays and Thursdays in The Kentucky Enquirer. He can be reached at 578-5584.