A number of years ago, riddles were gathered from schoolchildren in southeastern Kentucky. One collector suggested that the children ask their parents and grandparents for riddles they might remember. One child came back saying, “My mommy said she knows other old riddles that are kinda bad. She said she would tell them to you if you come and see her.”
Here are some of my favorite “good” and “bad” riddles, heard in my childhood.
Crooked as a rainbow,
Teeth like a cat,
Guess all night and
You can’t guess that.
(Answer: a briar)
Back to the ground,
Belly to the sun,
Tails begin to wiggle,
And the good begins to come!
(Answer: sow and pigs)
Up she jumped and out she run,
Down she squatted,
And the good began to come.
(Answer: milking a cow)
Green as grass but grass it ain’t.
Black as ink but ink it ain’t.
What is it?
(Answer: a blackberry)
As I went across London Bridge
I met a London scholar.
He tipped his hat and drew his cane,
And in this riddle I told his name.
(Answer: Andrew)
In yonders lot there is a cup,
And in that cup there is a drop,
And of that drop we all must taste.
(Answer: death)
Round as a biscuit, busy as a bee,
Prettiest little thing you ever did see.
(Answer: a pocket watch)
A hill full, a hole full,
But you can’t get a bowlful.
(Answer: fog or mist)
Four stiff standers,
Two lookers, two hookers,
One dirty switch-about
Lags along behind.
(Answer: a cow)
Belly to belly,
Hand on the back.
A little piece of flesh
To stop up the crack.
(Answer: a baby nursing)
On Stoney Fork we moved with the rhythm of nature and life itself. There was meter in our work and cadence in our laughter.
5
Decoration Day
One thing we all need is more light during the
dark days. We must shine brighter ourselves, to
take up the slack when there is need.
In my home in the mountains, we observed Decoration Day on May 30 every spring. Weeks before, people would take up shovels, rakes, hoes, scythes, and other tools and would clear off the graveyards and spruce up the area. Then, on Decoration Day, they would travel to various cemeteries, carrying both fresh and artificial flowers, plants, picnic baskets, and jugs of water and Kool-Aid. They would spend hours on the various hilltops, socializing with other families, sometimes listening to an impromptu sermon or homily if a preacher happened to be on the premises. Then they would return home for another year.
We had an old-fashioned rosebush in our front yard, and there usually were early blooms by the end of May. Mama would take bunches of them to decorate graves on May 30.
Decoration Day had its origins as a day to celebrate and remember the veterans of the Civil War. I don’t remember any mention of this during the Decoration Day observances of my youth. If a veteran had passed away during the year, he would be remembered with all the others. Even now, of course, though May 30 is now known as Memorial Day, people still take wreaths and flowers to the graves of family members and friends who have passed on.
Wakes and funerals in the mountains were attended by almost everyone, including small children. One of my earliest memories is standing in the sunshine beside an open grave looking down at a dead baby lying in an open, homemade casket. The baby’s blue eyes were wide open. The young parents kept crying and touching the baby’s face. I never got over the horror of that experience. Even today the memory makes me want to cry.
I remember another funeral in the springtime on Ben’s Branch, at a small hilltop graveyard. Pines grew near the edge of the clearing, and green moss covered the ground under the trees, the rocks, and the old wooden benches where people sat. I was five years old by that time, and do not remember much that was said or done, but I do recall the way the moss and wildflowers looked, and how the soft wind stirred the pine branches silhouetted against the clear sky, and how the carpet of pine needles covered the ground. I wondered if this was the heaven people were talking about.
When I was six, while we still lived on Coon Branch at the head of Stoney Fork, I experienced new life and death for the first time. Martha Jane, Mama’s sister, lived on Punkin Knob to the north of us. She had six children and was soon to have another baby. One day in August word came that she was in labor and having trouble. The midwife sent word for Mama and the other sisters to come and help out. Dad was on a hunting trip, so Mama had to take us with her. A number of relatives were already at the house when we arrived.
Aunt Mossie was bossing all the children around and trying to get dinner dishes washed and supper on the table. We went in to see Martha Jane. She didn’t speak; she just kept moaning and saying, “Lord have mercy.” The adults were all kneeling around the bed and praying for her. I remember her husband, Uncle Dewey, kneeling between the bed and the wall, crying and calling to Aunt Martha Jane to get better. They said “Amen,” and the Holy Ghost blessed Martha Jane; she began waving her arms about and shouting.
I quietly slipped outside and walked around in a daze. I did not know what was happening and what it meant when a baby could not be born. I tried to say a prayer and grieve like the others were doing, but I just couldn’t. I picked up a fork from the kitchen floor. “Poor Aunt Martha Jane, her fork is on the floor,” I mourned aloud.
I heard a muted whimpering coming from underneath the house and crawled under the porch to investigate. Far back near the chimney was a little brown dog. I remembered that cousin Willie Gladys had told us that her mother was going to have a new baby and their dog was going to have new pups. I watched the dog to see what would happen. A wet little body emerged and fell to the ground. I started to move closer, but the dog growled and I was afraid of her. As I watched, several more pups dropped to the ground.
I heard someone call my name, and Aunt Mossie stuck her head under the porch and yelled at me. “Come out from under there, Sidney! You shouldn’t be watching that dog. I’m going to tell your mother.”
I felt scalding shame at this rebuke, and tears spilled down my cheeks. I grabbed up some clots of dirt and threw them at Aunt Mossie, fast and furious. She backed away from the porch and left, calling for Mama.
By the time Aunt Mossie got back into the house, the baby had been born. I heard it crying. I crept up onto the front porch and Aunt Bertha, the midwife, patted me on the head. “You children be quiet now, yore poor Aunt Martha Jane is dying,” she said. “The Lord gives and the Lord takes away. Bless the name of Jesus.”
Uncle Dewey had started out to get the doctor. I remember watching him running down the hillside and Aunt Bertha calling out that he didn’t have to run. He walked all the way to Pineville and came back with a doctor who was riding a horse. They went on into the house. The doctor left after confirming that Aunt Martha Jane was dead.
Other people came out onto the porch, some of them sobbing. I heard Aunt Bertha say, “Children, keep praying; she might ‘vine’ up again.” How could a poor, sick woman ‘vine’ up, I wondered. Years later I realized she had meant that Aunt Martha Jane might revive. I went into the kitchen where Mama stood. I remembered how Aunt Bertha said we must praise the Lord no matter what happens. “Well, then, praise the Lord,” I said as loud as I could. Mama’s face turned red and she slapped me. “Don’t you ever say things like that!” she screamed at me. I ran outside and leaned against the front yard fence, crying in outrage and bewilderment.
At dusky dark Dad rode in and unsaddled his mule. He picked me up and carried me onto th
e porch. Sitting down in a rocking chair, he asked what had made me cry. In a jumble I tried to tell him about the pups, Aunt Martha Jane’s fork on the kitchen floor, and Mama and Aunt Mossie making me mad. I nestled in his arms, safe and secure. Dad made everything all right.
Weeks later, I heard Dad talking to Grandpa about that night and the tragic loss of the mother to her family of young children.
“I’d been to Kettle Island,” Dad said to Grandpa, “and when I come home Rachel and Mossie were gone; I figured Martha Jane was sick to have her baby. I didn’t know at the time that she was already dead. Old Bob, my mule, is going blind in his old age, I reckon,” Dad continued. “I have to make torches out of any kind of dry brush that I can find for him to see by, and lead him out of places. It’s jist at night he can’t see. When I am riding along and he starts snuffling the ground I stop, fer I know he can’t see a thing and is trying to trail the road by smell. I started over the hill to Martha Jane’s house and had to strike matches all the way and lead old Bob clear around to Punkin Knob.”
I have no memory of Aunt Martha Jane’s funeral. I never thought to ask Mama for details. After my aunt died, her older girls took care of their siblings, including the new baby. Eventually Uncle Dewey married again, and the family continued.
6
Growing Years
Those in my world who heard the mountains’
call told me about things that were past as
well as things yet to come.
When I was five and my sister Della was not yet four, Dad moved us from Coon Branch down to Straight Creek so I could go to school. Until Dad could get our new house built, we lived in a ramshackle two-room building at the back edge of the property, which faced a small hill called Little Knob. The roof of the building slanted all one way, with the front, high part facing Little Knob. The back wall of the house had no windows and no door, so from inside the house we could not look across the valley to the other side of the mountain.
I was sick for weeks that summer—Granny Brock said it was the “summer complaint” that killed so many children. I remember lying in bed crying because my stomach hurt. I must have dozed off one afternoon. When I awoke I saw that a door had been cut into the back of the house. The sun was setting, and I got up and stood in the doorway, looking at the sky. I ran to Mama.
“When did Dad cut that door out? Come look, Mama, it lights up the whole house.”
“You’ve been dreaming,” she said. “There’s no door cut out in that wall.” I argued with her until she grabbed my arm and forced me to look at the blank wall. “See there?” she said. “You were dreaming.” But my vision was so vivid I decided that the new door was magic, that only I could see it. For the rest of the time we lived in that house, every morning when I awoke I would turn quickly to look at that wall.
I never saw the door again.
That same year, late in the fall, I saw another strange thing. Mama, Aunt Mossie, Aunt Laura, and I had walked over Birch Lick Mountain to the Red Bird Hospital Free Clinic. As we walked down Mud Lick I saw a square little house sitting in the edge of someone’s yard. Laura and I ran up to it and tried to look through the doll-like windows. I remember how Laura patted the roof, asking who lived there. Its walls were green like jade and its roof was flat. Later, when I mentioned it, Mama said, “I didn’t see that.” Mama often accused me of telling lies, because she believed if you talked about something you only imagined, it was a sin. But I held stubbornly to what I had seen—both the little house and the doorway cut in the back wall of our house.
School Days
Even though I was not going to be six until October 30 that year we moved to Straight Creek, I was allowed to start school in August. I fell in love with school my very first day. The one-room school housed all eight grades. Each class was called to the front of the school to read aloud or work problems on the blackboard. I listened to each class all through the grades. I read ahead of my class whenever books were available. By the fourth grade I had practically memorized the eighth-grade reader because I had listened to the class read and recite so often. The teacher decided I was so far ahead of the other children I could skip fifth grade.
The first year I was in school, Dad began to build us a house down the hill from the old building. He cut and hauled in logs to build the house and got rough lumber from Sonny LeFever’s sawmill. The new house had two rooms with a lean-to kitchen. Dad and Grandpa built a fieldstone chimney, daubing in the cracks with yellow clay, which they also used between the logs to help keep out cold air. The front porch extended across both rooms. The back portion of the foundation rested on the ground, but the front half was several feet off the ground, with the space underneath underpinned with rock. There was a small crawl-hole in one side. Sister Della and I would play in there on hot summer days.
One night Dad was gone on a trip to sell moonshine. We went to bed when it got dark; the younger children soon went to sleep. Mama and I talked awhile; by around 9:30 or 10:00 we began to feel sleepy. Suddenly we heard a knocking under the floor right between our beds. Again and yet again the knocks came: knock-knock-knock-pause, knock-knock-knock-pause. There never seemed to be any change in the sound or the rhythm of the knocks. This continued until about midnight.
Mama and I lay there for quite a while, too scared to move. Finally we began to talk loudly so whatever, or whoever, was there would know we were awake. It made no difference; the steady knocks continued. Then Mama got her shoe and hit it loudly on the floor, hoping to scare whatever it was away. But the knocks kept on until about midnight, when they abruptly ceased. The next day Dad crawled under the house and looked for evidence of what might have been under there, but all he found was the rag doll Della and I had been playing with the day before. I always believed that either a real person or a ghost was under our porch that night.
A year or so after that, on a very dark night, when we were all in bed, another strange thing happened. I slept at that time on a little cot in a corner opposite to where the other two beds were in the room. All at once I felt uneasy. I felt as though something was looking at me. Then, on the end of my pillow, something began a soft tapping. It was just exactly the way a cat would do if it was playfully patting the pillow with its paw. This happened several times—pat-pat-pat-pause; pat-pat-pat-pause—before I screamed. Dad jumped up and lit the coal oil lamp on the table. There was nothing in the room that we could see.
I have always believed that what was patting my pillow was a big cat that Dad had seen one night playing with a bind of golden fodder in the moonlight around the structure of our new house. One night Dad rode in and was getting corn from the crib to feed his horse. He heard something making a rustling sound and turned around, facing the framework of our new house. He said he saw a big black cat walking along, tossing a bind of fodder up into the air and catching it with its paws. Dad said he started walking toward the cat, but as he got closer it went under the foundation and disappeared.
I believe there are supernatural beings and spirits. I believe there are physical and spiritual laws that we know nothing about. Who is to say for sure there are not unseen entities all around us? Perhaps there’s a warp now and then in the curtain that separates our realm from other realms that allows us to catch glimpses of these other entities. Man has learned enough about the laws of nature to send ships into space and to enable men to walk on the moon—feats unbelievable to those who lived in an earlier time. Perhaps in the future we may use those same laws to usher us into infinity.
Games We Played
As the oldest child, it was my responsibility to bring the cow in for her morning and evening milking. At times I was frightened at having to do this chore, particularly when the fog was thick and tasseled in the trees, or if the cow was in the holler between Little Knob and Big Knob. Little Knob had a graveyard on its flat top, with some of its graves so old that the carving on the stones was half obliterated, and others so new that faded and stained crepe paper flowers would still be
sitting there on the graves.
There was always so much work to be done that there was little time to play. But we kids were crazy for play and grabbed every opportunity. We played Ante Over—pitching a ball over the top of the house from one side while others tried to catch it on the other side. We played Drop the Handkerchief—standing in a circle with one person going outside the circle and quietly dropping a handkerchief behind someone and then running back to place as the person grabbed the handkerchief and chased after the one who dropped it.
As early in spring as we possibly could, we would go barefoot. Mama fussed that the ground was still too damp, that a misty rain could still get us sick, that we would catch cold. We paid no attention to her warnings, however, and by full summertime the soles of our feet were hard and tough.
The girls loved to play Hopscotch, with the blocks marked off in the hard dirt with a sharp stick. We girls dearly loved Hopscotch, Jump the Rope, and Drop the Handkerchief, but the boys did not like to play these games, preferring baseball and marbles.
The girls did not think playing baseball and marbles was only for boys, however. In early spring you could see tight little circles of children on the school grounds playing marbles. We played at morning and afternoon recesses and all through the lunch hour. The boys always played Keeps, drawing a circle around their hoard of marbles and with their “steelies” and “best shooters” gambled with their whole collection. If they won other boys’ marbles they kept them. They scorned girls who wanted to play. But several of us girls were sharpshooters, and occasionally the boys would allow one or two of us to play with them.
One game that boys and girls played together was horseshoes. I was allowed to play because I had a strong throwing arm. The grown men in the community most often pitched horseshoes on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. The game is still popular; one often sees it being played at picnics and family reunions. There are even horseshoe leagues and national competitions.
My Appalachia Page 5
