Boys and girls also played baseball together. There was no money for store-bought baseballs, so we would compress and sew together pieces of cloth until we had a ball of material approximately the size of a baseball—and almost as hard if one hit you! I was one of the best batters and fastest runners among the girls, and it thrilled me when teams were chosen and the boys wanted me on their teams because they recognized my abilities.
No doubt many of the expressions we used in our games (like “fudging,” “dibs,” and “knucks down”) as well as the rhymes we chanted as we jumped rope, or the song we sang when we played Drop the Handkerchief (“Skip to My Lou”) would sound strange to children today. Some of the games that we played then have been relegated to the past.
The Cure for Freckles
In the spring, when sap rises in maple trees it also rises in wild grapevines. We would make a small cut in a big grapevine and set a tin can or lard bucket to catch the sap. Mama diluted the sap with a little water and used it as a hair rinse after our weekly shampooing. The water we used for our shampooing, and the water used for the clothes that were hand-washed was water that Mama would collect from a bucket she would set under the downspout when it rained. Mama’s hair was a dark tawny shade, mine was a light blond, and my sister Della had Dad’s dark chestnut shade of hair. The rinse highlighted millions of gold flecks in Mama’s hair and brought out gold highlights in mine and red highlights in Della’s. We all felt so proud and fine with our clean, shiny hair.
Being fair-skinned and blond, I freckled easily in the summer sun. I tried everything that was purported to be a cure for freckles—everything but one cure Aunt Mossie told me about.
Mama’s sister Mossie married Dad’s brother Squire, and our two families lived fairly close to each other. One day, my cousins were teasing me, pretending to count my freckles. Aunt Mossie said that if I could find a tree stump with a hollow in the top where rainwater had collected, and bathe my face in the stump water, my freckles would disappear. It took awhile but finally I found a stump with rainwater standing in it. But I was so repulsed by the ugly, scaly growths in it and the yellowish red color of the water, I could not bring myself to put that stuff on my face. I have some freckles to this day.
My life was crammed full those early years with family and friends. For a while my best friend was Lora Hoskins. We played together at her brother Jeff’s house. Jeff and his wife, Minnie, kept Lora and Jeff’s grandmother, Hettie Hoskins—everyone called her “Aunt Hettie” out of respect for her age. Aunt Hettie told us many stories of people and places she had known, and she had a trunk, which she allowed Lora to open once to show me what was inside. When I saw what was there, I was both attracted and repelled. Aside from a few keepsakes, the contents were a memorial to Aunt Hettie’s only daughter, Julia, who had been married to Sam Nunn, a jealous and possessive man, with whom she had several children. One day in a jealous rage Sam Nunn shot and killed Julia, and then rode into Pineville, the county seat, and turned himself in to the sheriff. He was tried, found guilty, and served many years in prison. When he got out of prison he came to live with his son, Sonny Nunn. Sonny was a friend of Dad’s, and I knew both Nunns.
It was a custom in Appalachia to keep the last clothes of the deceased. People also kept locks of hair (which were often woven into a brooch) and pictures of the deceased as they lay in their coffins. Sure enough, inside Aunt Hettie’s trunk were the clothes Julia Nunn had been wearing at the moment of her death and a picture of her taken shortly before her murder. She was a pretty brown-haired woman with a shy smile and big dark eyes looking directly into the camera.
Two or three times a year Dad, Grandpa, and various cousins and uncles saddled up and rode away. Mama said they were going off hunting, but when I got older I learned that their actual destination was their hidden moonshine still, where they went to run off a batch of liquor. Usually at these times Mama and Grandma took the children and rode over Birch Lick Mountain and down Mud Lick to the Red Bird Mission. There we could go to the free clinics at the hospital and the used clothing sale at the Mission office.
One time late in October (two days before my fourth birthday) when the men rode off, Mama decided we would just go spend the night with Grandma. In the late afternoon when the chores were done, she got us ready. She said I was big enough to walk and she’d let Della walk part of the way. Mama fastened the Yale lock on our front door, picked up baby Clara, and we set out.
We walked alongside the creek, crossing it several times on foot logs and swinging bridges, and then we headed up Ben’s Branch. Most of the way Mama carried both Della and the baby. It seemed to take us a long time to get there. We stopped to rest on the last hill before we turned down the other side to Grandpa’s house.
Then we heard the strangest noise. Around the hillside to our right we heard a thump, as if a heavy body had jumped or fallen from a tree. Then came a cry, at first sounding like a woman’s cry, then gradually rising to the sound of a train whistle, before cutting off abruptly.
Terrified, we ran down the mountain. Mama had the baby in her arms and snatched up Della. When I stumbled and fell headlong down the trail she ordered me to be quiet and not cry. Then somehow she had me in her arms, too. She ran down to Meadow Branch then up the road to Grandpa’s pasture gate before she put me down. Sobbing for breath, shaking with fright, we hurried into the house. This was the first time I’d seen my mother afraid. We told Grandma what had happened, and she and Mama talked about what could have made those sounds. When the men came home we told them all about it.
For two weeks after that, the menfolk talked about hearing an animal on their way to or from work at the Ritter Lumber sawmill. Then, as suddenly as it had come, the sound was gone. Grandpa said it was probably some animal escaped from a circus at Harlan, Pineville, or Middlesboro. “We may never know for sure what it was,” he said.
“What’s a circus?” I asked, but Grandpa didn’t answer.
Reading and Writing
I started out in life full of light and with the clearest vision. I loved everything about words. I remember my feeling of excitement when I learned how to paint pictures with words. I was ten years old when I began to write little poems and descriptive essays about the mountains. Words came easily to me.
There were no pictures in our house when I was small. One time, when I was around three years old, Mama got some used Christmas cards. I’d never seen anything like them. One card had a cluster of grapes on the front, and I tried to bite them off. Even then, I was trying to absorb words to describe those grapes.
I read everything I could get my hands on. Aunt Dellie, who loved to read, shared her books with me. Neighbors down the road from us—Annie LeFever; her divorced daughter, Liza Meredith; and Liza’s two daughters, Lovella and Pauline—read romance magazines and comic books. They passed on copies to me after they read them.
Mama never approved of my reading. “Those old books are full of lies and will drive you crazy,” she often said. Despite Mama’s disapproval, I continued to cherish words and books. Every spare minute I was not working or reading, I was writing. I kept my writing bundled up and hidden in the loft. One day Mama found the bundle and read some of the pages I’d written. She burned them all and told Dad about it. She said I was losing my mind from reading sinful old books all the time. I was furious that she had found my writing and had dared to destroy it. For months after that both of my parents watched me for any “bad signs.”
7
It Was So Ordered
Even in the dead of winter the promise of
springtime lies just upon the horizon, ready to
nose out winter with its fine-spun radiance.
Being the oldest, I became almost like a second mother to my siblings. I was bossy, telling them what to do and when. Della resisted the most, and told Mama everything I said or did. Then Mama would sit me down and tell me straight what I could and could not do. Clara, the next sister, was mild-mannered and cried easily. I remember
one game we played often—Farmer in the Dell. We made a circle and sang about the farmer; his wife, Lillie; and his farm animals. One by one they all died, and Lillie was left all alone. We sang mournfully about poor Lillie. At this point Clara would start crying, and at that we would laugh with glee, trying to shame her for crying. Today I regret how cruel we children were, especially to Clara.
The fourth child, Hazel, was born during the year we lived with Uncle Squire and Aunt Mossie on Ben’s Branch. Hazel grew up to be a tall, slender woman with blond hair and blue eyes. She knew a sad life when she grew up. She met a man in Indianapolis, who courted her and persuaded her to go with him to Georgia. The wedding he arranged was fake, which Hazel discovered only later, when she got pregnant and the man abandoned her. She returned to Indianapolis and worked as a waitress until her son, Steven, was born. Steven was born prematurely and was not fully developed. By the time he was three, he began having seizures and going blind. Eventually he had to be put in a home. This broke Hazel’s heart, but she couldn’t work and take care of him. She would bring Steven home for weekends and holidays as often as she could.
When Hazel was forty-six, she brought Steven home for her birthday. That Saturday, sometime in the night, she suffered a massive stroke. She lay on her bedroom floor until the next day. Steven was too handicapped to use the phone. Our youngest sister, Sharon Rose, tried repeatedly to call Hazel, and finally went to check on her. Hazel was still alive when Sharon Rose found her; Hazel was rushed to the hospital. That morning I was called; the family told me to get to Indianapolis as quickly as I could. Hazel died an hour before my husband, Grant, and I got there. We stayed with Sharon Rose and her husband, Joe, until after Hazel’s funeral. It broke my heart to think of Steven alone with Hazel, not able to understand what happened to his mother. Now in his forties, Steven is still living in a home for disabled men in Indianapolis.
After Hazel was born, Mama had three boys—Jeems, Fred, and Lee Roy. Then she gave birth to three more girls, Minnie, Lola, and Sharon Rose. When they grew up, Hazel, Clara, Minnie, Lola, and Sharon Rose all moved to Indianapolis to work. Lola and Sharon Rose were the only high school graduates in my family; Lola and I were the only ones to get a college degree.
When Della graduated from elementary school, it was possible for her to attend the Red Bird Mission High School. I was jealous because I didn’t get to go; I had had to drop out of school early, and by this time I was married. But Della dropped out of high school in her junior year to get married. I did my best to persuade her to stay in school, but to no avail.
In all, Mama and Dad had ten children. By the time Sharon Rose was born I was fifteen, married, and living in my own home. My sisters all got married before they were twenty.
Sharon Rose, the youngest, was Mama and Dad’s favorite child. They named her for the Rose of Sharon, found in the Bible. She was musically talented: she sang with a voice clear as crystal and played the piano by ear. After I learned to read music, every time I went home Sharon Rose would have already picked out songs for me to play. After she’d heard them once or twice, she could play them by ear. For a short time I paid for her to take piano lessons, but Mama and Dad didn’t allow her to do this very long. They told me they knew God had given her the gift of music, and were afraid God would take away her gift if she took music lessons. I tried to reason with them, but got nowhere.
Dad had a rule: as soon as each of us reached the age of six, we must learn fieldwork. Sure enough, when I was six, Dad took me to an old worn-out field high up the mountain above Grandpa Saylor’s house in Bingham Hollow. He, my grandfather, and my uncle Andrew were preparing the field for corn, grubbing small roots and stumps and piling them up, along with dead limbs and dry leaves, then setting the piles on fire. Smoke drifted over the hills, and the spring sunshine was almost too warm at times. I tried to help, but I soon became bored with the whole process.
I knew then that I would never like to work in the fields. As I got older, when I had to hoe out a patch of corn by myself I would get so bored hoeing one row after another that I would invent different ways to get it done. Sometimes I would hoe several rows out halfway to the end, then go to the other end and hoe back a fourth of the way. I enjoyed hoeing those shorter rows.
On this particular day, my first one hoeing in the field, tiny ground squirrels were frolicking and scrambling everywhere in the woods. They were surely going to dig up the corn as soon as it was planted. To eliminate as many of them as possible Grandpa had brought his twenty-two rifle with us to the field.
The gun was pointed downhill, leaning across a rotted stump. It caught my attention, and I went over for a closer look. I touched the highly polished gunstock and curled my fingers around the trigger—I had seen Dad and others pull back the trigger to make the gun shoot. Was it hard to do? The others were cutting brush and digging up roots; Grandpa was just down the hill setting fire to a pile of brush. No one was paying any attention to me.
I was fascinated with the gun and pulled back the trigger just to see if I could make it shoot. It sure did, and with quite the reverberating detonation. Grandpa lurched sideways and almost fell. He was not shot, just startled—and angry. The bullet had missed him by inches. All eyes turned toward me; Dad yelled and Uncle Andrew swore at me. I was mortified. After Grandpa got over his shock he evenhandedly ordered me never to touch his gun again. I promised; and I have never since tampered with guns.
By late that afternoon the sun was shining horizontally against Pine Mountain. The soft rays detailed every sassafras, every sourwood, and every gnarled oak on the mountainside. It highlighted the big rocks, and the dark mouths of caves in the higher limestone ridges. I knew that soon it would be dusky dark, and time to go home.
It Was So Ordered
In the Appalachian Mountains it used to be that a man’s word was his bond. He would no more think about not keeping his word than he would turn his children away hungry. All through my childhood I heard adults in the community use certain words and phrases to indicate a course of action. If they said they would be at a certain place the next day at noon, you could count on the fact that nothing except death would keep them away from that place. But there could be extenuating circumstances, they realized, and they worked those into their verbal agreements. For example, Dad and Grandpa would make promises this way: “If the Lord’s willing, I will.” Sometimes they would say, “If the Lord’s willing and the creeks don’t rise.”
Over the years it seems to me that a man (or a woman’s) word has lost its seriousness and has become so watered down it almost has no meaning. Today people will promise you anything, but they are like the Don Juans of the world, eternally running here and there, never remembering from one day to the next, making promises but not keeping them. It hurts my feelings when I hear country people say flippantly what Dad and Grandpa used to say in earnest: “If the Lord’s willing and the creeks don’t rise.”
I remember a saying my mama always had for certain events. When something of note took place, whether it was good or bad, Mama would say, “Well children, it was so ordered.” For a long time I wondered what she meant. When I got older I understood that she meant it was God’s divine will.
Wilburn Saylor (1911-1966)
In March 1966 Dad was admitted to the Appalachian Regional Hospital in Middlesboro, Kentucky. I traveled from Berea, where I was living at the time, to be with my family on the day he was to have surgery. He had suffered for months from prostate trouble. The doctor finally decided the only solution was surgery. I spent the night before his surgery with Mama, and we got up early in the morning to be at the hospital. Dad came through the procedure really well, the doctor reported. By this time it was raining hard. I spent another night with Mama. Creeks were overflowing their banks, and the roads were washed out in places between Pineville and Barbourville, on the way to Berea, where I lived. I felt I needed to get home as soon as possible. My son, Bruce Alan, was only three years old, and I did not want to be away from him
any longer.
I stopped by the hospital to tell Dad I had to go home. We visited a few minutes, and I got up to leave. “I wish you could stay longer,” Dad said. I told him the reasons why I had to go home. At the door I turned and looked back. Dad was looking at me so intently, and with such love blazing in his eyes. I felt uneasy and hesitated at the door. Then, telling him good-bye again and that I loved him, I left.
Dad died days later. Mama, Della, and Minnie had gone to see him at the hospital. They talked with him a few minutes, and he said he was hungry. Della and Mama went to speak with the doctor, leaving Minnie alone with Dad. Suddenly he had a convulsion. Nurses and doctors came running, but he was dead in a matter of minutes. Mama came back to find him gone. I can’t imagine how she must have felt.
Through my own shock, and my numb grief, I felt a small measure of comfort because Dad’s life for the prior two decades had been one of faith in God.
I dealt with Dad’s sudden death the way I deal with most things: I wrote about it.
He Is Dead to the Hills He Loved
He is dead to the hills he loved
They cannot call him back to live again.
But I remember him
When the fields are turned for planting,
When I hear silver winds of summer,
See wood smoke in the fall of the year,
And wild geese honk south for winter.
And I remember him
When there is rain on Pine Mountain,
When foxfire lights up dead logs at night,
When his bees work in the red clover
And wind whispers in the corn.
I remember
The day after the night he died—
Frost-white fodder in the shock,
Sumac leaves red enough to bleed,
Yellow dirt where we dug his grave.
He is dead to all he loved
My Appalachia Page 6
