After the justice of the peace pronounced us man and wife we walked out of the courthouse, and Leon and Uncle Andrew just seemed to disappear, leaving Helen and me. I remember it was cold, and I was shivering because I was not wearing warm clothes. Helen and I walked down Main Street in Pineville and looked in the store windows, then we started looking for Leon and Uncle Andrew. We passed a little restaurant and through the window we saw them at a table, eating.
I felt embarrassed that my new husband hadn’t said anything to Helen and me about eating. We went inside, and finally Leon looked up and said rather sheepishly, “Do you want anything to eat?” Helen firmly said “Yes,” and we sat down at the table. It was a small restaurant, just three or four tables. I was so miserable I could hardly swallow my hamburger and Coke.
Leon didn’t say anything directly to me the whole time we sat there; he and Andrew talked. After that, we went to the bus station. While we waited for the Straight Creek Bus, Allifair, a girl that I had gone to school with, came up to greet me. She came from a family whose older members had died from tuberculosis, one by one. We talked for four or five minutes until the bus came.
Leon said he reckoned we had better stay at my house because there was not much room at his parents’. (It was the custom for young newly-weds to stay with their parents for a few weeks.) There was one bed in our living room where Mama and Dad slept, and two beds in the bedroom. The younger children piled up in one bed. I remember getting in the other bed that night, wishing somebody would tell me what to do.
Sometime that night, Leon got on top of me and pushed at me. I froze, because I didn’t know exactly what to expect. I remember he did invade me, and I remember that it hurt very badly; the next morning there was blood on the sheet. All I felt was the pain. After a while, he rolled over to his side of the bed and went to sleep again. I tried to sleep, but I felt like my world had ended. The next day, suddenly he decided we would go to his parents’ for a while after all.
We walked a couple of miles up the road to Birch Lick. We came first to his Uncle Brad’s house. Brad Lawson had married a young woman from across the hill when he was in his forties. They had four or five children—little boys, I remember, just like peas in a pod. Leon wanted to stop and visit with Brad before we went on to his parents’ house. So we stopped and stayed a while. Then he and Brad went off somewhere to another house in their community. I waited and waited for Leon to come back so we could go to his parents’ house, all the time dreading it and wondering why he had gone and why he was staying away so long.
Ethel, Brad’s wife, talked to me and was very warm and welcoming, but I still keenly felt Leon’s abandonment. I could not relax for even just a minute. Eventually it got dark and they still had not come back. By that time I had really begun fretting. I said to Ethel, “Do you suppose he has already gone home and will he expect me to come?” She calmly said, “Oh, I don’t think so. Why don’t you just relax and wait here until he comes for you.”
Leon and Brad finally came back about 9:00 that night, and Brad said, “Well, you might as well spend the night—it’s dark outside.” So Leon and I spent the second night of our married life at Brad and Ethel’s house. We slept in the same bed, but this time he did not touch me.
The next day we went on up to Leon’s home. He had told me that his parents never spoke to each other, that they’d been married for a long time and had several children, but it was like they hated each other. I found Leon’s family very strange. They greeted me when we arrived, though, and to my satisfaction Leon’s father seemed to like me. During the following days he spoke to me more often than the others did.
Leon had several younger brothers, and his mother was very pregnant. I remember thinking, “Well, they must communicate some way for her to be pregnant.” We settled in for the night; I remember how lonesome I was. I listened to the ticking of the Lawsons’ grandfather clock and felt sad.
Several days went by, and then one evening Leon went down to Brad’s grocery store and didn’t come back that night. I couldn’t understand it; I was embarrassed that he would stay all night away from his new bride. Again I laid in bed listening to the grandfather clock in the living room. Leon came back the next morning and didn’t say a word about where he had been. I did not dare ask.
Helen and some of the younger boys had planned to go see a radio show put on by Wilma Lee and Stoney Cooper and their band of musicians out of West Virginia. They were appearing at the school near the mouth of Stoney Fork. Helen asked if I would like to go with them and I said, “Sure!” She asked Leon to go but he said no. He refused to tell me whether he thought I should go or not. I decided to go. We got ready and walked to the school. There was already a big crowd of people. I had listened to music shows on the radio many times, but had never seen a live performance. I thought they were wonderful and enjoyed them immensely.
We got home that night to find that Dora, Leon’s mother, had gone into labor and that Leon had asked Brad to take her over Birch Lick Mountain to the Red Bird Mission Hospital. Leon stayed at the hospital until the baby was born. My mother-in-law was fifty-one years old, but she had no trouble giving birth to her last son, and she was back home in a week.
Then I got fever and chills; I had no idea what was wrong with me. I was sick a day or two and then one morning I got up and had bumps all over my chest, throat, and face. Leon’s mother recognized the symptoms. “You’ve got the measles,” she said. I was sick in bed for two weeks. Before I recovered, Leon’s brothers and sisters started coming down with it, one by one. Even the new baby got the measles. Dora said I had brought the measles in on the family. I felt terrible and extremely blameworthy. Sometime later I heard that Allifair, the girl I had talked with at the bus station, had had measles. I must have caught them from her. I tried to apologize to Dora, but she just sniffed and left the room. It seemed to me it took all that winter before the last person in that house got better. Leon acted indifferent to how I felt.
By the time we had recovered from the measles, Leon had made arrangements for us to live in an old house that was down the creek from where his parents lived. Some of his family had lived in that house years before. I remember that it was a nice, big house with several rooms. In fact, it was so big that in the winter we shut off part of the house to conserve heat. But I didn’t like living there, for I always felt afraid of something intangible. The floor would creak, and a door would close by itself. Now that I am older and more sure of myself, I would like to live in that house again. But back then, when Leon wasn’t home I was frightened to stay there by myself. Of course nothing ever happened.
When springtime finally came, delightful plants sprouted up all around the old place, and it was an adventure to see what would come up where and try to identify it. There were also fruit trees and a garden; that first summer we planted vegetables and I picked blackberries. I canned berries and apples, and made sauerkraut and pickled beets, like my mother had always done.
We lived there for a year, and then we bought a house and a small bit of ground, just flat enough to have a garden, on York Branch. From this little house I could look across the creek and see my parents’ house on the hill. Mama and I could stand out in our yards and holler back and forth to each other.
The house we moved into was just a one-room house built with rough lumber. The roof leaned all one way, high in front and down in the back. It had windows at eye level that opened and closed. For a while we lived in that one room. In the wintertime we had a Warm Morning heating stove in one corner of the room, our bed in another corner, and a wood-burning cook stove in the third corner. The homemade kitchen table stood in the center of the floor.
Leon got a job at the William Ritter lumberyard and began earning money. For the first time I knew the joy of having more than one new dress at a time. We bought a set of pretty new dishes with peach blossoms around the edges. They were beautiful.
Leon had to walk to work, which meant that he had to leave when it was just ba
rely daylight. I’d get up at 4:30 in the morning to bake biscuits and fix a hot breakfast before he left for work. I knew that I would have the whole glorious day to myself.
That summer I began listening to soap operas on the radio. I would rush out in the morning to pick beans and gather other vegetables for supper. I prepared the vegetables when the radio dramas came on the air. I appreciated the little bit of freedom I had living away from my childhood home and at least somewhat on my own.
I always found it exciting to listen to the radio. I imagined what the different actors looked like as they talked and tried to envision everything about the setting. It was much more exciting to listen to the radio and imagine what things looked like than it is to see everything on TV today.
Eventually Leon was able to get some lumber and materials to add on a room to our house. His dad and other men in the community helped to build a kitchen onto one side of our house. It was great to have a kitchen. Then after that he built a porch across both rooms so that we had a front porch. Later he boxed in half the porch. This new, extra room was just big enough to get one double bed in. You could barely get around the bed. A door opened out onto the porch, and one opened from the kitchen into the room.
That room became my refuge. Sometimes at night I’d wait until Leon went to sleep, then I would ease out of bed, go into that room, and stuff towels around the door so the light wouldn’t shine through. There I would read for hours. (By that time, the Red Bird Mission Bookmobile came to Stoney Fork every three weeks.) Sometimes I would listen to the radio, but I had to keep it turned down so low I could barely hear it. I was always afraid that it might awaken Leon.
Almost from the beginning my husband abused me verbally and physically. If I tried to express my opinion and at the least hint of arguing with him, even if it was just to pacify or explain, he would slap me and tell me to “shut up.” I could never win an argument because the more I stood up to him the more violent he would become. So early on I began to withdraw to a place inside where his blows and words no longer had power to hurt me.
I was ashamed for anyone to know about my fantasy world and how Leon treated me. Soon enough, however, my family and friends became aware of how things were between us, since he would scold and belittle me in a lordly sort of manner in front of them. But he would physically abuse me only at home.
17
Missionaries and Books
After all is said and done, the mountains are
still there. They are the backbone of my life.
At times I yearned to know what lay beyond the mountain ranges. I dreamed of cities, towns, lakes, and oceans, which I had only read about in books. When missionaries from the Evangelical United Brethren Church at the Red Bird Mission in Beverly, Kentucky, came to Stoney Fork to hold Sunday school classes on Sunday afternoons, I felt blessed. This was my first experience with people from outside the region, and they changed the world for me. I thought they were perfect.
The Red Bird Mission had centers in several other communities that they called outposts: Beech Creek, Middle Fork, Jack’s Creek, and Mill Creek. They opened a center at Stoney Fork in 1949. The preacher at the Red Bird Mission Church, Reverend Ira Wilson, and two high school teachers, Iona Wendland and Hazel Richter, arrived and began holding Sunday school classes in the one-room schoolhouse. Leon and I started going to the services; it gave us something to do, and there were no regular church services in the community at that time. We and our neighbors filled the one-room school every Sunday afternoon, where we were divided into classes.
I was learning a lot just by associating with the missionaries and seeing how they related to other people and to each other. After a while, though, I began to feel ashamed of my mountain ways in the presence of the missionaries, ashamed of our poverty and lifestyle, which seemed so different than theirs. I worked hard to talk like they did and grew obsessed with making myself commendable and “worthy” so as to be accepted by people who were beyond the hills. By that time I had decided that if I were to live in a big town or city someday I would need to talk and act like city folks did. This annoyed my family and friends. They accused me of trying to get “above my raising” of being “stuck up,” and of throwing away my heritage for a much more cosmopolitan style of life. Little did they know that I was even more driven to “get above my raising” than they even imagined!
At the Red Bird Mission, Esther Elmer was the high school librarian. The mission outfitted a bookmobile, and she began traveling up and down the hollows around each outpost. Esther came to Stoney Fork every three weeks. Patrons were allowed to check out three books at a time. Gradually that changed when she realized how much and how quickly I would read the books I borrowed, so she started bringing extra books just for me. She asked me to read them and tell her if I thought they were the kind of book that she should carry in the bookmobile. This gave me the chance to read all kinds of books on all kinds of subjects. I gladly read them all and dutifully reported to Esther.
In one carton of books Esther brought me was a magazine containing an advertisement about the American School in Chicago. It said students could take high school courses by mail. I was excited by that idea, especially when I read that the school was accredited and one could take college preparatory courses from them.
I wrote the American School for more information. They replied that it would cost $198 for three courses per semester, and that payment could be made by installments. I wanted to enroll more than anything. There had to be a way.
Around that time a full-time minister was sent to Stoney Fork. Morris Bauman arrived with his wife, Kathleen, and their two children, Sandy and Danny, in 1950. They rented a storefront house alongside the main road that went through the community. The building, with its sloping roof, had been hastily built. At one time it had been a store, where you could get gasoline or kerosene and groceries. The house had no electricity and no running water when the minister and his family moved in. I felt sorry for Kathleen because she looked too fragile to be the mother of two children, to keep house, and to help her husband in the church.
I prayed that the minister’s wife would be able to read music and could give me music lessons. I played music by ear on a reed organ I had bought from a neighbor, but I wanted to learn to read music so that I could play songs I had not even heard before. After the Baumans arrived and we got acquainted, I found out that Mrs. Bauman could read music, but could not play very well. She used one hand, playing only the melody and the alto part of hymns. Still, she agreed to teach me at no charge if I would promise to play the piano for Sunday school and church. I agreed and further vowed that if she gave me lessons I would learn to play using both hands.
I went to Kathleen’s house once each week for lessons on her piano. At home I only had the reed organ on which to practice. Then one week Reverend Bauman drove to Ohio and brought back a truckload of used pianos, one for the church, one for me, and several for some neighbors. Leon, who liked music, was very supportive of my getting the piano. He even paid the $40 charged to help pay the expense of the trip. My friend Tilda, who bought one of the used pianos, also wanted lessons from Mrs. Bauman.
I was still waiting to enroll in the American School. How could I pay for it? I went to Mrs. Bauman and asked if I could do any work for her. After thinking about it, she said I could do her ironing. (This was the day of cotton and almost everything had to be ironed.) She said she would pay me $3 a week. I wrote the school asking if I could pay $3 each week by installment. They agreed, and I enrolled.
Doing the Baumans’ ironing turned out to be a terrifying job for me. I was accustomed to using irons heated on a stove, but the Baumans had a gas iron. Its pilot light, when lighted, burned with a blue flame that bubbled and hissed all the time.
After a year or so, the mission told us they had plans to build a new church at Stoney Fork. The mission leadership said they would match us residents dollar for dollar in getting the church constructed. They told us that the congregation cou
ld work on the construction and they would figure out what our contribution was according to how many hours we worked. This seemed like a really good deal. Dad, Grandpa, and some of my uncles all helped. The mission decided the church should be built of native stones gathered from the creek. I remember Dad with his horse, pulling sleds full of rocks. There was a lot to do, and quite a few people worked on the church.
The mission brought in a man, from near Toledo, Ohio, to supervise the building project. He had spent his life as a builder. He volunteered his time to come and supervise the construction. I liked him; but Leon was possessive and jealous if I even spoke to this man or any other of the workers. At home he would slap me or yell ugly names at me, claiming he had seen me looking at them. My friends who hear this part of my story inevitably ask why I stayed in the marriage. My answer is that there was no work for women, and I had no place to go. All I could remember at the time was Grandma Saylor saying, “You’ve made your bed and you have to lie in it. There’s nothing you can do.”
The music lessons gave me something else in my life, and Leon was proud that I was learning to play the piano. It was one of the few things that I ever did on my own initiative of which he approved. He played the guitar and sometimes in the evening would play and sing, and sometimes I would sing along with him. But for some reason I never tried to play my piano with his guitar.
A local preacher, who had a radio ministry over the Pineville radio station, asked Leon and me to sing and play for his program. We began practicing in the evenings and on weekends. We sang for our church services first; then we went to do the radio program. We began getting invitations to sing at other church services, revivals, and funerals. The funerals were difficult, especially when the deceased had left specific requests that we sing certain songs at the funeral.
I enjoyed everything about our singing together. I would have to say that those times of traveling and performance were the happiest times we spent together in our marriage. Leon, who usually criticized everything I did, did not criticize my singing, which encouraged me. We became well known in the region for our singing.
My Appalachia Page 15
