My Appalachia

by Sidney Saylor Farr

  “That will be good. I’ll try to eat some of it.” He smiled.

  Going home, I felt so desolate because I realized my dream had ended. I had dreamed for such a long time about going away to live with Edd. I could not believe God would let him die now, nor could I believe that God was going to take him so soon because I had been good. I had gone out of my way to be good to Leon. Times when I should have been angry, I was good. I’d been a good mother. I’d been a good church worker. But now it looked as though God wasn’t going to reward me for having been good. I felt nothing but confusion and pain. I also felt overwhelmed with grief and sadness for Edd. I fixed a dish of macaroni and cheese and took it to him later in the afternoon. He thanked me and reached out for my hand.

  “I’m glad that things turned out the way they did,” he said. “You are young and have your life still ahead of you.” He squeezed my hand and looked at me lovingly. “I would have left you too soon.”

  Leon heard that Edd had come home to die. That Friday, when he came in from work, he said, “After supper, let’s go see how Edd Taylor is doing.” I hadn’t dared tell him that I’d been going to see Edd. So we went to pay a neighborly visit, and sat around Edd’s bed and talked. Edd told Leon he couldn’t eat and that he was losing weight because he just couldn’t keep down enough food. It was a painful visit and we didn’t stay long. We took our leave, and when we got to the door, I looked back. Edd was looking at me with such longing in his eyes and such love; it was almost like beams of light came from his eyes toward me. It was a look I will never forget. After we got outside, Leon, upset, said, “Why did he look at you like that?” I said, “I don’t know.” But of course we both knew.

  The next morning, word came that Edd had died that Friday night after our visit. The cancer didn’t kill him, but a heart attack did. I was thankful that he didn’t have to suffer any longer, because I’d heard that cancer of the liver can be a very painful death. I was glad he had the heart attack. Molly said the doctors had told them that something else would probably end Edd’s life before the cancer did. I was glad that he didn’t have to suffer anymore, but I felt as though the world had just collapsed around me.

  They buried him at the top of Birch Lick Mountain, just on the other side as you start down. That was the old family graveyard, and that’s where his mother wanted to bury him. I remember the way that graveyard looked. I remember Rendy, his mother, holding on to my arm as we walked up the footpath. And as we stood for the service she kept hold of my arm, and I took care of her as I knew that Edd would do if he were there.

  Edd’s mother had told me earlier that their family always dug the mountain graves so that they faced east, “so that on Resurrection Morning, they will come up out of the grave and be facing east, where the Christ will come.” They buried Edd facing east. Thoughts of Edd and his grave site stayed with me, and sometime later I wrote a haiku about him:

  Facing east he lies

  Morning sun touches his grave

  My heart is still dark.

  After the service at the graveyard, we went back home. Rendy and Molly were grieving for their son and brother, and I was grieving over the fact that Edd and I had never gotten to really be together; we had never even so much as kissed.

  For years after that, and even to this day, sometimes I dream that Edd is alive again. I go to that little house by the side of the road and he is alive. Or sometimes I dream he has just died. Or I am trying to get him to come back. Or I am trying to talk to him and yet never quite able to do anything but feel grief, frustration, and regret.

  After Edd died, my heart became very hard.

  WAYNE WAS NINE YEARS OLD when Leon wanted us to move to India-napolis. His sister and other kinfolk of his had all relocated there, and they all had good jobs, so Leon wanted to go see if he could find a good job too. By this time I had completed my correspondence courses and had received a high school diploma. For five years I had fought Leon for the privilege of studying and having books. I had also taught myself to type. I thought that if we did go to the city, maybe I could get a job as a clerk or some such position and help earn money. We closed up the house on Stoney Fork and moved to Indianapolis.

  With my high school diploma, I got a job in a very short time in an insurance rating bureau, which was housed in the Chamber of Commerce building in downtown Indianapolis. It took Leon longer to get a job, but eventually he was hired to work in the Beverage Paper Mill. He worked on the eleventh floor where they mixed the formula for paper. He soon came to hate his job because the work was hot, smelly, and backbreaking. He said it was much worse than the job he’d had at the sawmill because at least there he was working outdoors and had fresh air to breathe. He seemed to resent that I had a job in an air-conditioned office. I tried to explain to him that I got the job because I had a high school diploma. He became furious when I pointed out this fact, and told me to shut up.

  We had been in Indianapolis for only a little while when I met a man in the neighborhood. When he went to work in the morning he drove near the building where I worked. I rode the city bus most of the time. But he started coming by as I was waiting for the bus, offering me a ride to work. Before I knew it, I found I was attracted to him. I was a mountain girl, but I was not entirely naïve. One morning when I started to get out of the car he took my hand, leaned over, and kissed me. Wow! He called me a very pretty woman.

  Suddenly I had somebody else to daydream about. I felt rebellious and angry at life. After all, when I had been a good girl, God had let Edd die. For a long time after that, I wished I had made love with Edd, wished I had memories of a real love affair instead of just fantasies of him.

  In short, I was ripe for an affair. Andy and I had the right chemistry, and the sex was satisfying in a way that I had never experienced before. I was overwhelmed with emotion as I tried to conquer my fear.

  Several months went by, and then I discovered I was pregnant. Our adopted son, Wayne, was almost ten years old by this time, and I had been married for over thirteen years. The doctor I had been seeing at the clinic I had been going to for minor illnesses confirmed that I was pregnant. ‘I’m not surprised,” he said. “The medicine you’ve been taking for the last month to help regulate your periods can also act as a fertility drug.” He also said that a change of climate, a different lifestyle, and changes like that could also help some women get pregnant. That is the story I told Leon and his sisters.

  For a time I think Leon actually tried to believe I was carrying his child. But every so often he would suddenly lash out at me with jealous fury, accusing me of having been with another man. Leon admitted to himself that because he had had mumps as a teenager, he could not father a child.

  Throughout this tumultuous time, Leon and I stayed together, living and working. I started writing in my spare time. I was homesick for the mountains, and the only way I found relief was to write about them. One of my first poems expressed that longing.

  Mountains Fill Up the Night

  I know the mountains covered with snow

  And misty green of earth’s awakening,

  When they are drenched in summer storms,

  Painted with master colors,

  Softened with Indian Summer smoke.

  Then dusky dark, its curtain silent;

  The mountains grow starward

  Around us, and over us and

  Under. Even inside us.

  Where do the mountains stop?

  Leon was very unhappy with his job and wanted to move back to Kentucky. I thought it would be a good thing if I got away from Indianapolis and Andy. So we decided to leave Indianapolis.

  I had started writing in earnest by then. Mountain Life & Work, a magazine published in Berea, Kentucky, had published a couple of my short stories even before I had left Stoney Fork. I had become acquainted with the editor, Bob Connor, and his wife, Phyllis, when he had come to the Red Bird Mission to help teach a two-week writers workshop that I participated in. Phyllis and I had corresponded s
ince then. Now I wrote her to tell her that although Leon and I would be leaving Indianapolis, I didn’t feel I could go back to Stoney Fork to live—at least not yet. Bob and Phyllis helped us to compromise on Berea. Leon and I bought a house sight unseen and moved to Berea in August 1962.

  I was happy to come to Berea because it was the home of Berea College. Perhaps I could attend college classes, I thought.

  I had a hard pregnancy with Bruce and almost lost him while still in Indianapolis. I kept having spells of bleeding; the doctor gave me a new medicine: Thalidomide. Later I learned how fortunate we were that Bruce was not born deformed, like so many other children whose mothers had taken the drug—born without an arm or leg, sometimes without both. The only way the drug seemed to have affected Bruce was in his baby teeth. The periodontist theorized that at the time when teeth are formed in the fetus, something stopped Bruce’s development, and by the time it resumed, the stage for forming tooth enamel was passed. For whatever reason, Bruce’s teeth started crumbling when he was two years old. The periodontist was able to preserve the spaces in Bruce’s gums until his permanent teeth grew in.

  I was six months pregnant when we moved to Berea. When I told the Berea doctor how tired I had been feeling, even early in the morning, he said impatiently, “Well, Mrs. Lawson, most pregnant women do get tired.” They did not find out until I went into labor that my hemoglobin was very low. (Although my Indianapolis doctor had not tested my blood very often during my pregnancy, I thought they had done the usual blood tests when I was admitted.) By the time I was put into a hospital room after being admitted, I was told I needed a transfusion. This slowed my labor pains; it was thirty hours later when Bruce was finally born, on October 13, 1962, a little over two weeks before my thirtieth birthday.

  I remember being on a table and hearing a baby crying. I heard the doctor say, “You’ve got a boy, Mrs. Lawson.”

  I thought, “Oh, no. I was hoping it would be a girl. A boy might look like his father.” That was my first response. But when I held my baby for the first time and he nursed at my breast, I felt an overpowering love filling my mind and heart. It felt so right to hold him and nurse him. God had been good to me after all. He had given me a son who would come to mean so much to me.

  Leon went on a hunting trip with his father and brothers early in the morning after I went into labor. A neighbor across the street drove me the short distance to the hospital. Miss Key, the British nurse-midwife in charge of the maternity floor, was upset that Leon was away. After all, they might need him to sign papers should a life-saving procedure be necessary.

  Wayne was eleven when Bruce was born. Wayne had begun having what his dad called “spells.” He would be doing fine, happy and playing, and then suddenly, just like the sun going behind a cloud, he would withdraw and you could not talk to him. He would not tell you what was wrong and wouldn’t say if anything hurt; he would simply withdraw for a while. Then eventually he would be all right again. Spells like this became more frequent as he got into his teen years. I didn’t understand what the trouble was; I could only see that Wayne was beginning to get into trouble more and more and it always seemed to have something to do with money.

  Leon didn’t understand Bruce any more than he had understood Wayne. He still threatened to send Wayne to reform school, and I was still sheltering Wayne, and later Bruce, from his rages. Leon loved Bruce, but he always felt deep in his heart that Bruce was not his son. He sought retribution by punishing me, sometimes in very subtle ways and other times openly, with physical abuse.

  When Bruce was a toddler, I arranged to have individual counseling with the minister of Union Church in Berea. I had joined this historic interdenominational church before Bruce was born. The minister’s name was Don Johnson, affectionately called “DJ” by the congregation.

  By this time, Leon had bought a baby blue pickup truck. He would never let me even touch his truck, let alone learn to drive. He had convinced me that I was not capable of driving. I had very high blood pressure and suffered from the constant tension. I hoped, through counseling, to gain some self-assertiveness and independence.

  After being in counseling for two or three years, when Bruce was five years old, I told Leon one morning at breakfast, “I am going to learn how to drive, and I will get my license. And there’s not a thing you can do to stop me.” Leon blustered and threatened. But I simply kept repeating what I planned to do.

  Leon had a job as caretaker at Union Church at that time; he would walk to work and leave the truck parked at the house. One day I told him to not be surprised if he came in from work to find the truck gone. I would be out taking a driving lesson.

  The next day Leon told me he was moving out. He said he had found somebody else. He had met a divorced woman at church who had a child. He said he loved her and intended to court her.

  Of course he had no sooner moved out than he wanted to come back. But I was mindful of all that had passed between us and ultimately I would not agree to let him come home.

  We had been together for eighteen years. Since I was fifteen, I had shared my life with this man, who had never learned how to love and to trust. He was always paranoid, and not just about me. He felt the world was out to get him and that he had to get them first. He did not have any close friends because he would turn people off with his sharp words. I’d given up a long time earlier the idea of entertaining or even having friends come to visit me at home because he would always somehow manage to insult them.

  After Leon and I separated, however, I just withdrew even more, talking to almost no one except DJ.

  DJ was a very liberal minister; he believed in individual freedom and said that no one owned another person. He impressed on me that I should never depend on other people for my happiness, that I either had it within me or I did not. Every word he said had the ring of truth about it. With DJ’s help I was able to find the fortitude to hold firm when Leon wanted to reconcile. We filed for a divorce in 1967.

  After the divorce was final, the judge gave Leon visiting rights. But he was never consistent about the times he would come and get Bruce or Wayne. Sometimes he would come on a Tuesday and sometimes on a Saturday. The boys never could count on any regular thing with their dad. The court ordered Leon to pay me $50 per week as child support until Wayne and Bruce became eighteen years old. He was never late with the payments, but he never hesitated to let me know he was having a hard time making them.

  I was careful not to say anything negative about Leon to Wayne or Bruce. I knew that in time they would draw their own conclusions. I did not want to cause them to hate him. Bruce was angry with me for a long time; he would lash out if I were talking on the phone. “All you ever do is talk on the phone!” he’d say. “You won’t talk to Dad or nobody else! You just stay on that old phone!” And he’d say things like, “Why don’t you ever smile at Dad? You never smile at him.” I figured Leon had said these things to him, influencing him.

  Wayne never did finish high school. I could not keep him in school. I tried for a while. The two of us rode the bus once each week to a psychiatrist in Lexington, who I hoped could help Wayne, yet usually Wayne would just sit silent the whole hour and not talk to the doctor. He refused to talk about anything that bothered him. I despaired over my inability to reach him.

  When he was fifteen, Wayne got the idea that he wanted to go into the Navy. He talked to a recruiting officer, who said that if I would sign for him when he was sixteen, he could join. Leon had been in the Navy, so that’s what Wayne determined he wanted to do. Eventually I gave in.

  Leon would not help me with Wayne; by then he was dating the woman whom he later married. Any spare time he had was spent with her. He did not have time for Wayne. After Wayne turned sixteen I signed the papers for the Navy, and he was inducted and sent to boot camp. Eventually, he was stationed in Puerto Rico; he loved that country and seemed to thrive there. But when his three years were up he decided not to sign up for another stint.

  Wayne c
ame home even more restless and discouraged than he had been before he left for the Navy. He was a very handsome young man, tall and slim, with brown hair and blue eyes. Girls swarmed around him wherever he went.

  After Wayne had been home for a year he went to Indianapolis to look for a job. A few months later, he called to tell me he had gotten married and that he and his wife, Marilyn, were coming to see me. I wondered about their marriage and what his new wife was like.

  By this time I had met Grant Farr and was planning to be married myself. Leon knew of my plans and said he would stop the child support payments if I married. Grant and I discussed it and agreed to let Leon stop the payments.

  By this time Leon had married again. When he and his new wife wanted to see Bruce, or wanted Bruce to spend the night with them, I let Bruce go. I knew he loved Leon, but every time after he had spent time with Leon, he would come home angry with me. He would always push the limits until he had to be disciplined. It seemed as though Bruce had to reestablish his boundaries each time after he came back from a visit with Leon. I wondered what Bruce would think of Leon and me and his upbringing when he was older.

  20

  There Was Grant

  It is not required of us that we succeed, only that

  we be faithful to the highest good in us.

  Leon and I were divorced in 1967. When school started at Berea College in September 1968, I met Grant Farr at a ballroom dance class being taught by a faculty member. I loved folk dances and went every time one was held on campus, but I joined the ballroom dance class because I wanted to learn about dances I had only seen on television.

  Grant, who was certified to teach ballroom dancing, came to the class because, he said later, he “wanted to see how the faculty member taught.” The teacher quickly realized that Grant was a skilled ballroom dancer. She asked him to be my partner and to help the other beginners. The first time Grant danced with me our belt buckles somehow became entangled. We had to stand still while everyone laughed as he patiently got us loose. Afterward members of the class stopped at Porter-Moore’s Drugstore for Cokes. Porter-Moore had an antique soda fountain, and it was fun to sit at the counter and get acquainted.