“I don’t think anybody in here’s got more pretty cards than I do,” she said. “I know when Mae stopped by this morning she said she’d never seen so many cards and get well wishes. There was a woman from senior citizens who saw them. Said she’d seen more, but I know she’s just jealous. She had a heart attack last year and didn’t hardly get any.”
Then she picked one up and held it in her hands. Since it just said “Ruby” on it she took a pencil from her nightstand and marked it out, because she could use this one over again for someone’s birthday. She gave it to me and said happy birthday. I had just turned 14.
So it shouldn’t have surprised us when we started hearing from other people about how it was a miracle Ruby survived cancer. One day Ruby came home after one of her senior citizen meetings. She had only been home for a few minutes.
She was sitting in her recliner, wearing a breast cancer survivor pin. She kept looking at it and saying: “I love my little pin.”
Then she smiled and touched her pin again and said: “They threw a party for me down at the center and gave me this pin because I’m a survivor.”
My Aunt Mary couldn’t take it anymore.
She told Ruby she shouldn’t be wearing a pin like that and telling people she had cancer. Mary told her the pin was for people who actually survived. It’s not for someone who was just telling people she did. Then Mary said it’s a wonder the surgeon didn’t get sued.
So Ruby sat and thought about it for a while and said: “I know that’s what one of the hateful women at senior citizens told me, but what does she know?”
Then she said her line: “Besides that, it was only a preventative surgery.”
So Ruby sat for a long time and then she finally said: “Oh the poor things. It seems like you can’t even go out of your house now without something horrible happening.”
Then she thought about all the people she knew who were having bad things happen to them.
She talked about the little girl who had her foot run over by a riding lawnmower and lost her toes. She talked about how I came to live with her.
She talked about seeing her cousin, who was driving down the road and a rock slide crushed her to death.
Then she talked about her friend who just had her deformed leg amputated and couldn’t get out of the house now.
And then she looked like if you just left the house something bad would happen to you, hurricanes, earthquakes, and then she grew quiet with another look on her face like something terrible was going to happen to all of us one day.
And you know what?
It will…
…if not tonight, then the next night.
THE NEXT NIGHT
The next night was radio preacher night. That only meant one thing. My Uncle Nathan was going to drink beer. I tried telling Nathan it was a bad idea to drink beer, but he wouldn’t listen. My Uncle Nathan was 52 years old and still living with my grandma. He had cerebral palsy and couldn’t talk. He just kept groaning and pointing at the beer and then pointing at his feeding tube. My hands were feeling kind of shaky as I popped open a can. “I don’t know, Nathan. Grandma is going to get pissed again. She’s just been home from the hospital for a few days and she’s kind of edgy.”
He just threw his hands up in the air and pointed towards the back room where she was doing her quilting and then he flapped his fingers like it was a mouth talking. That meant she was always running her mouth about something.
Then he pointed to the teddy bear sweatshirt he was wearing. He was still pissed that earlier in the day she had put the teddy bear sweatshirt on him. He groaned goop oop and had a look on his face that said, Fuck her. I’m a grown ass man and she’s making me wear a teddy bear sweatshirt.
So I undid the dressing on the tube and pulled out the plastic tube.
“Are you sure?” I said and moved the beer to the tube.
He pointed to the tube and threw his hands up. That meant, Get on with it.
He tapped himself on the side of the head because he was smart. What was the use of drinking beer when you could immediately pour a six-pack in your stomach tube and have it shoot into your bloodstream that much quicker? I poured the beer in and then I poured another. Then I cracked another and another. Then I did the rest. He smiled and then he burped. It smelled like a beer burp. I cleaned up his tube and taped it back to his stomach and pulled down his teddy bear sweatshirt. Then he pointed to the radio. He wanted to turn it on.
“Ah shit, Nathan,” I said. “I don’t want to listen to the preacher tonight.”
Nathan did though.
He waved his hands and started listening to the preacher going on about hell fire and damnation and the Day of Judgment awaiting us all.
Nathan shook his finger and told the preacher: Tell them. That’s right, tell them sons of bitches.
Then he moved his little finger above his head which meant, the good lord’s coming to get us soon.
I put the beer cans in a paper bag and hid them outside.
It was a good thing I did too, because just a few minutes later Ruby came into the room. She was still stitched and bandaged up but she was walking around at least. She said: “That’s right Nathan—the good lord’s coming to get you soon.”
When Nathan wasn’t telling preachers to give people hell, he was talking about his favorite, Benny Hinn. He pointed over to the counter where there was a Benny Hinn book.
He pointed up into the air.
I said: “What are you talking about?”
Ruby said: “Oh he’s talking about this little girl the preacher healed the other night. Poor little girl was all crippled up and couldn’t walk. The preacher prayed for her.”
So Nathan nodded his head yes and pointed to his eye. That meant: I saw it.
Ruby said: “He was so excited about it he couldn’t even sleep—poor little feller.”
I told Nathan I didn’t believe in preachers.
Nathan threw his hands up high again and groaned and pointed to his head like it was true.
I told him: “Ah hell, Nathan, these preachers are just ripping people off. You know what they say? ‘I want to be a Baptist preacher/I want to join the Baptist church/I want to be a Baptist preacher because I don’t like to work.’” I giggled and reached to the table and said: “I know you got your money hid for a reason.”
I pushed back the table cloth where he always hid his money. It was still there—crisp five dollar bills.
So Nathan laughed and giggled because I knew where he kept his radio preacher money.
It was our secret.
The preacher kept hollering. I helped Grandma put away her dolls. Earlier that day, she was looking at them.
Grandma and I were going through her doll cabinet, and then all of the sudden Grandma went “shush.”
I shushed and then she said: “Listen. Nathan sent the radio preacher five dollars this week. And the little feller’s listening to hear if he says his name or not.”
I giggled and listened to the radio preacher rattle off the names of all the sick and dying and the dead and the recently dead and the need to be dead.
Then he said all of these names so that people could remember them in their prayers.
Let’s remember sister so and so in Beckley who just had surgery.
Let’s remember sister so and so who has arthritis and wrote in recently requesting your prayers. Let’s remember the church’s hot dog sale this week. Let’s remember sister so and so who’s been having heart trouble since last week.
Grandma whispered: “I think he’s going to say it.”
We both listened.
We walked back towards the kitchen.
The preacher said: “And now I’d especially like for you to remember a special listener to this program.”
Nathan listened.
We listened.
And then…
“I’d especially like for you to remember little Nathan McClanahan who lives with his mother in Danese, West Virginia. Now
Nathan has cerebral palsy and he listens to this program every week. He loves the lord and so I’d like for you to remember him and his five dollar donation. His mother has just recently recovered from surgery.”
Nathan burst out laughing.
He laughed and then he laughed some more.
He kicked and stomped his foot and threw his head all around.
Ruby patted his back and said: “That’s right, Nathan—the preacher said your name on the radio. I told you he would. I told you—since you sent him that five dollars.”
Nathan sat at the table and he didn’t even moan or groan. He sat listening to the rest of the radio preacher with this mischievous look on his face. For a moment I thought to myself that I didn’t know whether he believed or not. He believed in six-packs poured into feeding tubes. I didn’t know whether he believed in heaven and faith and souls flying high into the sky and the good lord above, or if at the end of the day, all he wanted was to just hear his name on the radio.
Then I saw a look in his eyes like he was famous now.
He had a look in his eye like he was just days away from hanging out with movie stars and having sex with supermodels. He was famous now and he wouldn’t ever wear teddy bear sweatshirts anymore. He was best friends with the most famous person in the whole fucking world. He was best friends with God.
So later that night, I rolled him into the living room. He sat and watched the preacher Bennie Hinn on the television. I sat down and watched it with him too. Bennie Hinn had his comb over and he was dressed in a white suit. He brought out this little girl with leg braces on. He asked her how old she was and she told him nine years old.
She was halfway crying, and so Benny Hinn crouched down on a knee and talked to her and he told her she was a beautiful little girl and that the lord loved her and Benny Hinn loved her.
He told her that the lord would come one day and get all of us and we wouldn’t have to worry about these bodies.
So Nathan threw his hands up in the air like he always did, which meant when I die just throw me in the backyard and let the raccoons have me.
He laughed and watched Bennie Hinn start praying overtop of the little girl.
He threw his hands up again, saying ahhhh. That’s right, when I die just throw my body in the backyard.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Nathan sitting there.
His head was bowed and he was praying.
And then he was giggling.
He was still giggling later that night when Ruby put him to bed.
I thought, My god, she treats him like a child. He’s an old man, but she’d still breast feed him if she could.
Then I went into the other room and read as Ruby tucked him in.
“Yeah that’s right, Nathan, everybody’s praying for the little girl,” she said.
Nathan held his finger up above his head and wiggled it around because the good lord was coming for us soon and would take away these piece of shit bodies.
“That’s right, Nathan,” Ruby said. “The lord’s coming soon. And he sent little Scott to look over us.”
Then she tucked him in and kissed him goodnight and turned out the light until it was only the black ass country dark surrounding us.
Then he giggled a giggle like he knew something we didn’t know.
He giggled a giggle because we were all a bunch of freaks.
He giggled a giggle because he knew we were the crippled ones.
Then he got a look on his face like he was thinking about something sad. It was like he was thinking about graveyards again.
GRAVEYARDS
I didn’t even want to go to the graveyard, but Ruby told me I had to. She was giving my Uncle Stanley hell about it for weeks until he finally said: “Oh shit, Mother. That old road up there is rough as hell. What are we going to do if I get my truck stuck up?” My Uncle Stanley just lived down the road so he always had to take us places.
But she kept going on and on about it, saying: “Oh lordie, I’d like to go to the cemetery. I don’t know when I’ll get back up there.”
She told us there was a grave up there she wanted to put flowers on.
There was a grave up there she needed to see before she died.
My Uncle Stanley finally gave in. He picked up some plastic flowers from the dollar store and drove her up to the graveyard in his truck. He drove down into Prince and we listened to the radio—99.5 The Big Dawg in country. Lord have mercy, baby’s got her blue jeans on.
We drove through the places where Ruby had given birth to babies in shacks that no longer stood, and where my grandfather sold moonshine. We gunned it up Backus Mountain with my Uncle Nathan, sitting in the back of the truck trying to hang on with his palsy legs. Then we finally pulled up the hill and into the Goddard graveyard.
Stanley stopped the truck and on top of the cow paddy hill we got out.
He said: “Damn it’s bad enough being buried up here, let alone having to come up here when you’re still alive.”
But my grandma wouldn’t listen to him and started walking through the grass. I remembered to watch my step because my Uncle Larry stepped in cow shit one time up here when he was wearing flip flops.
I told Ruby I didn’t like graveyards. She told me it didn’t matter.
Even though I was only 14 years old there was no telling when the angel of death might come to get my ass.
I stepped over a big fossilized cow paddy and then I stepped over another as Uncle Nathan laughed at us from the truck.
Earlier that day she fed me peanut butter fudge she made and told me nothing lasts.
Now we walked past the graves of all the people she knew.
There was Grandmommy Goddard and Daddy Goddard and Great Grandmommy Goddard and Virginia Goddard.
And there was her Aunt Mag Goddard who starved herself to death. Ruby stood in front of the grave and said, “No one knows why. She just locked herself in her room and starved herself to death.”
Then there were other graves and she started walking through them.
She said: “I don’t think they’ve been mowing it very nice out here.”
Then she stopped in front of one.
I asked her if it was her mother.
And Grandma said, “Yeah that’s Mommy. The day of the funeral they tried putting her in the ground facing the west. I just hollered and carried on ’cause she was facing the wrong way for the resurrection.”
Then she was quiet and smiled a gummy grin.
Then she walked on.
“Oh look at all the little graves,” she said, walking past the grave of her uncle.
She turned to it and said, “They had to bury him on his stomach. He always said he never could sleep on his back. So he had them bury him on his stomach.”
Then she said she never could sleep on her back either.
She had me pull away some tall grass from the graves.
She said that it seemed like all there was to do anymore was die. That’s all people did in this day and age. She said she couldn’t even get the ambulance to pick her up anymore when she needed them. Of course, I knew that they stopped coming because she called everyday claiming she was dying. When they got her into the ambulance, it seemed like she was always feeling better and just needed them to take her down to Roger’s and get a gallon of milk. Finally one of the ambulance people told her: “Now Miss Ruby, you call us when you’re having an emergency, not just when Nathan runs out of 7UP. The tax payers can’t be paying for your trips to get Nathan’s 7UP.”
But I didn’t say anything about it. She walked away from the graves and I noticed all the tiny plots beside her mother’s grave. There was a grave here and then there was a grave there—the stones all broken off and covered up by the grass.
“Whose graves are these?” I asked and then I wondered. “Why all these little graves?”
I knew the answer. They were baby graves.
I walked away, looking at the end where Ruby was.
And I thought abou
t her own mother losing baby after baby after baby after baby after baby and still going on—surrounded by the graves of sons and daughters, brothers and sisters who never were. They were in this ground—all this great big lump of flesh we call earth.
I had even looked in the back of Ruby’s mother’s Bible with all of it written in the back. There was a date and then—baby died. There was a date and then—baby died. There was a date and then—girl baby died.
So I said, “You want me to put the flowers down here? Are these the graves you wanted to see?”
But Grandma just shook her head.
She pointed to a couple of graves at the edge of the mountain and said, “That’s where I want to put them.”
I thought, THANK GOD.
Ruby moved her walker and started moving closer to the graves, past the grave of her own little baby who died, and then past her husband, my grandfather Elgie who died of his fifth heart attack when I was three.
I heard my Uncle Stanley from far over at the edge of the field say: “Daddy would have shit himself if he knew you put him up here with all these goddamn Goddards.”
Ruby got mean and said: “Well I figured I wanted him where I wanted him. And I put him where I put him.”
She hobbled along some more and I walked behind her.
She said: “This is the grave I wanted to see. This is the grave.”
I asked: “Whose grave is it?”
I walked in front of the stone and I saw it was her grave. It was the grave of Ruby Irene McClanahan, born 1917 died…
Crapalachia: A Biography of Place Page 2
