by War;Bluegrass If Trouble Don't Kill Me: A Family's Story of Brotherhood
Susan Montgomery Hall was Mamo’s mama, and she delivered the twins and all their siblings at her home. Granny Hall’s one-room log house was home to her, Judie, Judie’s young’uns, a great-grandbaby or three, and exactly zero daddies and grandpappies. The cabin’s main feature was a large stone fireplace and hearth that served as a heating source and oven for making ashcake, a delicacy baked right in the red embers of a dying fire. Young’uns peeled away the layer of ashes and devoured ashcake to fill their empty stomachs while they dreamed of suitable dinners. Most of the children slept in a loft reached by a wooden ladder. They huddled against the wind and snow flurries that squeezed through the chinks in the logs back when it used to snow a lot more.
Granny Hall was the mortar that held the household together. She cooked, cleaned, and sewed and took odd jobs to put meat on the table. The twins never thought to ask if she had a husband. Clayton and Saford just assumed that she didn’t, since men were as absent as food (and britches), but not nearly as necessary. The only menfolk the twins ever saw in those days were their tough older brothers, and they steered clear of them most of the time.
Granny Hall’s standing in The Hollow exceeded her physical stature. In addition to delivering babies, she treated The Hollow’s ill and infirm with cocktails of herbal remedies. She swore by peach bark tea for swimmy-headedness, mullen leaves for rheumatism, slippery elm for worms, and whiskey for everything. That last treatment made her quite popular in The Hollow.
Sometimes, it made her a little too popular with the no-good drunks, so she learned her way around a muzzle-loading shotgun. She could not control what her daughters did—a cabin full of fatherless children testified to that fact—but she was bound to chase off drunks the way you’d scare off a stray mutt, by filling their hindquarters full of birdshot if they didn’t hightail it out of there.
“If I had killed every man I wanted to kill,” she once said, “I could have laid them end to end and walked on them from here to Mount Airy.”
That would’ve made nine miles of dead men.
• • •
Those who truly suffered, she doctored. The sheriff showed up one night with a blinding toothache. His cheek was so swollen it appeared to be stuffed with a chaw of tobacco the size of an apple. He begged Granny Hall for some relief. She sat him down in a cane-bottom chair and poked her finger in his mouth and stretched his lips open. He had an abscess on his gum and a rotten tooth that needed to be pulled. Granny Hall brought out her “gum knife,” a slender, sharp blade that she used to slice boils on the grandbabies’ gums. The sheriff eyed that knife warily, but before he could quarrel with her, Granny Hall slipped it in his mouth and slit the poisonous abscess open. Blood, pus, and spit flew and the sheriff erupted from the chair like it was on fire, breaking the arms off with his bare hands.
“If you wasn’t a woman I’d knock the hell out you!” he shouted. To which Granny Hall replied, “Well, I am a woman so maybe you’d best sit back down and let me pull that tooth or find another dentist in The Hollow.”
The sheriff cooled off and asked Granny Hall if she had any whiskey. Granny Hall stuttered and stammered that, well, maybe she did, but you’s the sheriff so I ain’t gonna tell you if I got any or not. The sheriff said he wanted the whiskey for himself to numb the pain. He’d bring her a replacement batch tomorrow. So Granny Hall poured him a dram and he guzzled it down. Fully medicated, the patient sat back down as Granny Hall rooted in his mouth with a pair of black pliers. With one ferocious tug, she liberated the rotten tooth and the sheriff again flew from the chair in dizzying pain. She showed him the tooth and offered him a second swallow of whiskey. After the sheriff went on his way, Granny Hall cleaned the blood from her gum knife and called the children to her. Might as well check them all for gum boils, so she commenced running her finger along the babies’ gums.
The next day, the sheriff showed up with a jar of corn squeezings as payment for Granny Hall’s dentistry. He handed it to her on the porch, right in front of the grandbabies. The sheriff rode off and Granny Hall turned to see all the babies staring at her as she held that jar of illegal liquor.
“Well, the Lord sent it even if the devil brung it,” she told them.
• • •
Mamo wasn’t the only Hall girl to have children without partaking of a husband, but nobody had more illegitimate babies than she did. Mamo’s brood began with two girls, Roxie and Lee, then came the boys, Thamon, Mack, Romie, Sam, Simon (who died of an accidental gunshot when he was only seven years old); Asey, and finally the twins, Saford and Clayton, all delivered by Granny Hall. A couple of them might have had the same daddy (Saford and Clayton did, obviously, though they still had to figure out this “Dan and Fitzhugh” business), but Mamo never said so. She never said anything about any of their daddies or why she never got married.
My own mother always believed that Mamo was taken advantage of by the rowdy, often drunk, men of The Hollow, most of whom busied themselves ignoring their own families. Mom’s theory was that Mamo would take a job doing laundry or working on a farm for a household where the woman was sickly or overworked. After a few weeks on the job, Mamo would come home with a sack of meal, some middling hog meat, and a baby in her belly.
Despite the dalliances that left her with ten fatherless babies, Mamo never seemed to care for men. Then again, if dalliances with men kept leaving you with illegitimate babies, you might not like men very much, either. One time she carried a load of laundry into a neighbor’s house and was staggered to see the numerous pairs of men’s britches the poor wife had to iron. The living room was festooned with trousers hanging from curtain rods, light fixtures, and rusty nails. Mamo practically skipped out of the house, crowing, “I sure am glad I’ll never have to iron no man’s long-legged britches!”
Mamo was pushing forty and showing it when she had the twins. Her dark hair was threaded with gray, and she wore it in a tight bun, like Granny Hall. She wore long dresses that buttoned up the front, which made her look even older. She never shirked her responsibilities to her family, even if it meant working past sundown only to have to fry up hog jowl at midnight for a passel of hungry children.
She was also a true artist. She weaved exquisite baskets from oak splits and sold them to the orchard men in Patrick and Carroll counties for a few pennies a piece. Her baskets were the number one vessel for apples until modern picking buckets arrived with their cloth flaps that made it easy to dump apples into crates. Baskets were rendered obsolete, yet their value increased. Years later, long after she died in the Catawba Sanatorium, one of her baskets sold at an auction for fifty dollars. If only she had gotten that kind of money when she was raising all those babies.
As she worked, she sang those mountain ballads, the ones as old as eternity and about as long. Her version of “Barbara Allen” could last for days:
As she was walkin’ through the fields
She heard the death bells tolling
And every toll they seemed to say
“Hard-hearted Barbara Allen”
She looked east, she looked west
She saw his corpse a-comin’
“Lay down, lay down the corpse,” she said
“And let me gaze upon him”
“O mother, mother make my bed
O make it long and narrow
Sweet William died for me today
I’ll die for him tomorrow”
Many mountain ballads are about women in a mess of trouble, so it’s fitting that Mamo preferred them. “Knoxville Girl,” “Down in the Willow Garden,” “Pretty Polly,” and a slew of other songs all end badly for the female protagonist. “Poor Ellen Smith” was a true story about a gal from Mount Airy:
Poor Ellen Smith, how was she found
Shot through the heart lying cold on the ground
Her clothes were all scattered and thrown on the ground
The blood marks the spot where poor Ellen was found
Most of these morbid “murder ballads” were
based on kernels of fact from real events. Some folk-music experts believe that many of the victims in these songs were killed because they were pregnant and refused either to marry or to have an abortion. Mamo could have been one of those girls. I wonder if she ever saw herself as such a character—a Polly begging for her life, an Ellen shot through the heart, or a Knoxville girl beaten to death and thrown into a river. Her own life was a murder ballad, minus the murder.
Born of a woman who had never married and delivered by a witch, the twins set out on their path to greatness.
• • •
“Clayton was the best,” Asey said. “He had a better heart.”
Asey is the last of Mamo’s children still living. His full name is Silas Asa Hall. Some people actually call him Silas, but the family always called him Asey. He still drives every day even though he’s ninety-two and doesn’t see very well. So if you see a boat-sized Buick coming your way on Wards Gap Road, you might want to give it a wide berth.
Asey grew up the same way the twins did—the same way they all did—poor, hungry, and fatherless. But even he knew that the twins were special, and he was eager to talk about them. They had God-given talents and abilities that separated them from others in The Hollow, even their own brothers. Asey learned to pick a little “Wildwood Flower,” the old song made famous by the great Carter Family of southwest Virginia, whose songs influenced Clayton and Saford immensely when they were boys, but he wasn’t in the twins’ league. He fought in the war, too, serving as a medic, and was grievously wounded and earned a Purple Heart. As a boy, he saw his seven-year-old brother Simon shot dead accidentally by a cousin who fired a loaded pistol discovered lying in a dresser drawer. The twins were only two when that happened, and they never had any memory of Simon, but eighty-five years later, Asey still dreamed about that boy and that tragic day.
Maybe that’s why he felt like he had to take care of the brothers he still called “The Babies,” even after they were both gone.
“Me, Saford, and Clayton were the youngest,” he reminded me. “We lived in a world of our own.”
Saford was the one always starting something. One spring afternoon when he and Clayton were boys, he swiped Granny Hall’s spring chicks from her coop and carried them down to the pond past the springhouse.
“Let’s make ’em swim,” Saford said. He pulled out a chick in each hand. They looked like yellow cotton bolls, fluffy and soft as rabbit fur, with stubby useless wings and bright orange feet. They cheep-cheep-cheeped when Saford set them in the water.
Clayton warned him that the birds couldn’t swim.
“Yes, they can,” Saford huffed. “Just watch ’em. I’ll learn ’em to swim.”
Clayton watched the first two chicks kick and flail in the shallow water. Their precious peeps sounded like panicked shrieks. Saford grabbed two more chicks and set them in the roiling water, then tossed the last two in with a splash.
The cheeping, doomed chicks sank one by one. The water bubbled a few seconds, then calmed, save for the circular ripples that radiated outward like the soul leaving a body. One by one, the chicks floated to the surface, still and quiet.
“See, they can swim,” Saford hollered.
Asey ran down to the pond to see what was causing the commotion and got there in time to see a half-dozen dead chicks floating in the water.
“Saford, what did you do?” he said with alarm. “Granny Hall’s gonna kill you for drowning her chicks.”
Saford’s self-preservation instincts kicked in, and he panicked and ran off. Asey and Clayton watched the chicks for a minute or two, looking for signs of life. Asey didn’t stick around, though.
Left by himself, Clayton picked up a stick and held it out over the water and raked in a dead chick. He fished them out one by one and set their soggy, lifeless bodies on the red bank.
As he reached way out for the last one, a strong bony hand grabbed him by his shirt collar and jerked him to his feet. He looked up and saw the withered, reddened face of Granny Hall.
“You’ve drownded them chicks!”
She held him with her left hand and whipped him with her right, hard and swift.
She was as old as a Confederate veteran and no bigger than a bobwhite, but she was stout from a life of honest work. She whipped him good. Clayton did the best he could not to cry, but his eyes overflowed. Granny Hall demanded an explanation—“Why’d you do it? Why’s the devil in you like it is?”—but he never offered one. This was the kind of thing Saford would and was expected to do, but not good little Clayton.
Clayton never broke. He never told her that Saford drowned the chicks and that he was just cleaning up Saford’s mess. He accepted the beating as if it were a penance for the chicks, to be paid regardless of who did the deed.
Clayton sulked and sniffled as he sat on the edge of the pond where the last chick still floated lifelessly. He didn’t know if he felt bad for the chicks or if it was from the whipping. Saford shuffled up and sat beside him. He offered the best apology he knew.
“I thought they was ducks.”
• • •
People often got tongue-tied trying to say the twins’ names together. “Saford and Clayton” would come out “Clayford and Satan.” A preacher at Saford’s funeral even slipped up and called him Satan. Sometimes, though, people said “Clayton and Satan” and they meant it. Granny Hall was known to say Saford had the devil in him.
One summer day when he was about ten years old, Saford convinced Clayton and a gang of cousins that it would be a real hoot if they all rolled down a hill of tall grass on Uncle Alfred Dawson’s land. What’s the harm, he said. It’ll be fun. They rolled and rolled like runaway oxcarts, mashing the grass flat. Saford popped up like a prairie dog, looking for the others, then lay down and rolled away. Within minutes, they had flattened that field like it was biscuit dough.
When Uncle Alfred came along and saw his field of rye ruined, the stalks flattened, the buds squished, and a season’s wages vanished, he nearly lost his religion, and he was a Moravian preacher. He banished Saford from his property even though he was the son of his wife Emma’s sister.
When Granny Hall heard what the twins had done, she whipped them with a leather strop, Saford first.
“Why me?” Saford begged to know.
“You an old instigator!” Granny Hall hollered.
Clayton and Satan. Even their cousins called them that.
• • •
Despite Saford’s penchant for landing him in trouble, Clayton usually stuck by his older twin.
Saford and Asey were fighting one day at Booger Branch, a spooky, rippling creek spilling from the mountain. Old folks said it got its name because some poor fellow wandered up into the mountain near the headwaters and was never heard from again—except for the moans that wafted down from the dark hollows. Saford started the fight, probably by spitting on Asey, cussing him, or throwing a rock at him—it could have been anything, really; Granny Hall didn’t call Saford “the old instigator” for nothing—but Asey had him down and was really working him over when, from out of the blue, something cracked upside his head like a thunderbolt and sent him sprawling. Asey saw stars. He looked for the rock slide that had waylaid him. Clayton was standing over him holding a tree limb as thick as a baseball bat. Clayton! Good little Clayton with the good heart, why on earth did you cold-cock me like that, Asey begged to know.
“You were hurtin’ my brother!” Clayton said.
“But I’m your brother, too,” Asey said.
He wasn’t Clayton’s twin brother, though, and that made all the difference.
• • •
Fighting was nothing. They all did it. Saford fought Asey, Asey fought Clayton, and the twins fought each other. They even scrapped with older brothers who punished them not for playing hooky but for going to school. Their brothers Mack, Romie, Sam, and Thamon all quit school as boys and went to work as soon as they were old enough to labor in the fields and apple orchards. They had no choice.
The ever-expanding family had to eat. As a consequence, some of the older Hall children never learned to read or write. As bad as the twins had it, their older siblings had it much worse. They were on the front line for all the name-calling and meanness The Hollow had to offer.
Mack was the fightingest of them all. In a few years, he’d grow up to beat a sheriff’s deputy to a bloody pulp after the deputy busted up his liquor still and smashed every jar, except for the ones he kept for himself. For now, though, Mack was just your normal, everyday whiskey-making illiterate teenager with a bad temper. He was ten years older than the twins, and everything about him, from his demeanor to his well-muscled limbs, was as hard as black walnut. He worked so the babies could eat and play. And he wasn’t the least bit happy about it.
Asey and the twins were spoiled, Mack believed. Granny Hall made treats for the babies by spooning sugar into handkerchiefs, twisting them into cones, and dipping the tips in water for the twins to suck on. Doesn’t sound like much of a treat, but it was the Depression, after all. The fact that the treats were called “sugar tits” should be reason alone to enshrine them in the confectioners’ hall of fame. The twins sucked on sugar tits for days, even weeks, until they were dirty, rock-hard, and nasty. But they still tasted sweet.
