by War;Bluegrass If Trouble Don't Kill Me: A Family's Story of Brotherhood
I won’t kill as many trees telling you about the next thirty years as I did on the first thirty. In the process, I will give short shrift to my mother, grandmother, brothers, and other people who were deeply close to Clayton and Saford in the first few decades after the war. I apologize to them, but they can write their own books. Besides, most of my family would agree that the exciting part of the twins’ shared story was the early days. Those are the stories they regaled us with over and over again in my grandparents’ cozy living room: the one about the time they walked to the White Plains fiddlers convention in the storm with blue dye running down their legs; the one about Roy Hall coming to Bassett looking for the Hall twins; the one about Clayton buying his first car with money he had saved in a sugar sack.
Not as much time was spent on the stories about how much they enjoyed applying stain and varnish to chests of drawers at National Furniture Factory in Mount Airy, North Carolina. Nor did they wax nostalgic about the fights they waged as old men, against their myriad health problems, marital duress, money issues, and each other.
But those thirty years are an important part of the story. That’s when all the pent-up bitterness and stresses began to push against the surface, like lava awakening inside a dormant volcano. And when it erupted, the force blew the brothers apart.
• • •
Mount Bethel Moravian Church was packed from pulpit to front door every Easter. Families who hadn’t been to church since the Christmas candlelight service sprouted in pews like lilies in the field, men dressed in their best suits, ladies topped by flowery hats. Easter was the one time at Mount Bethel when even the preacher, Paul Snyder, didn’t recognize every face. Elinor, who had met just about all the neighbors up and down Wards Gap Road, wondered who all these people were in her pew.
After the service, a snappily dressed woman walked up to Elinor and Renee, and she commented on how pretty Renee looked in her dress.
“I can’t tell who she looks like,” the woman said to Elinor, meaning that she couldn’t decide if Renee resembled her daddy or her mommy. Renee thought the woman was silly. I look like Renee, she thought.
Pearl Tilley, a regular member of Mount Bethel, heard the lady’s comment. Pearl strode by and said, “Ha! I know who she looks like!”
That didn’t sit well with Elinor. What did she mean by “I know who she looks like?” Elinor demanded an explanation.
Pearl explained that she thought Renee resembled the Smiths, Pearl’s own cousins. What makes you say that? Elinor asked. And that’s when Pearl Tilley told my grandmother the story of Dan and Fitzhugh Smith and their relationship to the famous Hall twins of The Hollow.
• • •
Dan Smith was Pearl Tilley’s uncle, her mother’s brother. Dan and Irene Smith had a large family of several boys and girls, all of them bright, hardworking children. Their daughters became teachers. The oldest son, Fitzhugh, had moved away to West Virginia to find work and rarely returned home.
Pearl told Elinor, “Now, you’re going to hear that Fitzhugh Smith was Clayton and Saford’s daddy. But my mother knew the truth. Uncle Dan was their daddy.”
As Pearl explained it to Elinor, Irene Smith had fallen ill during the late summer of 1918. The flu epidemic had decimated Patrick County, especially children and the aged, but it’s unclear what afflicted Irene. Mamo had been called to help nurse Irene back to health, to cook and to clean, and to care for the little Smiths, which included Fitzhugh, who wasn’t so little. Mamo stayed at the Smith house for several weeks, just as she had done for other women over the years who had needed her domestic help. She and Irene were friends, and she even called Irene by her nickname, “Renie Gal.”
But just as it had happened at some of the other places, Mamo departed the Smith house with a baby in her belly—except that this time, it was two babies.
Pearl told Elinor that the Smith family laid the blame on Fitzhugh, who would have been a teenager at the time. Fitzhugh moved away soon after, and the Smiths were spared any disgrace.
Elinor had never asked Clayton about his father, and Clayton had never volunteered any information. She never knew about the mean boys of The Hollow who bullied Clayton and Saford with taunts of “Dan and Fitzhugh … Dan and Fitzhugh.” But now Elinor knew the truth.
Pearl Tilley wanted Clayton and Saford in the Smith fold. The Smiths were good people, and Dan and Irene’s children, who would have been Clayton and Saford’s half siblings, occasionally reached out to the twins, who thoroughly and unequivocally let it be known that they wanted to be left alone.
Pearl once called Elinor at home to tell her that the Smiths were holding a family reunion and that Clayton and Renee should come so that Renee could meet her cousins. Elinor asked, “What about me? Can I come?” Pearl replied, “Aw, you ain’t no Smith.”
Pearl tried one other time to reach out to the prideful Halls. She told Elinor that Renee was the spitting image of Dan’s daughter Grace, who had been a schoolteacher. She thought it would be wonderful if Renee would come visit her aunt. She even sent a photograph just so Renee could see the resemblance for herself.
Renee wouldn’t even look at it.
“I don’t want to see what I’ll look like when I get old,” she said.
Mamo admitted to nothing. She never had to, because the family had adopted a don’t ask, don’t tell policy regarding her personal life. Most of Mamo’s children eventually came to know who their fathers were, but none ever had any kind of personal relationship with the men.
• • •
Mamo’s grandchildren—and there were many of them growing up along Wards Gap Road, nearly twenty in all—adored her. Who wouldn’t love a woman who let you flip a fried pie in a pan, or played the card game Rook with you all night? My mother claimed she learned her numbers off of Rook cards. If Renee beat Mamo at a hand, Mamo would throw down her cards disgustedly and complain that the children’s chatter had distracted her or that someone hadn’t dealt the cards right. It was easy to see where Clayton and Saford had inherited their competitive natures.
Mamo loved her grandchildren right back, especially Renee, whom she believed was a living, breathing good luck charm. After Renee won a giant doll in a punch-board game at Lummy Chappell’s store, Mamo spent every penny she had on Renee’s punch-board habit (possibly laying the foundation for my mother’s lottery-ticket addiction). Over the years, Renee won a cornucopia of cakes and gift baskets, fulfilling Mamo’s belief that she was one special child.
Almost every Sunday afternoon in the summertime, Mamo invited her children and grandchildren to Clayton and Elinor’s house for a day of food, family, and music. She would make huge pots of dumplings, pans of biscuits, and washtubs of lemonade. The boys—Clayton, Saford, Sam, their brothers, their cousins, and their nephews—busted out the fiddles and banjos and played until dark.
Mamo was still a fine singer herself, still preferring those old mountain ballads she sang as a younger woman working in the fields or making baskets. In the 1950s, a man came with a big reel-to-reel tape recorder and asked her to sing her favorite songs so he could save them for posterity. She hemmed and hawed at first, claiming nobody would want to listen to them old songs, not when she heard the kind of music her granddaughter Renee listened to—Elvis Presley, and all that rock and roll.
But she sang. She crooned the old mountain ballads about poor Ellen Smith, how was she found, shot through the heart lying cold on the ground; about handsome Molly, Barbara Allen, and a girl named Cindy, about whom she sang, “Get along home, Cindy, I’ll marry you someday.” The man made his tapes, and she never heard from him again.
Into her eighties, Mamo continued to doctor the aged and the infirm. When Renee fell gravely sick with rheumatic fever and missed several months of school, Mamo treated her granddaughter with pans of hot biscuits, honey, and foot rubs. At night, Mamo cried that poor little Renee (who wasn’t that little anymore) would not make it in this world very long. She worried that she was too delicate. That might
have been the only prediction that Mamo ever got wrong. Renee got well and returned to school, where she was an exceptional student.
Many evenings, Mamo made chicken and dumplings for herself, only to remember somebody else in the community who was hungry. She would pack the pot into one of her handmade baskets, wrap a few fried apple pies in a dish towel, and walk down Wards Gap Road to feed another hungry person.
Nearly everybody in The Hollow loved Mamo. They would miss her when she was gone.
• • •
Sometime in the early 1960s, Saford grew ill. Always skinny, he had shriveled below 120 pounds in his early thirties and was stricken with a continuous cough. A chest X-ray revealed a dire diagnosis: tuberculosis.
Saford’s lungs had been scarred considerably from years of smoking cigarettes—he preferred Salems and Camels to Clayton’s Winstons. He had also been subjected to poison-gas training before the war, not to mention the noxious fumes of furniture factories. He was a sick man.
He spent several months at Catawba Sanatorium in the rolling green hills northwest of Roanoke County, where he was treated with antibiotics and clean mountain air. By the time he returned home to Clovie and Larry, he was fully recovered, although he never again resembled the picture of good health. He continued to smoke, and he looked as thin and frail as a cancer patient. He and Clayton both continued to work in the furniture factories of Mount Airy, bringing home meager paychecks with which to pay off their grocery bills at the country stores. This was their lot in life now: work long hours, feed and clothe their families, play a little music on the side, repeat. Their chance for country music glory had long passed, and their battlefield adventures were just stories to entertain the family.
• • •
It must have been hard being Saford Hall’s twin brother after the war. Saford loved regaling his copious nephews with war stories, telling them about meeting Patton, storming the beaches of North Africa, and chasing the Germans back to the Rhineland. He taught the boys how to shoot pistols by taking them down to a creek and setting up cans and bottles for target practice. He barked orders like the platoon sergeant he had been, instructing them how to hold, aim, and fire the weapons.
Clayton couldn’t compete. He tried, repeating the stories of getting shot in the Philippines and the time he fell into the tank trap on Okinawa. But most of his stories didn’t come easily—it’s hard to explain to a gaggle of war-hungry boys what it’s like to just sit in one place and have the shit shelled out of you day after day. Those stories weren’t as exciting as Saford’s incredible tales of escaping from Germans and slitting the throats of enemies.
It didn’t help that, years earlier, right after the war, Saford had received a package that contained a cross-shaped medal and some papers.
“Looky here!” he exclaimed. “It’s got Charles de Gaulle’s name on it!”
Saford had been awarded the Croix de Guerre avec Etoile de Bronze—literally, a War Cross with Bronze Star, a prestigious commendation given by the French as thanks for helping with that liberation business.
Even with his Purple Heart, Bronze Star, and a breast full of combat ribbons, Clayton didn’t stand a chance against Saford’s braggadocio. So Clayton’s stories got a little bigger with each retelling. Saford had been a platoon sergeant in charge of fifteen men (a fact verified in his service record). Soon, Clayton was, too, even though he had only been a squad leader, at best. Saford claimed that he had met Patton. Clayton claimed that he had killed eight Japs by himself. In the end, Clayton opted out of the war-story arms race. If Saford needed to believe he had been the better soldier, so be it. Clayton wanted desperately to leave the miseries of war behind, not relive them every day with his overly competitive twin brother who had Charles de Gaulle on his side.
• • •
The 1960s gave Clayton the chance for a clean break from refighting the Big One. He turned his attention away from war stories and got interested in county politics. The Halls were old-school, turn-of-the-(last-)century Democrats, who were fairly conservative when it came to social issues and religion but were liberal in their ideas that the government should help the poor and ask sacrifices of the rich. This was an odd position for Clayton to take, considering that, except for one or two visits to the VA Hospital in Salem, near Roanoke, for free medical care, he had never availed himself of the many government programs created to assist GIs returning from the war. He never went to school or learned a trade on the GI Bill. He never went back for a GED. Since his discharge in 1946, he had made his living with his own two hands, whether they were slapping a bass fiddle or slapping stain on furniture.
That didn’t mean he felt government had no role in helping make people’s lives better. Times certainly were not as hard as they had been during his poverty-stricken childhood in the 1920s, when a boy might eat one meal a day and be happy to have it, but even in the 1960s many neighbors, friends, and family were shamefully poor. Even in his own county, Clayton saw the economic disparity between country people and townsfolk, especially when it came to the sorry state of the schools below the mountain, where children were still taught by the warmth of coal-burning stoves. So this combat veteran, factory worker, family man, and Sunday school teacher took his stab at politics and ran for the board of supervisors—and lost. He never ran for office again.
Instead, he found a more important way to serve his community: He became a preacher.
He was not a trained minister; few mountain preachers could even spell “seminary,” much less graduate from one. But he had a profound interest in the Bible, and he taught Sunday school at Mount Bethel Moravian Church, where he listened intently to the sermons of the Reverend Paul Snyder, a gentle pastor who favored a thoughtful, softer approach behind the pulpit over the hell-and-damnation hollering of many mountain preachers. Clayton soaked up anything he could about preaching, the Bible, and the Moravian sacraments.
Mostly, though, he wanted to preach the Gospel because of a promise he had made to the Lord during the war. Clayton told Elinor, “I promised that if the Lord let me come home alive, I would serve him the rest of my life.”
Clayton was keenly interested in the book of Revelation, whose prophecies of fiery destruction and violence didn’t seem so fantastic, considering Clayton’s own wartime experiences. But where others saw the apocalypse coming in the revelation to John, Clayton found hope that all bad times shall pass, that better things lay ahead, and that this mean old world we all live in would come to know peace.
Sometime around 1964, Reverend Snyder asked Clayton if he would take over Crooked Oak Moravian, a little church on an old gravel road called Bear Trail with a small congregation that had never prospered. Crooked Oak had been started by Clayton’s own uncle, the Reverend Alfred Dawson, the husband of Mamo’s sister Emma. Alfred preached his first sermon behind an actual crooked oak, which he used as a pulpit and where he laid his Bible. The namesake tree was felled to build the frame church, which was attended by a handful of congregants who had cycled through a series of young pastors they could not afford to pay. Reverend Snyder made his request to Clayton by slipping a note under his front door. Clayton accepted the offer and soon was preparing to become a preacher.
• • •
More changes were coming fast. Renee grew from a tomboyish imp who played with her boy cousins into a teenage beauty queen. Her light-brown hair had darkened considerably, and her wide brown eyes made her look like a Persian princess. She became a cheerleader and played clarinet in the band at Hillsville High School, a good thirty-minute bus ride over the mountain. She loved the Beatles and Sam Cooke, and she was a good dancer. She was quite popular, especially with boys, who called on her and wanted to date her. Clayton warned her, only half-jokingly, that he would shoot the tires out on the vehicle of any boy coming to see her.
“You’d better have a lot of bullets,” Renee shot back.
She settled on one boy in particular—the fellow who had my name first. Ralph Berrier was two years o
lder than Renee, a superb athlete who excelled at baseball. They met at the only place any hillbilly parents of mine could possibly meet—at the bowling alley in Mount Airy, North Carolina. Elinor, Renee, and Clovie had gone to town to do laundry on a Saturday night, and Renee convinced them to roll a game at the bowling alley. As the three ladies walked in, Ralph and a buddy were walking out. Recognizing the popular, athletic boy from the halls of Hillsville High School, Renee chirped, “You want to bowl a game?” Turns out that Ralph had never had a real date, and his buddy had dragged him to town to “find some women.”
Ralph grew up in an apple orchard about ten miles from Renee’s family, all the way across U.S. 52, which dissected the primarily “below-the-mountain” community of Cana. The sweethearts dated through Ralph’s senior year, during which Renee was a sophomore and was voted the school’s “Snow Queen.” They stayed together even after Ralph was drafted at age eighteen—not by the military for service in Vietnam, but by baseball’s Houston Astros. He reported to Florida for spring training and played for the Astros rookie-league club in Bradenton. He had been the best player in Carroll County, a slugging, left-handed power hitter who crushed baseballs over the old field house in right field. But in pro ball, everybody was the best player from somewhere, and young Ralph struggled. He was also homesick. A poor country boy from a family of apple pickers, he dreamed at night of mountain trails he had walked and woods he had hunted, and he wrote letters home to his mother wondering if anyone had taken over his job of mowing the cemetery at Flower Gap Primitive Baptist Church.
Renee made a road trip with Ralph’s parents to visit him that summer in Florida, but mostly they kept their romance alive through letters. The next winter, as Ralph prepared for his second season in the minor leagues, he and Renee got married on December 22, 1965, the fiftieth wedding anniversary of Ralph’s grandparents, Fred and Ella Leonard. He was eighteen, Renee had just turned seventeen and was a junior in high school. Like I said, we marry ’em off young in my clan.
