Red used to drink now and then, and there was no telling what he’d do. We used to see Red and Angie, that’s Doo mother, fussing sometimes. One time Doolittle had to tie Red up so he could come sparking—that’s our way of saying “courting”—at my house without worrying about what Red was up to.
One night Doo’s brother came running to my house saying that Angie had untied Red, and Red was chasing everybody around the yard. Doo had to rush home and wrestle his Daddy to the ground. Even though Red had only about four teeth, he bit Doo until he was bleeding.
Everybody likes Red but, still, he does do some strange things. Doo says the worst thing his Daddy ever did was on a Thanksgiving. Angie fixed up a beautiful turkey dinner with all the fixings and all ten kids were sitting around the table ready to eat. Red had this rule that none of the kids could eat until he himself was served—and one of the kids broke the rule. This made Red so mad that he picked up the table and dumped the whole dinner out the window. Luckily, most of the dinner slid right onto the tablecloth and didn’t get ruined. The kids sneaked the food under the porch and had their Thanksgiving dinner in peace while Red raced around the house.
There’s only one way to get along with Red—you can’t pick on him. You just let him have a beer or two and don’t nag him. But if he gets rough with you, get rough right back. He respects me and Doolittle, I think, because we’re as mean as he is.
When we first got married, Red came out to live with us in Washington. Me and Red got along great. He taught me how to play pinochle while I was waiting for my third baby. I was too far along to pick vegetables, so me and Red would play pinochle all day. About ten minutes before Doo would be getting home, we’d rush around and straighten up the house. Red would sweep all the dirt under the rug, and I’d fix some supper. Then Doo would see all the pinochle scores written on a brown shopping bag and say, “I see you’ve been playing pinochle again.”
And Red would say, “Just a few games.”
Red never has been one to stay in one place for long. When Doo was just a boy in Kentucky, they heard rumors that coal was selling for twenty dollars a ton in Washington State. Red took off one day and nobody heard from him for a long time. That was rough on Doo’s mommy. I’ve always loved Angie. Even today, she’ll make me a big angel food cake whenever I visit. And she had her hands full in those days.
Meanwhile, Doo had to support his family by hoeing corn for fifty cents a day. Sometimes the grown men would help him finish his row so the boss wouldn’t fire him. Even then, Doolittle wasn’t satisfied with one job; he was always working. His aunt sold milk in the coal camp, so Doo delivered the milk on that old blind mule of his. They figured as long as he was hauling milk that way, maybe he could haul moonshine in the same jugs and the federal people wouldn’t know the difference. They would pay him a nickel a gallon. He never actually made moonshine, but he hauled about an ocean of it.
Finally, Red came back from Washington and said he was prospecting for minerals. They packed up the family in an old 1933 Dodge and put their belongings in a two-wheel trailer they made. Every night, Angie would find a creek and cook dinner. Around St. Louis, the motor bearings tore loose. That meant they had to drive slowly one day, then spend the next day fixing the bearings. They did this all the way to Washington.
Doo told me he got so thirsty in Utah that when he saw this lake he begged to get out and take a sip. His Daddy told him it was salty, but Doo wouldn’t believe it. He found out the hard way that his Daddy was right. It was the Great Salt Lake.
It took them twenty days to get across the country. They finally broke down thirty miles from their town, and Red’s boss had to tow ’em the rest of the way. They settled down, but it was the middle of the Depression and there wasn’t much money going around. The kids got put back two years, every one of ’em, because of their Kentucky education. One day Red took off again—didn’t say a word to anybody, and Doolittle was left responsible for his mother and the nine kids.
Doo was in the first year of high school when he finally quit. He says he did pretty good, and I believe him. He had to walk four miles to the school bus every morning. He also had to get food for the family. He saved up for a shotgun and a few shells, and he used to sneak up on the pheasants so as to not waste shells. He’d go to the potato farms after the farmers picked what they wanted. Anything they didn’t grade, he could take—and there were plenty of good ones left.
Some guy made Doo a deal that if he would clean out the chicken houses, he’d give Doo an old Ford that was hardly used. And another time Doo used someone’s bulldozer to clear a road to a creek, and then he’d go after salmon. You ain’t supposed to get salmon when they’re swimming upstream to spawn. But if you’re hungry, you do. So Doo would take a pitchfork and watch for small-sized salmon, because the big ones were all bruised up from swimming in that tiny creek. He’d get a whole load of ’em, and his Mom would smoke enough for the winter. One day the game warden caught Doo and said by law he should run him in. But he knew Doo’s folks were hungry, so he told him to take those fish straight home to his Mom. Once when a deer got hit by a car, the game warden was supposed to take it to the hospital to get it fixed—but he brought it to Doo instead to kill and clean.
Doo was still out West when the war started. He and other men helped make lookout towers because they figured the Japanese would attack from the Pacific Ocean. Doo wanted to join the service real bad, but his Mom was so scared about a war breaking out on the West Coast that she decided to go back home to Kentucky. She didn’t drive, so Doo got what was called a “hardship driver’s license,” which they gave to kids who were underage.
By this time they were driving a ’34 Chevrolet, and Doo built a two-wheel trailer out of an old car frame so he could haul his Mom’s old Maytag washer back to Kentucky. He wasn’t full grown yet, maybe around five feet, two inches, so he had to put wooden blocks on the pedals of the car and an apple box on the seat to raise him up some. He loaded his mother and brothers and sisters in the old car and they took off. All they had was sixty-eight dollars and some ration stamps for gas.
But it was the same deal coming back as it was going out there. The rear end fell apart in Iowa City, and the whole family had to camp outdoors again while Doolittle tried to fix the car. He finally talked his way into working in a car shop, where they taught him to use one of those flame-throwers that cuts cars. He worked for four days, and then a guy in the shop fixed the rear end for him. By this time they had used too many gas stamps and were down to twelve dollars in cash, so they didn’t dare leave Iowa City. Doo’s mother was getting nervous they’d never get back to Kentucky alive, with them camping out and such.
Doo told me once he couldn’t sleep at night just worrying about what was gonna happen to his family. One night he got an idea, and he was so afraid he’d forget it that he stayed up all night. The next morning he told his family to follow him down to the welfare office and nobody say a word, just obey his orders. So he lined up his family in the welfare office and asked for gas stamps. The man said it was impossible to give extra stamps. So Doolittle says, “All right, if we have to stay in Iowa City, there’s ten of us, and we’re gonna have to go on welfare. Let’s see, we’ll need food and clothing and welfare checks.…”
Doo says that man told him, “Don’t move. Don’t go away. I’ll see what I can do.” And in about five minutes, that man had a huge handful of stamps that he gave to Doolittle. That’s how they got back to Kentucky. Doo even had enough gas stamps left to sell for cash.
When he got his family settled, Doo tried to join the service. But he was underage and underweight. The army told him to join the navy. The marines told him to join the Coast Guard. Nobody wanted him. But finally the army took him in 1944, even though he was still too young. In sixteen weeks he was in Europe. Doo don’t talk too much about the war, not even to me. But he was in Germany, France, and Italy for the last year of the war. Sometimes when people talk about the bad things that went on in Vietnam,
Doo will say, “Aw, that’s always happened in wars.” But he don’t tell too many details.
I know that when he got home after the war, he couldn’t adjust to being home again. He couldn’t sleep at night because he had nightmares about snakes and stuff. The only time he could sleep was during the day. That’s how he met me, actually. He was trying to sleep around the house, and his mother was talking to the schoolteacher about that pie social. The teacher was complaining to Angie that she couldn’t get no one to auction off the pies, and she started to cry. This woke Doo up and he said, “Lady, if you stop crying, I’ll auction off your damn pies for you.” Angie got mad at Doo because he talked rough to a schoolteacher, but he didn’t care. I think there were two little Banks girls he wanted to meet at the school anyway and play post office and spin-the-bottle with. But he says, “As soon as I saw Loretta, I knew I wanted to get ahold of her.”
Well, he did. He gave me that great big kiss on our first night that made me fall in love with him. Then he got that bloody nose from walking into that fence post. But that didn’t discourage him. The next evening our family was sitting on the porch after supper and we heard this terrible noise coming up the holler. We looked and there was this jeep blasting up the dirt path. You can ask Mommy. It was the first automobile that ever came up Butcher Holler in history. And Doolittle pulled into our yard as pleased as could be and said, “From now on, we’re gonna take my jeep.”
8
Hey, You Ain’t Supposed to Wear Clothes Under Your Nightgown
You can feel my body tremble
As I wonder what this moment holds in store.
And as you put your arms around me, you can tell,
I’ve never been this far before.…
—“I’ve Never Been This Far Before,” by Conway Twitty
I was glad to see Doo, but I was afraid my Daddy was going to say something. I knew they didn’t want me to see Doolittle, but you know how kids are—they’re going to do what they want anyhow.
I still wouldn’t go in that jeep with him, not at first, so we courted at my house. It was cold—we met on December 10—and we had to stay indoors. We would sit in the front room and talk, with all my sisters and brothers saying things about when he was gonna kiss me and stuff like that. And my Mommy walking in saying “Would you like a soda?” or talking about the weather. Just to keep an eye on us, you know.
We didn’t have much to talk about. I was just a bashful kid, never been anywhere. He told me a little about the army, and he talked a lot about Washington State, and said he wanted to move back there some day. I didn’t have nothing to tell him about what I’d done. Kind of a one-sided affair, wasn’t it? But that was how we spent December 11. The next day he talked me into riding in his jeep. But I didn’t go with him just because he had a car. It was almost the opposite. I was scared to death to drive in it, even though he was very confident. He would try anything in a jeep—drive up the side of a mountain, if you dared him. He wasn’t afraid of nothing.
He kept hanging around my house. Just a-hanging around. At Christmastime he bought me a doll and said we were gonna get married and that next Christmas we’d have a real live doll. I didn’t know what he was talking about. I never thought about getting married and having babies. And all the time my Mommy and my Daddy were telling me it was just puppy love.
But it was more than that. When we were working on this book, Doo told the writer: “I was attracted to Loretta at first by her looks. She was real mature with a full woman’s figure. I didn’t know she was only thirteen until I was at her house a few times. But it didn’t change my mind. When you’re in love, it don’t make no difference. I was fresh out of service and I had done my share of chasing around. I knew what I was looking for to marry—and Loretta was it.”
Mommy and Daddy started getting real nervous. Doo had this reputation for being wild because he drove too fast and had gone out with other girls. You know how country people are. Actually, he wasn’t as wild as our own two boys are today, but he seemed pretty wild then. Mommy and Daddy were afraid I was getting serious so Mommy decided to send me to her sister’s house, just across the Big Sandy into West Virginia. She packed my clothes and had me driven over there.
I didn’t know what was going on. Mommy’s sister was trying to get me to forget about Doolittle, because she fixed me up with this other boy who was as old as Doolittle, maybe even older. She got this boy to visit me at her house one night while she and her husband went up to their room. This boy got fresh with me and scared me half to death. He was a-grabbing and I was a-running all around the living room. Finally he gave up. Too tired from running, I guess. The next day Doolittle found out what the deal was. I don’t know how he knew where I was staying, but he showed up in his jeep and told me, “Get your stuff. We’re leaving here.” I even left my clothes behind and never told Mommy what happened at her sister’s house. I just came home like nothing happened.
Then me and Doo started going out on dates, right after New Year’s. We were talking about getting married in April or June or sometime. One night we went to a skating rink over near Prestonburg with my brother and his girlfriend. Daddy warned us not to go there because they sold moonshine and it was kind of a rough place. But we went anyway. When I got home, Daddy whipped my butt. It was the first time he spanked me in years. But it didn’t change things.
I kept telling Mommy, “We’re gonna get married,” and she kept saying, “You’re too young.” But I kept telling her.
We were talking now about waiting until February, but one Friday night Doolittle came over and said he had a big paycheck that day from working in the mines. He said we might as well get married the next day since he had the money. I thought if he asked me, I might as well get married. So I said yes.
Me and Doo had this discussion in the living room at my house. Daddy knew something was up. He was standing on the outside porch, even though it was cold out. He liked to stand out there at night, where it was dark and quiet. So I told Doo, “You’d better tell Daddy.” But when Doo went out on the porch, Daddy said, “You’d better tell Clary.”
Doo found Mommy in the bedroom and tried to tell her, but she said, “You’d better tell Ted about it.”
But when Doo went back to Daddy, he said, “You’d better tell Clary.”
I could see they was gonna run Doo back and forth all night, and they still weren’t gonna go for it. So I told Doo, “Wait until they get tired and decide to go to bed. Then they’ll be together and they’ll have to listen together.” So we waited and finally Doo told ’em he wanted to marry me.
Daddy said that I was awful young to be thinking about getting married. Doo said he knew that, but he’d take real good care of me. They didn’t exactly say yes, but I knew we were gonna do it. After Doo went home, Mommy and Daddy cried all night and didn’t hardly talk to me.
Daddy did make Doo promise not to whip me, and not to take me too far from home. And Mommy told me, “This is something you’ll regret for the rest of your life.”
Well, there have been times when I thought Mommy was right, and there’s been times when I knew she was wrong. But on that particular day, I was just gonna go ahead and get married. Mommy told me later that the reason she let me get married was she knew if it was her, she’d have gone out and gotten married anyway. She said I always looked older and acted older than my age. So she knew there was no sense arguing.
We got married Saturday, January 10. I remember Mommy’s Cherokee father, Nathaniel Ramey, rocking on the front porch. He never said much, but he looked at Doolittle and said, “You be good to my little girl, or I’ll kill you.” Doolittle seemed impressed, because he knew that Indians never make promises they don’t keep.
I was wearing my aunt’s dress and my mother’s shoes. The dress hung down below my knees. I had to be the ugliest bride you ever saw. We just went down to the county courthouse in Paintsville to the judge and got it done. We didn’t have a ring. I didn’t know nothing about rings. In fact, I n
ever had a ring until after I started singing and the guys would come around and try to date me. They’d say, “Well, you don’t have no ring on.” So Doo went out and bought a ring just to let them know I was married.
But on our wedding night we weren’t that organized. We got there at eight o’clock, but Daddy didn’t come down until eleven o’clock to give me away. He stood in the back of the room and didn’t say a word. Mommy didn’t even come down. She’s never been to any weddings except my sister Brenda’s, and I haven’t gone to any of my kids’ weddings either. It just makes me nervous—I don’t know why.
At our wedding, Doo wrote down his name as Oliver Vanetta Lynn, and I said, “Who’s that?” See, I thought his real name was Doolittle.
We were taking our honeymoon at Chandler’s Cabins, about seventeen miles from Paintsville. But before we could leave, Marie’s daddy got in Doo’s jeep and said he was coming with us on our honeymoon. I didn’t know what we were gonna do, but Doo gave him a pint of Fat Messer’s best moonshine and let him off on the highway somewhere. Then we went on our honeymoon.
Before we get any further along, let me say that I didn’t have much of an idea what a honeymoon was all about. Doo was the first boy I ever went with, and I didn’t go with him long enough to know what was going on. My parents never told me nothing. Now I was different with my girls. I told ’em the facts straight off. My Daddy used to tell me they got me by turning over a cabbage leaf—and I believed it. I’m sure my little twins know more than I did when I got married. I think a mother should talk to her girls about it. But that was a different time back then.
So, we drove to these cabins, which were nothing fancy, just a little bunch of cabins side by side. But I thought it was the end of the world. I guess I was a little nervous. We got into that little cabin, and I was shaking like I was freezing. Doolittle turned on the radiator and I sat right down on it, wrapped in my little red teddy bear coat, the only coat I owned. I just kept shivering, even when the heat went up. My husband, he went to bed. He was wearing shorts and one of them undershirts with no sleeves. I was embarrassed just to look at him. He said, “Can’t you come to bed?”
Loretta Lynn: Coal Miner's Daughter Page 7
