My thoughts right now don’t center on the day’s events, though I do wonder in passing if I could have done something to alter them. Rather, they randomly alternate between some of the happiest, most distressing and bizarre times of my life. I take some comfort that they don’t “flash before my eyes,” something I’ve heard happens if one is truly at death’s door. No, they show in remarkable detail, some as vividly as if I was experiencing them in the moment.
I can’t imagine anyone as young as I capable of recalling so many and so varied, except maybe my brothers and, though I haven’t seen him for a long time, Tony Waybright. I feel sorry for that poor kid. His brother seems to get just about anything he wants, often at Tony’s expense. I don’t think Tony gets enough to eat. I’ve witnessed him struggle needlessly through winters without good shoes and coats. And though he always seems happy on the outside, I can’t help but wonder what he is feeling on the inside. He’s a good friend, and I like him, but I don’t think I would want to trade my life for his.
Chapter 2: The House and the Creek
I wouldn’t consider myself an expert tradesman, but even a child with no formal training could tell the old shack wasn’t constructed well. While most homes were built on solid foundations, the shack rested on twenty-nine stacks of cinder blocks. Five stacks were placed roughly six feet apart under each of five large wood beams spanning the length of the house. Four additional stacks, one at each corner and positioned perpendicular to the beams, provided extra support. Each stack consisted of three cinder blocks, with the bottom block forced beneath the surface.
Hard to believe maintaining a livable shack required such effort. When it came to making repairs, The Old Man constantly played catch up. Working two jobs, along with a hefty share of overtime, he did repairs when he had time, a rare commodity. Unless something posed a substantial risk of seriously injuring or killing one of the kids, the repair was usually done on Sunday or in the middle of the night, provided The Old Man didn’t have to get up too early for work.
Once, however, he did have to take two whole days off work just to repair the floor. Lee had been bathing in the washtub one Sunday afternoon when it gave way, sending him and the washtub to the ground below. The Old Man and his friend, Old Man Waybright, reinforced that area with four-by-fours and two additional sheets of plywood.
I don’t know why Feenie and The Old Man chose that place. Not only hazardous, it was far too small for nine people. Six boys crowded one bedroom, while Feenie and The Old Man slept in the other one, with the baby, Tim. The kitchen barely contained room for a four person table, let alone the oversized table and bench seats built by The Old Man. The living room held enough space for one large couch, which was usually occupied by either The Old Man or Feenie, or both, forcing the rest of us to sit on the floor.
As you might expect, we fought over sleeping arrangements. Not that it mattered much; we always ended up carving out a small space on the floor to sleep, only to wake in a different spot after getting kicked and pushed through the night. I often woke in the middle of the night to push someone’s leg off of my face. Every once in a while, I woke to someone having rolled over on top of me, making it hard for me to breathe.
The shack sat in a clearing roughly two hundred yards deep by two hundred yards wide. The northern perimeter abutted Cheat Hill. Cows grazed in a field across the dirt road, to the south. All twelve in the herd belonged to the Grants, who lived up Ike Hill, to the west. Town, populated by four thousand, three hundred and thirty-seven residents, was about five miles east.
Making our way through the hollow to our house from the main road was tough work, even in perfect weather conditions. Travelling it in the wintertime, or after a heavy rain, was a nightmare. I can’t begin to tell you how many times my brothers and I were called on to help push my parents’ bogged-down cars out of the mud.
The hollow was much like many others in the country. Turning left off Cravensdale Road, approximately one hundred yards of paved road gave way to about a half mile of gravel. Gravel faded, leaving only a dirt road for the remaining mile or so.
Thousands of trees rose from both sides of the road. Their branches stretched across the road, intertwining with branches of trees on the opposite side. Summertime saw leaves so plentiful the sun never hit the dirt road directly beneath them. Those same leaves prevented summertime rains from drenching the road and making it unable to travel.
Halfway between the end of the gravel and our shack, a gate, comprised of four pieces of guardrail running horizontally welded to two vertical metal posts, stretched across the road. If the dirt road was in good condition, Feenie and The Old Man drove their cars through the gate, all the way to the house. Otherwise, they parked in an area near the end of the gravel and walked the half mile or so to the house.
Working the gate was tough work for us kids. Sure, The Old Man could easily open it, pull the car through, and close it in a matter of seconds. However, if there were kids in the car, they were tasked with operating it. We struggled to open and close it, knowing both The Old Man and Feenie had very little patience for us.
We were usually given thirty seconds to jump out of the car, unlock the pin, and swing the gate across the road. We got another thirty to close it, lock it, and get back into the car before the yelling began. Frustrated at our inability to work it quickly, Feenie often just drove off, leaving us to walk. The Old Man, on the other hand, usually yelled a bit, called us “little pussies” and various other names until we made it back to the car.
That gate was more than just a device to keep the Grants’ cows from escaping. Those living on the east side of the gate deemed themselves somehow more civilized than the three families living to the west of it. We on the west were hillbillies, while those to the east were town folk.
I never understood why people shunned that label. I liked the people on our side of the gate. We didn’t pretend to be something we were not. While I’ll admit the manner in which we conducted our lives suggested nothing other than the hillbilly label placed on us, those who lived to the east lived no differently. In fact, most everyone I knew lived precisely as we did, the sole exceptions being the many foreign students that attended the local college. I’ve always believed that if one is born and raised in Appalachia, then she is, by definition, a hillbilly.
A small, two bedroom, neatly-kept shack stood in a clearing between the gate and our house. Feenie despised the lady who occupied it. I don’t know what happened to make Feenie hate Rose Martin, and I’m not sure if nemesis is the correct word to use, but the mere mention of Rose’s name would trigger an outburst. They rarely spoke, but when they did, it almost always escalated into yelling, screaming, and name calling.
I think Feenie was a bit jealous of Rose. She made no secret of her disdain for Rose’s various states of dress, or undress, depending on whose point of view one was looking from. When Feenie saw Rose in a bathing suit, which she did often in the summertime, she always made it a goal to point out any flaw in Rose’s appearance. She once commented to Rose that she should “learn to keep her hedges trimmed.” I didn’t know what trimming hedges had to do with Rose wearing a bathing suit, but the comment set off a heated argument.
Feenie often accused Rose and The Old Man of doing stuff behind her back. Once, when The Old Man drove too slowly past Rose’s house, Feenie ran to meet him before he even got out of the car, slapping at him while screaming “why don’t you and that slut just get it over with.” I wasn’t sure what it was, but Feenie often made it a subject of first conversation when The Old Man got home.
I often thought Feenie and Rose would end up physically fighting. I don’t know how that would have turned out. Feenie was small, probably weighing no more than one hundred and ten pounds. Though Rose was taller and heavier, what Feenie lacked in size, she made up for in temperament.
Rose’s two daughters could be found playing outside on most days. I heard them say their real names once, but I don’t remember what they were. I ca
me to know them simply as “Tink and Sis.” Or, if Eddie spent too much time talking with them, “Stink and Piss.”
Far from town, the shack didn’t have electricity. We burned enough candles to give us sufficient light for doing homework and our nighttime chores. One was usually left burning on the kitchen sink at night, offering just enough light to make it to and from the outhouse. Not that it mattered much. As far as I know, all of the kids peed off the back porch if they absolutely felt the need in the middle of the night. I suspected The Old Man did, too. If Feenie felt the urge, she had the convenience of a store-bought toilet, the sort that children learned to potty train on. She must have used it often, judging by how frequently she carried it out across the road in the morning, rinsing it out with a half bucket of water.
A traditional, country, coal and wood stove provided heat, at least for the front living room and the adjacent bedroom where The Old Man and Feenie slept. Heat never reached the back bedroom, where all that separated the rest of us from the elements was a plywood wall covered with tar paper. Trust me, when it’s bitterly cold outside, it’s brutally cold inside a room devoid of insulation and heat.
That said, wintertime drove the six kids from the back bedroom and into the living room. Seeing our breath as we tried to sleep provided clear indication that it was time to move to a warmer area. We all managed to somehow find space on the living room floor, close to the wood stove.
When we did sleep near the stove, we made sure we had two buckets of water on hand, in case an ember popped out of the stove and started a fire. We knew something like that was a possibility, but when weighed against the very real prospect of freezing to death in the back bedroom, we elected to take our chances.
While water was plentiful, it took a lot of effort to recover. It had to be drawn from the well, roughly thirty yards north of the house. As wells go, it was unremarkable in appearance, nothing more than a deep hole in the ground. Cold, clear water rose from the bottom, some twenty-five feet down, to within six feet of the surface. Covering the well was a big, brown concrete, circular construct. Slightly larger in diameter than the hole, it rose about three-and-a-half feet above the ground.
I hated that well. At first I hated it because it scared the hell out of me, having claimed far too many buckets and pans. From the time I was given the assignment of bringing in each day’s water, I hated it because it stole so much of my time and energy. I especially hated it during the winter months, when its near-freezing water splashed all over me, adding to the misery of being out in the bitter cold.
Technique was required in recovering water. A cooking pot was secured to a y-shaped rope, made from strips of bed sheets, tied around its handles. If thrown correctly, meaning that the pan hit the water open-end first and at the proper angle, water would begin to fill in. Otherwise, it just sat on top of the water, requiring it to be lifted completely out of the well and tossed down again. I must have made a hundred attempts before I recovered my first full pot.
When Eddie got big enough, he was assigned to help collect the day’s water. Although it took him way too many tries before he finally mastered the technique, I was happy to have the help, especially during canning season and on weekends, when laundry and bathing required a seemingly endless supply.
The kitchen stove struggled to keep up during those times, sometimes operating non-stop for up to sixteen hours each day. Its fuel, flowing in from two large propane tanks sitting directly outside the kitchen window, could deplete in less than a week.
The Old Man warned the kids about staying away from the propane tanks. He placed them on a big, flat rock slab. He drilled out two holes into the side of the house to route the gas lines. Since the holes were slightly larger than the pipes that ran through them, we packed newspaper into the holes to keep air and bugs out. Surprisingly, it worked pretty well.
Bathing progressed slowly, as did laundry. In the winter, we added several five-gallon buckets of heated water to several buckets of cold water, until a lukewarm mixture was reached. While suitable, perhaps even preferable, for laundry, it never seemed to provide the necessary warmth for a relaxing bath. Perhaps that was precisely the point. Feenie wanted the process to resemble an efficient assembly line. We needed to get in, get clean, and get out as quickly as possible.
Summer often found us bathing in the creek. Formed by runoff from the mountains to the north and west, the creek flowed north to south across the property, and its cool water provided for refreshing baths during the summer. Provided the creek wasn’t muddied by recent rains, The Old Man bathed five or six times a week, saying he preferred a complete body wash to the washrag and bucket of warm water that awaited his nightly arrival home. However, wintertime always found us bathing in the large metal wash tub on Sunday.
Behind the house, we added a wood porch, which we used as storage for the wash tub, as well as all of the gardening tools. The garden lay directly behind the house, running a hundred yards or so deep. Every available kid spent the bulk of each spring day preparing that garden for planting. We hoed and weeded part of it every day during the summer. When we reached the end, we started back at the beginning the following day.
Late in the summer, just before school started, we spent entire days harvesting vegetables, husking corn, or just getting the necessary water. We also spent a lot of time helping Feenie can food for the upcoming winter. I hated canning season. Each step in the process had to be performed in exacting detail. Harvested fruits and vegetables had to be cooked to perfection. Only adequately boiled water could be used to sanitize jars and lids. The combination of glass jars, boiling water, and what she deemed as reckless kids always seemed to test her patience to the core. She had canned every year since I was a baby. And every year, jars broke. The only variable in that equation was which child was deemed responsible for breaking a jar, and jars seemed as precious to her as water was to fish.
We built a little wood shed about fifty yards from the outhouse, to the northeast. When we killed a deer, which we did often, we took it into the shed, where we gutted and skinned it. Skinning deer was hard work, especially in bitterly cold weather. I can’t count the number of times I feared losing my hands to frostbite.
At least when it was cold, the shed was easier to clean. On warmer days, we gagged from the horrific stench of deer guts. Sure, the outhouse reeked in warm weather, but it was a different smell. I don’t know if people are naturally programmed to tolerate that smell or if we had just become immune to its affects through frequent use, but it never made me gag.
Once we finished, we carried the tub full of entrails, head, and damaged meat through the garden and dumped them over the fence at the rear, into a ditch covered in thick vegetation. I don’t know what happened out there on the other side of the fence, but most of what we dumped was usually gone by morning.
Summertime was clearly my favorite time of year. Each day, when Eddie and I finished bringing in the day’s water and hoeing the garden, we played. We sometimes could be found in the middle of the dirt road, pretending to be famous baseball players, while hitting little mounds of hardened dirt with sticks. At other times, we could be spotted catching bees or fishing worms.
Sometimes we set out to catch snakes, but they were harder to find than bees or worms. More often than not, we came back in the late afternoon empty handed. Some of those otherwise unproductive days turned out to be the best, with Eddie and me just talking about life as we saw it.
Country life might seem boring to a lot of people, but I never wanted summer to end. Whenever school resumed in autumn, teachers asked us what we did over the summer. Most of the kids described vacations and different places they saw. Every year, I had the same story to tell. It usually started with “I spent most of my summer with my brother…”
Living so far up in the hollow, I didn’t have any friends my age, nor did I need any. Sure, when school resumed, I talked to and played with other kids. But as long I had Eddie and as long as water flowed in the creek, I
was happy.
Eddie and I spent the better part of nearly every summer day in the creek. I’m uncertain if it was catching crawdads I enjoyed so, or if was simply spending my summer days relaxing and talking freely with Eddie. Either way, the best days of my life were spent on the creek.
Thick brush covered the creek in the summertime, making for some tough going. We would often travel with a sickle in hand, stopping to cut through vegetation we were unable to cross. We’d sometimes cut it just to make sure we didn’t get bitten by any big spiders that might be lying in wait. It slowed us down, but on the creek, we were never in a big hurry anyway.
Life seemed somehow easier when we were in the creek. The farther up we traveled, the less we thought about Feenie. We could let our guards down, not living in fear that our next move might trigger an angry outburst.
While we walked on eggshells all the time around her, she didn’t seem to be quite as cruel when The Old Man was home. We fell into the routine of doing our chores early, then spending the bulk of each day avoiding her as much as we could. We usually came back home late after we thought The Old Man was back from work.
While his presence helped ease our fears that she might do something so drastic she would leave us permanently injured or worse, there were occasions when even when he was around, she was as mean as if he wasn’t there. Take, for example, the time that she caught me picking my nose:
Chapter 3: Don’t Pick
Five of us kids were loaded up in Chrysler with Feenie and The Old Man. Jeff was in front with Feenie and The Old Man, while Lee, Eddie, James, and I were stacked in the back seat. The car didn’t have air conditioning. July heat and humidity added to our collective misery.
We had been driving up and down almost every street in the whole town. Feenie and The Old Man used to cruise the town looking for couches that people threw out when they purchased new furniture. Hence, the shack’s living room played host to a different sofa each year. Before it was allowed inside, we kids would have to scrub it down and let it sit outside for two or three days so it could air out.
Three Minutes More Page 2
