Kin, page 16
We called the scattered row houses along the creek bottom Downtown Seco, though the coal mines had closed nearly thirty years before, and with each passing year another house or two disappeared, torn down or fallen in; soon after our arrival, the house Mom had lived in went the way of the latter. Only remnants of the town lingered, a few row houses, the hammered metal bathhouse where miners could rinse the first layer of coal dust from their bodies before walking home, the white clapboard post office and Methodist church, the only official buildings in a town that had once had its own school and hospital. It seemed to me like the prettiest graveyard, the scattered remains of another time gathered round the massive, shuttered company turned general store, which rose from the center of everything like an ancient church, its porch stacked high, for some mysterious reason, with old televisions.
Suddenly, I had so much family, so many cousins to play with. I could hardly believe how many people knew me. They dropped by and we dropped by, which felt like going to parties all the time. Most of my cousins lived in other nearby coal and former coal towns, so they went to different schools, but they all made me feel like I belonged and always had, like they’d been waiting for me to come back. A few of the faces I recalled from the earliest recesses of my memory, at Mamaw Mae’s funeral, which happened right before we left for Minnesota, when I was still very little. Most of my Addington family were Old Regular Baptists, and Mae’s funeral was held at the Little Rock Old Regular Baptist church in Kona, one of the first Old Regular churches in the birthplace of Old Regular churches. Mae’s mother, Bertha Collier, was a member of the same church, and Bertha’s funeral had been held there, too, though she had been dead ten years by the time I was born.
“Who is that?” I’d asked at Mae’s funeral. I had only seen her barefaced in curlers and a housedress. I didn’t recognize her in the lipstick and brightly colored suit she was wearing.
Mom was crying so hard that strands of her bleached platinum hair were glued to her cheeks. The church body had gathered around the coffin to sing lined-out hymns, unaccompanied, since instruments were not allowed, stretching each word out so long the songs were indecipherable but familiar; it sounded like weeping in time. Mamaw Mae had sung to herself that way when Mom and I visited her from Ohio. Sometimes Little Mae chimed in, her voice thin as a whistle. They never sang about anything but Jesus.
“It’s Mae,” Mom said, her body stock-still, like she was holding her breath. I’d never heard her say her mother’s name out loud, and I was too little to understand that Mom was only twenty-three and had already lost both her parents and all four grandparents. After the funeral, I remember kicking through piles of wet, matted leaves, trying not to be sad. Little Mae died soon after. Mae had been sick for a while and made arrangements for a replacement for her charge, but Little Mae refused to eat for anyone else. They had lived together for more than a decade, so Little Mae was family, and her stories became part of ours, woven in with such great care the edges of each were imperceptible.
Tommy Warren showed up unexpectedly one day, passing like a ghost in front of the large picture window in our living room, his close-shorn, stubbled head crisscrossed with scars like the belly of a spayed animal. He was a metallic gray rail, the slight smoke of a forgotten cigarette, and smelled like sweat so old it had turned into something else—burnt tires and exhaust and rubbing alcohol. He had survived for decades as a vagrant in big cities like Miami and New York, worrying Mom half to death, though she rarely talked about him.
He needed to borrow money, so she gave him a little, and after he left she sat on the bench Dad had built into the porch railing, another money-saving idea, and said Tommy must have heard we were doing well, that it had drawn him out of the woodwork. I didn’t recognize him, but I knew his story by heart, that though he never graduated from high school, he was the smartest of Mom’s brothers, and the most independent, the only one who knew how to hunt and fish, how to harvest gobs of ginseng for cash. He had dreamed of becoming a marine, had studied and trained for it until he passed all the tests, but then his epilepsy got him discharged. He had fallen in love with a girl who sometimes cleaned Bertha’s house, whose newly widowed father had turned to her for sex after her mother died. Tommy saved her by marrying her and hiding her away at Grandma Bertha’s farm at Thornton, just a few miles from Seco, knowing that when the bride’s father showed up my great-grandmother would run him off with the hard side of a broom handle; her family were Scotch-Irish and it showed. Bertha would have been in her fifties then, but she had already lived three lifetimes. By the time she was twenty she was widowed and had given birth to three children, two living, including my Mamaw Mae, and one dead from spina bifida. Even men were afraid of her. Bertha Viola Rose.
Mom sipped a Pepsi while we sat, her eyes following the birds that covered the mountains in wingbeats and songs, darting between the clusters of flowering bushes that covered Grandma and Grandpa’s hillside in blossoms. My mother wasn’t the outdoorsy, gardening type, but she loved flowers and bought baskets of grocery-store petunias and begonias to set on the railings and hang from the porch mimosa and the small fruit trees she and Dad planted in our narrow strip of front yard. In the evenings, my parents often took their coffee outside, and sometimes Dad used the weedeater or cut grass or sprayed the grit and pine needles from the road with a water hose while she watched from the porch.
Mom didn’t talk as much about Grandma Bertha’s house, because that was where Mae stayed every time she tried to leave Grandpa Joel until she finally succeeded. Those were painful memories, but I still wanted to hear them, and sometimes when I pushed, she’d tell me about her mother’s mother, who had inherited a fine, two-story farmhouse on a generous piece of property, winding its way along the north fork of the Kentucky River, high enough to shed creek water when it flooded, but low enough that the soil was dark and fertile. Her place was a window looking out onto the time before coal, or so I imagined.
Bertha grew just about everything they ate. She kept the stone springhouse stocked with every kind of food; Mom’s favorite was pickled corn salted down in barrels, sweet and sour at the same time. She and Aunt Sharon liked to plunge their arms shoulder deep into the brine and bring up handfuls of corn, which they washed down with fresh milk kept cool in the stream that passed through the little building. Outside they’d climb a fruit tree for dessert. “She had one of everything,” Mom said, “something was always ripe at her house, and nobody could make a better pie.”
Through the screens I could hear Misti inside the house, switching the TV on and opening the refrigerator. Around us the first lightning bugs of the evening rose from the grass and blinked in the cool night air. On Fletcher Hill, once the sun went down you needed a sweater, even in summer, but nothing could make me move when Mom was telling a story.
“Shouldn’t we have given him a plate of food or something?” I asked about Tommy. I was still thinking about him.
She shook her head at me and raised her eyebrows, like she’d been waiting all along for me to ask that question. She moved her face closer to mine. “Sure, genius,” she said, “that’s a great idea, and he could live here, too. He could have your room. You could sleep right in the bed with him. How would that be?”
I knew she wanted to keep me safe, but I also knew she was embarrassed by her brother, that he couldn’t keep a home or a job or a family—and didn’t want to. His life was ruined, and he couldn’t pretend it wasn’t.
“Well, I love him,” I said, trying not to cry.
I thought my saying so would make her mad, like I was arguing with her, but instead she leaned over to kiss my cheek.
“I love him too, babygirl,” she said. “That’s the problem.”
A few weeks later, as quickly as I’d met him, he was gone.
At the funeral, we found out he’d been staying with family in Eolia, on the other side of Pine Mountain, and died in his sleep. Eolia was where Jesse’s branch of the Addington tree had taken root. Though Sharon lived in Ashland, when she came home, she would visit us briefly and then drive to Eolia to see her Mom and Dad, her brothers and their kids. Eolia felt like another arm or leg of the body of our family.
“Thank heavens for small favors,” Mom said about her brother’s death, when she learned he’d had the good sense to come home instead of dying among strangers who wouldn’t have known him from Adam. They would have stepped over his corpse, she imagined, like it wasn’t even there.
Dad named our hogs Buffy and Jody, after a pair of orphaned twins from a TV show he remembered. He was making a joke, because in the show a wealthy bachelor uncle raised the twins in Manhattan, and our hogs lived in a small, manure-filled sty at the edge of Grandpa Roy’s property, just above the turning place.
My grandparents seemed to think that most of the homesteading Dad was doing was just another phase he was going through, and Grandma brought up The Body just often enough to keep him aggravated, but even then I knew they were only afraid he’d move away again and take all of us with him—Grandma said as much to me. Instead of telling him so, she talked about Minnesota like it had been a terrible financial decision and reminisced about our two-bedroom ranch house in Xenia, Ohio, and Dad’s management position at a plant in Dayton that made asbestos brake pads. She thought that he had been on the right track and didn’t know what had happened to change his mind.
Dad didn’t have the same rose-colored view of our time in Xenia, and it bothered him that his parents thought an asbestos plant was as good as he deserved. He said Grandpa’s years working in the mines had taken their toll, and he was right. Even I noticed how Grandpa seemed to shrink a little with each passing month. Some days he could barely get through tasks he’d managed for years, like planting flower cuttings he always had rooting in jars of water in a sunny windowsill, or shoveling clean gravel into tadpole-filled puddles on the road, or painting the trunks of our ancient apple trees with a blend of chemicals in white latex paint so they looked like old ladies in white skirts—none of us knew why he did this. After he left the mines, Grandpa had made a living doing all the jobs nobody wanted, digging up stumps and hauling trash in the hot summer sun. His energy had seemed boundless, but it was waning.
He and Dad fought nearly every moment Dad wasn’t away at his new job at the fire department. Grandpa picked at him, at everything he didn’t already know how to do. He stood over Dad, swearing in whistles under his breath as Dad tried to repair our cars and lawnmowers. I had always loved Grandpa’s whistle-talking, it was one of the things that made him Grandpa, but he and Dad were different people around each other, maybe not looking for a fight, but always ready for one. Sometimes Dad hid in our house when they were fighting, his feelings hurt by some terrible thing his dad had said. He’d pour a glass of water and drink it over the sink, wipe his tears away with a paper towel, then climb the hill again like a boxer retreating to his corner between rounds.
Once, when Misti and I were home alone, walking the porch railing like it was a balance beam, it broke right off. Our wails alerted Grandpa, who ran down the hill, afraid one of us was hurt. But we were fine, only scared, me especially. I knew how hard Dad had worked to build the porch railing and how angry he would be with me for undoing all that work and giving him even more to do. Grandpa tried to console me, but nothing worked, so he met my parents in the drive when they got home, and when Dad started toward me, he stepped between us.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Dad said, shaking his head at the situation. “This has to be a joke.” I thought he would whip me after Grandpa left, but he didn’t.
Laura Ingalls’s family raised their hogs by letting them run wild in the Wisconsin woods, feeding on acorns and roots, but we slopped ours with a mix of pellets Dad bought from the feed store (too expensive, Grandpa said) and table scraps wetted down with whatever we weren’t eating, cottage cheese that had turned, half-empty cans of vegetables pulled from the back of the fridge, a bag of flour infested by weevils. Dad said the only thing they wouldn’t eat was cucumbers, which made you wonder about cucumbers, and meat, of course. In his new job he spent three days at a time at the fire department, bunking above the engine bay, and Mom started work at Rite Aid, but even when she was home she was so tired she usually got straight into her nightgown and lay down on the couch to twirl her hair and watch television, so the chores, including feeding the hogs, fell to me.
The hog pen was shaded by the tree line and surrounded by a single wire of electric fencing, which Dad said didn’t need to be on once they’d been shocked the first time, they were so smart, but he left it on just the same. He said, unlike Pa Ingalls, there’d be no way he could catch them if they got out.
All summer long and then after school and on weekends Misti and I were usually home alone, and we took full advantage, playing until well after dark with some neighbor girls, though Mom fussed about it because they lived without plumbing or running water and often had lice, so we were warned not to set foot inside their house, but we played every game we could think of and then we made up our own games. We explored Fletcher Hill, climbing all the way to the top, which was flat, eroded by eons of wind and rain; the climb took the better part of an afternoon. Sometimes we packed a picnic—the neighbor girls would bring a plastic bread bag filled with breaded fried squirrel brains, making Misti and me self-conscious about our fancier bologna-on-white-bread sandwiches or the cans of potted meat Grandma donated. Sometimes we found enough change for a can of Country Time lemonade from the single vending machine on the porch of the company store. Just like Tommy had, our neighbors thought we were rich.
We played a game I called Princess, dividing the hillside into four equal quadrants, one realm for each of us to rule over. On mine I built a tiny castle of rocks, scrap plywood, and branches I cut with a pocketknife, just large enough for the four of us to squat inside and hold princess meetings. Between the meetings we played veterinarian with stray cats and dogs, pulling wolf worms from their necks with matches and tweezers and engorged ticks from clusters on their backs, stomping and smearing the ticks into red swirls across the blacktop; when we ran out of ticks we stomped clusters of pokeberries to finish our pictures. I made up a story that one of the cats, an orange tabby, was an alien, and they pretended to believe me for days as we followed the cat around, hoping we might be around when it let its guard down and showed us who it really was.
We shook Grandpa’s apple trees and gorged ourselves on the spicy apples, then stomped the rotting, wind-felled piles into orange-brown mush, yellowjackets and all. Grandma gave me her old washboard, the same one she’d scrubbed Dad’s diapers on decades before, and we had laundry day with our baby dolls’ clothes. Thanks to his garbage haul, Grandpa kept us in bikes, and we let them fly down the steepest hills in Seco, raising our hands in the air like we were praising the Lord. I wrecked so many times I ended up with coal dust in my knee, a permanent tattoo I showed proudly to anyone who would look. When we finished daredeviling, we flipped our bikes on their sides and pretended the wheels were millstones, picking handfuls of grasses to “grind” into wheat flour. We choreographed dances to our favorite country songs; mine were “Swingin’, ” by John Anderson, and “Nobody,” by Sylvia. Huddled around a radio Grandpa gave us, we chatted and waited until a song we liked came on, then jumped to our assigned places.
Once, I ordered a sample box of greeting cards from the back of a magazine, and we went door-to-door on Boss Hill trying to sell them to the rich old widows who lived there. Nobody bought any, but Dad was horrified by my begging, as he saw it, and even Grandpa didn’t save me from that whipping. But the next day, he brought home a box of old textbooks left in the rain behind the school, and I used a pack of index cards and a rubber date stamp I had already convinced Grandma to buy for me to turn the books into a library. I never once let anyone else use my librarian stamp.
More often than not I forgot about the hogs until well after dark, when the only lights that shone against the midnight-green of the hillside came from my grandparents’ windows and the moon, if it was up. The slop buckets were heavy and cumbersome, but I zigzagged up the hillside along the paths I came to know by heart, paths my own feet had helped make, and then above that, where there were no paths and the tall grass tugged at my ankles, coaxing me to lie down and catch my breath, to gaze at the sky full of glittering stars until the sick smell of the slop roused me again.
Hidden in the dark of the mountain I was alone but not alone. My grandparents were one call for help away, my sister and mother comfortable in front of the TV—I could see the flashing lights from where I lay. I could not see our neighbors, but I could hear their muffled talking from the shadow of their own porches.
By the time I made it to the hog pen, I was usually so distracted I felt the jolt and froze in confusion before I realized what had happened, that I’d bumped into the fence again. The hot wire came to the tops of my thighs, but I didn’t feel it there first. Instead it was a hand tightening around the back of my neck, then a pulse that held me until I could remember how to let go. It made hanging on to the buckets a kind of endurance test, and more than once, after I’d dropped them and wasted the slop, I tossed them at the hogs in a fit of temper, just like my dad and grandpa would have done, though the hogs never seemed to mind, or even notice. They only cared that I fed them.
How I loved our new life on the mountain. At night instead of witches and needles, my dreams were full of warm cookies, new coats, and yellow moons vibrating close enough to the hilltop that I could cup them in my palms. On Sundays, we walked with Grandma to the Methodist church in the bottoms where old people sang about heaven and let me teach Sunday school if any other kids showed up. Afterward, Grandma fixed a big, rich pot of chicken and dumplings, and I ate until I felt sick. Sometimes when our bellies were full, Dad read aloud from the Bible or his favorite books, The Thread That Runs So True or the Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come, while I lay with my head in Mom’s lap as she tickle-scratched my arms and clucked over my wild uncombed hair.
