My Family: Chapter 8

 

 When I got older and we had moved above Cly about ten houses, he came home with a new wife, her name was Betty also.

        I would trade comic books with his second wife Betty. She would go through my stack of books and pick out the ones that she hadn’t read and I would do the same with her books, and each of us would keep the books that we traded fore. Cly would kid me in front of Betty and say that he changed my diapers when I was a baby.

        I ask my mom and she said that he probably did, because mom and dad would take Shirley and me down to Betty his first wife and his house and stay the night drinking,

       The house that I was born in was three houses above theirs. When he shot his wife and kills her, we lived across the railroad tracks behind their house.

        I was walking home from school… and Cly and Betty came up the road in their car and stopped, and ask me if I wanted a ride home. I said sure and climb in the back seat, when we passed some school kids I duck down in the back because I didn’t want them to see me in the car with a black couple.

       Mary at that time said something to me and she had to lean over the front seat to see me, she ignored that I was bent over on the back seat and kept talking to me like nothing was wrong.

 Remember Aunt Alice's husband ran off and she had him brought back?  Well, he took off for good and Aunt Alice went to Logan, got a job as a live-in-maid and forgot she had any children. So we took in Alton Lee, who we called Sonny, when he was about seven. Aunt Belva & Uncle Noah took the two girls. Sonny was the son Dad never had.

Sonny age 7

Aunt Belvia and Uncle Noah lived at Orville next to the hard road, the fourth house after you crossed the bridge.  I made friends with a girl that lived two houses away from Belvia and closer to the bridge. While I was visiting Belvia, I would go down to this girl’s house to play.  She had a older sister that was retarded and her parents kept the sister in a dark bedroom in a baby’s crib. They didn’t allow the door to be open or anyone to see their daughter. I knew about her because my friend told me about her older sister. She didn’t tell me her sister was retarded, she just said she wasn’t right in the head and she would never get any older in her mind than a baby. She wasn’t allowed to take any of her friends into her sister's room but I just had to get a peek at this sister and see for myself what was wrong. So I talked her into letting me take a peek through the door. When we open it, I was shocked to find this big girl, about the same size as I am, sitting in a baby’s crib! When she saw us she shook the crib bars and made loud noises. We shut the door and ran.  I didn’t get a real good look because it was dark in the room but I never tried to see the girl again after that one time.

We were only living at Macbeth for a little while when Mom got into a fight with one of our neighbors.  Shirley was up at her friend's house playing inside when Mom hollered for her to come home.  The neighbor lady came out of her house and told Mom Shirley couldn't come right now she was busy playing.  Mom told the neighbor lady not to tell her what her daughter can and cannot do, then she jumped off the porch, grabbed the clothesline pole, and bolted over a 5 foot fence (Dad always put a fence around our house). Mom would get into other fights with this neighbor lady, always chasing her into her house.  And as much as Mom was fighter, she was also good at everything -  all you had to do was ask.  Once we stayed all night with the another next door neighbor when she had her baby.  At other times, Mom helped the neighbor ladies paint and paper their houses.  You just couldn't get her mad.

Mom was going to have another baby but no one told us, and the first I knew was when we were sent next door to stay the night with a neighbor.  The next morning we went home and Dad told us the baby had died, he let us into the bedroom to see the baby.  They named him Ronald Lee.  I remember he was beautiful with a head full of black hair and Dad said he had two teeth already.  The baby was so big he had to be buried in a coffin would have fitted a one year old.