My Family: Chapter 3

A neighbor and Dad got into a play fight one day over a garden hoe. They tried

Lucille, age 3

 to take it away from the each other when I jumped in between them, cried, and told her to leave my Daddy alone.  I got hit in the head with the hoe.  As I screamed, blood just poured out of my head. Mom cried and told Dad he killed me. Dad rinsed my head in a dishpan full of water which they had to empty

three times by the time the neighbor got back with the doctor.  He stopped the bleeding and said I was going to be alright it wasn't as bad as it looked.  He put a black salve on my head with a bandage. I still have a scar on my head to remind me not to interfere when two people are fighting.

The neighbor had a daughter who was older then Shirley. The girl loved oranges, she would always suck on an orange. If we got an orange that would have been a treat for us. I don't know why she didn't just drink orange juice. I remember once when she was at least ten years old, she sat on her back porch steps while Shirley, Lucille, and I sat on our back porch. The porches faced each other. We watched as she made a hole in the orange sucked all the juice out, and then threw it out in the yard. One of us would go get it and eat it, she did this until we all had an orange. I’m going to get disgusting here and tell you why I remember about the oranges. I always had worms - they look like earthworms. As I sat and ate my orange, I felt a tickle in my rectum, reach down, pulled out a worm and held it up then threw it on the ground and continued to eat my orange - I was about four year old.

Shirley, age 6

All three of us had worms at one time or another, I remember Mom giving us worm medicine.

My Aunt Alice's husband left her, without food, to go parts unknown. Mom went to Lyburn to get her to bring her and the children home with her, she took me and Lucille with her - Shirley was in school. Alice didn’t want to go and laid in bed with her baby while her other two children took care of themselves. Mom told her if she didn’t get her lazy butt off of the bed and pack, she was going to whop her. She wasn’t at our house but a few days when her husband came for her. Grandma Francis told me years later, Aunt Alice went to the government in Charleston, told them her story, and since he had cross over the state line, they brought him back. Mom and Aunt Alice's husband got into a fight and I can still see him hiding underneath the kitchen table to get away from her.

Aunt Belva & Uncle Noah

Aunt Belvia and Uncle Noah were destined to meet in Orville. Belvia was nineteen and Noah was twenty-nine year old. He just got home from the war. Belvia said she didn’t want to marry Noah . Mom didn’t like Noah, she accused him of killing her cat. Not only her cat but everyone's cat in the camp. They were always finding a dead cat with its neck broken. Mom and Belva got into a argument over Noah because he didn’t like cats so mom wouldn’t let him come in her yard. He would stand at the gate and holler for Aunt Belva. She announce she was leaving and went to stay with her sister in Tennessee but Uncle Noah followed her. She couldn't say no and they got married lived in Tennessee for a few years. After they came back to Logan to live, I don’t remember her ever coming to our house. Uncle Noah went to work for Orville mines and they lived next to the hard road across from his brother and wife. This took place after we had moved out of Orville camp and went to Macbeth. Mom and Aunt Belva still didn't talk to one another. It would be years before they talk to each other but she never came to our house again. It was after Grandma Francis moved across the creek from us that they began to talk again. Aunt Belva would visit Grandma Francis almost every day, and because she still was our aunt we would go to her house after she moved to Orville. I was with Aunt Belva before she died and we talked about how she was a scare of the dark when she said, "I bet Marie wasn’t a scare of the dark." I told her a story about how afraid of the dark Mom was:

Uncle Vondon was in England during the war and he needed money to come home so he asked Mom and Dad for a loan. Dad had just gotten a check from a mine accident so they wired it to Uncle Vondon. He came home from the war in 1946 and lived with us for awhile. He would babysit for Mom and Dad while they went out to drink. He would give us a bath then sit us on the front porch steps daring us to get dirty.And if we moved off of the porch, he would paddle our behinds. This one time after he finished bathing me, I don’t remember why, I took off naked and ran through the camp all the way down to the last house along our row of houses. I was always going to visit Ike and his wife, Pearl, who lived there. Ike’s sister lived across railroad tracks behind us in the last house beside the Orville hollow. When Uncle Vondon got to the house, Pearl told him that I had a fever and the measles.  She saved me from getting a good spanking.  Uncle Vondon left sometime after that and went to Ashland, Kentucky to get a job.  He was twenty-four years old. He went to war right after he graduated high school where he joined the C. Bees. that went straight over to help England before American got in the war.  He became a mechanic in the Air Force and I heard him tell Dad and Mom he was shot down and he went missing for awhile.  While he was hiding, he said that he saw the creeks were red with blood.

I can remember another story about Ike (who was Uncle Noah’s brother) and Pearl.  They were taking their family to visit somewhere in Logan. Ike had a pickup truck and their kids rode in the back.   Shirley and I decided to go along with them so we climbed into the back of the truck.

Me (Poodie)

Our parents didn’t know we went, Ike and Pearl didn’t know we were in the back of the truck until they got to where they were going. I don’t know how they let our parents know that we were with them. We didn’t get home until dark, Dad was waiting for us when we got out of the truck. We had been gone all day.

Dad and Mom drank and fought so much on the weekends the neighbors in Orville went to the mining company's superintendent and complained that they couldn’t get any sleep on the weekends because the Dillo girls screamed and cried. The neighbor’s at Orville finally complain enough that the Company boss told Dad we would have to move. He helped Dad get a job at Macbeth, who had changed their name to Hutchinson by this time. Now we are back to living in a three- room house again, across the railroad tracks and up against the mountain. Dad dug the mountain out from the back of our house so we would have a back yard. There were three community water pumps in that part of the camp, all of the houses had to use the pumps and carry their water. Finally the coal company did put water in all the homes although there weren't any sinks and no plumbing in the houses.

Here's the story of how I got my nickname, Poodie: It's the name Dad gave me when I was first born. Mom had promise an old lady (in the holler) she could name my sister but she was on vacation when Shirley was born so she missed it. Mom tried again when I was born but told the old lady if she was gone she would wait until she got home. Sure enough, the lady was gone when I was born and Mom waited for three months before she gave me the ugly name of Alma. Meanwhile while they waited, Dad told Mom that they had to call me something, so Dad told her that he was calling me 'Poodie.' The name stuck and it's how I am known to all my family and my friends while growing up. Once the teacher called roll at school, and I told her my name wasn't Alma it was Poodie, she said that she had to call me what was on my birth certificate.