My Family: Chapter 11

After we moved to Macbeth, Shirley and I made friends with the kids at the bottom of the hollow. They played in the cemetery.

Graveyard up Rum creek

They got cardboard boxes and slid down the hill. Sonny must have been with us, I just don't remember him too much except for he slept at the foot of my bed and lived in the same house as I did. I claimed him as a brother and he claimed us as his family, but he had his own set of friends and we had ours. I think the reason I don't remember too much about him has a lot to do with him being a boy. He was such a good son, never got into any trouble - I think he was a little bit afraid of Dad. I feel sorry for him because he really loved his birth mother but you could count on one hand how many times she came to see him the whole time we had him. And when she did come, he would hang on her hugging her but she would push him away. My parents gave us love and attention in their way but not by hugs and kisses. Dad gave us love by playing with us when ever he could or was home and he told everyone he had the prettiest daughters.

Small Church in Logan, WV.

Macbeth hollow had a Presbyterian church, but we belonged to the Church of God, which is a Pentecostal denomination. Mom didn’t care if Shirley and I went to Sunday school there but she wouldn't go. We went every Sunday. One Sunday, they were giving away little Bibles and we wanted one, but in order to get a Bible you had to be baptized. So we got baptized and they gave us each a Bible. When Mom heard we got baptized she got so mad that she gave us a whooping and took the Bibles away from us. She took the Bibles back to the minister and told him that he didn’t have the right to baptized us without her permission, that she didn’t believe in his church, and that we wouldn’t be coming back. We never went back again.

Remember how isolated Mom felt living at Macbeth? It really was lonesome. I remember this one time an old woman who lived by herself in the last house up Macbeth got bit by a rattlesnake. It was a while before she got any help. I can still see them carrying her out of the hollow. I don’t remember if she died. Still, Mom nagged Dad to get her out of Macbeth. I forgot how bad Mom nagged; you would do anything just to shut her up. I can remember sitting out on the front steps listening to Mom cry, and she cried a lot while we lived up Macbeth hollow. Mostly because Dad was gone so much and she was left to take care of the children.

Grandma Dillow died of cancer while we lived up Macbeth. I was ten years old and had just gotten over the mumps. Dr.Vaughn said it was the first case of mumps he had seen in years. I was lucky and wasn't that sick - I had them only on one side. Shirley wasn't so lucky, she had them on both sides and still had to go to Grandma Dillow's funeral - she was very sick. Do you recall I mentioned that the family sits up with their dead for two or three nights before they bury them? Well, one night while the family sat up with Grandma Dillow, Grandma sat straight up in her casket! The next morning, my aunts and uncles were too excited to listen to the funeral director as he tried to explain the reason to them.

Wasn’t long after Grandma Dillow's funeral, Dad came home from work and told Mom there was a family who wanted to trade homes with us. A man had approached Dad and told him his wife wanted to move, he thought she would feel better up Macbeth as it would get her away from people. The main reason was her father was a bootlegger. West Virginia is a dry state that means that you can only buy whiskey in a state store and not on weekends. And although her father had stopped selling whiskey, people were still coming to the house all night long. She had two small boys, so her husband thought it would make her happy to move away from the people that kept coming to the house. The family had lived in the house for years. The wife's brother and her were born in the house and her father did many improvements. He had added a bathhouse and put in hot and cold running water. We traded homes but we got the best of the deal because we got a sink with a cabinet above it, hot and cold water in the kitchen, and a bathhouse with two showers.