My Faimly: Chapter 36

When I was 14 years old, I had a girlfriend, Karen, who lived in Dehue, she was also my cousin’s friend. One time Karen needed someone to go to a dance with her on a double date. My cousin couldn't go because she had already had a date to the dance so I was talked into going with her. I didn't want to but I went anyway - the boy who was my date had the car. My cousin and I stayed at Karen’s the night of the dance. Once there, we met up with another group of kids and they all decided they would go up a hollow they knew about. Karen came up to me and told me their plans begging me to go along, I told her I wanted the boy who brought me to take me back to her house. Boy, was he mad; I think he did 90 mph all the way home and we never said a word to each other. 

I got out of the car and went into the house and Karen’s mother said I was home early and asked where her daughter was. I gave her some excuse about not liking the boy I was with and had decided to come home, I told her Karen stayed at the dance. I watch TV with her mom until my cousin came in from her date then I told my cousin what had happen at the dance. And when Karen came home, she acted like she was drunk but I think she hadn’t drank a drop. Her eyes were all shining; we went in her bedroom and she told us all about her date including the sex part. It had been her first time. Karen ended up getting married and having a child by the time she was 16 years old.

My Family: Chapter 35

Sometimes, after school I’d visit my girlfriend as her family was sitting down to eat dinner and if there was enough food, they’d ask me to eat with them.  If there wasn't I’d wait outside until they finished. Then I’d help do the dinner dishes so I could eat any leftover food. Sometimes there wasn't anything left, but I’d still help with dishes. My girlfriend’s dinners were like we have now, always different every day. Once I had dinner at another friend’s house and I didn't know what were eating, she told me it was meat loaf. Everyone I knew was poor but I just didn’t know it until I got into high school where I met a lot of different girls.  

I had to catch the school bus to go to school, our high school was in Logan which is fifteen miles away from our hollow. I wore Mother's orange jumper every other day to school and stole Shirley’s shoes. I must have gotten my own shoes later but I don't remember. I do remember I did go to one more year of school before I was sixteen and left. I never missed a day of school once I started high school.  One day a girl in my class asked me if I would have lunch with her and she would pay. We went to a restaurant. I was so nervous I didn't know what to order so I got the same thing as her - a tuna fish sandwich and a coke. I never had tuna fish before and was the best tasting sandwich I had ever eaten and I told her so. She wanted to take me to lunch again but I said no. She then asked me if I had supper the night before and even though I told her yes, I don't think she believed me. See, she asked me what I had for dinner and because I was embarrassed about just having beans and cornbread all the time, I made up a dinner that I read in my Health class. She said I was lying and I didn't have dinner like that. I asked her how would she know she wasn’t at my house. She never asked me what I had for supper nor does she ask me out to lunch again. 

While writing this I’ve been thinking I haven’t change very much since high school. I treated my co-workers the same as I treated my classmates - I had lunch and breaks by myself, nor did I talked to anyone. They used to call me stuck-up or say I thought I was better than them but the thing is: I was really afraid they would snub me. We didn’t eat like everyone else.  Most times I didn’t have a lunch to eat. And because we ate lot of chicken, I don’t like it now. When I was a child, we didn’t have turkey. Aunt Hannah use to say the meat was too dry to eat. I will eat a very small piece of turkey at Thanksgiving but only because it is a special day with my family. 

My Family: Chapter 34

Uncle Andy and Aunt Hannah

My Dad’s sister, Eloise, gave her daughter, Janice Sue,  to her sister, Hannah. Aunt Hannah had been married for twenty years but had no children of her own. She blamed herself because her husband, Tennie Day, had a child by his first wife. However, not too long after she took Janice in, Aunt Hannah re-met Andy Mazon. She already knew Andy well as Andy’s parents had been the neighbors of the Dillow’s at Dehue. Aunt Hannah had been 14 years old when she married Tennie Day, who was 15 years older than her. Tennie never liked to stay in one place for long, so they traveled with a circus. Aunt Hannah told fortunes until one day one of them came true and scared her. She gave it up and worked at something else.

Aunt Hannah decided to leave the circus life and came back to West Virginia. Tennie Day also left the circus but he turn into a hobo and jumped trains - that’s how he got killed. Then Aunt Hannah re-meets Andy, who was divorced from his first wife, at the restaurant where she worked. They started to date and then three months into the affair, Aunt Hannah finds out she’s going to have a baby. Andy and her get married and in the first four years they have three sons and in a few years more she has another son just not as quick. There’s about four years between the last two boys.  When Janice was about nine years old, Aunt Hannah let her go to Ohio to visit her family - only Aunt Eloise wouldn’t let her come back. I don’t think either Aunt Hannah or Janice Sue ever got over it. I know Aunt Hannah talked about it until the day she died.

My Family: Chapter 33

 Sharon lived at the end of our camp, her parent’s are the same ones who got into a fight with my parents at the picnic. We were in the same grade. She may have lived with her sister in Logan when we started high school because I don't remember her riding the school bus with me. Anyway, I remember she once took me to her sister’s apartment and that’s where I saw an electric clothes dryer and washer for the first time. I can recall she got into a big fight in Junior High which started a small war where it was hollow versus hollow. See, someone had made Sharon mad (I don't recall how it started) and she wrecked the classroom - threw books and paper all over the room. The whole class joined the fight with kids from other classrooms joining as well. Maybe it was just an excuse to cut up. I had already heard about the fight as my class was two doors down from her classroom. Principle came into our homeroom and talked to all of us. He said kids from the hollows weren’t raised right, we were “savages.” And he would jerk us up by the hair of our heads.

Poodie age 16

I went to Junior High everyday without a lunch. Because of this I would walk to Aunt Belvia’s house every day for lunch since she lived around the mountain from the school. Aunt Belvia’s husband, Noah, was a miner at the Orville coal mine and he drove by our house every day to and from work, so if I wanted a ride to Aunt Wanda’s or just to go to visit Aunt Belvia, all I had to do was stand in front of my house and flag him down as he drove by. He would always stop and give me a ride into Logan. 

This one time I spent the night with them. I slept in a small bedroom next to the bathroom, close to the mountainside. I had a bad dream that night and, while I was still asleep, I tried to open the window.  I was just getting ready to scream out the window when Uncle Noah woke me up. He said I woke him up when I opened the window. He thought I was going to climb out.  I told him I had a dream and was going to holler for my Mom.  I walked in my sleep quite a lot when I was little, Mom was forever waking me up and telling me to go back to bed. One time, I woke up on my own with my hand on the back doorknob. I had been trying to get out the door, but I think the doorknob was cold which is what woke me.  I know I’m very thankful that I didn’t make it outside that door - I’m scared of the dark.

My Family: Chapter 32

The Company always had a Fourth of July picnic for the miners up Slab Fork Hollow. They would put the watermelon in the stream which ran out of the mountain to keep it cool. This one year all the grown-ups got real drunk. There was this one couple who decided to pick a fight with my parents. The wife yelled at Dad (for what, I don’t know) and Mom got mad. She yelled back at her. And then the husband yelled at my mother which caused Dad to yell at him. The next thing you know everybody was running around a large table, the size of four tables put together, and they were throwing food at each other. All the children just stood around, stunned, as these grownups fought.

Uncle Noah’s sister was our neighbor on one side, boy, was she a bad neighbor, but then again so was my parents weren't great neighbors either. I certainly wouldn’t wanted to live next door to them. Anyway, she was a bad neighbor and When the kids from the camp would play games it would be in front of her house in the alleyway. The reason was because there was a wide spot in the alley and we could play baseball. Her yard was fenced in and when our ball went into her yard, she would not give it back. Typical old lady stuff.  We always had to find another ball or stop playing. She never had any children of her own. 

Her husband's garage was next to our fence and when my parent’s had their parties the men would park their cars in front of his garage so he couldn’t get his car out. One time he wrote in black paint across the garage doors “DO YOUR SPARKING SOME PLACE ELSE.” That didn’t help Shirley’s and my reputation. Other than the sign on the garage doors, I don’t ever remember if they ever complained to Mom and Dad about the noise or the parties. 

About this time, I had a boyfriend. He liked Shirley first but she didn’t want him so he latched onto me. I would meet him in church or at the movies, let him walk me home, and kiss me good night. All he wanted to do was sing country songs and kiss. When we sat together at the movies, I would have to buy a soda and put the straw in my mouth so he couldn’t kiss me. I never took it out of my mouth until the movie was over. I would always pay my own way in the movies and, can you believe the gall, his sister had the nerve to say I was only using him. I told her sure that’s why I paid my own way to the movies. He couldn’t even afford to pay the fifteen cents for me to go to the show. 

Well, he joined the Army and while there I wrote him a “Dear John” letter. When he got out of the service, he came up to the house and asked for all of his pictures back. And if I would go to the caravel in Logan with him that his stepbrother would drive us. I said that I would go, It was the worse mistake of my life. When he picked me up Shirley’s boyfriend, Dave, called from the porch to be home early and not to do anything he wouldn’t do. Dave was just trying to embarrassed me because it was my first date going anywhere with a boy. But I wish he had hit me over the head and made me stay home.

My date was all hands, I had to fight him off all night and it was worse when we were in the car with his brother. When I first got in the car, his brother made the comment he wished I was his date, and by the end of the evening, I wished I was his date, too.  When his brother stopped in front of my house, I got out of the car fast, and said goodbye. That was the end of that boyfriend. 

Once this one woman from Dabney came up to our house and stood by the gate; she did not come into our yard, but yelled at me, calling me a whore and other names. When my neighbor heard her, she came over and told her to leave. My neighbor told the women she was talking to a baby and it wasn’t my fault if she couldn’t keep her husband home. My parents weren't home at the time or this woman wouldn't have called me names. Later, after Shirley’s oldest daughter grew up and moved to Ohio,  she married this same woman’s son. Small world, huh? 

My Family: Chapter 31

Alone the railroad tracks in back of house

Shirley thought that if Dad hadn’t stop to talk to her as he went through the house to the back porch that Mom and Dad would have come face to face. As it was we followed Dad around the house and to watched him shoot at Mom. She was heading up the railroad tracks. Mom had made it about four houses up the along the tracks when Dad took aim and fired the shotgun. He shot at her twice and missed both shots. Mom fell as she got off of the tracks. We were sure Dad thought he killed her. We stood on the back porch and watched as he went up to the tracks and looked for her in the tall grass. Mom said later that it was her falling that saved her life. She had lain there until he stopped shooting then she got up and ran again. She said she heard the bullet pass right over her head.

And Mom did come back about two weeks later and, boy, did she come back drunk and mad. Our bed was up against a window and, in the middle of the night, she woke all of us by breaking every windowpane in the house with her fist. As she did so, she yelled for Dad to open the door and give her the babies, Bonnie and Ronnie. Dad came into our room, took Bonnie and Ronnie out of bed. Mom then changed tactics and yelled for one of us to let her in the house. As Dad left the room he dared any of us let her in the house then ran out the front door while Mom broke the glass out of the back door. Later we found out that he took Bonnie and Ronnie four houses above ours to the neighbor's house.

She finally broke the window out of the back door,  unlock it, and came to our room after going into Dad’s first. We had glass all over our bed because she broke every pane of glass in the window beside our bed. My girlfriend was sleeping over at time, too. Mom asked all of us why we didn't unlock the door for her. We told her  Dad told us not to. She then asked where he went and we when told her we didn't know so she left and we went back to sleep.

We didn't see her again for a month. Dad had all the glass put back in the house, I really don't know what excuse he gave the Company for them being broken. Dad went and got Mom to come back home. She said he told her he was starving to death. She made him get rid of all his guns first, but nothing changed; they still got drunk and fought every weekend. And Mom was still seeing Bert.

Shirley and I worked at Bert’s hotdog stand during the summer and sold hotdogs and ice cream. I remember once a  guy stopped by and asked me to make him a milkshake. I told him I didn’t know how, I had never heard of a milkshake before. He told me how to make it.

Bert eventually ended up back in prison for killing a man at the hotdog stand. I believe it had something to do with Mom and Dad. I don’t know the whole story, I was very sick in bed. Mom told me the deputy’s had been to the house and had search it. They even looked under my bed while I was sleeping with my mouth open (now to a thirteen year old this is terrible news, especially since I also had the slop jar under my side of the bed). Mom said Bert had killed a man last night and they believe he was hiding in the mountains. But Bert gave himself up and went to prison. He got out of prison about ten years later, he died about a year after he was home.

My Family: Chapter 30

Dad found out about Bert. He came home one Sunday and Mom was at church. He asked us a lot of questions and we would never lie to him. He would kill us if we did. Lucille got very upset and afraid under his questioning. So, she told him she’d seen Bert and Mom hugging while she was suppose to be asleep in the back seat of the car when Bert was driving her and Mom home from church.
 
When Bert finally dropped Mom off at home after church, Dad was waiting on the front porch with a shotgun. Before she even got out of the car, he took aim and was going to shoot her. I was standing behind him and just as he raised the gun,I reached for his arm and pulled it down. All the kids were crying and upset. Mom had just gotten one leg out of the car when she looked up and had seen Dad with the gun. She slammed the car door quick, Bert and her took off. Dad left the house after that and we didn’t see him until the next day. 

Mom had no where to go. Her mother was in Kentucky, living with her brother and taking care of his wife who was dying. Grandma Francis told me much later that Mom had come to Kentucky to ask to stay with her, but Grandma Francis told Mom she could stay only one night then she would have to leave. My guess is she went to stay with her uncle, Bert’s parents, who also lived in Kentucky. 
 
Mom came home one day while Shirley was at the store and stole Bonnie Sue. Dad was mad at Shirley; as if she could have stopped Mom from taking her baby. Mom took Bonnie to Aunt Belvia’s and left her there. When Dad found out he went to Aunt Belva’s and got her back.

Mom sued Dad for a divorce and was at the house when they delivered the papers. Dad’s niece, Sue, was also at our house at the same time. She and Mom sat in the kitchen talking and joking about what Dad would do when he came home and saw the papers. They guessed Dad would just try and shoot Mom again. They both laughed at this and by the time Dad came home from work Sue had left.  

When Dad saw Mom at the table, he asked Mom where his shotgun was and to get it for him, so she went and got it for him. He then told Shirley and I to take the babies and leave the house. Shirley said no and picked up Bonnie. Mom took off running out the kitchen door and Dad told Shirley again to get the baby and go. Shirley still said no. She told him if he was going to kill her mother, she’s going to watch and be a witness. Dad realized that Shirley wasn’t going to leave so he took off out the kitchen door after Mom. 

Shirley and I followed right behind Dad. I had Ronnie by the hand and Lucille was beside me while Shirley still had Bonnie. We had just skidded out into the yard when we spotted her. Mom had gone around the backside of the house and was running up the railroad tracks. Dad lifted the gun to his shoulder and took aim.