Christmas is always about the
past. Ebenezer Scrooge's first and most poignant visit is with the ghost of
Christmas Past. And Truman Capote 's
"Christmas Memory" begins with fruitcake weather when he was a child.
I indulge myself today and strain
the patience of my readers by recalling a bit of my own past, primarily for
folks who know me. My occasional readers
may, with my apologies, skip over it and get back to the serious stuff I try to
write about the short story as a literary form.
I used to amaze and appall my
students with stories about my childhood. While they sneaked tweets and texts
on their i-phones, they smiled that we
did not have electricity in our house until I was twelve—and, of course, no
running water, or natural gas, not to mention no indoor plumbing. Carrying the
slop jar out to the toilet and gouging small chunks of coal out of a snow-covered
frozen pile in the yard were two of my responsibilities.
Now that I am seventy-three, I
recall that pre-adolescent era of my life with a kind of arrogant pride, especially
when I watch my seventeen-year old grandson transfixed in front of his laptop,
ear bud wires stringing down his cheeks, playing video games involving the kind
of super heroes I used to read about in limp and ragged comic books that we
swapped with cousins who lived on the other side of the railroad track a mile away.
I was the oldest of five children
and helped my mother care for my two brothers and two sisters, spaced, between
three and five years apart, from the time I was four. My father was a truck
driver and was usually gone on runs up to Cincinnati, Ohio or down to Knoxville,
Tennessee except on the weekends, which he spent listening to ball games on the
battery-powered radio. By battery, I don’t mean those little marvels of
compression that I have to constantly recharge, but rather a heavy pack of dry
cells that could have been used to start a car.
I always mark the beginning of my
life with a memory I never really had of my maternal grandfather and grandmother.
I see my grandmother sitting in a
small shack stringing and breaking green beans into her aproned lap. Her tanned
hands, although young, are already cracked and wrinkled from washing my
grandfather's clothes in hard lye soap and hoeing in the garden. She breaks the
beans quickly with a sharp snap and looks at her wedding day portrait on the
wall.
I look at a black and white copy
of that picture today on the wall behind my computer screen and remember it hanging
above the bed of my grandfather's living room, the string of flowers draped
across my grandmother's brimmed black hat tinted a faded rose. She stands
straight and proud, her round face solemn above the high white collar of her
blouse. Beside her, my grandfather stares straight into the camera with coal-black eyes and a thin moustache. He was
twenty six at the time; she was 21. Although only taken the year before,
already the girl in the picture must have seemed distant to the woman looking
at her. Her husband was down the road playing cards with men he worked with in
the mines.
Years after my grandmother died,
when my grandfather, paralyzed by a stroke, lay in bed in his small living
room, I would stare at that picture with the fire light flickering on the faces
and be afraid my grandmother's ghost haunted the house. When I was five, I had
clutched my mother's dress in front of her open coffin before the cold fireplace in the same room, the
sickly sweetness of the flowers mixing with the musty odor of the house. And
didn't my grandfather once tell us that he had heard her voice speaking to him
from a large rock at the corner of the garden up on the hill? He never told us
what she said.
She might have smiled looking
down at the beans in a lap, made smaller by the child in her belly. Then she
heard the shot. A sharp crack that made her jump and spill the broken beans.
She must have known immediately that it was Jarvey, for she grabbed a kitchen
knife and cut the newspaper backing off the picture, removing it from the frame
and rolling it up with a ribbon. Then she got the cardboard suitcase from under
the bed and placed the picture in it carefully, packing her stockings and
cotton underwear around it. She was gathering the rest of their few pieces of
clothing when, red- faced with drink, he came through the door. "I've shot
a man," he said. "We have to get out of here."
My grandmother told this story to
my mother many times, and she in turn told it to me—so often that it took on a
mythical quality, and I filled in with my imagination details that my mother's sketchy
version left out. I don't think my grandfather really killed that man, for the
law never came after him. But he was capable of it. He was known as "Black
Jarvey" when he was young, and it was said (another mythic story of my
family) that Devil Anse Hatfield asked him to ride with him in that well-known
feud that the History Channel and Kevin Costner have made more famous. He
turned Hatfield down. But I know he used to carry a small black thirty-eight
revolver that always tempted me from where it hung behind a picture of my
great-grandparents by the fireplace mantle.
Avoiding the main road, they took
off through the woods on foot and headed
north toward Eastern Kentucky, my mother said, where my grandfather knew a man
who might let him do some sharecropping. Somewhere in the mountains, my
grandmother gave birth to a premature boy, and, to my grandmother's everlasting
sorrow, my grandfather left it in a shallow grave. They walked, I don't know
how many days, until they came to a narrow valley along the Levisa Fork of the
Big Sandy River in Johnson County, Kentucky, where, indeed, a man my
grandfather knew did take him on as a sharecropper and gave him the use of a
hillside above the river where he built a living room and bought a cast iron
bed. It was in that bed that my mother, their last child, was born. And sixteen
years later, it was there that my mother gave birth to me, her first.
The house, which is just south of
Paintsville, Kentucky in an area called "The Nars," had a living room
with a fireplace, a narrow windowless kitchen, a concrete-floored dining room,
and two small bedrooms. The Nars, is, I learned at some point in my
childhood, a mispronunciation of the
word "Narrows." It aptly describes a long, lean corridor created by Levisa
Fork, bounded on both sides by hills so high that, depending on the season, the
sun came up late and set early. Just above the river was the C&O railroad
line. And just above that, in front of my grandfather's house, ran U.S. Highway
23.
By sharecropping, my grandfather earned
a strip of land about sixty yards wide, extending vertically from the top of
the hill to the edge of the river. There was very little of the steep rocky
hillside he did not cultivate. "If you can't eat it," he would say,
"I don't see no use planting it."
The two-mile strip known as the
Nars was anchored on one end by Depot Hill, at the top of which a bootlegger
named Peg Ward with a white pine 2x2 for a left leg lived and did business in a
small tar-paper shack. On the other end was Dead Man's curve, a hairpin, where
my father always said you could meet your own arse going around it. These were
the points where, no matter where you stood in the Nars, your line of vision ended.
There were only half a dozen modest houses in between.
Coming up U.S. 23 from town,
after you passed Peg Ward's place, there was a quarter mile of sheer rock
cliffs, where the road was so narrow that the big coal trucks nearly blew me
off on to the railroad track below. Then came what was called "the
breakdown" and the black-looking house of old Bob Rice and his wife
Sallie. Bob was a drunk, and when he couldn't afford Peg's bootleg whiskey, he
drank Mennen After Shave. The branch between his house and Papaw's was filled
with the squat, green empty bottles.
Just past Papaw's place was the
little house where I lived with my mother, father, two brothers, and a sister. Perched
on a rock cliff just above and beyond us was the house of Charlie Ray Baker and
his wife Nannie, a big woman my tiny mother almost had a fight with once, and
their four children. Just past another stretch of rock cliffs that lined the
road was the house where my paternal grandmother lived, and just above and beside
it a small house which for several years we rented from my Uncle Bill for
twelve dollars a month.
About a half mile on up the road,
where the river took a sharp bend, was Fred Price's big gray stone house with
an elaborate fish pond in front. If the Nars had been a far and distant land in
a fairy tale, Fred Price's place would have been the castle. Price owned the
pasture land above the highway all the way up to Dead Man's Curve. He also
owned the big red bull that chased my brother and me when we went to pick
blackberries or gather paw paws--a story my children and my grandchildren never
tired of hearing.
The last house, located at the
sharpest point of Dead Man's Curve belonged to my uncle Bill's girlfriend. Most
everyone thought she was a witch; she once took warts off my fingers by holding
my hands, closing her eyes, and mumbling words I couldn't understand. Just past
the curve was the Newsom Family Cemetery, where all my mother's people, as well
as my parents, are buried. There is a place marked out for me there, where
Jordan, my younger daughter, has promised to take my ashes. I have a small
polished wooden box on my bookshelf, which originally held an expensive bottle
of Irish whiskey, reserved for that purpose.
My grandfather's farm held a
great deal for such a small scrap of land. A few steps away from the house was
the smokehouse, where salted sides of meat lay on newspaper-covered shelves and
brown hams hung from hooks in the ceiling. Next was the open-slatted crib
filled with corn which I shelled for the chickens and threw in the pen for the
hogs. The barn had three stalls––one for the chickens and one each for a horse
and a cow, both of which were sold before I was born. The barn had a mysterious
second floor, which once held hay, but now was used for storing just about
anything that would not fit anyplace else.
My Uncle George, a small mine owner,
kept his black powder there, wrapped in heavy waxed paper in rough wooden
boxes. I was warned never to go near it.
But who could resist its powdery pungency? Also there, hanging from cross beams,
stretched on boards, were hides of muskrats trapped by my uncle Charlie. Beside
the barn was the hog pen, with one large
old sow that Uncle Bill was fattening. In the fall, my grandfather would hit it
on the forehead with a short-handled sledge, slit its throat when it fell to
its knees, hoist it up on a tripod, and expertly gut and dress it. Finally, at
the farthest edge of the property was the toilet perched on the side of the
hill above the road––a three–seater well stocked with slick-paged Sears
catalogues and corncobs.
From the time I was five years
old until I was sixteen, the Nars was pretty much my whole world. I went to
school in town––a county seat of a little over four thousand. No other children
from school lived in the Nars, so it was often lonely. Town, however, filled
with strangers, was frequently frightening, so I was always glad to get home.
My students at California State
University, Long Beach, where I taught for forty years, would of often ask me,
if I knew so much about the short story, why I did not write short stories. I
have tried to write stories about my life for the last sixty years and still have in my file cabinet
ragged typed pages of material I wrote when I was twelve. I really would like
to create a group of short stories from these experiences. But what often happens is that I get bored
trying to write them. Just moving my persona across the room seems so tedious
to me. I really love sentences rather than plots, but am not quite sure how to
construct a voice that captures the mysteries of my life.
Maybe my life has no mysteries;
maybe that is the problem. Whenever I begin to write, I hope I will find some
meaning in mere experiences, some central core in various anecdotes that will pull
the piece together and make it glow with significance. Part of the problem is
that I don’t seem to have that obsession that makes writers write fiction, that
compulsion that drives them to carry on and on. I used to think I did, when I
was young. But now I know better. I am a
reader, not a writer.
Happy Holiday to those who
stumble on this bit of personal background. I will get back to the real
business of my blog right after Christmas.
