Oral History (9781101565612) (32 page)

Not like Almarine, who is all the time trying to get us to go into the AmWay business with him and Debra. The more people they get, see, the closer him and Debra get to being a diamond distributor, or a ruby or a emerald distributor, or whatever the hell it is he wants so bad.

“I'll buy your soap,” I said, “and I'll buy your oven cleaner,” I said, “but by God that's it and you might as well take all those cosmetics right out of this house.”

I am not about to go fooling around with any soap cosmetics.

I told Almarine that, too, right to his face.

“I don't buy a thing but Mary Kay,” I said. “Now get that straight.” Roy was laughing and laughing. Lord, I love the way that man can laugh. And Almarine leaning forward, just so serious, he was sitting right there on that couch.

“Tell me your dreams,” he said. Almarine learned that at the AmWay convention, they tell you to say that and write them down.

“I dreamed I went to a demolition derby in my Maidenform bra.” Roger said that—that's my grandson, Roger, with the smart mouth. We were all in here in the family room looking at Almarine sitting on the couch with all that soap and air fresheners and nail polish and God knows what-all spread out around him like he was a regular store. And putting on weight, too, I noticed—Almarine used to be a tackle in high school and now he's got this real big neck.

“No, I'm serious.” He held his pencil up in his hand like he was back in tenth grade, taking a spelling test. “Tell me your dreams,” he said.

“Shit, Almarine,” Roy said. “Come on.”

So finally Almarine got up and went home. If he had any sense he would of known he'd never get anyplace with me and Roy who are the only people on our street who haven't ever planted any grass in our yard so we won't have to mow it. That's how we are.

But Almarine is always telling people that if they go in the AmWay business their life and their marriage will improve.

“It's a couples business,” Almarine says.

Shows you how much he knows.

But my whole family is like that. People say they're haunted and they are—every one of them all eat up with wanting something they haven't got. If it's not being a double ruby it's something else. Roy says that watching my family carry on is better than TV. They've
always
been like that—not Ora Mae, of course, but she's another case altogether, and not Pappy, that's Luther—any more since he's gotten so old and crazy he's forgotten what it was that he wanted so bad although all the rest of us remembers it real well as you might imagine. But the rest of them, Lord!

When Roy fell off of the truck about a month ago and got his knee smashed up so bad, I told him the whole story, I never had told it before, Roy sitting home in a leg cast so he couldn't do anything else
but
talk.

“Listen,” I said, and I got him a beer, “I'll start at the beginning,” I said, which I did, and although I told it the best I could, I'm still not sure I got it straight. It took me a day to tell the whole thing.

 

I've always said this: either a person loves their mama or they don't. And either a family will work or it won't, that may not be the way it is everywhere, and especially not now with women's lib, but that's the way it was here, when I was growing up.

You've been in those houses too, the ones that don't work, and you know what that's like, the kind of house that makes your blood pressure go up just to put one foot inside the door, everybody yelling and snapping off each other's heads, breaking stuff, running off in all directions, and once the kids are gone they never come back, oh they might send a Christmas card or something but that's it, couldn't wait to get the hell out of Dodge, and who's to blame them? or else it's the kind of house you go in there and it's so quiet and you can hear a pin drop all the time. Everything happens the same way every day, same time, you know you almost die you get so bored. Nobody has got anything to say to anybody else.

This is the kind of house my friend Lois Crowe grew up in, you couldn't even open the Frigidaire Lois said between meals and you had to sit on plastic on the chairs. The end of that story is the way her mama, who was such a housekeeper, got at the last, how she took to washing her hands about twenty or thirty times every day, but then every time she got them clean, she'd just stand in front of the sink and holler for Lois or Ozell or one of the kids to turn off the water because she couldn't stand to touch the faucets, see, she had gotten her hands so clean.

Well, there is houses and houses, I guess.

Sometimes I'll be driving along over to Black Rock or up to Richlands or something, and I'll pass by a bunch of company houses—the kind we used to live in, at the Blackey camp—and I'll get to looking real close, and wondering what kind of families live in each one and what-all they do, what makes them tick, you might say, or not tick as the case might be and often is, I guess—all those houses just alike, and all the families inside them different, but those houses still exactly the way ours was then, that porch on stilts and the cool dark place beneath it where we played, wringer washer on the front porch, the front room where the sofa was and the lamp from Ohio with tassels, and Mama and Pappy's bed, and the back room where all the rest of us stayed except for Lewis Ray, the baby.

Pappy made him a little bed in a box by the kitchen stove when he was born, and even when he got bigger, he slept in there. Once Lewis Ray set his mind on something, he just had to have his way. Our house was like the rest. And we were like the rest, too, I guess, us children, snot-nosed and sniveling, and hungry half the time, playing games we made up straight out of our heads.

I remember us all getting in that old Dodge out in the yard and taking a trip to the West. “Where the cowboys are,” I'd say. And Billy used to tell us over and over how much Tom Mix had been hurt: blown up once, shot twelve times, hurt forty-seven times in the movies alone which didn't even count stuff, Billy said, like knife cuts. “Turn left,” I'd say, “for the Grand Canyon.” “I don't wanna go in the Grand Canyon,” Lewis Ray'd start hollering. He was so stingy and contrary we never let him play if we could help it. “I wanna go out West,” he yelled, “where the cowboys are.” “The Grand Canyon
is
West,” I had to tell him, so he'd shut up, and Pearl and Maggie sat on the back seat folding their hands like ladies and giggling.

I remember those times we'd go with Pappy over to the fiddlers' convention at Matewan and sit under the big old shade trees along the banks of the Tug, and Pappy'd walk off with all the prizes.

And sing! He sang to us by the hour in those days. Songs he made up or the old songs, songs he just naturally knew. Such as for instance “Barbary Allen,” or “Fair and Tender Ladies,” or—this was my favorite—“Down in the Valley.”

I can still see it all so plain, us of an evening, sitting out on the porch, and Pappy on the steps with his guitar or his dulcimore across his knees, and all of us sitting around out there on the porch in the dark or out in the cool dark yard.

“Down in the valley, valley so low, hang your head over, hear the wind blow,” Pappy would sing, his voice so pure and true at that time it was like it never came out of him at all, it was like it was something he called up out of the dark green summer air and out of the mountains themselves—“hang your head over, hear the wind blow.” The neighbors used to come over too, you could see the end of Horace Stiles's cigarette shining red by the corner of the house where he stood, and the women's dresses light in the shadows of the porch.

It's a funny thing but I don't know now whatever happened to Horace or any of all those Stileses.

Way up on the side of Hurricane, where the slag heap from the coal camp was, you could see the red glow of the burning slag, which never went out, and when the wind was right you could smell it, a sweet-awful smell that doesn't smell like anything else in the world but it's got a little sulfur in it somehow, enough sulfur anyway so that every time I peel a boiled egg nowadays it takes me right back there in a flash, just like I never left, like we are all still sitting around there listening to Pappy sing. “Send me a letter, send it by mail, send it in care of the Birmingham jail.” He had the prettiest voice, he could go up high if he wanted just like a woman, or down real low, he could almost whisper and still be singing. I've heard it said a million times that Pappy could of made a mint if he'd of wanted to, if he had ever written down those songs he made up or if he had gone to Nashville and got on the radio. I believe this is true. But Pappy didn't want any more than he had, I think—or I'll say it this way—he already had everything he wanted.

Which was Mama.

Now the funny thing about our family at that time was how the whole thing turned around her. It's like the kaleidoscope we got that year for Christmas that Lewis Ray took such a fit over, and wanted to hold all the time and not share, and got his way, of course, like he always did.

But I remember looking in that kaleidoscope too, and how it had a bright blue spot in the middle of all the patterns, one spot that never moved no matter which way you turned it or how many pretty bright patterns came and went all around. Our family was like that, with Mama at the center, not doing anything particular but not
having
to either, and all the rest of us falling in place around. Whatever she was doing, it was like Mama was
waiting
somehow, caught up in a waiting dream. Mama was so beautiful then, and she never raised her voice. I said, she didn't have to. There are some people like that, you know, where the whole world just gets in line to help them out. And if it's that kind of person, you don't mind being in that line.

Most nights, after supper, and after
Amos 'n' Andy
, I'd get the lantern and Mama would get the bucket, and if it was winter I'd put on Pearl's winter coat which was the warmest, and we'd go out to the sidetrack which ran down the mountain close by the house, and after the train came by, striking sparks off the rails, we'd go along the track picking up the coal it spilled along the track. They used to overload them at the tipple on Hurricane.

“Mama, we've got enough now,” I'd say finally, but sometimes she didn't seem to hear, walking head down into the wind. “Mama!” I'd say. A lot of times, it was like she was listening to something couldn't none of the rest of us hear. I'd run to catch up piling handfuls of coal into her bucket, and I'd pull at her hand until finally she turned back and then we'd walk the dark track together, home.

I would have done anything for Mama, and did. She called me her little right hand and swore she couldn't get along without me, and it was true, no matter what Ora Mae thought.

Ora Mae would not leave us alone. Mama seemed to draw her too like she drew the rest of us, around and around, the only difference being that Ora Mae didn't want to be that way, and all the rest of us did.

I grew up with Ora Mae there like anything else we had to contend with, like the flash floods that came in the spring, or how they kill your favorite hog to put meat on the table, or how they would up and lay people off at the mine without telling them first not so much as a by-your-leave.

I grew up with Ora Mae like some kind of a natural aggravation.

I didn't care, then. We had a lot to put up with in those days and we put up with all of it and didn't care. We were happy. This is why Billy—that's Ora Mae's son—he wanted to live with us instead of her, and most of the time he did. Ora Mae couldn't hardly get him to go home at all.

Billy was curly-headed and blond, like that daddy of his we never saw nor ever heard much about, either. And he was smart. But flighty, lots of ideas and no real sense (I'll say it—I was the only one with any sense, out of all us children, I mean. It's true. I was. And I was the one who was good, which may be the reason that when I turned bad, I went so far the other way. But in those days, in a way I never liked, I was the one who took after Ora Mae, which may be the reason I hate her so much and won't let her in my and Roy's house—I wouldn't let her come in here if she begged me, which she won't. I've got her number, old Ora Mae, and she's got mine). So Billy was flighty and silly and giggled a lot, a kind of a sissy almost, and afraid of the dark. He used to wet his bed instead of get up and go to the outhouse, even after he was a big, big boy. It seemed like me and Mama were all the time boiling sheets whenever Billy had been at our house.

Billy as a boy reminds me of a wire strung out in the wind, like those highwires Roy works on sometimes that scare me to death. When the wind blows real hard they start whining, a high-pitched terrible whine. Billy was like that. I used to think he might just fly off any day and disappear in all directions over the world.

Which he might have, if it wasn't for Maggie, who was everybody's favorite next to Mama. Maggie looked the most like Mama, which was probably part of it, real pretty, but also she was sweet. If Maggie didn't have something good to say about something, why then she just never said a thing. Some people like that can drive you crazy, but not her, because all of it was
natural
. If it's not natural, it pisses you off. Maggie used to keep Billy calmed down, she was not a thing like Pearl, even though when they were little, folks called them identical.

Well those twins were not identical, they were just as different as night and day. It's funny the way I think of the twins, even now, like I was their big sister instead of it being the other way around. I was just so
good
then—well I said that.

But Pearl was out for blood. I mean never satisfied, not for one minute, always worrying, whether it was over a coat she thought didn't look good on her or somebody she thought didn't like her. If I think of Pearl even right today, with her now dead and gone, what I see in my mind is those thin pretty white hands of hers grabbing and grabbing out at the air. Pearl was the worst one for wanting, of all of us. And the biggest fool. You could see it in her eyes, pretty eyes, blue eyes, exactly the color and shape of Maggie's, but while Maggie's eyes were like a pool and it was restful looking into them, Pearl's eyes were glittery and jumped around. They looked wet and kind of
smeared
.