When Aunt Rachel arrived, we were rocking on the front porch. She had ordered Ralph, the taxi driver, to blow the horn. My mother accepted her joviality as a good sign, an omen announcing her cure, but my grandmother’s face betrayed a darker assessment. Her cheeks had turned red and her mouth hung open with disbelief. “Would you ever!” she gasped. “The likes of it!” she placed her hands to her lips.
Aunt Rachel hung partially out of the cab’s right back seat window. Two balloons—one blue, the other yellow—bounced against the vehicle’s doors. When she stepped out of the cab, her purse fell off her lap, and its contents spilled across the drive. Ralph hurried to her rescue, while she reached back inside for her valise and a hatbox. She was wearing a stunning pink dress, cut rather low about the breasts, though she had so little to display. Even as a child of six, I knew a flat-chested woman from one with a fuller bosom. And poor Aunt Rachel had nothing to reveal, or conceal. She and my mother often laughed about it. But, there Aunt Rachel stood, her purse and hatbox in hand, with the balloons’ strings tied about her wrist, her face aglow with renewed self-confidence and the rosy blush of sobriety. I immediately scooted from my rocker and hurried down the steps to hug her. “Tommy, Tommy!” she whispered, as she bent down to kiss my cheek. Tears filled her eyes. My mother quickly followed. Aunt Viola walked stiffly behind her. My grandmother rose from her rocker, swallowed the lump in her throat, no doubt, and made her way with a bruised pride into the circle about Aunt Rachel.
“Rachel! You break my heart, but you’re what you are.” My grandmother placed her arms about Aunt Rachel’s neck and kissed her. “Who am I to condemn you? Forgive me, dear. Holman wouldn’t have it any other way.”
“Mama Edmonds, there’s nothing to forgive,” she kissed her in return. “I’m sorry for all the pain I’ve caused you, and always seem to cause. I’ll be going home soon.”
“Now, now! What family doesn’t have its delitescent sorrows? We will survive. That’s the Edmonds motto. Sic jurat transcendere montes. You must dare to cross life’s mountains! Come dear. You must be hungry as well as tired. And you, too, Ralph. Come on in and have a bite with us.”
“Thank you, ma’am, but I’ve got to get on. The bus from Bluefield will be arriving soon. But I’m much obliged.”
Aunt Rachel reached in her purse and handed him a five-dollar bill. “Thank you, Ralph. You’ve been wonderful.”
“It’s always my pleasure, ma’am. Well, I’d best be off!” he tipped his hat and returned to his cab.
It was late afternoon before Uncle Jim’s wagon came trundling into view. Grandmother tried to persuade him and her sister-in-law to spend the night, but Uncle Jim preferred to drive on. “Thanks, Kate,” he called her by her middle name, “but we can be home before dark.”
“I don’t believe it,” she said. “You and Viola need to think about boarding that place up and coming down here. I’ve got two empty tenant houses you can choose between. Anything could happen to you, and you know it.”
“Well, we’ll give it some thought.”
My mother assisted Viola into the wagon, and we waved as the couple rode off.
Aunt Rachel left the following week. Her original intention had been to remain for most of the summer, attend the wedding, and then go home. But after her stay at the sanitarium, she resolved that it was time for her to return to Roanoke.
After she departed, the house seemed empty. Mr. Chappels returned from Richmond and continued to court my mother. In the meanwhile, Uncle Everett came by periodically to check on the farm and us.
With the coming of April, plowing and seedtime resumed, and great activity broke out across the land. Since I was not in school, and wouldn’t be enrolled until the fall, I had a child’s run of the fields and barnyards, allowed to participate in whatever caught my fancy, or my mother and grandmother consented to let me do. I got to ride on the backs of the big draft horses, cling to the drag when it came time to break up the plowed clods, take the horses down to the creek for water, and, once their harnesses were removed, feed them huge ears of hard yellow corn, or a half-pail of oats each. I also enjoyed gathering eggs, feeding the chickens, slopping the hogs, and playing with the tenant farmer’s children, whenever they didn’t have chores of their own.
Two of the children were close to my age, a five-year old boy named Russell, and his four-year old sister, Cruella. They hailed from sturdy mountain stock, to say the least. Russell was a tough little kid and always wanted to fight. We frequently wrestled each other and would hit each other hard on the arms. His sister liked to play with dogs, especially when the dogs were in heat. This was all new to me, and even I came away shocked one afternoon when I stumbled upon Russell and Cruella having sex with a dog. Russell was holding it by its hindquarters, while Cruella had taken off her panties and the dog was humping her back. My curiosity overrode any sense of buggery or morbid wrong. Later, the three of us played “doctor-nurse,” Russell and I practicing on Cruella what the dog had more successfully performed. That continued for most of the summer until Pearl caught us doing it in the apple house and threatened to tell my mother. “You leave those thrash alone!” she reprimanded. “Good Lord, boy! Your mother would skin you alive!” I doubted that, but I had no desire to anger or hurt my mother. I avoided the two children, but occasionally I would play “husband-wife” with Cruella in the barn. She would pull down her panties and I would slip out my “winky,” as my grandmother called it, and press it against Cruella’s tight, little crevice. It was only in my teen years that I realized what we were supposed to have been doing. But by then Cruella and her family had moved on.
Summer ushered in many exciting activities. Earl, Pearl’s father and one of the older farmhands, hitched up the wagon one noon and took me with him into the Knobs to cut a load of firewood for the kitchen’s cookstove. We stopped near the top of the ridge, overlooking Uncle Jim’s farm, before turning off into an old growth of hickories and oaks. Earl carried a long, wobbling steel saw over his shoulder and cut up a number of logs from fallen trees. He watched me carefully, but allowed me to assist with the sawing. Since I was a tall, stout boy, I was able to pull the saw in unison with him, but he had to do the heavier, muscular work and load the logs onto the wagon. Later, he split them into stovewood-size pieces and let me whack away with a hatchet to create kindling. He oversaw everything I did and taught me how to swing the hatchet with clean smooth strokes, creating slender sticks that would ignite quickly. He rarely called me “Tommy.” Instead, he addressed me as “Son.” I thought that strange at the time, but his calling me “Son” made me feel special. He had lost his only son in a mowing accident. Pearl would often retell how “his horse done reared up when he come upon this rattlesnake, and Felston fell right off, face fo-m’st in the blades. It ripped him up like a hog.” It was Earl who let me sit on the drag, ride the horses down to the creek for water, and perform other chores within my range. He never once raised his voice in anger, swore, or grew impatient over anything around me. He sometimes ate with us in the kitchen, since his wife, or Pearl’s mother, was dead, but he always walked back to his cabin at night. Two brothers and their wives and children lived there, as well. It was his brothers who did the larger portion of the plowing, planting, harvesting, suckering of tobacco, hay bailing, thrashing of the wheat, cutting and shocking the corn, and, at Thanksgiving time, slaughtering the hogs. The latter, however, constituted a colossal undertaking, requiring every farmhand’s effort for an entire week. Not even the women were exempt. They worked harder than the men, cutting off the fat for lard and grinding up scraps for sausage, which they peppered and stored in long, greasy, cloth sacks.
During berry picking time, we descended on the hills like locusts. First, came the strawberries and later blackberries, mulberries, and cherries. Like primitive food-gatherers from some wandering ice-age tribe,