Walking With My Brother in Pine Grove

A few years later you would not be able to drive from Pine Grove to South Fork because the Buffalo Bridge would be taken out. Even when my brother and I used to walk the road and over the bridge, for months they had been talking about building a new bridge and tearing down the old one, but people didn't get in much of a hurry around those parts. I guess they figured, you could walk, swim the murky, smelly South Fork of the Kentucky River, or you could just get out on highway 11 and take the long way around. After all, the long way was only about eight miles or so.

           

None of that would matter to me for much longer though, cause in a few years this whole area would become a memory. Then I would have no reason to go from Pine Grove to the other side of the river. But on those evenings after school, when we'd walk in that direction, it mattered.

           

My Grit paper route took me down that way too and it felt like a long way even though it was just from our house, down into Pine Grove and back. I include back, because I always did that, I always came back. Mary Snowden was my last customer. I always seemed to make it to her huge, cracked yellow two story house about the time the sun went down behind me. That meant that most of the time I rode my little piece of a bicycle back home in the descending black. There was only one really bad place and that was at Lowell Thomas's house, the Thomas brother who beat his boys, my age, and a little younger, the age of my brother; senseless, from time to time - with a trace chain. A trace chain was no instrument of discipline, but a chain you hooked to horses and around whatever you wanted the horse to pull for you.

           

I did mind, yes, I minded going by that house, really I guess for two reasons. For one thing, it was a hell of a long hill to climb just getting there and then they had diseased, but energetic dogs that always seem to know when I was finishing up my Grit paper route. They never bit me, but that did not keep them from chasing me and scaring the shit out of me. I kicked at 'em. Sometimes I even got off my bike and bent down to act like I was picking up a rock. That bluff always sent them scurrying for home. 

           

You can tell dogs like you can tell people. Those dogs had been thrown at before. Otherwise, you know nothing like somebody bending down and acting like he was going to pick up a rock would scare them. It's not like they are reincarnated or anything and can remember somebody hurling stones at them from a thousand years ago.

           

The road was gravel and dirt or dirt and gravel, you say potato, I saw potato, too. In fact, I say one potato two potato three potato four. That was what we always said when we were trying to decide something. The courageous leader of the group would say that as she went around bumping the circle of friend’s fists with hers. Can you imagine.

           

I only had maybe 10 customers who took the Grit newspaper. It was this tabloid thing that came out once a week. As I recall it was printed somewhere in Pennsylvania. They lured you into selling the paper by telling you how many famous people had sold it when they had been little. Most of the ones they mentioned were halfway famous, except for a few who were really famous. Right now I could not tell you a one of their names if my life depended on it.

           

But I can tell you this: I am not famous. And I can tell you another thing related to that:  being popular, to be a widely-known adult; has absolutely nothing to do with wanting to, because there has never been a person who wanted to get bigger than me, when I was a teenager. I thought about it all the time. I would be thinking about it in Algebra and get Cs as a result. I thought about it in German class and now I cannot tell you but just a word or two in German. I remember bitte, which is please and feder, which is pencil. Pass me a feder will you bitte? That is about the extent of my ability to converse in a tongue other than my native English, thanks in part to my desire to be famous.

           

Yep, I would think about being famous when I took a piss beside the road after all my papers were delivered and I could not hold it until I got back home. Way out there in the country like that, it might be fifteen minutes between cars out on the dirt and gravel or gravel and dirt road, so I would haul her out on demand and let er whiz. Do you suppose I will ever get famous, I would think to myself as I remounted that old bike of mine and headed for the trailer.

One Saturday, Earl and me took off walking toward Stewart's General Store, nevermind it was a good six or seven miles. The clouds were way up there, like pillows on a clothes line, and that old road would come up in your mouth when a car went by. Spitting little rocks from your mouth, and after some fast walking, on a scorching hot day, you could wipe off a mustache that looked like brown sugar and tasted like salt.

           

Every little while I would air it out and let Earl try to catch me. His legs were too short to keep up with me. My best friend Raleigh told me I was the fastest white man he had ever seen. I know I sure felt that way. When everything was clicking I felt like my legs were a bicycle wheel under me, like those pictures I would draw sitting in class, with arms in a running motion and the legs a circle with two dark triangles to indicate blurred speed.

           

We breathed the air deep as we walked, as deep as you could between car-kicked up dust storms. If I could walk that way on a Saturday morning with Earl right now, I would breathe a hole in the air. Now I know about how many times you are that free to wander off several miles, just to get an Ale-8 at a general store. About three or four, that's all. About three or four, freaking times, maybe five if you're lucky.

           

The road eventually turned to a broken asphalt, and that meant heat and soft tennis shoe bottoms. Heat rising off like water boiling for grits. Too much distance to cover; but too much urgency to get there and back, to let the heat slow you down.

“Take off your shirt if you're hot, that's the smart thing to do. Or be stupid and leave it on.”

It did not take much for me to get testy with Earl.

           

Young boys in logging trucks, complete with a load, flew by. Some of the boys might do that their whole life, drive one of those trucks. I did not know for certain that I would not. But I would have bet money against it and I would have won. Stewart, the old man that ran the General Store, really was an old man. His younger brother was the Superintendent of schools. It's like they had different genes. They only looked somewhat alike and Sedley the Superintendent, probably never paid many visits to Chester's General Store. It was the tale of two brothers, about to be repeated all over the place around there.

Those that want to get away, usually wind up far-far away, and those that either decide or get tricked into staying, stay about as close as you can get, to home that is. I am talking about a mountain home, terribly unlike the city or even just the country. Something is just different in Appalachia. I could not put my finger on it back then. I did not know that it had to do with Scottish-Irish immigration from Pennsylvania, south into the hills of Eastern Kentucky and on down into North Carolina, and that these people would become clannish and eventually what people elsewhere sometimes loathingly called hickish.

           

All I knew for sure was that I was deep into a boyhood, about to become something that seemed to be in control, but only in short stretches, about to venture into a life out there away from the world of rusty bikes, grimey cars and dirt roads. Out there away from little brother, too far to see him grow older; stronger; harder to talk to; harder to see. All that was about to become me.

Walking Into Oak Grove Missionary Baptist Church

Another Sunday morning at Oak Grove Baptist Church in Piedmont, South Carolina, twenty minutes before ten o’clock and the musicians are already playing between Sunday school and church. They have the windows rattling. The sun, at forty-five degrees, reveals shafts of blinking dust through the clear top part of the windows. The bottom windows were frosted at the factory. Stained glass was for richer, more ritualistic churches in town.

                  

Our Black and Red 56 Plymouth sits among Fords, Chevys, Buicks and other Plymouths. It’s 1963, the early part, still Camelot. Grandpa just opened granny’s door and he’s helping her out of the car. We see them and then they see us. Granny was smiling, although getting out of the car was not easy at her size. She was not tall, not even five feet, but she tipped the scales way over two hundred pounds. As the years went by, she would get even bigger, until real late in life she would lose some and then her whole body would be covered with chicken-neck skin.

                 

Mama’s purse, the size of a small suitcase, had lifesavers and other mysteries, so I walked with her and whispered for one. She walked toward the church with us, digging. I could never help myself by running my hand down in mama’s purse. She always told me, “Never get in a woman’s purse.” My guess is it had something to do with feminine hygiene products.

                  

“What are you digging for Joyce?” Grandpa asked in his wry way.

                  

“Michael wants a lifesaver, and he decides to ask me right now as we are walking in to the church. He couldn’t have asked me when we were still in the car you know,” mama said, making me look bad to Grandpa for wanting a lifesaver.

                  

“Here, I have a pack right here in my pocket, and the lord knows it’s not nearly as big as that feed sack you’re carrying,” Grandpa said, holding out his lifesavers.

                  

Grandpa Spearman reached me a lifesaver with his tan-leathered hand. I didn’t wait for the usual, “What do you say”. I said thanks pretty loud. Grandpa patted me on the head. I’m certain I took both the candy and the pat for granted. If I could go back there now, I would reach up and grab his hand and dwell on how it was like a baseball glove. I might pretend like a fortune teller and read his palm, trying to figure how long he would be with us. It turns out he would be with us only about nine more years, an eternity to a child my age, but what I now know to be a blink of the eye.

                  
The song coming down the aisle, out through the vestibule and then to where we were on the outside of the blond wood double doors, was, The Eastern Gate. All the instruments the church had to throw at the music were involved, a banjo, three kinds of guitars, a piano, an organ, a harmonica, a tambourine and a set of drums. They held nothing back. They flaunted musical machines the way the Church of Christ avoided them. Sometimes during morning worship service, when the weather was warm and the windows raised, you could see people sitting in their cars on the side of the road with their windows rolled down, smoking cigarettes and listening to the old-time gospel music.

                  

Daddy had fallen in stride with Junior Bryant, Frankie Bryant’s daddy. Frankie was the one playing the piano we were walking in to. This would have been the same Junior Bryant that usually played the guitar and two harmonicas at the same time, one with his nose and one with his mouth. It was also the same man that would, twenty-five years later, expose himself to granny Spearman, in the choir loft of another church. Granny told me about it and almost cried, because she felt so sorry for Junior, who had obviously lost his mind. Junior Bryant was not in the band playing yet, because his wife was sick at home and he had come just for worship service.

                  

The screen door slapped together as Cathy reached out to get it. She was always the first one in the church. She wanted to get with her friends and sit. I suppose it would have killed her to have to sit with her family. They let her get away with sitting somewhere else, but they had to keep an eye on me, so I sat right between mama and daddy. Earl sat on the other side of mama, to keep us separate.

                  

Earl was a toddler in daddy’s arms. Brenda was behind Cathy, trying to get a knot out of her hair. Her face was all twisted up, partly from the sunshine, but partly from the fact that she had both hands behind her head trying to gouge a bobby pin out of her hair, so she could get her brush through the tangle.  Before we got to the front door of the church, she had the tangle out and the bobby pin back in. The brush was in one of her hands. She slipped it in her purse, right before walking into the vestibule. I was glad I was not a girl. They had to mess with their selves way too much, ever time you went anywhere. It never made sense to me. Girls were way prettier than boys, but they usually acted like they were ugly and worked at fixing their hair or face, and the guys who really were ugly, did nothing to look better.

                  

We found seats near the front of the church. Grandpa and Granny sat with me and Earl and mama and daddy. We had not got there in time to get a back seat, but daddy didn’t want a back seat anyway, the way most of the other church families did. Some people would just about fight you over the back few pews. Cathy and Brenda found separate seats in the back with their friends. I had friends, but I couldn’t sit with them. I had cut up too many times in church. Junior Bryant went on up to the stage behind the pulpit stand, picked up his electric guitar and just like that, the Eastern Gate got louder and better.

                  

Everybody was standing around, coming in, milling about, shaking hands, some entering from the back of the church where they had been in Sunday school, walking down off the stage through the musicians, probably a little embarrassed at having to walk in time to the music and therefore almost feeling like they were dancing - a sin. We usually were there for Sunday school too, but on this morning we had woke up in plenty of time but then after mama and daddy had a fuss, she had gone in the bedroom to pout. By the time she was done pouting and we all got dressed, it had been time for Sunday school to be about over. It was nice to finally be in the church, listening to Oak Grove’s band music, instead of mama and daddy arguing over whose fault it was we had missed Sunday school.