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When I--Virginia Carol Shortt--was just six my daddy was killed. My sister, June Marie, who was nine, read me all about it in the newspaper. It said my daddy, Jed Shortt, a coal miner for the Clancy Valley Coal Company, was shot in the back and the bullet came out under his arm. It said the man who shot him, Donald Struthers, was arrested and charged with "man's laughter." That's how Junie read it--man's laf-ter. When I asked Mama, who knew everything, what man's laughter was, she said, "It's not man's laughter, Gin-Gin, it's man-slaw-ter, and it means murder."
For a while there were so many neighbors andkinfolks pouring in and out of our house, I didn't think much about murder and what it would mean to Mama and Junie and me. But then one day all the relations were gone, and the warm June sun threw a stillness over our little coal-company house. We moved around from room to room just touching stuff and looking at each other and wondering what was going to happen to us now that Daddy was gone.
Mr. Josh Clancy, the owner of the Clancy Valley Coal Company, came to see Mama and told her she would have to move out of the coal-company house. The houses in the camp, he said, were reserved for coal miners and their families, and the coal company let you live there for free as long as you worked for them. Mama just hung her head and said she didn't know what in the world she was going to do. Then Mr. Clancy looked like he wished he was someplace else.
"There's no hurry, Mrs. Shortt," he said to her. "I'll see if I can help you find a place."
That was in 1948, and me and Mama and Junie and Daddy had lived in Clancy Valley Coal Camp for as long as I could remember. It was a part of the coal-mining area nestled in the rugged Appalachian Mountains of Virginia's far western point.
All the houses were alike, square brown wooden boxes. There was a partition running down the middle of each house that separated the quarters ofthe two families living there. You went to the company store for food and clothes, and you paid with little tickets the company gave you. You went to the company doctor when you were sick, and he gave you medicine for free.
There was a movie house, too, in Clancy Valley that cost just ten cents to get in, and Daddy and Mama took us to lots of shows. And we got popcorn and ice cream. Now, if we had to leave and live in a new place, I wouldn't know what to act like. I'd never even seen another place except Coaltown, the county seat.
A few days later Mr. Clancy came back and said there was a house on Sweet Creek Holler three miles down the river that Mama could buy for only two thousand dollars. It was right below his own house, and he took Mama to see it.
That night Poppy came to visit us. Poppy was Daddy's daddy. He was an electrician in Mr. Clancy's mines. Me and Junie loved Poppy and Granny better than anybody else except for Mama and Daddy. Poppy was always laughing and joking and swinging us over his head like rag dolls, but that night he didn't laugh a bit. He sat with Mama in the kitchen and cried, and they talked real serious. I wondered where Granny was, but I didn't ask. There didn't seem to be a good time to butt in.
Finally, Poppy said he could raise a thousand dollarsfor us. The other thousand Mama would get from Daddy's life insurance. So it seemed like we would be moving to Sweet Creek Holler.
Poppy borrowed a truck to move us and the way was long and hot because I had to sit all scrunched up amongst Mama and Junie and Poppy in the cab of the truck. I thought I would suffocate to death.
Sweet Creek branched off from the Levisa River valley over a big steel bridge. Then the truck started snaking up the dirt road to the house we were moving to. The holler was skinny between the mountains. The road was chiseled out of the side of one mountain base, and was just barely wide enough for the truck to travel without slipping into the creek. Houses were stuck on the sides of the hills, many with stilts underneath to prop them up level. Others had footbridges running from the road across the creek and on to the front porches. Some were made of cinder blocks, a few were white board, or brick, but most of them were tar-paper shacks.
People came out of their houses and stood on their front porches or in their little bitty yards to see who was passing by in a big truck all loaded down with stuff. Potbellied mamas carried their babies on their hips and squinted their eyes into the cab of the truck. Dirty young 'uns swung on a gate or twined their half-naked bodies around a porch post and lookedat us. The men were still in the mines. Around every curve, a bunch of children scattered like chickens to get out of the road where they were playing marvels or jump rope, hopscotch or May I?, and twice Poppy had to slow the truck while first a pig, then a cow grumbled and moved out of the way.
I was getting pretty tired when all of a sudden we stopped beside a brown tar-paper shack and Poppy said, "This is it."
It was a four-room shack with a patch of weeds out front that was supposed to be the yard, and running alongside the road was an overgrown garden shaped like a piece of pie and ending at a bridge below. The house, yard, and garden were all closed in by a rusty wire fence with a sagging gate opening to the creek in back and another opening to the front. Across the creek, the mountains loomed straight up to the sky, and on the other side of the road in front, they humped up again. The mountains were all green in June, hunkering over the valley like bent-over giants, holding Sweet Creek Holler close in one deep wrinkle away from the rest of the world. The sky was a channel of blue you had to look straight up to see.
Poppy started unloading the truck, with Mama doing all she could, and they told me and Junie to stay out of the way. Then some men came by and offered to help. These were big rough men with coal dust all over them, on their way home from work.They had hollow eyes and sharp features and hands like shovels. Poppy had told us that the men of Sweet Creek were independent miners who owned their own homes and were paid with money instead of company tickets.
Junie and I were standing beside the gate, watching and listening, when this little redheaded gal with her thumb in her mouth came up and gouged me. She held out a paper poke without saying a word. I took the poke and she turned around and ran back into the shack next door to ours. The poke wiggled. I peeped in, and out jumped this li'l ole puppy dog, just licking me all over and wagging his tail. He was a short, stumpy, brown armful. Me and Junie started giggling.
"Kain't we keep 'im, Mama? Huh? Please, Mama?" I begged.
"I reckon so, Ginny." She smiled at me and the puppy as she carried Daddy's RCA Victor into the house.
It didn't take long for the men to have everything in place in the house. Mama started fixing supper while Poppy thanked them for helping. Then Poppy got in the truck and hollered goodbye as he was driving off.
Supper was soup beans, fried taters, side meat, corn bread, and green onions. Mama thinned cannedevaporated milk to wash down the corn bread. It was good.
After supper, me and Junie played with the puppy while Mama put things away. We bounced an old sock in front of his nose and watched him make for it. I found out if I let out a Boo sound with my lips right loud, that puppy would light into me like he was bound to tear me up. We got to giggling over that teeny dog thinking he was so big.
"You're funny and you're my buddy," I said to him.
"Buddy!" Junie said. "Let's call him Buddy."
"Okay," I...
