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Gayle Compton 557 Gayle Compton “Long Distance to Detroit” Gayle Compton was born and grew up in a coal camp in Pike County. With lively humor, good will, and respect, he writes poems and stories about the mountain people and their way of life, including the ones who move to Detroit and sometimes have difficulty communicating with their loved ones back home. h MILDRED (answering the telephone): Charlie Bob Tucker’s residence. OPERATOR: I have a collect call from Ms. Irene Sweeney, Peabrook, Kentucky . Will you accept the charges? MILDRED: Yes, mam, put her on. IRENE: Hello, Mildred? Is that you? Well, it’s about time. I been trying to get a hold of you for over a week now. Ever time I call up there I get a place name Joe’s Pool Hall and a feller named Eightball that sounds for the world like your Charlie Bob. I hated to call collect but I wanted to ask you about that old ironing board you got stored down at Mommy’s. I called three times yesterday and got a funeral home and some smart aleck that tried to make me a deal on a casket. He sounded just like your Charlie, too. Reckon everybody up there talks just alike. Just this morning I called the same number and got Tucker’s Whorehouse. What kind of place is Detroit anyhow? MILDRED: Oh, Irene, it’s just so nice here. You’d love it. We all just got back from a weekend at Boblo Island and . . . IRENE: Well, I just hope you’re having better weather for it than we are. Don’t know from one minute till the next what it’s going to do down here. Saturday it was just as warm! People out plantin’ their peas and onions, and that old Nadine Thacker out in them shorts mowing her yard and showing her hind end. Next day we got a tornader. Why honey, yesterday it was snowing and thundering and lightning all at the same time! Hail balls big enough to knock the winder lights out. They can call it El Nino if they want to, but we didn’t have weather like this, Mildred, until they started putting up all them old rockets and saddlelights, going to Mars, messing with the Ozarks and walking around on the moon. Course, Homer says ain’t nobody never been on no moon. He says they just took them pitchurs in a desert somers. Where’s this Boblo Island? 557 558 The Kentucky Anthology MILDRED: Oh Irene, dear, it’s my favorite place in Michigan. Me and Charles, we took the kids and got on this big boat— IRENE: I heard about Charlie Bob getting his back hurt on that night watching job up yonder. A body can’t be too careful. To beat it all, Homer’s hurt his back too. Pulled it picking up a case of beer the wrong way. I doubt if he’ll ever work again. He’s getting him a lawyer. Lord, he gets on my nerves sometimes! He’s not even suppose to be here. No! He moved back in about a month atter we started getting our checks. Said he missed his family so bad he couldn’t hardly stand it. All he does, Mildred, is lay around and eat and work on that old motorcycle of his’n. He’s got it scattered all over the house. The other day he had the motor baking in the oven and the pistons boiling in my big kettle on the cookstove. Only God knows why. He claims he’s crippled but you ought to see the way he acts when that old sorry Nadine comes on the place. That Nadine’s no count. Just like her mother. Mayfern was the same way. Had six young’uns and nary a one of them had the same daddy. She paid for it though. That’s the very reason that last child of hers, bless his sweet heart, was born afflicted and marked by a bullfrog. How’s your young’uns? MILDRED: Fine as can be, and loving their new school. Billy got sick on us, though, on the boat over to Boblo I— IRENE: You know, Mildred, I don’t know what I’m going to do with Eugene . Stands up and sasses me and won’t go to school a-tall. It don’t do no good to whup him. This morning I gave him...

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