Martyrdom of the Onions (review)

father ran in opposite directions, and they haven't had honey since that summer. They describe their house, which is constandy being added on to; a hard rain that flooded die basement. They tell what it's like to ride die school bus off the mountain to school: At the post office, there's a Coke machine and a "sign pointing to Pumpkin Center, which is not on die map but is still a place where people live." They tell about a cemetery; an abandoned house that is their haunted house (there's another house that can be seen only "between four o'clock and six o'clock, from a certain point on the road, on Tuesdays and Thursdays"); a trip to the river and an encounter with a nest of yellowjackets; a raft trip down the river with their parents; tree houses; forts; secret places. In "A Hidden Cave and Something We Hid" the boys tell about burying a time capsule in a cave. "It would be something somebody might find five hundred years later and it would tell them something about us. We put things our dad calls 'Good Medicine'—things that are important to you and so have a spirit—in a quart mason jar ... . Some of the things we put in were arrowheads, some baseball cards, a piece of rubber, a plastic necklace, a battery, a comic book, and a two-dollar bill." Our Mountain is itself a time capsule, for it will tell anyone who comes across it, now or years later, not only something about these boys, Jimmy and Corey Allder, but something about all boys, anywhere, at any time. Ellen Harvey Showell has caught her grandnephews' interests, enthusiasms, and puppy-dog curiosity ("What I want to know is, why do spiders make their webs so neat?"). In so doing, she has captured something at once unique and universal. Jimmy and Corey Allder are contemporary Tom Sawyers and Huck Finns. Their story, Our Mountain, puts me in mind of Twain's books, and of the delightful I Thunk Me A Thought, the journal of a turn-of-the-century southern Appalachian boy, Will McCaIl, published in the mid-1970s. Ellen Harvey Showell is the author of The Ghost of TiIUe Jean Cassoway, winner of the South Carolina Children's Book Award. Jimmy and Corey Allder live in Auto, West Virginia. With Our Mountain, Ellen Harvey Showell has hit on a splendid idea: letting kids everywhere tell about their families, neighborhoods, communities— places, on or off the map, where people live. —Jim Wayne Miller Michael Chitwood. Martyrdom ofthe Onions. Troy, Maine: Nightshade Press, 1991. 35 pages. $6.00. Michael Chitwood doesn't just write about martyred onions; his new chapbook 71 also includes odes to grease, goats, groceries, and grandma. Chitwood's Virginia mountain heritage incorporates truck stops and country stores, a fiddlers' convention and a family reunion, all in poems that are in no way "down home" despite the choice of subject matter. For example, meet Chitwood's mountain grandmother: How she hated the ungoverned crawl of the wisteria that had coiled to the top of the backyard loblolly, though I did see her, more than once, take its lilac perfume like a sinful dip of snuff. At the fiddlers' convention, after stabbings, drunken judges, and "limping" amateur bands, the real reason for being there surfaces: But when some tobacco-stained fence rail in bibs from Algoma or Sparta or Mouth of Wilson draws down the first note of "Bonny Prince Charles," you remember the fiddle is bagpipes in a box. Not all, though, is so picturesque: The frenzied wriggling of maggots is a sexual ecstasy, the happiness of their bodies which is the happiness of the working mouth. Over lunch, I heard a woman say to another. "And your sexual appetite?" You'll meet Patsy Cline, the Hodges boys and their father ("identical bellies like flour sacks hunker around an International Harvester engine"), Uncle 72 Lester, and old Tinker Powell in die pages of Martyrdom of the Onions, and perhaps Patsy Cline best described this book when asked what she'd sound like if people could only see her through her voice. "Trouble...