Trouble on Troublesome

Trouble on Troublesome by Duke Payne Our land had come down to us from Pap's Grandpap, who had five hundred acres given to him by the state of Virginia for fighting against the King across the waters who kept our people poor while making himself richer. My greatgrandpap growed up in the Blue Ridge Mountains, so he figured he'd feel at home in our mountains. His five hundred acres were whittled away by so 27 many heirs by the time it got down to Pap there weren't but fifty acres. Luck was with us. More than half was good bottom land that could be cropped. We all worked hard, especially Mammy, as good a hand on the land as she was handy in the house. She always had enough garden sass [vegetables] to feed us through the winter . One summer when there wasn't hardly any rain, most folks didn't have more than a mite of garden. Mammy made us put two rain barrels on the sled and haul 'em down to the creek, fill one at a time with water and haul it back up the hill to where she was waiting in the garden with a gourd dipper to water every plant. While she was doing that, we went back down to the creek and filled the other barrel, so it went on for half a day, back and forth, until the mule and us was plum wore out. Mammy still had to go to the house and cook supper. Twice a week all through June, July, and part of August we done that, but we went into winter with yards of shucky beans hanging from every rafter on our porch, a dozen holes in the garden lined with straw and filled with cabbage and taters, and shelves in the cellar that Pap's Pap had dug in the hillside, all filled with Mason jars full of corn, peas, cucumber pickles, and blackberry jam. Mammy never let anything go to waste. At butchering time she pickled the feet and cooked the heads till the meat all fell off the skull bone and made souse out of it. Pap salted down the hams, side meat, backbone, and two shoulders in a big salt box that his Pap had hewed out of a poplar log. Most folks made sausage out of the trimmed off scraps, but not Mammy. She made Pap grind up two shoulders along with the trimmings. Because we all smoked pipes, we grew enough tobacco for our own use, usually two or three hundred plants. About August we cut the stalks, hung them in the barn to cure up brown, and when they were in case [ready] we stripped off the leaves, made them into enough twists to fill up a big wooden tub. We never smoked them until they had gone through the June sweat and dried out again. Pap and us boys augured out dry hickory to make our pipes and got stems from a canebrake down by the creek, Mammy wouldn't smoke nothing but a store-bought clay pipe. They were made especially for women, she said. She never looked as restful and peaceful as she did when she sat on the porch after washing the supper dishes and smoked her pipe. She had a bench to rest her legs on and a pillow to put under her knees. With her pipe in her hand taking a puff now and then she looked like she didn't have a worry in the world, but she'd be up and at work with the sun next morning. Pap's Pap built our house by a neverfailing spring of water under a ledge of rock. He dug a shallow pool, always full of water, and later built a rock house over it. He put shelves around three sides. Mammy kept them full with crocks of buttermilk, cream, and butter. In summertime there was nearly always a watermelon laying there cooling. Two of Pap's brothers and one of Mammy's lived within four miles, so Sunday there was always visiting and eating at one place or another. The womenfolk talked of...