My Father's Stories

My Father's Stories 22 by Meredith Sue Willis City people don't settle back when they listen to one another tell stories. In the city, it's the punch line you listen for. That was the difference I didn't catch right away. In the city you might even interrupt the storyteller with your own quip and raise the ante. In the city, you don't settle back to listen, you lean forward . Whereas, when my father was a boy and used to spend summers in Blackwater , Virginia, where both his parents were born, people sat way back. They sat in swings and on cane bottom rockers and on the porch steps. They waited for the midday heat to ease and the cornbread and bacon-boiled beans to settle. Somebody would start telling a story, and if you'd heard it already, that didn't matter any more than it mattered that hymns and ballads were sung over. You never jumped in. You waited your turn. You might have to wait till you were a grown-up, but you knew there would be time for you too, someday, the Lord willing. So you gazed out at the shimmer of heat between you and the side of the unpainted barn, or maybe at a little dust in the distance on the dirt road, or at the ripe tobacco in the field, and you let Uncle Eck reminisce about when he was in the army in the first war. Or someone would tell about the aunt who was so pretty and smart as a button and went for a teacher but died of influenza in 1919. Or it might be a story about finding a black snake in the bed. That latter sort of story would be aimed slyly but especially at my father, who was considered a town boy, since his father had long since left the farm. Papa Willis had the American desire to move. He signed on as a store manager with the coal company, and they relocated him to Burdine, Kentucky; Coburn , Virginia; Owings and Shinnston, West Virginia. And every summer, wherever the family was, they would drive through the mountains in their Model T to Blackwater . My father tells about one of those trips. He is in a room full of relatives, he says, and Papa Willis makes him stand up and turn around in the center of the room. "Now, isn't he a big one?" says Papa Willis. "Ain't he growed big!" answered all the relatives. "Like a big old heifer," says my father, still shaking his head fifty years later. "They stood me up and turned me around like I was a big old heifer." He doesn't mean this to be a criticism of Papa Willis, just a fact to wonder at. To my father, Shinnston, West Virfinia , represented grand new vistas, his was the great world to him in a way city people can hardly imagine. Shinnston had folks from Syria and Spain and Yugoslavia. Shinnston had a mansion on a hill built by an Italian immigrant , and it had a dark little shop in town where an elderly Jew repaired shoes. My father says that on the first day he was in Shinnston he met Dave Hardesty, who told him: "We have a real tall man here in town named Short, and we have a little short man named Long. There's a black man named White and a white man named Black." A town of wonders: everything was possible. 23 My father's stories of boyhood and growing up in West Virginia have a tone of nostalgia that is missing from his visits to Blackwater. The boyhood stories are like an intense technicolor version of the Our Gang comedies. Oh the funny things they did. The jokes they played. Scotch-Irish Hardesties and black Junior Mayfield and the Italian Romeos. It seems in my father's stories that the world is populated by boys, and all the boys are equal in the rough and tumble of their adventuring. There was the time they took the little billy goat up on the top floor of the Hardesty house. Well...