Mr. Cartoon

We got one channel that came over the mountains from West Virginia, and bad weather just about ruined that. On stormy winter nights Papaw went outside to turn the antenna while my big brother, Wendell, stayed in front of the TV, watching for the picture to get better. I stood in the doorway and yelled back and forth between them.

Papaw twisted the pole and hollered, “What now?”

“What now?” I said to Wendell.

“Nothing yet,” Wendell said.

“Nothing,” I yelled to Papaw.

He moved the antenna some more. When the picture got good, Wendell said, “Stop!” and I said, “Stop!” but usually Papaw was done past the stopping place and the picture went bad again. Sometimes if it wasn’t too cold, me and Wendell left Papaw out there for a joke, no matter what the picture did. After a spell, Papaw stomped inside cussing so fast the words ran together like fish on a stringer. The picture wouldn’t be any different, but we pretended like Papaw had made it better. Mainly we watched a good picture with bad sound, or a fuzzy screen that you could hear what people were saying on. We got to where we knew when to switch between them.

Our favorite show was cowboy movies. Wendell and me were always the good guys and Papaw was the one we went up against. During commercials we’d try and guess what they’d do on TV. It was pretty easy to figure out—the bad guys always captured the good guy, and somebody helped him get away. If a woman saved him, she turned out to be the bad guy’s daughter. If it was a buddy, he got hisself killed. The woman hardly ever died. Papaw said that made me lucky to be a girl. I couldn’t see the luck in being somebody who didn’t die if they wasn’t you in the first place. Wendell said I was a good thinker, like our mom was. I didn’t say nothing because I was thinking she was a woman and she was dead and there wasn’t no luck in that at all.

Wendell remembered her, but I never. He told me how she liked to sit by the creek and watch the spiders hop across the top of the water, how she washed her hair in the kitchen sink and made the beds every morning. Then a coal truck pushed her car off the road. My daddy was driving and they both died in the wreck at the bottom of Dry Creek Holler. Now I slept in Mom’s old room and nobody made the beds.

Our people were always fighters. Papaw’s family fought in the Civil War, some on one side, some the other. He said they’d sing to each other of the night, then shoot barbed wire out of cannons in the morning. Papaw kept his DDay medals in a cigar box. The day Wendell turned seventeen he volunteered for Vietnam. He left his rifle at the house, which made me nervous until Papaw said they’d give him a new one that shot faster. Wendell’s was a flintlock he was two years making. He used broken arrowheads he found in the creek to light the powder. When he shot, a smoke ball flared by his face and sparks flew out of the barrel.

With Wendell gone, I was down to Papaw for family and he didn’t talk much. After school we watched Mr. Cartoon. He wore a straw hat, a striped coat, and dark glasses and was in charge of cartoons for a half hour. Sometimes he showed The Three Stooges. I liked Curly the best, but he quit and Shemp came. I didn’t like him, but he was a champion snorer. When Shemp snored, me and Papaw laughed like the dickens because Wendell sounded the same. Sometimes when I got worried about Wendell, we’d climb the ridge behind our house and lay on our backs and look at the stars. There’s about a thousand...