Growing Up Hard in Harlan County

Thirteen

__4 __ THIRTEEN BILL WAS A FINE, HEALTHY BABY, perfect in form and very pretty. It didn't take long for me to learn the effect of closeness to him. He seemed to want to snuggle up to me more than he did to his mother. Winter was over and the county work crews and the W.P.A. workers were busy cleaning up road ditches and hauling rock and gravel from river banks to fill in big holes rutted out in all the roads. The coal mines were working about every day. Things were running along smoothly. Mae and I decided we wanted to move into the camp where I worked. The foreman on my shift was having me stay late three and four evenings a week. I was having difficulty getting home, a distance of six miles, some evenings having to walk it and maybe getting caught in a hard rain and no shelter along the road but big trees. I started checking with the office every evening for a house closer to work. Finally they rented me one up near the mine. I could walk to and from the mine in less than five minutes. The house was about two miles up the hollow from the company store. My foreman put me to working on the night shift and Mae would enjoy walking with some of the neighboring women to the store. They did their gossiping as they went to and from it, toting bags of groceries. I had a lot of idle time during the day, nothing to do but look out the back, up the mountain, and watch mining locomotives go back and forth with long lines of loaded cars of coal, or look out the front, which faced a larger mountain that at one time had had a farm. Mae soon got with child again, with nothing else for us to do or much to talk about. I didn't have anything to do but work at night and sleep all day. I was beginning to think I was a bother to Mae, 118 petting Bill and trying to teach him to say words all day, and spoiling him till she couldn't control him. She seemed glad for me to be away from the house for a while. One morning, sitting on the front porch, looking at the big cleared fields on the mountain, I told Mae I was going to lease it and raise a crop of corn and other vegetables. Me having a lot of time in the daytime, and her already pregnant and nothing else to do, I might as well do some farming. She agreed readily. The company I worked for owned the old hillside farm. They told me to use all of it I wanted. The land was so steep, you had to dig out a place to stand. If you missed a footing, you'd slide to the bottom and then have to climb back up. That was sure hard farming, but I managed to raise a good crop of about everything you could want. Mae canned a lot and dried a lot and I sold some and gave a lot to families that couldn't pay for it. Our se'cond child was born when I first started cleaning the growth of weeds and briars from the fields. She was the prettiest baby I had ever seen. We named her after two of my favorite movie stars, Norma Shearer and Jean Harlow. The way my family was increasing, and the small wages I was making, I started planning for future foods. Mae's father gave her a young milk cow. I traded a lot of vegetables I had grown to a friend for a brood sow. I had grown enough corn to raise and fatten eight or ten pigs and still have enough to feed the milk cow all winter. The sow had ten pigs, all colored just like her. They grew fast and soon started eating. I penned the sow for fattening when she weaned the pigs. She was a big frame hog and when I butchered her she weighed near 600 pounds. Miners all around me would go to Harlan and stand in line for a government hand-out of free food. Some of them would miss a day's work just to go and get it. Mae and I had done our planning well. We didn't have any money but we had...