Two Appalachian Towns

MEMOIR Two Appalachian Towns Bo Ball "GOING TO TOWN," for ordinary and sober daytime chores, meant to Honaker, 11 miles to the east. For excitement on a Saturday night, it meant Haysi, to the west. Honaker was farmers who came on weekdays for seed, fertilize, wire, parts for broken machinery, and on Saturday (a rest day) to gather by Sid's Café (its strongest drink Co-Cola) to spit ambrew and remember floods. Haysi was almost a ghost town until the weekends when miners came to get over what they'd just been through and to build up numbness for what was coming on. Honaker was a ghost town at night, its few sinners (movie-goers and somnambulists) darting home to avoid the glare of the four streetlights. From Council there were two ways to town: by mail truck and, in the late '4Os, early '50s, by bus—a squat, little blue reject an ex-Army boy pounded into running from Haysi to Honaker and back, six days a week, and to Haysi, again, on Saturday night. (Sunday was for the driver's hangovers.) The mail truck was cheaper (1Oi as opposed to 3Oi, for children), but the little bus was the better ride. You could have an entire window to yourself. Every chug and lurch gave a square of past experience: There's where Omie Tiller had a fit. And there, Virgil Deel backed up to run over a tarpin. Perhaps a new square: Johnson Hale whipping an unruly horse; his wife Sarie on the front porch shredding kraut and whispering for her son to come home, from ten years of missing in action. But the one-lane dusty road generally gave plenty to keep the mind at salute: Nat's Store and its twin, the Post Office. There the blind O'Quin Sisters waited for the mail, and Square Dick Presley talked Republican to a nest of Democrats. The Mission School (now a high school, County-owned), on the hill above, and, around a curve, Windy's Store—a shack really. On its inside door were tacked newspaper clippings of modern life: Siamese twins, haunch to haunch; a two-headed cow; Christine Jorgensen in Navy blue and then chiffon. Just over the hill was the cave where Donald and Rosie played house, at thirteen and twelve. She had their real baby and they got married, but they came back to the cave to pass time. In the bottom to the right, I got drunk with Furl Combs and Laz Keen's boys—not on liquor, but on Lightening Hot Drops—patent medicine for cows and dogs. Diluted with water (5 to 1), it could be held down—for a crazy high, our nostrils spitting fire and camphor. In that same bottom, we had our last communal working—to build a brush arbor for an August revival. Born-agains and sinners cut trees and bushes for a "church" of waving leaves. Under the canopy, preachers bellowed and made the limbs shift; women, in shout, inadvertently slapped the moths drawn by kerosene lamps. New lovers sparked just in the dusk, hormones churning baby-fat to bring a strange sweetness to the sweat. The road forked, its arm leading to Grissom Creek where the Monkey Man lived. For 1Oi a head, he'd let you view his two spider monkeys, enticements for moonshine and homebrew trade, but children needn't know why the Monkey Man and their daddy walked through a yard of dogs and into bushes, to return with a paper poke and red eyes. Around the next big curve, Sheriff Hale caught Jackson Viers and Mae Krause in full coition. Politely, he gave Jackson his request—that theybe allowed to finishbefore he arrested them for public fornication. Wild flowers became the road's shoulders, as the little bus shifted into high. Rhododendron and mountain laurel wreathed Big A Mountain—rough and craggy in the distance. If the bus met another vehicle, one or the other had to back up for some wide place, to pass. But near the top of the mountain, black convicts were blasting away cliffs to make a second lane. (Their camp was in Russell County...