Dolly
My life
and other unfinished business
Pages 13/14
As I flailed like an
unwanted necktie against the cow`s neck, Bessie dragged me
through briars, into rocks and stumps, and under low-hanging
limbs. Those bushes that had only seemed scary were now a real
threat. As they slowly flayed my skin away, I began to think how
shocked mama would be to see Bessie coming home with a kid
skeleton hanging on to her bell strap.
What blood I had not left
on the hackberry bushes in the holler rushed to my heart as I
caught the first glimpse of the kerosene lantern mama was holding
as she called Bessie, "sook, sook!" when I was finally
dragged into the yard, I thought mama would be thrilled beyond
words to see my bruised and bloodied carcass. She must have been,
because she didn`t use any words as she administered
a few extra bruises to my butt with a hickory switch.
I have to admit that
switch actually felt good. As soon as the licks had been dealt
out, mama held me tight as I cried. I could see tears in the
corners of her eyes too. If you had asked her why she whipped me,
she would have said it was because I hadn`t come home when she
called me. Any parent knows that what she was really saying with
that switch was, "You scared me half to death. You have to
feel pain now so that you`ll remember this in the future."
At that moment, we were both just thanking god that I had a
future.
Pages 16/17/18
The
floorboards in our cabin were so far apart, a kid could feed the
chickens bits of bread or crackers through the cracks - and one
kid did.
That in
itself should have been fun enough. But then up steps that
youthful meanness that adults make tolerable by calling it
mischief. I figured that if the chickens could be lured into
pecking up through the cracks, a little girl with quick fingers
could grab them by the beaks and hold them above the ground for a
few seconds, causing them to thrash about and beat their wings as
if they had been set upon by the devil himself.
The plan was
successfully carried out enough times to give every chicken in
the yard a sore beak and a wisdom about sticking her nose into
cracks. I used to tell myself it somehow made them better
prepared for the future. It is that same kind of childlike
innocence that creates such an excuse for devilment that also
chooses to believe a chicken has much of a future in the first
place.
Of course
if my daddy ever caught me at it, many a sore chicken beak would
be avenged on my backside in short order. I don`t mean, as some
celebrities have, to claim that I was abused. None of us kids
were. We were not beaten. We got plain old Tennessee butt whippin`s.
And in truth, we deserved them.
When one of
us had done something wrong, the rest would rather die than tell
on the guilty party. I don`t know if that was out of loyalty to
brothers and sisters or some unspoken code of the mischievious
that made us keep silent knowing the same service would be
afforded us when we were the one who "done it."
Whatever the reason, our failure to cooperate with
the party of the second party (the one holding the belt) usually
meant we would all end up getting spanked. If we had
taken a minute to think about that, we would have figured out
that the loyalty we were drawing interest on in that unspoken kid
bank was not really doing us any good if it was intended to be
insurance against getting our butt beaten for some future offense.
This way, we were bound to get whipped not only for that future
one but for every present one as well. Still, the code was
followed, and I supposed there was some kind of integrity in it,
if not the clearest of logic.
I would
always want to be the last in line. My plan was to run around to
be first in line before daddy got to me, but that never worked.
You`d think a man with that many kids would lose count just once
in his life. Being in last place, and being a sensitive kid, I
ended up feeling every blow to every other kid just as if it had
landed on my butt.
Daddy used
to spank us with a leather strap. But when mama whipped us, she
would send us out to pick out a switch. We would try a crude form
of mountain-urchin psychology by choosing a big, dangerous-looking
stick that mama wouldn`t have the heart to hit us with. We`d go
out to fetch a switch but come back with a limb that would be
better used as a fence post. Our psychology usually backfired
when mama would only get madder and go out herself and pick out
one of those reedy little sting-your-butt-bad switches.
Pages 29/30
After school
that day, I went to the hollow tree to get the crayons and found
the teacher, glaring at me, razor strop in one hand and my
pitiful stolen colours in the other.
I closed my
eyes and waited for the thick piece of leather to come down on me,
but it didn`t. I would have preferred being beaten to what
happened next. The teacher called all of the other kids together,
and they watched as he took hold of my shoulders and shook me.
"Do you all see what Dolly has done? She has stolen!"
he railed. I was terrified and embarrassed. The teacher made such
a big thing out of it. I felt completely worthless and vile.
I got in
trouble again when I got home. We had always been taught not to
steal (that was one bit of the bible teaching daddy agreed with
mama on), and I was harshly punished for what I had
done. That whole expirience gave me a negative
feeling toward school that I never really got over.
Page 43
For a few
moments, I allowed myself to think that my brother had actually
come to my rescue in a tight spot, but then his fist grinding
into my back told me I was living in a dream world. Not only did
he beat me on the way home, he also told mama and daddy that I
had lied at school, causing me to get a whipping when
I got home.
Page 48
Our favourite
thing was a sugar daddy because it lasted so long. You could suck
on it and pull it into a point and make the sweetness stay with
you until bedtime, even beyond. My mother will attest to this,
having found many a kid with one glued to his or her hair with no
choice but to cut it out with the scissors.
The peddlar
would take eggs or even live chickens in trade if you had no
money. I can remember the chickens, tied by their feet to the
outside of the old bus, looking quizzical but seeming to accept
their overall part in the sceme of things. We were not above
stealing our own chickens to trade to the peddler for something
sweet in our mouths, even if it meant a board across
our butts. Like the chickens, we had learned to
accept life`s trade-offs.
I guess I
always had a streak of devilment in me. I think it was more due
to curiosity than anything else. The problem
was that curiosity included finding out just how far I could go
without getting my butt beat.
Pages 71/72
There was also a great
catchall commandment that could make just about anything a sin:
"Honor thy father and thy mother." Anything you did or
said that went against what your father or mother wanted you to
do or say could be construed as dishonoring them, and there-fore
a sin. This was the one situation when I used to turn the literal
translation of the bible around to work for me. "It says
honor," I would say, "Not obey." This
of course did not stop me from getting
my butt beat, but it did allow me to sniff back my
tears with a healthy sense of righteousness.