Child of the Woods

by Susi Gott Séguret

  Now he was motioning us over to the fireplace, where he had been sitting cracking walnuts with a ball-peen hammer.

  “Git y’uns some-a these hyere, Hic.” And he took an old “poke” out of the corner and filled it with the black nuts. Then he took us down to his garden patch where he tended beans and watermelons. “Take one-a these-h’yere ’melons, Hic. Git y’uns the biggest god-damn one y’uns can find. Git that son-of-a-bitch right yander!”

  Staggering, we lugged home a watermelon the size of a newborn calf, the sack of nuts dragging behind. Our parents met us on the front porch and chuckled as we related the latest encounter with Old Man Hic. Then we all cut into the juicy watermelon and buried our faces in it, sending seeds flying like the old man’s tobacco juice, far as we could spit.

  Tools

  I received my first set of tools on my second birthday. It was a little garden ensemble: rake, shovel and hoe.

  Puffed up with importance, I set off with the tools slung over one shoulder, as I had seen Daddy do, and my “doggie” (a very limp stuffed dirty-white beagle that had first endured the caresses of my aunt and then my mother) slung over the other. Off I trudged to find my own patch of land and make something out of it. I don’t remember how long my zeal lasted, but I stayed gone for long hours at a time (probably what my parents had in mind when they bought the set of tools.)

  Sometimes, instead of heading off on my own, I’d help Mother hoe corn or Daddy thin radishes. One day I took my first bite into a radish, freshly pulled out of the earth, bits of soil still clinging to its smooth, red skin. I popped the whole thing in my mouth and chewed its acrid flesh with determination. Flames leapt within my cheeks and rolled over my tongue, and I went running to the kitchen to beg a drink of water from Mother.

  But the burn of the fruits of labor didn’t tone down my desire to “be useful.” From then on, each successive birthday and Christmas, my tool collection grew. A drill saw, a coping saw, a hammer, a carving knife, a set of chisels…At first, I amused myself with making holes in a scrap of board, fastened into the vice at the end of Daddy’s big workbench. Then I began to make shapes with the coping saw, and later on I carved a ball-in-a-cage and a chain out of a stick of stove wood. Or I would climb with my new nail belt up to the top of a scaffold and help fasten shingles onto whatever building my parents were working on at the moment.

  One day, in the earlier stages of my wood-working, I had nailed two leather ears to the corner of a board which I had designed into a rather frightening lion’s face. I was pleased when the electrician came to help Daddy wire the house and brought his two girls along. Eager to show off my prowess, I invited them up to our jungle gym fire tower (built out of sassafras poles), where I had stowed away my lion’s mask.

  It so happened that that morning I had decided not to wear any clothes, in order to be cooler in the jungle. It didn’t occur to me that there was anything unusual in this decision, but I vaguely remember the girls’ awed faces as they regarded me behind my lion’s mask.

  Some years later, in reflecting on this incident, I realized that the girls must have been totally shocked by my unwitting breach of decorum, and I was surprised their father had even allowed them to play with me. I hoped fervently that I would never run into these girls again.

  When I went to high school (a two-hour ride each way by school bus), one of the more “hip” girls of the in-crowd stopped to speak to me one day.

  “Aren’t you Susi Gott?” she queried, her perfect curls held perfectly in place by whatever perfect spray was in fashion at the moment. “My father’s the one who wired your house!”

  Hog-Killing

  Hog-butchering day was one of the major yearly events in my young life. It was a festive occasion for everyone, as all the neighbors gathered around to help. A lot of leg-pulling and joke-telling went on, and there was always a huge meal at midday fixed by the women, this time with a generous sampling of the best fresh meat straight from the hog.

  Talk about living high on the hog! We might not have thought about it then, but it sure is what we were all doing.

  My favorite part was at the very beginning, when the hog was shot. Where this apparently heartless streak came from I have no idea, and age has turned me into a softie, but at five I was into realism, and that was the most action-packed moment of the day. (Do you walk away from the TV when the news is showing war-bloodied victims? Do you turn your head if you happen to pass an auto accident on the road? No, you sit with your eyes glued to the screen, saying, “Oh, how horrible!” while somewhere feeding on the rush of adrenaline your body feels from viewing such a crisis, even at your safe distance. Or you crane your neck out the car window, looking for hints of blood, eyes open for something really gory, even while your outside demeanor is shocked and sorrowful.)

  My father was usually elected to pull the trigger, although he was one of the most gentle-hearted men present. He was practical enough to think that if you were going to stand around watching it done, you might as well be doing it yourself. He was also the best shot.

  Actually, the shot itself was not what killed the animal. Aimed right between the eyes, it only served to stun him, as his skull was too thick to allow the bullet to penetrate. Once he stumbled over, one of the neighbors would slip into the pen with a huge knife and slit his neck. That was what killed him—he bled to death. But, since he was blissfully unconscious, thanks to Daddy’s bullet, he didn’t feel a thing.

  The difference between the powerfully snorting live hog and the passive lump of flesh and fat that lay in a pool of mud and blood after he had been stabbed was quite remarkable. This did not seem to be the same creature I had seen day after day when I went to play with the neighbor girl. And it seemed as though, suddenly, it had taken on a different form in everyone else’s eyes, too. No longer pet, but pork chops and bacon, to be carved into such as quickly as possible.

  From stunned silence into instant action, everyone leapt to his post. The women laid out sharp knives and aprons, the men fetched scrapers and made sure the water was boiling. The tractor moved in with a hook suspended behind and raised up the hog by its rear legs, transporting it to a more convenient corner of the farm, away from the spot of the massacre.

  I followed the trail of blood to the new site where, after being laid out on a plank, scalding water was poured over the hog’s form—not too much, for the flesh must not be cooked prematurely—just enough to loosen the hair for the scraping of the hide. The men stood ready with their scrapers and quickly fell to work, while a couple others moved constantly back and forth from the boiling barrel to the carcass, bringing fresh dippers full of water to loosen the hair just ahead of the scraper, and to wash off the hair behind.

  The next step was to hoist the hog by its hind legs back up on to the crane, and to slit open its belly with a sharp axe, just between the ribs. This had to be done very deftly, so as not to chop into the intestines before they came out. Insides extracted, the hog was laid back down on the freshly scalded plank.

  Now came the fun part, chopping apart the ribs and the hams with a double-bitted axe, setting the head aside for head-cheese, and slicing away the layers of fat to be rendered down for lard until—satisfied with themselves—the men wrapped the big pieces of meat in paper and laid them on cool shelves in the canhouse built into the side of the hill. The plank was scalded off one more time, the tractor put away. The rest of the work was for the women: salting down the bacon, stirring the lard in a huge cast iron cauldron over an open fire for hours on end until it came out pure, separating the cracklings, pickling the feet, cleaning off all the knives, washing the men’s overalls spattered with blood, and—of course—setting out the midday feast for all the hungry husbands and children.

  There were sausage balls, tenderloin, ham and gravy, fried chicken, green beans, soup beans, mashed potatoes, sliced tomatoes, coleslaw, corn on the cob, biscuits, cornbread, applesauce, cherry pie, coconut cake, homemade butter, apple butter and molasses, fresh buttermilk
and sweet tea, and steaming pots of coffee.

  I loved to eat at the neighbors’. Everything was fried in hog grease and melted in your mouth. We never ate that way at home (Mother was adamant about fresh vegetables cooked as little as possible, with only the tiniest amount of salt allowed), and the proliferation of dishes was something to make a king envious.

  And everyone went home with a fresh stash of meat afterwards. We usually carried away the tongue and the kidneys because no one else would have them, but the taste of sausage would linger in my mouth for months afterwards. Even now it comes back to taunt me, and I begin to salivate and wish I weren’t so far away from those days of hog-killing.

  Language

  The language of the Southern Mountains is somewhat of a puzzlement, closer perhaps to Chaucerian English than to that of Webster. Who can tell how certain expressions developed? “Up North,” people imitate the Southern drawl by saying “y’all,” but you’ll never hear that in the mountains. Instead, it’s “y’uns,” a contraction of you ones. And yours becomes “yer’un” (your one).

  This can be pretty comical, as in the case of a trial that took place in the Madison County courthouse one day when my mother was serving jury duty. It seems there had been a car accident, and the guilty one was under pinpoint. One old granny was witness and, as she appeared to have her facts a little bit scrambled, the judge inquired about her vision.

  “Granny?” he said, slightly overstepping his line, “Do you sleep in your glasses?”

  “Why, no, sir!” she replied, indignantly, “Do you sleep in yer’un?!”

  These words, like splashes of color, give mountain speech its special quality. Courting is “sparkin’,” a kiss is “some sugar,” an expression of cold is “oozie!” and one of surprise is “They!” Molasses is plural and becomes “them ’lasses.” To have a crush is to be “sweet on somebody.” A paper bag is a “poke,” and a soft drink is a “dope.” (“Think ah’ll mosey on down t’ the store ’n’ git me a dope in a poke.”) Tobacco, tomatoes, and potatoes become baccer, maters, and taters.

  When my maternal grandmother came down from New York for a visit and encountered a neighbor woman her age, they could have been speaking two completely different languages. And neither one understood the other more than the other understood her. Ellen, awed by my grandmother’s educated background, searched for something to say: “Is them yore real teeth?” Granne, taken aback: “Why, yes, they are.” Ellen, in reply: “I had me a set of good teeth once too, till they done all fell out!”

  Double negatives are a normal occurrence in everyday speech (“I ain’t got none”), and triple negatives are almost as common (“I ain’t never see’d none”). Double nouns are also frequent: “stair-steps”, “log of wood”, “Church of God”, and even (a personal favorite of one of our neighbors) “turd of shit.”

  The neighbor that came up with this latter expression was the one that bulldozed our road. He had a round face, despite his Indian cheekbones, a combination which made him look almost oriental save for his Irish red hair. He had a deep chuckle that began somewhere down behind his bellybutton and came out slowly while he shook all over like a bowl of head cheese jiggling on its way to the table.

  He and Daddy were taking a two-minute pause from their work one day, and somehow got on the topic of childbirth. Ovie said, earnestly,

  “Boy, I sure would hate to be a woman. How would you like to shit a damn watermelon?!”

  School

  Contrary to hog-killin’s and ’lasses bilin’s, school was not something I looked forward to with anticipation. My elementary school (which spanned first to twelfth grade at the time) was an ancient orange-grey building constructed out of creek rock with a tarpaper-shingled roof.

  When I go there in my mind, all is somber: the floors, often strewn with a greasy green sawdust to keep the grime from rising; the old wooden desks that had been marked and carved by so many distracted minds before that it was impossible to write on their surfaces; the low-ceilinged lunch room painted in two sickly shades of green; the hall leading to the principal’s office, dreaded by one and all.

  The teachers all carried heavy wooden paddles, some with holes drilled through them so that they would swing faster, sting better and—it was reported—leave blisters on your hide afterwards. These they used at the slightest provocation.

  I escaped fairly well, having learned to read and write before I came to school, and being blessed with an uncanny ability to sit still. But some of the other children were called to order as many as ten to twenty times daily.

  Naturally, all this corporal punishment left little time for anything else to fill the day. So I did a lot of dreaming. Out the window of my classroom, on the other side of the high chain link fence lined with barbed wire (designed to keep children from escaping), was a dirt sled road that wound around the mountainside. Time after time I followed that road to escape the monotonous thud of the paddle, winding in and out of the trees where no one could find me anymore. I built hiding spots from dead tree limbs, winterized with earth and leaves. I wanted to be able to survive any weather. I gathered roots and berries from the wood, and dried them to last me through the snows. I made friends with animals, and some of them would snuggle in with me for added warmth when it became extra cold without. There was no need for school because I already knew how to survive.

  And this is the lesson we were all learning: survival. Survival of the fittest. I would be the fittest.

  Daddy’s Banjo

  None of my immediate family would be alive today if it hadn’t been for Daddy’s banjo.

  The lady at the local store loved him because he played “Shout Luler” and she could dance. So when a couple of local men got drunk and stopped in to ask directions to our house (they were gonna go up ’n’ kill that damn Yankee, God-dammit), she sent them up the wrong road and they got good and lost. By the time they found their way back out again their “likker” had worn off and they had forgotten why they set off in the first place.

  Things got a little stickier when Daddy was calling dances in the little shack next to the second house my parents rented (also for no money). Since Daddy was the instigator of the dances, he also had to keep order—not an easy task when half the crowd went out between sets to “take a little snort.”

  One night, one of the dancers, who had been outside a few too many times, came sashaying a little unsteadily up to the band. Moved by the music, he started tapping rhythm on the guitar. When the guitar player looked at Daddy with an “Uh-oh!-what-do-I-do-now?” expression, Daddy, still playing his banjo, stepped between the two men until the first one got the point and staggered outside.

  Later on that night, after Mother and Daddy had gone to bed on the front porch, where they slept in the summer, they saw headlights approaching the house. Knowing this meant trouble, and knowing the law of the land, Daddy went inside for his rifle and stepped quietly back out on the porch, ready for whatever he had to do. But then a familiar voice came out of the darkness, saying, “Put your gun away, Pete.”

  It was our neighbor from down the road, and he approached the house, explaining that he knew—after what happened in the dance hall—that the trouble was not over for the night. He’d seen that Old Loley was good and mad and had muttered something about going home to get his rifle. So he’d waited outside the dance hall when everyone else had gone home, knowing Old Loley would come back. Sure enough, it wasn’t long before he heard a Chevy clattering up the dirt road, and he managed to stop the car and climb in with the old man and talk him out of it.

  Daddy, being still young and blessedly naïve, wanted to walk down to the car and clear up the misunderstanding. But the neighbor said, “Oh no, you better not, Pete. Loley’s got two pistols cocked ’n’ loaded, ’n’e’s madder’n I’ve ever seen ’im.”

  Time went on, as time will, and years later Old Loley wound up playing that same guitar at some of the dances. And Daddy learned a valuable lesson in mountain etiquette: never s
hove someone out of the way indirectly, but confront him straight on and be done with it.

  Robin

  Robin is a name that spells disaster. For my parents, at least; for Tim and me, she was one of our favorite childhood friends, who came on occasion to spend a week with us during the summer. She was a year older than I and a decided tomboy, so she appealed to both of us.

  I marvel, now, that we managed to get in such scrapes every time she paid us a visit.

  It’s not that we did anything really naughty. Only somehow, we always did something that didn’t please my parents a whole lot. I suppose Tim and I had a built-in censor for what was acceptable behavior and what wasn’t, and we usually didn’t have any reason to overstep those boundaries. But when Robin proposed something, and we reflected on it and found it hadn’t been forbidden, we suddenly wondered, “Why not?” Even if one small voice said, “I really don’t think we should do that,” Robin would say, “Why not?” and dare us.

  And so we’d catch ball jars full of lightning bugs and set them loose in the closet. We’d build race-tracks out of blocks in the living room while our parents were trying to relax after dinner, and bring in a collection of toads to see whose was the fastest. (Of course, most of them managed to pee on the polished oak floor before we could get them back out again.)

  One evening, as we sat up on the knoll behind the house, burying our feet in the tall grasses and listening to the night sounds: the crickets, the cicadas, the screech owl, the horses letting air out of their nostrils, the chickens settling in for the night, the cats out prowling for mice, Robin decided the jewel weed growing just in front of us was obstructing our view. So she ran to get Tim’s hatchet (Tim had a handsome tool collection, too) to chop it down.