by War;Bluegrass If Trouble Don't Kill Me: A Family's Story of Brotherhood
He met a pretty girl named Susan Montgomery, a tiny slip of a thing from up on the mountain, with long black hair and dark brown eyes. Somewhere along the way, the two courted, became lovers, and had a family. Somewhere else along the way, Henry took to drinking and never stopped, not even after Susan banished him from their home. He didn’t do much to raise his children. He left them alone to fend for themselves, a parenting philosophy that produced a family of desperate, lovely girls who did whatever they could to feed and clothe themselves and the babies that never stopped coming.
That’s when Susan became Granny Hall, whose sole purpose of existing was to fend for her pretty daughters and bastard grandchildren who wore babies’ gowns.
When Henry became too feeble to care for himself, she took him in like one of those helpless, fatherless children. With Pappy Hall back, the twins witnessed the roots of their family’s dysfunction firsthand.
“Susanny!” Pappy Hall hollered from his bed. “When I go to meet the Great Almighty, you ain’t gonna bury me in the Montgomery graveyard, are ye?”
“I suspect I will,” she said.
Pappy Hall was mightily offended.
“When that eastern sky splits open,” he said, “I don’t want to rise with them leather-eyed Montgomerys.”
The Montgomerys probably didn’t think much of the idea, either.
• • •
The twins were about ten years old when they were ordered to tend to Pappy Hall while Mamo and Granny Hall worked outside the cabin. This particularly perturbed Saford, who couldn’t sit still long enough to care for a decrepit old man. So he made the most of his time with the helpless geezer—he taunted him and teased him. Every morning when he fed Pappy Hall his breakfast gruel, Saford held the spoon in front of Pappy’s face, giggling as poor, half-blind Pappy groped at the spoon with his mouth like a baby bird. Saford would just hold that spoon out there, moving it ever so slightly away until Pappy grabbed the spoon and shoved it, and part of Saford’s hand, into his mouth.
Pappy Hall continued to make bread trays, mostly by memory and feel since he couldn’t see well enough to know what he was cutting into. The twins would lead him into the woods and help him find poplars, from which he’d chop out a large block. Then they would drag that block on a tarp all the way back to Granny Hall’s, where Pappy Hall would whittle and smooth the wood into a concave tray, perfect for rolling out biscuit dough. After he’d made enough trays to peddle, he’d strap himself on the back of an old mule and seek his way through The Hollow, selling his wares.
When he died, Granny Hall did like she told him. She buried him on the hill above her cabin in the Montgomery Cemetery, among her own kin. Mamo had the hardest time with the loss of her daddy, as sorry as he was. Maybe she had waited on him more than the others, or maybe she understood how life can just get away from you and things happen that you’re not proud of, but you’re still a human being. Anyway, she draped herself over his coffin and sobbed uncontrollably.
Granville Gwynn, the Methodist minister, preached a eulogy that has forever lived in family lore.
“Poor old Pappy Hall,” Preacher Gwynn began. “Never did no harm to nobody. Never did no good to nobody. No good to himself or nobody else. But the Good Book says, ‘In my house are many mansions,’ and how do we know that Pappy Hall doesn’t have one of those mansions right now?”
And he was so right. How do we know? We don’t know how this whole circus called life turns out. Pappy Hall might be taking a nip of corn liquor from a golden chalice. If a preacher didn’t know for sure, then two little bastards didn’t know, either. When your mama never marries your daddy, and when your grandmother dresses like a widow even though your grandpa ain’t worth killing, you learn not to judge people too harshly.
• • •
The bullies of Chestnut Grove School were merciless. They still called Clayton and Saford names. “Hey, Dan! Hey, Fitzhugh!” The twins could handle the younger boys in a fair fight. The bigger boys were a problem.
But they found a way to handle the ruffians and they owe Mack all the credit. No, Mack didn’t beat up the bullies for them. He tormented the twins, too, the way big brothers will, and he also used physical intimidation to impart discipline on his rambling baby brothers. Fast approaching twenty—which was about thirty-five in Hollow years—Mack was almost twice the size of the twins. The trouble started when he caught Saford smoking a homemade cigarette he’d rolled from some of Granny Hall’s tobacco stash. Granny and Mamo dipped a little snuff and took a drag off a pipe or cigarette every now and then, so Saford figured he’d give it a try.
When Mack caught him, he commenced to thrashing little Saford. He didn’t see Clayton nearby behind a rock, where he was about to get sick from swallowing his own plug of tobacco before Mack could catch him with it. Clayton watched the beating for only a moment before that brotherly defense mechanism kicked in and he ran to Saford’s aid. What unfolded changed the law of the Hall fraternal pack.
Clayton blindsided Mack and nearly leveled him. Mack was stunned for a second or two, then he grabbed Clayton and nearly throttled him. That’s when Saford hurled his tiny body against Mack’s backside and knocked him over. Mack barely got to his hands and knees before both twins were on him, pounding him with little fists, kicking him in the ribs, and generally making Mack miserable.
It took a minute, but Mack was finally able to throw both boys off. He stood up, unhurt, but definitely beaten and a little shook up.
“I’ll fight either one of you,” he said as he staggered away, “but I won’t fight a pair of varmints!”
• • •
Personally, I have never fought anybody, except in the second grade when I tangled with a boy I’ll call “Skippy” on the playground at Lambsburg Elementary School. I pushed him to the ground (a development that was so surprising I even bragged about it to my teacher, who, equally shocked, never punished me). A year or two later, my buddy Randy and I wrestled each other in a classroom while the teacher was out, and I—in a move that was as tactically brilliant as it was just plain miraculous—ended up on top of him. I had him facedown and wrapped in a bear hug, as much for my own survival as for strategy, but didn’t dare try anything more because Randy would’ve pummeled me had he escaped. Like Cold War superpowers, we were trapped in mortal deadlock, until I finally let go and fled the room before he could whip me.
I never saw a fight that I couldn’t flee. Two older, bigger bullies terrified me so badly in the sixth grade, I quit the safety patrol rather than have to see them at the flagpole every afternoon when I was assigned to take down the American flag and fold it like a paper football. I never really fought with my baby brothers, Ricky or Billy, either. Ricky was three years younger, and our rivalries played out in highly competitive games of Wiffle ball and Nerf basketball, both of which Ricky could beat me in because he was that good (and because I was not above throwing a game every now and then when he was little, just to keep him from whining about getting beat). Billy was younger by eleven years, so he was much too little to scrap with, although that rarely stopped Ricky from terrorizing him.
You may think me a wimp, but I saw myself as a cagey diplomat. By the time I was in intermediate school, I had befriended most of the school bullies. They all fought one another, sometimes viciously right there in the cafeteria, the school courtyard, and ball fields, but I was above the fray. They ended up in the principal’s office, doubled over to provide ample targets for hard licks from a wooden paddle (this is the South, after all; we believe in God, guns, and whippin’ children). I stayed neutral. Like Switzerland.
I would’ve been eaten alive by the bullies of The Hollow, circa 1929. But I never had schoolmates call me a bastard to my face every day of my life, either. If so, I might not have had such a peaceable nature. Clayton and Saford, to hear them tell it, fought all the time, not because they enjoyed it, but because they had to.
Clayton might have been the peaceful one, had he gotten the chance. He might h
ave been the conciliator, but that was never an option. He was a bastard. And he had Saford as a twin.
Saford would start a scrap with anybody. He’d get into a tiff with an older boy who’d called him a name and next thing Clayton knew, he was in the fight, too. One boy kidded Saford about his hand-me-down shoes, which were a couple of sizes too big and looked like clown shoes. Saford quarreled with the boy, who then resorted to the tried-and-true tactic of calling Saford “Fitzhugh” to his face. “Fitzhugh! Fitzhugh! Aw, wassamatter, Fitzhugh? Don’t know who your daddy is?”
“Quit calling me Fitzhugh!” Saford shouted as he took off after the boy, only to run smack into a pack of bullies and a mess of trouble. The bigger boys had the drop on him. They threw Saford to the ground, kicked him in the rump, and rubbed his face in the dirt.
In a flash, there was Clayton, good little Clayton, to the rescue. Smaller and skinnier than his older twin, Clayton fought with a rage that doubled his size and evened every battlefield. He did to that pack of beasts what he had done to Mack. He waylaid the first one with a body block. He decked the second with a vicious haymaker. He never laid a glove on the last boy because he was halfway to Booger Branch by the time Clayton was finished with the first two.
One of the boys hurled Clayton to the ground and started working him over. Instantly, Saford tackled him. Clayton got up and punched the boy in the belly. Saford hopped on his back and chewed on his ears. The fight was a schoolyard version of cougars attacking a deer in the woods.
The twins were often outnumbered, and they never let their guards down. They climbed trees next to the road and waited for the beasts to lumber past. They dropped, guerilla style, from the treetops and beat the bullies senseless. They took on three, four, five bullies at a time. Entire families of thugs were vanquished in minutes. The twins were terrors, yet beloved by the girls for their good looks and respected by the boys who admired their dashing schoolyard heroics. Clayton and Saford never ran from a fight, and they even sought out a few. They were tough little bastards.
The thing about being twins is that you have an eternal ally and an eternal foil. Somebody’s there to watch your back, right before he stabs you in it. Every day was a competition. Every report card, every ball game, every footrace, every song, was a duel. Saford relished his role as instigator. He initiated the scraps, either by punching Clayton when he didn’t expect it or by bragging that anything Clayton could do—play the guitar, throw an underhand curveball, recite multiplication tables—Saford was superior. Not only superior, but articulate enough to explain to Clayton point by point where he came up short.
Not that Clayton wasn’t smart, because he was. Somewhere in a pile of notebooks and printouts on my desk is one of his old report cards from Chestnut Grove School. I borrowed it from one of my grandmother’s photo albums. (Those photo albums are amazing. There’s about a half-dozen of them, each crammed with eighty years’ worth of photographs, letters, newspaper clippings—even the occasional National Enquirer headline—arranged in absolutely no order whatsoever. They’re page-turners on par with any Raymond Chandler novel. You have no idea what to expect on the next cellophane-sheeted page. There’s me dressed in a Carolina blue tuxedo with my junior prom date in 1983. There’s my parents’ wedding photo. There are the twins again, dressed like Chicago gangsters, only they’re armed with fiddle and banjo instead of tommy guns. Oh look, there’s some long-dead relative pointing a pistol at a puppy’s head. There’s me as a baby.…)
I can’t find that report card. If I could find it, I’d be able to relay if it was a 99 or a 100 Clayton got in arithmetic. He scored high marks up and down the curriculum. Even his penmanship was exemplary—it got even better once he signed his autograph enough times. Clayton was no dummy. He just didn’t brag. Saford did. Sometimes, Saford’s bragging would get so deep under Clayton’s skin that he’d bear down extra hard to try to beat his older twin.
Their natural rivalry made them better at everything. They were better in school than their older brothers had been. They even became better musicians, each trying to outplay or outsing the other. They were rivals, but they needed each other.
“If we stick together,” Saford liked to say, “can’t nobody do nothing to us.”
Saford was right. As long as they hung together, the twins were invincible. You messed with one boy, you messed with two. The bullies of Chestnut Grove finally left them alone. Their big brothers moved on to more important concerns, such as making whiskey, then getting married, raising their own babies, and finding honest work. The twins had it made. They stayed in school, picked apples in the summer, and made music every night until Mamo sent them off to bed. They lived a better childhood than a pair of fatherless twins could expect to have in the rough hills of Virginia circa 1930.
• • •
And I haven’t even told you about the White Plains fiddlers competition yet. That’s the greatest story ever. That story is such a part of family lore that when my mother wrote an article about Clayton and Saford for the Carroll County Genealogy Club’s family history book in 1994, she dedicated six full paragraphs to the White Plains fiddlers competition. World War II got two paragraphs (one for each twin’s service).
Mom started it like this:
The little entertainers moved on to greater rewards in their musical careers at age ten when they set out on a journey to White Plains, North Carolina, to enter their first competition. For their debut their mother and grandmother had made each of them a new outfit from some black and white striped material. When they donned their new outfits, it quickly became apparent that their mother and grandmother had not communicated well to each other the directions the stripes were to go. The shirts had stripes going across while the knee britches had stripes going up and down. This situation would only get more humorous as the day went by.
Clayton said they looked like little convicts in the suits with the stripes running wrong directions. It was probably a Saturday. I imagine it was summer, since the boys walked all day in knee britches and bare feet. “Ankle Express,” Clayton called it. The trip from The Hollow to White Plains, a community just past the “big town” of Mount Airy, was twelve miles. I don’t know how they heard about the fiddlers convention, nor do I have a clue how they knew the way to White Plains. Rafe Brady might’ve had something to do with it.
Saford toted the fiddle he had earned by selling salve. Clayton carried a cheap guitar. They walked barefoot down Wards Gap Road and arrived in Mount Airy just as the boiling noon sun blistered South Street on the factory side of town. They passed a greasy spoon where a crowd of rough-looking workers from the furniture factories milled about. One of the roughnecks saw the silly-looking twins with their instruments, and he called them over. He asked where they were headed, and they said to White Plains to enter a contest.
“Play me a fiddle tune and I’ll buy you both a Co’Cola,” the roughneck said.
Even though they didn’t know a Co’Cola from a whiskey sour, Saford and Clayton scrubbed off an old-timey number, and the men clapped and whistled. The roughneck kept his promise and escorted the boys into the diner and pulled two Coca-Colas from the icebox in those beautiful six-and-a-half-ounce bottles that were shaped like voluptuous women. People have always said that Coca-Cola got its name because it used to be made with cocaine. I don’t know if those bottles were laced with little-c coke or not, but when Clayton took a big slug of carbonated Coca-Cola, his head nearly blew off. The strongest thing he’d ever guzzled was buttermilk. Fizz and bubbles hit the back of his throat and Coca-Cola shot out of his nose, and maybe even his ears and eyes, too.
He dropped his bottle like it was poison and hollered, “Throw it down, Saford! It’ll blow you up!”
Saford flung his bottle, too, and the twins ran like whipped puppies, leaving behind a group of tough men who probably for years told their kin about those pitiful hillbilly twins who were scared off by their first sip of Co’Cola.
The twins would’ve kept right on runn
ing all the way to White Plains if it hadn’t started raining. They made it to a bridge across Stewarts Creek and scampered beneath it for shelter. Within minutes, gentle Stewarts Creek ran fast and brown. Clayton noticed the water rising quickly. They were about to be washed away. Before you could holler “four feet high and risin’” the twins crawled out from under the bridge and beat it down the muddy road.
The rain was blinding, which was a good thing because that meant they couldn’t see the blue dye from the stripes in their mismatched suits running down their legs and arms.
They arrived at the White Plains schoolhouse, soaked, cold, and blue all over. Dye had stained their limbs in the colors of bruises. Clayton told Saford he looked like a “drownded mouse.” Clayton poured rainwater from his guitar like it was a watering can. He strummed a chord that sounded as melodious as a basket of rotten peaches splattering onto a hardwood floor. Saford’s soggy bow went limp as a noodle. They were a sad sight, all right. Garnett Warren, a big-shot fiddler player with one of the bands expected to win the competition, took such pity on them that he let Saford borrow his bow. Poor little fellers, he must’ve thought. This’ll be the highlight of their life. Let them leave here with at least a taste of dignity.
The scene inside White Plains School resembled a hillbilly Lollapalooza. People packed together hip flask to hip flask, some flatfooting to the music, most just hollering at the musicians. Bands assembled in crescent patterns so they could see and hear one another over the clackety-clack of the dancers. Fiddlers sawed breakneck versions of “Sally Ann,” banjo players flailed double-time gallops, washtub bassists thwacked their taut twine tied to broom handles. The music was invigorating, and the crowd—especially the twins—loved it. The boys had heard their mother sing unaccompanied ballads and they had been transformed by Mrs. Boyd’s 78 phonograph records, but they had never heard music played like this or heard an audience go hog wild. By the time the twins took the stage, their arms and legs stained blue with dye, that crowd was primed. People went bonkers. They damn near blew the roof off the joint. Clayton was flabbergasted. They love us and we haven’t played a note yet! Wait till they hear us!