It was my first taste of harmony, and I loved it. My dad got a kick out of having me sing with him, hearing my tiny but expressive oom-pah-pas. I would experience the same feeling of pride years later when I brought my daughters, Miley and Brandi, onstage to sing with me.
My favorite song in their set was “I Want My Loved Ones to Go with Me.” It was the group’s slowest and saddest song. Written by papaw Cyrus, the tune told the story of a man growing up and learning to appreciate what was really important in life. Toward the end, my dad would stop singing and speak the words as a slow recitation. In a plaintive tone that had people hanging on every syllable, he said, “And now I have my own sweet family, a wife and little children dear, and only God knows how I love them, and how I love to have them near.”
That song moved me inside. It moved my spirit. And as I got older, I would ask, “You got Papaw’s song on the list?” I wanted to make sure they were going to perform my favorite.
My dad would smile.
“Yeah, bud, it’s in there. Are you going to sing ‘Swing Down, Sweet Chariot’ with us?”
It’s my impression that the harmony extended to our home. My mom was the hands-on field general. Ruthie wasn’t all that big, but she was tough. She was an expert skeet shooter as well as a seasoned musician. You know that old saying dynamite comes in small packages? That describes Ruthie, who was both feisty and loving. She never failed to take in a stray animal, feed one of my friends, or nurse a dead plant back to life just by loving it. That said, she never took any shit, either.
My dad was the more laid-back of my two parents and a very wise man. He saw a lesson in just about everything and concluded most of his thoughts by saying, “And the moral of the story is…” I know I inherited a sense of that. Dad was both a friend and a father, the same way I try to be with my kids. He worked hard, often pulling double shifts at the steel mill so that we could make ends meet. Sometimes I would wait up for him, and even though he must have been exhausted, he would get out the Oreos, pour us some cold milk, and watch some cartoons. As I got older, he never failed to ask how I was doing and if I needed something or if there was anything on my mind I wanted to talk about.
To this day, it’s one of the things I miss most. I mean you can have all the conveniences and luxuries money can buy, but you can’t bring back having your dad there when your back is against the wall and you want to talk with someone who knows you better than you know yourself, and knows about life, too. That was my dad.
My brother, Kebo, was side by side with me through the majority of my childhood. Although older than me, he was slight in stature and smaller than most kids his age. He used to get picked on now and then, and I instinctively stuck up for him, even if it was his fault. Conversely, he could talk me into anything. One night, he convinced me that it would be fun to hide in the ditch in the woods, holding a fishing line connected to a plastic baby doll. When a car came around the curve, he told me to pull it across the road.
With Kebo’s encouragement, I did exactly that, scaring the crap out of one driver who jammed on his brakes, probably convinced he’d narrowly missed hitting a kid. I got scared and never did that again.
Kebo and I spent Sunday mornings driving to and from church in my mamaw and papaw Cyrus’s four-door Buick. We passed the time in the backseat by trading miniature football helmets, toys, and plastic rings we purchased in the machines at the gas station and Hills department store. We also spent many hours in the nearby woods, fishing, tracking down animals, and exploring. We found arrowheads and climbed trees, sometimes pretending to be Daniel Boone, other times pretending we were Apaches or Cherokees. Our great-grandmother was part Cherokee.
I know I’m painting a kind of idyllic picture of my childhood, but that’s the way I remember it, until the strains of my mom and dad’s fighting became more common than not. Looking back, I know these were the moves people who had married young had to go through as they realized they were different as adults than they were fresh out of high school. I hated hearing the fighting. It tore me up. I didn’t understand what was going on. Nor did I understand why my parents seemed to want to hurt each other.
It didn’t help that my dad was thought of as the Elvis of Southern Gospel. His chiseled good looks and angelic voice were catnip for gospel groupies. After one performance, my mom found lipstick on my dad’s collar. Soon after, she recruited her best friend to help spy on my dad. She put Kebo and me in the backseat of her car, and the four of us parked outside a bar in Ironton, Ohio, called the Auger Inn. It had a hand-painted sign in front that read AUGER IN… STAGGER OUT. I don’t recall what she saw, but it was something incriminating. She also spied on him at the Crownsmen’s performances.
I remember some major blowouts. Nothing made me more upset than seeing my mom cry. One day, my brother and I came home from school and immediately sensed a dark cloud hovering above our house. Instead of asking me about the activities in my first-grade class, my mom stood with her arms crossed and told Kebo to take me into our room and lock the door. She explained, “Your dad and I are going to have a fight.”
Indeed, my dad came home and the fighting started. It was horrible. Kebo and I heard plates break, furniture overturned, and a fist go into the wall. Unable to take the screams and cries any longer, I bolted out of my bedroom and wedged myself between them. Everything stopped. In the stillness following the battle, my father glared at my mom and said he was going to leave. Hearing that, I jumped up and wrapped my arms around his chest and wrapped my legs around his waist, clinging like a little monkey.
Without saying anything, he walked past the living room, which was in total disarray, and outside, down the five green steps, and past the birdbath. Finally, he wiped his tears, kissed me on the forehead, and got in his car. Kebo stood nearby, and my mom watched from inside the door. My dad turned on the ignition, backed out of the driveway, and disappeared over the hill. He never returned again to live under that roof as a family.
From then on, there was no question that life ain’t fair.
CHAPTER 2
Back When I Was Young
I DON’T KNOW WHY I liked to torture myself. But I did. Unless I had a ballgame, I still went to every Crownsmen Quartet performance, and each time, as I had always done, I asked my dad if the group had Papaw’s song on the list. Except now, my dad’s emotional reading of the lines about his “own sweet family, a wife and little children dear,” destroyed me inside.
I suppose I intuitively understood the power music had to move people, even when it hurt, and man did hearing him say those words hurt. I couldn’t reconcile those lines with our vastly different reality. After the split, Kebo and I spent weekdays with my mom and weekends with my dad, who eventually bought a home on fifteen acres in Argillite, Kentucky, about ten miles from Flatwoods. I prayed they would get back together and make our family whole again. But that day never came. Instead, I found myself torn between two worlds.
The divorce didn’t stop my parents from fighting. Whenever my dad dropped us boys off at the end of the weekend, Ruthie would find all sorts of reasons to let him have it. Once, before he married Joan, he made the mistake of coming to the house with his new girlfriend. When he pulled up to the house in his girlfriend’s shiny new convertible, with his girlfriend next to him, Ruthie went ballistic. She grabbed the lady’s jet-black bouffant by the roots, yanked her out of the car, and literally kicked her ass. Kebo and I and all the neighbors watched. My dad managed to separate them and get his girlfriend back in the car.
After he peeled out of the driveway, Ruthie apologized to the neighbors for her unladylike behavior.
“Ruthie, if it makes you feel any better, you stomped her ass right there in the ditch,” one of the neighbors said.
On July 17, 1970, my dad remarried: a very nice woman named Joan Ward. She was educated and wore nice clothes. She had been married before and had two daughters, Cheri and Lisa, both older than Kebo and I. On January 19, 1972, Joan gave birth to my little sister
, Angela Leigh Cyrus. Not long afterward, my dad was driving me back to 2317 Long Street when he said he was “getting ready to make a move.”
I didn’t know what he meant.
“I’m getting ready to make a move so that you and your brother will live with me all the time,” he explained.
I suppose he thought he could give us a more stable life at his place, but my heart sank. I wanted to say, “Daddy, please don’t do anything. Everything is fine like it is.” It wasn’t fine, or maybe it was in its own way, but I couldn’t imagine leaving 2317 Long Street or my mom. Nor could I begin to tell my dad about the pain, anger, fear, and other complicated emotions that were going through my head at that moment.
Like a lot of kids who feel overwhelmed and confused, I was sullen and moody, and with all those feelings inside me, I didn’t know how to express myself. So I just sat quietly. That’s what I did with my dad. I just shut down.
To his credit, he didn’t press me. He kept driving, and after a while he turned the radio back on.
But his notion turned into a custody battle. Soon a hearing date was set and Kebo and I were told we would have to go into court and talk to a judge about where we wanted to live. It was scary. Each of my parents spoke to us privately about wanting what was best for us, while intimating that it would be best if we chose them. “You do see why living with me and Joan and Angie would be best for you, right?” my dad asked. My mom said, “Now you guys tell me. Y’all want to stay here, right?” As far as I was concerned, there was no right decision… only wrong. Someone’s feelings were gonna get hurt. But I knew my mom needed me.
I was aware of when the court date arrived. From the bits I heard, relatives from my dad’s side painted my mom as inferior to my dad, and some of our neighbors went in and did the same in regards to my dad. It was ugly. The last cards in the deck were me and Kebo. No one wanted us boys to be put in the position of talking to the judge, but finally that day came. Papaw Casto drove us to the courthouse in his red Ford Falcon. I don’t think we spoke a word the whole time.
For some reason, though, Kebo and I never made it inside. To this day, I’m not sure what happened, but we pulled up in front of the courthouse, got out of the car, with our hair combed and dressed in our nicest clothes, and someone came out and spoke with my papaw. A moment later, he told us to get back in the car and drove us back to 2317 Long Street, where Kebo and I lived for the rest of our childhood and beyond.
Back then, especially in a God-fearing town, divorce was uncommon and brought a great sense of shame. It didn’t help that my grandfather was the town’s preacher and his church was a focal point of the community. At school, I was the only kid whose parents were divorced. I heard the kids whisper about me. Cyrus’s parents are divorced. Does that still make them Christians?
It didn’t help that I was insecure about my appearance. Nothing on my face seemed to fit right, not my ears (they stuck out), my eyes (too big for my head), or my teeth (they were crooked). Ruthie kept my hair short, in what was called a butch cut. One day in first grade, a bunch of big kids from the eighth grade formed a circle around me and laughed. The oldest of them was a very hairy, scary midget. He scared me the most. He pushed me and said, “Come on, fight me. I’m your size.” He pushed me again. “Come on.” I broke free and ran home. That night I started saying a new bedtime prayer: “Dear God, I know I’m ugly, but when I grow up… just make people think I’m funny. Amen.” It became known as my “nightly prayer.”
I found refuge in the nearby woods, where I learned the calming effect of Mother Nature. One of my favorite things was to pretend I was Geronimo. Papaw Casto had given me an old rifle that no longer worked, and it looked identical to the one Geronimo is holding across his knee in the famous photograph of him from the Smithsonian. Instead of walking directly to school, I detoured into the woods and climbed a tree that my brother and I called “the song tree.” We used to sit in its branches and make up songs. If I could sit in that tree and imitate the calls of the birds or see a deer or a rabbit or a squirrel or even a red-tailed hawk, I was happy.
I would sit in the tree for five, ten, or even twenty minutes—however long I could until I heard the first warning bell from school. By the time I reached the baseball field at McDowell Elementary School, the second bell would be ringing. I would usually make it to class just after everyone else had sat down.
“Boy, why are you always late?” my teacher once asked.
“I ain’t late,” I replied, heading straight to my seat without stopping. “I’m right on time.”
Money was tight in our household. My dad’s small salary mostly went to his new family, and Ruthie cleaned houses for a living. Somehow she always managed to find an extra hamburger to fry up if Kebo or I had a friend drop by; or if I needed a new football helmet, she made sure I got one. But we were practically the only family in all of Flatwoods that didn’t have a telephone. I dreaded the beginning of the school year when the teacher made each student stand up and say his or her name, address, and phone number. Again, I heard the whispers. Whoa, Cyrus doesn’t have a phone? Yeah, he’s the one whose parents are divorced. Wow, no phone. They probably still use an outhouse at his place.
One of the saddest days of my life was when my mom sold her beloved piano, which had belonged to her mother, so she could pay the power bill and buy us clothes for Christmas. I think it was the saddest I ever saw my mom. Later on, when I started Russell Middle School, I met kids from Bellefonte and Kenwood, the two rich areas, and I realized how much of a divide there was between us and them.
We couldn’t even afford a membership at the community swimming pool. When the summer heat and humidity got unbearable, Kebo and I cooled ourselves off with a garden hose on the front lawn, trying our best to ignore the laughter and the sounds of classic rock blaring over the loudspeakers at the nearby pool.
My best friend was Robbie Tooley. He showed up in third or fourth grade, the new kid in a school where we all knew each other, each other’s parents, and each other’s grandparents. Something else made him stand out, an aura, the way he immediately claimed a space for himself. Whatever it was, Robbie had it. His clothes were nice, his hair was slicked back, and he seemed self-confident, especially for a new kid. He was so different that I had a feeling someone was going to try to take him down a few rungs. Sure enough, they did.
By the end of the first week, word circulated that a couple of the school’s bullies planned to take him down a notch or two after the last bell. There was a pond along the path everyone walked home, and word was they were going to confront Robbie there. Robbie got the message, too. Rather than cower or take another route, though, he made it known he planned to fight back.
I thought he was crazy.
After school, I followed the crowd to the pond. But instead of watching the new kid get beat up, I watched Robbie kick the crap out of two tough guys who thought they were going to teach him a lesson. It was the coolest thing I’d ever seen, like a scene out of the movies. Afterward, as Robbie dusted himself off, I stepped forward, helped him pick up his books, and told him my name. We were best friends from that day forward and that helped me.
My poor mom was the definition of snakebit. Bad luck seemed to dog her. Even now she recalls, “If I had one good day, four bad ones followed.” Kebo and I didn’t help. She had a succession of boyfriends after she and my dad divorced, but we scared most of them off. As the unofficial Ruthie Protection Squad, we pulled out all the stops whenever we decided one of her dates wasn’t good enough, including one guy who owned a car dealership and was crazy about Ruthie.
He even gave her a car—a used car we nicknamed Ragsy because we stuffed the gas cap hole with a rag. I don’t remember whether we ran him off or she wasn’t interested in him. Another one, a perfectly nice gentleman, gave me a terrific birthday present, an official leather NFL football signed by the commissioner, Pete Rozelle. Under different circumstances, it would have been the greatest gift in the world. But I was in R
uthie Protection mode. I went into my bedroom, got out a hunting knife, and cut the ball into shreds. Then I returned with the mutilated ball in my hand, grinning like a crazy clown.
The poor guy grabbed his coat, kissed Ruthie good-bye, and bolted for the front door. We never saw him again.
I know my mom deserved a life, but it didn’t feel right for another man to come into the house where my dad had lived. Now, I like to say that if I hadn’t run all of them off, Ruthie never would have meet Cletis Lee Adkins, a former railroad man turned truck driver for Ashland’s Wolohan Lumber. Cletis—or Red, as I and everyone else called him—spent his last nickel to make sure Kebo and I had milk to drink, clothes on our back, and other comforts most kids took for granted. He was one of the best men I have ever met. But before I let him know I felt that way, before I admitted it to myself, I put him through hell.
On the day he and Ruthie got married in the church, we observed the occasion by actually getting into a fistfight in our front yard. It rained hard that day, which seemed appropriate to Kebo and me. After the ceremony, we drove home. It was still pouring, and the yard was a wet, muddy mess. When Kebo announced that he was going out to play, Cletis went into full stepfather mode and ordered him to think again.
“You’re not my father,” Kebo protested. “You can’t tell us what to do.”
Us? I hadn’t planned to go outside. But now that Kebo had drawn a line in the mud, I wanted no doubt about whose side I was on.
“Yeah, you can’t tell my brother what to do,” I chimed in.
Cletis begged to differ, and the argument quickly escalated from raised voices into a shoving match and then into a full-scale war. There I was, trading punches with a man more than three times my age and twice my size, as the rain drummed down on us in the yard. And Kebo? He cheered me on from the safety of the porch, while Ruthie stood with her hands covering her face, horrified, screaming for us to stop.
Hillbilly Heart Page 2