Milkweed Ladies (7 page)

T
he Swago neighborhood was interlaced
with wagon roads and with little footpaths that wound and sprangled across the hills. The Big Road that ran through the village, following the old Indian Trail, was not hard-surfaced until the late twenties. There were also smaller dirt roads: one down the river, one up Dry Crick, and the one across the river bridge. We were, essentially, a foot-walking society; and the paths intersected farm fields, ran up over pasture hills, along fence rows and the winding cricks. All paths and roads led eventually to the village, and there were the three centers of our life: Wint's store, the two-room schoolhouse, and the Lower Church just around the hill. The Upper Church stood at a crossroads up on Dry Crick.

The store, which was also the post office, was where we got our mail, did our trading, picked up the news of the week, and visited
with our neighbors and kin. There, the men sat around the stove, or on the store “platform,” talking, chewing, and spitting. On clean-up day, Wint would have to take a shovel to the dried tobacco spit, sort of scaling it off like he was digging up a hard-packed garden in the spring.

The store building was a long cavernous structure, with only a little light filtering in from the high windows in the front and rear. In this narrow darkness, Wint kept a wild assortment of store goods in stock. There were showcases full of neckties, armbands, rolls of ribbon, button cards, rifle bullets, and shotgun shells. Horse harness, oil lanterns, steel traps, and gum boots hung from nails along the wall; and there were pepper boxes, vanilla bottles, cheese, fireworks, Arm and Hammer soda, yard goods, wooden buckets of salt fish, women's “fascinators,” Fig Newtons, and high-buttoned shoes. Wint also took in products from the neighborhood as trade goods: eggs, prints of butter, pokes of ginseng, maple sugar cakes, berries in season, and in the winter, the stretched and aired skins of foxes, raccoons, possums, and skunks.

Various odors mingled in the smoky air, but the two that gave the pungent essence of the store were the brown Brazilian fragrance of coffee, and the stewing brown
smell of tobacco juice. To a mountain child, these odors gave promise of a five-cent tablet for school, a poke of striped peppermint candy, or even a box of Uneeda Biscuits or a can of sardines. We particularly envied our cousins, Wint's four children, who could come freely into the store, open a can of tomatoes, pepper it, and drink it down for a quick lunch. The tomatoes Mama canned at home lacked the exotic flavor of the store brand. In all cases our homegrown and homemade products seemed inferior to us, and we would refer favorably to “store cheese,” “store cookies,” “store peaches,” and “store clothes.”

Over this wild profusion, Wint presided as entrepreneur. He was a natural storekeeper, canny, warm, persuasive, and gifted with a poetic and prodigious wit. He would stride up and down the store platform, beading down on the floor nail heads with shots of tobacco juice and summing up the eccentricities and equivocations of the neighborhood in highly colored phrases. In a sense, Wint held the neighborhood together, like my peg in the haymow door. For Wint had charisma, a kind of red-headed Irish power to attract, to hold, and to finish off. If a world problem arrived in the weekly copy of the
Toledo Blade
, a war or a diplomatic crisis, Wint could finish it off with the same
quick dispatch he used on a mangy hound dog sniffing around his salt fish kegs. The store was kept open from early morning to late at night, and it was for all of us, but most of all for the men. They would sit, and as their spit fried on the stove, world problems, and old guilts and ancient sorrows would fade away.

The schoolhouse stood about a hundred yards above the store on a patch of dry, rocky, crick gravel we called the playground. The Big Road ran on one side; Rush Run along the other, and up on the laurel-banked hillside canted the two wooden privies. Two well-worn paths led uphill to these sanitary and social centers, and under a hemlock tree by the run was the girls' playhouse of flat rocks.

The schoolhouse, one of the best in the county, was painted white and had an imposing bell tower and two classrooms, one called the Little Room and the other the Big Room, with two rooms for storing dinner buckets and two long cloakrooms with rows of metal hooks. Each of the two schoolrooms had a big pot-bellied stove, rows of fastened-down desks with ink wells, two well-worn blackboards, and a shelf of books. Up front was the teacher's desk and, facing the teacher, the Recitation Bench where we
lined up to recite. On two sides of the room were several windows with ragged, incorrigible window blinds. There were erasers and chalk, a metal waste basket, a picture of
The Landing of the Pilgrims
, and out in the hall, a metal water cooler. Outside stood the flagpole, and every morning some favored student would be selected to run the flag up.

When the bell rang from the tower, the teachers would stand at the top of the steps in front of us, and the Big Room teacher, the principal, would call “attention” as we lined up, clapped our legs together, squared our shoulders, saluted the flag, and then marched up the steps and into our rooms. When the teacher came in and stood behind her desk, we would stand and sing “My Country Tis of Thee” for “opening exercises.” On the last verse, the teacher would hold up a warning finger, and we would all sing very softly. After a story or Bible reading, the teacher would call the roll. Some of our teachers had us answer our name call with a Bible verse: “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help”; or “The words of a man's mouth are as deep as waters”; or the favorite short one, “Jesus wept.”

In the Little Room, we had twenty or twenty-five pupils and there would be about
ten or fifteen minutes for each class: reading, arithmetic, spelling, English, and penmanship. Each class in turn would file up and sit on the Recitation Bench. For spelling, we lined up against the wall, had a “head” and a “foot” of the class, and “turned each other down.” Sometimes, we read history stories like “The Pilgrim Fathers,” or “George Washington and the Cherry Tree,” or the story of George Rogers Clark's men drinking deer broth on their way through the swamps to Kaskaskia. When I was six and in the second grade, we learned the names in alphabetical order of all our state's fifty-five counties, and of all the forty-eight states.

When we got up into the Big Room, we had regular classes in geography and history, and in “physiology and hygiene,” “agriculture,” and “civil government.” Our history stories were about “Nolichucky Jack,” Christopher Gist, Francis Marion the “Swamp Fox,” and Concord Bridge. In our big readers were many of the Greek myths. We read “Pandora's Box,” the story of how evil and hope came into the world; the story of Proserpine and Pluto, of Theseus and the Black Sail, and of Jason and the Golden Fleece.

Sometimes on Friday afternoon we would have “recitations” from the floor. We said poems like “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere,”
or “Old Ironsides,” or “Westward, westward Hiawatha / Sailed into the fiery sunset / Sailed into the purple vapors / Sailed into the dusk of evening….”

On winter mornings after we had waded a mile or two through the snow, we would sit on the benches around the stove to dry our feet and clothes. The room was cold, and steam would come up from our sodden shoes and stockings; the smells of wet woolens and long underwear, of onions and floor oil mingled in the room. At noon hour we would hurry up with our cold sausage sandwiches and rush out on the school ground to play in the snow. We would have snowball fights, slide on the crick ice, play Fox and Geese in a snowy ring, and coast on our wooden sleds down the river road. About 1917, when lumber-mill prosperity hit the village, my brother Ward had a second-hand sled with the words Flying Arrow painted on it in red and blue. When the coasting was good, we might come back at night, build a fire down by the bridge, and coast until ten o'clock. Then we would walk home, pulling our precious sled behind us up Uncle Dan'l's hill.

In good weather, when noon hour and recess came, the big boys played paddle-ball with a yarn ball, or football with their blown-up hog bladders, or sometimes they
would play Run, Sheep, Run. The girls and little boys played Drop the Handkerchief, Pet Squirrel, Skip to My Lou, or Green Gravel, Green Gravel.

Sometimes the teachers had trouble with kids who went into the dinner bucket room and stole food out of the pails. Or boys would dip the girls' long hair down in the ink wells or draw dirty pictures or pass dirty notes. If kids got into fights, they might get a whippin' or have to stay in after school. Sometimes, they were shut up in the cloakroom for half a day or ordered to write some moral motto a thousand times, like “For Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do.”

Sometimes some kid would get infested with what we called the “seven year itch,” or a girl would come to school with “nits” in her long hair. Then the whole neighborhood had to rub with sulfur and grease or comb their hair out with doses of lamp oil. In the fall we often got “diphtheria sores” that would bleed and run, and we would have to take a dose of Epsom Salts every morning before breakfast for seven days.

The most important thing to us girls was that the teacher should be pretty and wear nice clothes. We would think about it all summer, wondering if the teacher would have a pretty dress. One year in the Big
Room, we had Miss Anne Correll. She was nice-dressed and “modern,” and she had the board of education put in a new, flat-topped stove. Then she told us to bring cabbage, potatoes, and onions from home, and she put them in the pot and made us “hot lunch.” For Valentine's Day, Miss Anne pasted red hearts and let us have a Valentine Box. Sometimes, she would use colored chalk on the board, and for Christmas she drew a border of red and green holly and red bells around the top of the blackboard and pasted Christmas trees on the window. Miss Anne had a subscription to
The Normal Instructor and Primary Plans
and she took pictures out of it and programs for Christmas.

We always had a night Christmas program at the schoolhouse. We would have a tree decorated with strings of popcorn and teaberries and red paper chains. The presents were put under the tree, and the bracket lamps lighted, and the stove boomed up until it glowed red. We all wore our best clothes, and we girls had our hair curled in ringlets (on rag curlers) and we had ribbons in it. The kids in the program would hide in their costumes out in the cloakroom until the crowd gathered on the small, crowded seats. Little girls dressed in long cheesecloth robes carried candles and sang “Away in a
Manger,” and we said poems. At the last would come the pageant, with the baby Jesus lying like a china doll in his straw crib; and little shepherds dressed in sheepskins and little wise men in their sisters' long dresses with tinsel on their turbans; and then little cheesecloth angels with gold cardboard wings.