Loretta Lynn_ Coal Miner's Daughter - Loretta Lynn [16]
In spite of that, I still got into my share of trouble with Mommy. I hated to wash dishes, and I’d do anything to get out of it. I even hid the dirty dishes under the kitchen cabinet, and one time Mommy found out and cracked me over the head with a broomstick. Daddy saw this and said to her, “No wonder she don’t have no sense!” At the time I thought, “Good old Daddy, always sticking up for his little girl.” You won’t believe this, but it wasn’t until after I was married that I figured out Daddy wasn’t exactly praising his little girl.
Mommy is still healing people. She now lives in Wabash, Indiana, where she married Daddy’s first cousin, Tommy Butcher, and she works in a home for retarded children. Her job is to make sure the kids get their medicines. She doesn’t make the medicines herself—they’re prescribed by a doctor—but she swears the medicines are the same as she made when she was raising us.
The home where she works is a beautiful place called Vernon Manor. You think of homes for retarded people and you think of those big ugly buildings that the government puts up. But this is a private deal, and that’s why it’s so nice. It’s laid out in a big H-shape, all on the ground floor, and all the rooms are bright and sunny. The kids are from infants to nineteen years old, and most of ’em have physical problems, too.
They’ve got doctors and nurses, but I think Mommy knows just as much about curing them. She makes a salve out of soap and some other stuff and rubs it on those little children’s sores. Her bosses say nobody can heal a child better than she can. They’re always after her to teach them before she retires. Mommy says she’s not much for writing things down; she’s got a few secrets written down in a family Bible somewhere. I’d say that some day, that’s gonna be valuable to medical science.
Her bosses call her “The Squaw,” because she’s got special powers. She can read the grounds in a coffee cup and tell your future. We’ve got some kind of extrasensory perception in our family, too. Me and Mommy are on the same wavelength—I can always tell when she’s sick. I’ll call her up and say, “Mommy, what’s wrong?” and she’ll tell me she’s got the virus. I’m the same way with my oldest daughter, Betty Sue. I think it has something to do with being Indian.
4
Family Style
Hungry little baby on a cold hard floor,
Crying for milk but there ain’t no more.
Can’t get credit at the grocery store,
But that’s how it is when you poor.…
—“When You’re Poor,” by Tracey Lee
I never asked Mommy and Daddy whether they wanted such a big family, but I do remember Mommy saying that as long as she was nursing, she couldn’t have another baby. That’s about the only kind of birth control they had in the mountains in those days. And the truth is, that’s the only method I knew until after I had my first four.
I remember Mommy nursing Jackie—we call him Jay Lee now—until he was four years old. When company came, he’d go behind the door and motion for Mommy to nurse him. He hates for me to remind him about that, but I do it just for meanness.
Mommy says I was always mischievous, fighting with my brothers all the time. She says I liked to draw attention to myself that way but that the kids never stayed mad at me for long.
I was the second child, right after Melvin—everybody calls him Junior. Herman came after me, followed by Jay Lee, then Peggy Sue, then Betty Ruth. Next was Donald Ray and finally Brenda. The oldest and the youngest were around fifteen years apart,