Loretta Lynn_ Coal Miner's Daughter - Loretta Lynn [22]
Most of our songs we learned from our friends and our family. We didn’t sing too much stuff from the radio when I was little because, like I said before, we didn’t have a radio until I was eleven. The first song I remember on the radio was “I’m Walking the Floor over You,” with Ernest Tubb singing. Nowadays, I can stand right on the stage and watch my friend Ernest Tubb singing that same song. Thrilled? That ain’t the word for it.
Nowadays, people learn their songs from the radio or records. You go up to the mountains and the kids all know the top country songs, even rock ’n’ roll. But they don’t know the old songs anymore.
When we weren’t in school, we were still mean. We used to go around tipping outhouses over, or turning over corn shocks on Halloween. Anything to be mean.
Marie Castle was my cousin and my closest friend. She used to stay with us a lot, and we’d fight one minute and play together the next, but we always knew how the other one felt. Even today, when she pops into my bus in Columbus, Ohio, I know exactly what Marie is feeling. Well just hug each other and start laughing and crying and telling stories about Butcher Holler. Ain’t neither of us changed one bit. We’re still mean.
The last time I was in Columbus, Marie reminded me about the Halloween when we saw a vision. We were rubbing soap on the windows of Tillie Dollarhide, who lived just up the holler. I could see her working in the kitchen. Suddenly I looked down in the yard and saw that same woman walking by some rocks in her garden. Marie saw her, too. We just ran away and never went back to bother her. Doolittle says I’m crazy to believe in “haints”—that’s our word for ghosts. But I’ve seen some things I can’t explain at some séances we’ve held in the last couple of years. I’ll get into that later.
Marie used to chew tobacco—Day’s Work, Beech-Nut, any brand she could find. Sometimes we both smoked rabbit tobacco, which grows wild in the hollers. That’s the plant Mommy calls “Life Everlasting” and uses for tea.
Like I said before, Mommy smoked but she didn’t want us to. She saw smoke coming out of the barn one time and accused Marie of smoking. Marie said I was smoking, too, so we both got whipped. The next day I whipped Marie on the way to school. She was heavier than me, but I was meaner.
One time me and Marie were supposed to be cleaning the kitchen but we got into some home-brewed beer my brother left around. We got dog drunk before we remembered we were supposed to be cleaning up. Well, we poured a whole can of lye into the tub of water. We put our brushes on the wet floor and went skating around, having a great time. I said, “Marie, this floor must really be dirty. Look at the dirt come up.” But it wasn’t dirt. It was the paint we were a-taking up. Mommy whipped us good when she got home. We were just lucky our skin was already used to the lye from doing the wash on Mondays. If it wasn’t, we could have gotten burned bad, the more I think about it.
All of us kids had a starvation for candy. Oh, we’d eat anything with sugar in it. One time I drew a dollar on my Daddy’s credit at the company store and bought ten Pay Day candy bars and ten Fudgsicles. I hid the candy bars for later and ate the Fudgsicles before they melted, but I got so sick I thought I’d die. There I was, sick to my stomach, and to top it off, I caught my foot in some old wooden pilings down near the mine and they had to call Daddy out of work to set me free. I cut my foot and he made me walk home. I’ve still got that little scar to show for it. Years later, when I realized how hard Daddy worked to make that dollar, I felt sick all over again.
Another time me and Marie found this scrip penny from the Van Lear company store. We didn’t feel like walking down to Van Lear so we went to the little grocery near the mine. The man who ran it was working his farm up on the hill. We called him down—him thinking our mothers wanted an order of food. When we handed him the scrip penny, he