Loretta Lynn_ Coal Miner's Daughter - Loretta Lynn [33]
9
Doo Kicks Me Out
I’m tired of asking you where you’ve been,
Tired of all this misery I’m in,
Two steps forward and six steps back again.…
—“Two Steps Forward,” by Loretta Lynn
It was bad enough being fourteen and pregnant. But it was even worse when Doolittle kicked me out. When I was about two months’ pregnant, Doo told me to go home to my parents. What else could I do when I was only fourteen? I went home.
When we were doing this book, my writer asked, “Mooney, how could you kick her out when she was so young?”
And Doo kind of hid his face and said, “Aw, her and my sister used to sit around yapping when I came home from work.” Actually, Doo knows it was a bad thing to do—now. But then it didn’t seem so bad to him.
Sometimes Doo says he kicked me out because of my cooking, but I know better. He met this girl named Pearl who lived in one of the coal camps. He insists he never touched her, just talking on the street and stuff. But he was leading up to it. Plus, there was this other woman who had been with every man in Johnson County just about. Doo had been with her before we got married, and he went back to her again.
I can see where having such a young wife would give a man ideas about straying. But still, at the time, it hurt me bad. I could tell Doo wasn’t happy with me. I didn’t know what sex was all about. I think even if I had been handled real gentle, it might not have made any difference. I was too young to be living with a man. It’s that simple.
There were other problems, too. They say the quickest way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. Well, I didn’t get to Doo’s heart that way, either.
I never had been too good in the kitchen because my Mommy was so good at it. When I got married, all I knew was beans and potatoes and corn bread, while Doolittle was used to pot roast and stuff like that.
He knew right away he was in for bad cooking when he asked me to make pancakes and I didn’t know how. I never did get it right. We were living with his family for a while until we got our own little shack, and Angie showed me a few things. But after we moved into the camp in Van Lear, I still couldn’t cook. Every night Doo would come home from the mines and, if he didn’t like what I cooked, he’d just throw it over the porch. We had a dog named Drive who was getting fat eating all the stuff Doo throwed out. But sometimes Drive wasn’t hungry and Doo would point to the mess of food and say, “You see? Even the dog won’t eat your cooking.”
One time I had two of my girl friends do the cooking, and they were pretty good cooks. But when Doo got home, he didn’t know who cooked it, and out of habit he just dumped it over the porch. He said I couldn’t cook and he told his brother to take me home.
Doo was starting to visit this Pearl after I went back to Mommy and Daddy. I was feeling really low, being fourteen and pregnant and getting kicked out already. My brothers started to tease me, and I’d fight with ’em, chasing Junior or Herman through the cornfields, slapping ’em if I could catch ’em.
Mommy, the practical one, suggested I should start getting out with my friends again. She told me to take the bus to Paintsville to see a picture show. The movie was called I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now?—which was a pretty good title for my situation. Doolittle saw me downtown and kept cracking funny little jokes to flirt with me, but I wouldn’t talk to him. I was mad at him for the way he treated me.
After the movies, when I was walking up Butcher Holler, Doolittle was following me. I had these new shoes that were giving me blisters and he said, “Hey, you’re walking funny. Take off your shoes.” I still didn’t talk to him, but I took off my shoes. Finally, he said he wanted to talk to me about ordering clothes for the baby. So I let him talk to me, and we decided to get together again. Later I found that Doo’s Uncle Jake told him: “That’s a real good girl you got there. You ought to make up with her.”
When I moved back, I found that Doolittle