Loretta Lynn_ Coal Miner's Daughter - Loretta Lynn [40]
Four years later we spent two months in Indiana, and that was the last time I seen Daddy alive. He sent me cards on my birthdays, with presents when they could afford it—fake pearls on my nineteenth birthday, a shirt on my twentieth or twenty-first.
I would think about Daddy a lot, out in Washington, and later I even began to dream about him. One night in 1959 I dreamed, as clear as anything, I saw him wearing a blue suit and lying in a wine-colored coffin. I was terribly upset by the dream, so I woke Doolittle up and told him about it. He said I shouldn’t pay no attention to it. Yet when I went back to sleep, I had the exact same dream all over again, only this time I could see myself wringing my hands.
I was still dreaming when Clyde Green knocked on the door and said there was a phone call for me. People didn’t usually call me that early. Sure enough, it was Mommy, telling me Daddy was gone. That was February 22, 1959, on George Washington’s Birthday.
Later I learned how pitiful Daddy’s last days were. They just had this big flood in Wabash, the worst they ever had. The river went right through their home, putting them without food or beds for a while. Daddy went down to the Red Cross to ask for help, but everybody was pushing their way to the front of the line, even people that wasn’t in the flood. So Daddy just turned and went out. That night he got a migraine headache and was walking the floor all night, Mommy said. That was about the time I was having my dreams, you see? Do you think that I could have been feeling Daddy’s pain more than two thousand miles away? That morning he got a lift to the factory, where he just fell over around eight-thirty and died a little later. When I got the call, I wasn’t surprised. They said he died of a stroke but I figure the coal mines done it.
Me and Doolittle just got in the car and headed east for the funeral. They held it in the big brick church in Van Lear—mountain people may move away to find work, but we get buried in our mountains. I always wished it had been held in the little white church in Butcher Holler. That was more natural to Daddy.
They had this big, fat undertaker from Wabash bring the body down from Indiana to Kentucky. That man couldn’t believe how steep the hills were in Kentucky, him trying to move that coffin. We put Daddy up at Mommy’s sister’s house, where we sat up three nights a-praying.
When me and Doo got there, we saw Daddy dressed in a blue suit and lying in a wine-colored coffin—just like I dreamed it!
We buried Daddy in the family plot on the high ridge over Butcher Holler, and I left yellow flowers. For six months afterward, I’d have these nightmares of trying to get to Daddy to tell him I loved him, of being caught in huckleberry vines, or climbing the mountain, afraid I’d get home too late.…
Later I wrote the song called “Mama, Why?” It asks the question, “Why did God take my Daddy?” I know we’re not supposed to question God, but I just felt that he died so young—only fifty-one years old. Daddy never did know what success was like in his life. His times were hard, and he never had anything nice. I wish I could have been a singer when he was alive, so I could have helped him. But he never did know me when I was singing—though I feel like Daddy has helped me.
See, I still feel like Daddy is with me. I can feel his presence. Whenever I go back to Johnson County, I know he’s there. There’s this old bridge from Paintsville to Van Lear that goes over the Levisa Fork of the Big Sandy. When I was little, I always hated to walk that bridge because it was so shaky and high. Now whenever we drive over that bridge I know that Daddy is watching over me.
When we go back to our house in Butcher Holler, I can see the grate where Daddy used to sit and rock me in his arms, him spitting in the fire. I can still feel his arms around me.
And I’m not the only one who feels this way. My writer, George, told me