Loretta Lynn_ Coal Miner's Daughter - Loretta Lynn [41]
That’s the way we mountain people are. Daddy’s younger brother Corman still lives in an old cabin up the holler. Corman was a real quiet boy, about twelve years younger than Daddy was. He’s real shy. He’s one of us who never could adjust to live outside Butcher Holler.
Sometimes Corman is so shy that he won’t even look me in the face, or talk one word to me. But if I threaten to whup him, Corman gets as nice as can be. The last time I was there, Corman told me he knew Daddy was going to die the night before he did. Corman said he was walking in the darkness, when he saw something yellow in the woods, like a spaceship almost, but not moving. Corman said when they brought Daddy back for the funeral, he knew then that it was no spaceship, but rather it was Daddy’s coffin—with the yellow flowers. Like I said, we’ve got a kind of extrasensory perception, ESP, in my family, but it also goes along with being mountain people. Maybe it’s from not being so busy with books and television and other people. We can feel things going around in the air.
You can say that’s crazy if you want. But I know I’ve got ESP. It’s like I can always tell how my oldest daughter Betty is feeling. If I dream that I’m whipping Betty, I know she’s in trouble. Or I’ll see her crying and call her on the telephone and say, “Betty Sue, what’s the matter—aren’t you taking your medicine?” And it’ll turn out she’s feeling sick.
Now Doolittle says I’m crazy to believe these things, but I believe ’em. I believe in reincarnation, too. I once read that you could feel your past lives if you concentrated real hard. So I tried it in my hotel room. I wasn’t asleep but kind of in a trance. I lay down quiet and let my mind drift.
All of a sudden I was an Indian woman wearing moccasins and a long buckskin dress and I had my hair in pigtails. Even the sounds and smells were vivid to me. All around me there was a huge field with Indians riding horseback. I was standing next to a mounted Indian—I sensed he was the chief and that he was my husband. I knew he was about to go off into battle, and I was saying good-bye to him. Then a shot rang out, and my husband fell off his horse. I started screaming, and that woke me out of my trance. That’s all I can remember.
In the second such experience, I saw myself dressed up in an Irish costume, doing an Irish dance down a country lane in front of a big white house. But then the telephone rang and the trance ended.
But I know I’ve always had a strong feeling for Indian things, and Irish music has always made me respond in a deep-down way. I know my church doesn’t believe in reincarnation, but sometimes I’m positive I was really an Indian and an Irish girl in times before this one.
Anyway, after Daddy’s funeral, me and Doo went back to Washington State. The next summer, Mommy brought the family to stay with us. It was good to spend some time with them because I’d been away from home almost ten years, and I didn’t hardly know the little ones. This is when I found out that Jack was singing in a hotel club in Wabash. He used to sing on the radio station in Paintsville and now he was singing in public. Peggy and Brenda, the baby, were singing, too. And me, I hadn’t even started yet. But I don’t think that really gave me the idea to start singing. That came later. They stayed with us the summer, and then Mommy went back to her job in Wabash and took the kids with her.
A little later was when Mommy married Daddy’s first cousin, Tommy Butcher. She knew him in Butcher Holler about as long as she knew Daddy. Tommy’s been real good with us. To me, he’s one in a million, and I love him very much. Tommy used to be pretty wild when he was younger, but he’s reformed now and he works in a factory. The only time he’s wild is behind the