Loretta Lynn_ Coal Miner's Daughter - Loretta Lynn [9]
We still lend our old house out to relatives. They keep a guest book for my fans to sign. There’s been people from almost every state in the nation, which ain’t easy because there aren’t any signs marking Butcher Holler. You’ve just got to ask directions, if you can find anybody to ask. The old house is falling apart now, the floor sagging and stuff. But they’ve still got my old bed and other furniture and some day I’m gonna put it all in the museum I’m building on the ranch.
My folks don’t make a big fuss over me in Butcher Holler. They knew me when I was wearing flour sacks, so I ain’t no big deal to them. I can go back there and we’ll talk just the same way we always did—tell snake stories and ghost stories, believing about half of it.
Somebody wrote a story saying I should pay to have the road paved so people can drive up easier. I won’t do it, and I’ll tell you why. The only reason people ever heard of Butcher Holler was because I put it on the map. It’s just a little place. If my Daddy were alive today, he’d say I shouldn’t pave it. He’d know better. I waded out of the mud when I left Butcher Holler and when I go back to visit I wade through the mud again. They don’t need no pavement.
We didn’t even have cars when I was living there. When I was born, there was no sense in going to the hospital. We couldn’t afford it anyway, not with the Depression going on. So we had this old woman, Old Aunt Harriet, around eighty years old, come to deliver me. She was almost blind, Mommy said, and she had to feel with her fingers where to cut the cord. Daddy had to sell our milk cow, Old Goldy, to pay thirty-five dollars to Old Aunt Harriet so she’d stay two weeks with Mommy.
After I was born, Mommy put me in the crib in the corner. We just had this one-room cabin they made from logs, with the cracks filled with moss and clay. The wind used to whistle in so bad, Mommy would paper the walls with pages from her Sears and Roebuck catalog and movie magazines. I remember I could see pictures of Hitler, Clark Gable, and that Russian man—Stalin, is that his name?—and a picture of a beautiful woman with earphones on her head—a telephone operator. I never forgot how pretty she looked. Mommy never went to the movies, but she always liked pictures of Loretta Young and Claudette Colbert. Right over my crib she pasted pictures of them two stars. That’s how I got my name. Lots of times I wonder if I would have made it in country music if I was named Claudette.
When I was born, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the president for several years. That’s the closest I’m gonna come to telling my age in this book, so don’t go looking for it. I’m trying to make a living singing songs. I don’t need nobody out there saying, “She don’t look bad considering she’s such-and-such years old.”
One time on television, somebody asked my age and I said it was none of his business unless he was selling insurance or taking the census. Then he asked me what year I was born in—and I told him! Afterward, my husband said I must be the dumbest person in the whole United States. Well, I may be dumb but I ain’t stupid, at least not anymore. Now I’ve learned not to give away my age.
I was born on April 14, which I think is important because I believe in horoscopes. I was born under the sign of the Ram, which means I’m headstrong, don’t like people telling me what to do. That’s the truth. I listen to ’em, but if they’re wrong I just do what I think is right.
Mommy says I started to walk and talk around eleven months old, before I took sick. I had an ear infection called mastoiditis. The only way they could cure it was by drilling holes in my head to clean out the infection. They done this every day, then put cotton right into the holes. I had curly blond hair up until that time, but they cut off all of them curls so they could fix the infection. Mommy couldn’t afford to keep me in the hospital overnight, so every day she’d walk with me the ten miles to Golden Rule Hospital in Paintsville, so they could scrape the infection. I’ve still got the scars from the drilling around