Songs of Life and Grace by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2021-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

TWO-MILE TUNES

Enthusiasm and hope leavened my family like soda in sorghum for a winter’s breakfast, expanding and lightening the heavy molasses while cutting the sweetness by half. Our laughter saved us from a syrupy sentimentality—laughter with an edge to it. The improbable we tried with heart. The impossible we just laughed about. Our thinking was that if you can poke fun at the devil, it gives you some control over him and over the inevitable outcome of his acts. Had old Lucifer in our sights, we did.

Momma and Daddy moved back to Two-Mile essentially unchanged. They laughed a lot, loved their family, worked hard, and liked to have a good time. The West Virginia years in the Hemphill coal camp had changed one thing about my parents, though—their names. In the early forties, Daddy and Momma had gone off to West Virginia as “Lifie Jay” and “Grace.” In the late forties they returned to Kentucky as “E.J.” and “Grayce.”

When Sister was born in 1947, that ended West Virginia and the traveling life for me and Momma, since two kids were one too many for us to just up and go follow Daddy from job to job. While Momma would have preferred to stay in Hemphill, Daddy never got broke from home enough to see himself living that far away from Grandma Alk and Pop Pop. Fortunately, we had the option of moving back because—thank the Lord!—Daddy was part of the patch-off tradition. We had land. When Daddy married Momma, Pop Pop had deeded him a little piece of ground right across the road and the creek from where Pop Pop lived with Grandma Alk and Daddy’s youngest sister, Jo. To an outsider it may have appeared that there wasn’t much to the Lifie Jay piece. To Momma, Daddy, and me, however, it was “home” in every sense of the word, and it tied our little family to Two-Mile and to a rural Appalachian lifestyle that was all but destroyed by the industrialization of the American landscape.

The point could be made that the patch of hillside land across Two-Mile Creek was not a substantial gift, since the property wasn’t good for much of anything, not even a very good house seat. It was, however, the only piece of ground Pop Pop ever gave any of his children, since he knew early on that he would need to leave anything he accumulated to provide lifetime care for Jo, his severely retarded youngest child.

The Lifie Jay piece was a rolling patch of land about two hundred feet deep and three hundred feet wide that lay between the hill and the graveled main road that ran between Paintsville and Inez. Daddy and Pop Pop built our house on a fifteen- to twenty-foot shelf of flat land that lay between the ten-foot flood plain south of Two-Mile Creek and the precipitous rise of the hill behind it. There was hardly a foot of level ground to be found on that side of the road, but

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