12. A Handful of the Mountain
13. Lead a Horse to Water
14. A Gizzard on My Fork
15. Suffer the Little Children
16. The Flesh is Weak
17. Ladies Don’t Sweat
18. Gypsy Skirt
19. Birds of a Feather
20. The Living and the Deaf
21. Lonely Hearts Club Man
22. There Be Dragons
23. Mr. Pursley’s World
24. The River Ran Cold
25. The Mountain Fell Away
26. All the Bells Were Ringing
Epilogue: We Are Going Home . . .
Acknowledgments
The scales would drop from my eyes;
I’d see trees like men walking;
I’d run down the road against all orders, halooing and leaping.
ANNIE DILLARD, PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK
A Note from the Author
Running on Red Dog Road is a memoir of my childhood, mostly set in 1940s East Beckley, West Virginia. It is a living history of the Appalachia I lived in and loved as a child. How it looked and sounded and tasted. How it was. I was as faithful to those places and people as memory and the passage of time would allow—to do less would be a disservice to the remarkable family and place this book is meant to honor. Although names of all family members and many other characters are real, identifying characteristics of some places and people were changed to ensure their privacy. The stories in Running on Red Dog Road were recreated, not exactly as they were, for that clearly would not be possible, but as seen through my eyes as a child. As I wrote, I asked myself the same question over and over—what would Grandma think? I think she would be pleased. Mercy me, she’d say, here you’ve gone and set us down in a book. Yes ma’am, I’d say. I hope I have done her and all the others proud. Their influence on my life was and is immeasurable.
Begun as a legacy to my progeny, Running on Red Dog Road ended as a tribute to their forebears, the family to whom I owe everything. It is, then, a book of atonement. Resurrecting the dead, living with them, and burying them again was profoundly moving. It took me six years to complete this book, and for several of those years I wrote nothing at all—blindsided by memories that struck me dumb. They were mostly good memories, deeply rooted in family and mountains and the culture of Appalachia, so I was unprepared for the emotional physical spiritual toll this writing could and did exact—and puzzled too. After all, I come from stoic stock, not given to unseemly histrionics. I took after this kin, or so I claimed. I never cried. Not at my grandpa’s funeral, nor my grandma’s many years later. Not at my sister’s or brother’s or mother’s. So the tears that overcame me as I relived our lives on that red dog road so long ago were an enigma—that is, until I realized every family member I wrote about is dead. Except for me. And the heartbreak is they died not knowing how I felt about them. They couldn’t have. Until I began to write their stories, I didn’t know myself.
RUNNING ON
RED DOG ROAD
Prologue: in the beginning . . .
Her life traces a thin red line across a monitor in the intensive care unit. Tangled wires and tubes curl around baby arms and nose and foot. The widow’s peak of dark hair that shapes her face into a valentine is shaved to make room for yet another needle. Each determined gasp heaves her ribcage up and down, forcing oxygen through lungs not yet ready to breathe.
She fights hard, this first grandchild of mine, and gradually recovers from the hyaline-membrane disease afflicting her at birth, earning her stripes early as the fifth living generation of strong women in her family. She is given her great-great-grandma’s name, my grandmother’s—Clerrinda—and like that grandma, she is called Rindy.
One year later, when Rindy is not only breathing but thriving, we have a picture taken for Grandma Clerrinda’s one hundredth birthday. Five generations line up in front of the camera—Grandma, my mother, me, my daughter, and Rindy, on her great-great-grandmother’s lap.
Still the strongest link in the chain, Grandma directs the photographer and us as well. He’s from the newspaper and is gathering information for the feature article he’s writing about her. She remembers everything, prompting us when we need help with a name or date.
Like a movie star, she talks and laughs and sings hymns into the video camera recording the event. She wears the dress I bought for her at Neiman’s, a silk jersey print of mauve flowers with Irish lace trim. I overspend because I believe it might be her last new dress, her last birthday. I watch as she smooths the skirt over her lap. She thinks she looks beautiful, and she is right. She tells me she wants to be buried in that dress. Three and a half years later, her wish is granted.
But now, Rindy is a young woman, dandling her own baby on her lap. This great-granddaughter, called Drema after me, will carry the Appalachian name my father gave me deeper into the future than I can see. Rindy holds the old picture of the five generations in one hand, turning it this way and that, trying to recognize something of herself in her great-great-grandma’s century-old face.
“Am I anything like the grandma I’m named after? Did you know my grandpa? Do you remember them?”
“Yes,” I say, “I remember them.”
1
I Come from Coal
We were in the middle of a war. Grandma came right out and told me, but I knew it anyway. Grandpa couldn’t turn on the radio without us hearing how Uncle Sam needed everybody to buy War bonds, and ever last one of us had a brother or uncle or neighbor over there fighting, as everybody said, the Japs. Grandma told me it did not matter one
