. . . about West Virginia, I write from a secure place. I’m sitting on the top step of a porch that runs the length of “The Homeplace,” a two-story house built in 1902. The step is mostly aggregate and sometimes I’ll run my finger over a pebble or throw green beans back on the porch.
The green beans are coming from the women who sit in cushioned rockers above me. These are my five great-aunts, all of whom have been stringing half-runners since late afternoon and won’t stop until moths cover the porch light. Sometimes they miss the pans set between their feet.
The longer they string, the more they talk, and the more they talk, the more details they dredge from the past. They also forget I’m sitting there because I’ve stopped throwing the beans back.
I learn the town’s history until dusk. I learn about the Depression, where the gas lines were first laid, how they learned to use oleo instead of butter, and about Sunbonnet Sue flour sacks. All the young girls wore flour sack dresses just as everybody had a garden. Why, Fred Ball’s corn grew right to his door!
But as dusk deepens, the bean juice affects them like distillery fumes, and details about the townspeople pop out. Their stories are astonishingly accurate (and deeply personal) because none of the great-aunts ever lived out of the town.
Yes, the gas lines originally ran down Pike and crossed to Mason, but they also ran over to Buttermilk, where the sprawling Davis family lived. Those Davis girls went gas-men crazy, and one got left with a surprise. Woody Perkins courted Stella Fetty for months while secretly married to a girl from Burlington. No, Stella didn’t know it. Emmalee, the postmistress, told her. She opened his mail. And I’ll never believe Blanche Greene’s fall was an accident. She was up and down those cellar stairs all her life. And left that nephew everything.
I perched on that step for six summers, listening through bushels of green beans, corn, peaches and a week of cracking black walnuts until my hands were stained.
Then, I turned thirteen and their stories no longer fascinated me. I didn’t want to hear about the past. I didn’t care about dead people. I wanted to be on the phone or at a friend’s house applying mascara. I desperately wanted to smoke.
So,
I left the porch but the porch never left me. Every time I write about West Virginia, I hear their voices. Though they had similar speech patterns and colloquialisms, their voices were clearly distinguishable. Irene had the voice of a young girl, while Dortha’s was shrill due to hearing loss. The other three filled in the harmony. They reminisced, they gossiped, they argued over recipes, and all was done to the cadence of produce hitting tins.
A town was forming inside me, though I didn’t know it. I was filled with people I knew but had never met. Thus was born Harshbarger Mills.
It’s got a river, three churches, a bank with $27,000 in it, and a general store that sells everything from meat hanging in a cooling room to lace tablecloths kept under glass. Someday, there will be a movie theatre called The Virginian, a drug store, and a Greyhound bus stop. There’s three schools, a band, and majorettes with blue plumes and taps. The stories span years, but the action takes place in a radius of ten blocks. The people I write about are the archetypes that traveled with me to a larger world. Never be a Davis girl, nephews aren’t to be trusted, and don’t eat vegetables from the can.
The people I write about are connected by details, and the details tether them to the town. Nowhere but in Harshbarger Mills could there be only one stop light and one taxi, driven by a one-armed man. And it would be preposterous to think that the one -armed driver, a veteran, didn’t lose his arm in the war but when he reached for his whiskey, hidden in a woodpile. A rattlesnake bit him. Dr. Veach used his own sleeve as a tourniquet, then severed Donald’s arm with a bone saw before the venom stopped his heart.
He was Stumpy McGhee after that.
There’s truth in myth, in the stories that connect us.
