CHRIS COX AND OTHER HILLBILLY FRIENDS

 

I've been reading in a collection of my friend Chris Cox's columns he writes for the Asheville paper. Chris is from Alleghany County and many of the people he writes about are people here. Some of them I have known. I'm enjoying reading his accounts of people I know and know of. His first collection of his columns he published in a book, WAKING UP IN A CORNFIELD. Amazon has it with 5 stars from customer reviews. I don't see a consensus of five stars on amazon reviews very often. Chris's writing is clear, concise and poetic in the best sense of the adjective, not floral but insightful. His columns are lovingly conceived, coming from somebody whose mind is in touch with his heart. He may not think of it in these terms; it's so much a part of his character he wouldn't notice. In a sense, he is what I mean when I call somebody "real." It's what I call the mountain people, real. When somebody is bad, they're real about it. When somebody is good, they're real about it. By real I mean true, true to self, true to others, honest, straight-forward, says what he means with no compulsion to say what he doesn't mean. And by honesty I mean something more expansive than true and false. I don't mean always telling the truth or even seldom telling the truth. Not that Chris makes things up, he doesn't need to. I'm defining my use of the word, not Chris in particular. Chris is mountain people; it comes naturally to him to connect with the humanity of individuals he writes about. One in particular sticks with me, a friend of his dad's, Leo, who played poker seriously, a great guy, who, the first thing you need to know about Leo is never trust him. Know that and you never have a problem with him.

 

 

Leo was a really good acoustic guitar picker who could not play with a band for being unable to get along with anybody long enough to finish rehearsing their first gig. Understanding where Leo came from helps one to see Leo in an empathetic light; his dad was in prison through most of his childhood for killing a cousin over a still they were working together, whose last words were, Y'kilt me. When I say rough people, I don't mean sandpaper rough, but sawmill rough. Leo was one of the very first people I met here, maybe the second, after his uncle Tom. I was inside my house, which was completely empty, making bookshelves for a wall. It was Christmas day, 1976. I'm not a Christmas celebrant, so I spent the day preparing the house to start bringing my items in. It started snowing. I was driving a 4 wheel drive Jeep pickup with good tires and let it snow. The snow was up to four inches and I was shutting down to go back to the house I was staying in waiting for this house to be emptied by the previous owner. I saw a 61 Ford go up the road. I thought, You won't get far, and went out the door thinking it a good thing to have tracks in the road to drive on. On the road I saw parallel tracks that looked like two huge snakes went up the road side by side. I knew for sure he was not going far. A short ways after the road starts uphill I saw him, driver's side tires in the ditch, back wheel spinning. It was a gravel road then. I stopped, went to his passenger side door with window open and saw him face-down on the steering wheel, passed out drunk, foot on the gas pedal holding the motor wide open. I spoke to him, he jerked upright and I asked if he needed help. Duh. He told me to push it back onto the road. I went back to the left rear fender and pushed the car sideways while he spun the tire. Easily pushed it out of the ditch, hardly any effort on ice, and he was gone, snaking up the road out of sight. He turned left where I turned right. All I know of what happened next was he and the car survived the drive to wherever they went.

 

 

I saw his car go up and down the road several times during my first months. His uncle Tom had told me he was living up the road with his girlfriend. In the spring I was working with Leo's cousin, Bill, clearing a meadow that had grown up in saplings with bush-axe and chainsaw. We saw Leo's car go up the road and Bill said, There goes the most worthless man in Alleghany County. I had to double-take on Bill saying that of somebody. Bill, himself, was a contender for the title. It made what he said all the funnier. Bill said it to mean that guy is even more worthless than himself. Bill had his issues, too. His daddy died of a heart attack driving a tractor when Bill was 12. He and his half dozen brothers and sisters came up in the worst kind of Appalachian poverty, a house you'd call a shack, looked down on by everybody and called 'inbred" because mama and daddy were cousins. He and his brothers became a small gang. They were not aggressive tough guys, but you take one on, you've got them all to deal with. They stuck together to hold their ground. I learned quite a lot about Leo from Bill and Tom. He was a living character for me by the time I met him. And he'd heard about me from his cousins. I don't know how they characterized me, though it would been something like a college-boy that don't know nothin, though he can drink himself stupid and likes to ride around in the car with them on weekends drinking beer and laughing, is respectful and doesn't look down on them. It was easy to be respectful, I was half afraid of them until I found they were my bodyguards when they took me to places I'd never dare go alone. Looking back, I could have easily gone alone with no problem, but then I was looking at the unknown with fear. The pool room on a Saturday night late when everybody was red-faced and red-eyed is something I could never have experienced without my bodyguards. They knew everybody. Everybody already knew I was the new college-boy that worked with them, and were no more interested in me than if I were a bottle cap in the parking lot. I liked it like that. I didn't want their attention. I'd never been in such proximity with so many really rough looking guys. I felt like Pee Wee Herman in the biker bar. And that is not an exaggeration.

 

 

On the sixteenth of April my friend Pat was visiting from the city for the weekend. It was her birthday. She was at a wok in the kitchen when Leo's car stopped out front and we heard a knock on the door. I opened the door. It was a woman in jeans and jacket wearing an old-timey bonnet, blond with blue eyes and black teeth. She put out her right hand and said, Hi, I'm Margie. By this time I'd heard so much about Margie she was a legend already, from Bill and his brothers. I about fell over backwards. This was the first time I'd seen her. They didn't say she had black teeth, but I heard about all the rest of her. She said Leo was waiting in the car. They had some vodka and some chaser and beer. Did we want to party? I said, Yeah. Margie went back to the car and they both returned toting the condiments, a guitar case and a banjo case. Pat turned off the stove and joined the party. We started off with some drinks, getting acquainted, where you from?, talked, laughed, Leo took out his guitar and started picking. Margie took out her banjo and sang, It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels. She had a harmonica, called here a harp. It was the only song she knew. She sang it over and over as the night went on and we got more shit-faced. It was her song. She loved it so much she didn't need any other songs. The song was her life. I never tired of hearing her sing it. I put a cassette on to record her singing it and let the tape go as she and Leo made music and we laughed and partied. Bill stopped by, seeing Leo's car, and went to town for more liquor. Pat was loving this spontaneous moment at least as much as I was. We were both in awe of what was happening before our eyes. It could not have happened if either she or I looked down on these people. Margie told us she'd learned to play the banjo in prison, harp too. Leo was an impressive guitar picker. I thought Margie's banjo pickin was beautiful. I loved her singing, the first my ears had beheld of hillbilly singing. She sang it from her soul. It was right. It was right like Big Mama Thornton singing Summertime and Nina Simone singing Porgy. I gave the hour and a half tape to Pat for her birthday present. She still has it.  

 

caterpillar

all photos by tj worthington

 

LAUGHING WITH FRIENDS

liberty baptist, whitehead nc

 

Early afternoon today I stopped by the welding shop seeing the pickups of some of my friends parked out front among a few dead pickups, tractor parts, scrap metal, Mountain Dew cans in various degrees of being crushed underfoot. It was five of us standing and sitting close around the wood stove. One pulled up and parked right behind me, one whose name I won't mention and whose picture I don't take, even though I had camera and wanted a picture of his face. I won't even ask permission; I don't want to compromise him, knowing he would never rest wondering what I was doing with the photograph of him. He's an incredibly suspicious man. I would be lying to say he doesn't intimidate me. He knows it and gets a kick out of it. I know I can trust him never to do a man any unprovoked harm. And he's not somebody I'm going to provoke, so I'm safe. The fact is that if I were to fall into some kind of tight spot, he'd be the first one at my side, armed, and would have gathered a gang on the telephone that would show up one at a time. He's four years older than me and the roughest human being I know. He's spent a lot of years in prison, hard core prison. He told me once that no matter how good you think you can fight, first thing you learn in prison is you don't know how to fight. All the bones in both hands have been broken such that the outer three knuckles are about a half inch farther back than original. His face is like a minor Picasso face, twisted and misshapen by hard fists of powerful men. He's in the big league of tough guys. He's also the best story teller I've ever known. He keeps me and everybody around bent over in laughter. One of them was talking about issues he was having with an ex girlfriend and said to him, I'll call him Floyd, "D'you ever know a woman you could please?" Floyd said in big man braggadocio and his beautiful southwestern Virginia accent, "I pleased ever woman I ever fucked!" I'll call him Bill, who asked the question. Bill bent over laughing, turned around and walked a few steps away shaking his head, saying, "I knew that's what you were gonna say! I knew you were gonna say that!" Everybody was laughing because it was such a Floyd thing to say. It's the humor of outrageous. It goes all the way back in mountain humor.  

 

front end loader

 

The whole crowd was a rough bunch. Except me. One who works there as welder and mechanic has a degree in Philosophy from Chapel Hill. I'll call him Rick. He's easy going, doesn't attract attention to himself, has his black and white dog with him, Rambo. I once said to him he's the only one I've ever known to have a dog named after a French poet. He got it. He shakes his head and laughs when Floyd talks because it's funny even when it isn't. Bill used to be a fighter, but he'd rather use a gun. Keeps one on him all the time, legally, because, in his words, at least twenty people are looking to kill him and four of them mean it. He's not talking the humor of exaggeration, either. He's constantly alert that somebody might pull up out front and start shooting. He's only a provoking personality when he's severely pissed off. They're all good people. Another who had dropped by was a welder whose daughter died a few years ago from some bad meth going around that killed twelve in the county that year. I'd stopped by his place for some welding when she was six. He had to go upstairs about something and the two kids, girl and boy, were outside playing. She brought me a pale red feather she'd found and told me where there were more. I went with the kids to the back yard fence where several pale red feathers were on the ground. A hawk had stood on the fence rail to devour its catch. I used to know what the bird is called, some kind of bunting, a sparrow-sized bird. Fifteen or so years later when Justin was in his first summer after high school, he came in the door one afternoon and she was with him. She said, "You probably don't remember me, but we met when I was little." I said, "You showed me a bird feather you'd found." She said, "You REMEMBERED!" and we hugged like friends who hadn't seen each other in a long time. Unfortunately, she didn't make it through her wild-thang time. She rode the edge and, by surprise, it gave.

 

sawing firewood

 

These are friends I trust one hundred percent. I've got awful bad where trust is concerned since living in these hills. Here, you don't give trust lightly. It takes years and experience, enough that behavior bears out dependable. I gained the friendship of especially Bill and Floyd in the time I took care of their friend Jr Maxwell, who was also my friend, in his last year of slow fade, mind going away, unto his dying at age 87. It was important to him that he die at home in his own bed, not in a nursing home, the lumberyard for the dying. He was terrified of a nursing home. Everybody around him was busy with their lives and couldn't commit to the full-time care it would take. I was getting enough Social Security to get by on, so I took the role of his caregiver. Social Services and two bitch-from-hell half-great-nieces kept me a nervous wreck with threats, lies, surprise inspections, refusing to believe I could handle it. Finally, somebody mentioned Hospice and I called. The woman I talked with told me he has to be diagnosed six-months terminal or less. I said, "I'm looking at six days." She got off the phone and was walking in the door five minutes after I put down the phone, the exact amount of time it takes to drive to the house from town. She told me what Hospice was going to provide, they'd get SS off my back. I had become determined in my fight against a nursing home aggressively after him, behind-closed-doors looking, on the phone with the company lawyer, to get me out of the way. They didn't know who they were up against. I figured they're corporate, there are limits to how far they can go. I'm on my own. I have no limits. Where they end, I begin. I had to do that, too. The end of it was they never wanted to hear my name or his the rest of their lives. When I have to appeal to my inner redneck, look out. I was under much suspicion by Jr's friends. They'd never heard of anybody helping somebody out for nothing. I didn't want money, refused the offer a few times. I'd say this is between me and Jr; if I take your money it's between me and you. I bought my own groceries and his. 

 

the road down the mountain

 

The day Jr's spirit left the body, one of Bill's cousins said to me, "You get into any kind of trouble, ALL of Whitehead will back you up." I was told it again, same words, by another of Jr's friends same day. When it was over, everybody saw I had not manipulated my way into his will, wasn't taking his guns, didn't want anything but to go home. That day everybody who had been watching me with suspicion embraced me. I felt very powerfully that day the love the community of Whitehead had for him shift its focus to me. It was like the beam of a bright light. I had no idea he was so loved by everybody in the community. I said to one of his friends, "I used to think it was between me and Jr. Now I see it was between me and Whitehead." He said, "That's right." Every one of Jr's friends is now my friend, except the half-great nieces from hell I alienated permanently. These friends of Jr's are people I appreciate deeply for who they are. I feel honored in the heart to have the friendship and trust. They see that I cared about Jr in appreciation just like they did. We respect that in each other. It is even a feeling of Jr's presence when we're together laughing like little boys talking dirty. He loved to listen to Floyd tell his stories. The three of us would sit at the table over a dram apiece, Floyd telling his outrageous stories from experiences in his exceptionally straight-ahead rugged life. Jr spent much of the time bent over in the chair laughing out of control. When Floyd talks, the GD word, the F word, the MF word, the N word and all the others in the alphabet of forbidden words are used multiple times per sentence, as many as he can get in there. He's one of the last of the remaining mountain people whose rhythm of talking has iambic emphases and makes music. I learned appreciation for Floyd from Jr, as well as from knowing him. Floyd even asked me today why I haven't been by to see him. I didn't see that coming. I'll make it a point to do that. When I'm around him I feel like an eleven year old boy with a fifteen year old friend/bodyguard who keeps the bullies away. I look up to him in the same way as the kid. He's a good man. Among the best. Every day I am grateful these people are in my world.  

 

shadow tracks

 

 

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