Growing Up (4 page)

A country lawyer in Tidewater Virginia, he mixed religious piety unhealthily with capitalistic ambition. His urge to make money led him into timber speculation. His religion led him to abhor insurance. When an agent tried to sell him a life-insurance policy, he lectured the fellow on the sinfulness of his trade. “God hates a gambler,” Papa said, “and life insurance is gambling with God.” Papa was a good Methodist, and a good Methodist he died at the modest age of fifty-three, felled by a heart attack during a business trip to Richmond. Debt-ridden from timber speculation and uninsured out of respect for God, he left his family destitute.

The year was 1917. My mother was in college at Petersburg—Papa had had grand plans for his children—but she had to quit and go to work. Her education qualified her to teach school, but not for the choice assignments. To find jobs she traveled northward, out of the genteel old Tidewater culture, where her family had been “quality folk” for 250 years, and into primitive backwaters where mountain children came barefoot to school and dropped out after fourth grade to take dollar-a-week work in the fields. Her youth became a succession of two-room schoolhouses, boarding with families of preachers and farmers prosperous enough to have a spare couch to rent for a few dollars a month.

In her middle twenties she came at last to the Arlington School in the northernmost reaches of Loudoun County, a two-room schoolhouse at the foot of the Short Hill Mountain. A few miles beyond to westward lay the Blue Ridge, a few miles to the north, the Potomac River.

Four hundred yards to the west, between the schoolhouse and the mountain, lay a festering center of sin, a bootleg whiskey still operated by the celebrated anti-Prohibition guerrilla Sam Reever.
The dirt road running past the school carried a steady traffic of horseback riders, buggies, cars, and strolling pilgrims to and fro in ceaseless quest of moonshine.

My mother hated whiskey and admired men who could leave it alone. In her family the men never used it. “Papa,” she told me over and over again, “never touched a drop of whiskey in his life.” She believed alcohol brought out men’s innate brutishness, made them foolish and quarrelsome, and destroyed their ability to make something of themselves. The traffic outside the schoolhouse saddened and disgusted her. So many of the men looked so young to be traveling that road to perdition.

When she was outside for recess with her students one day, a sputtering old Model T en route from Sam Reever’s coughed and died right beside the schoolyard. She watched a lanky, dark-haired young man step out, lift the hood, and peer in at the engine. He wore a shapeless gray cap, coarse work clothes, and heavy clodhopper shoes.

After studying the engine, he opened the tool chest on the fender and took out a wrench and a Mason jar. He had the cap off the jar and was lifting it to drink before he noticed her watching him from the playground. “Like a gentleman,” she later recalled, he quickly put the jar out of sight, flashed her a broad smile, and lifted his cap in salute.

He was still tinkering with the engine when recess ended. Back in her schoolroom, her anger about his exposing children to the sight of whiskey was softened by feelings of sadness. What a shame for such a nice-looking young man to be ruining his life with whiskey. He looked like a man who might be able to make something of himself if a good woman took him in hand. Her chance to do so came a few days later.

She was boarding at Ep Ahalt’s farm. Ep owned the biggest barn, the mightiest silo, and the fanciest house in the neighborhood. Ep’s wife, Bessie, a tiny, sweet-tempered woman with grown sons, was different from most women thereabouts. She too wanted her boys to make something of themselves. She fretted about all the bad influences, all the temptations to idleness which
surrounded her sons. One of those tempters dropped in one evening. He wore a shapeless gray cap and arrived in a sputtering old Model T and knocked at the door asking if Walton was there. Walton, one of Bessie’s sons, was not there, for which Bessie was probably grateful, but the schoolmarm boarder was, and Bessie, being the soul of politeness, introduced them.

He was tall and lean in the angular, graceless mountaineer style. His hands were rough, callused, competent. Workman’s hands. Not at all like Papa’s hands. He was not at all like Papa in any respect. With coarse black hair and dark brown skin, he might have been part Indian.

Maybe it was his utter difference from Papa that stirred her. Despite her preference for gentlemen, she was not without a healthy feminine interest in tall, dark, and handsome specimens with the adventurer’s gleam in their eyes. Much later, when Robert Taylor was Hollywood’s newest sex symbol, I was surprised to overhear her tell a group of women discussing Taylor’s charms, “He can park his shoes under my bed anytime.” She was joking, of course, being one of the girls. Still, it forced me to concede that she was capable of more varieties of love than her girlish love for Papa and her motherly love for me.

The young man in Bessie Ahalt’s parlor was obviously no gentleman. Gentlemen didn’t visit Sam Reever. In his favor, though, he was quick to smile, and he was not a complete Hottentot. He had enough manners to say “ma’am” when he talked to Bessie. There was a sense of fun in him too. Unlike most men she met, he was not so blinded by awe of a schoolteacher that he couldn’t see a woman. Though he’d left school after fourth grade, her learning didn’t scare him. Cheekily he asked if she’d like to go riding in his Model T.

She said she’d like that.

Among other things, she planned to improve him. Her first goal was to stop his drinking, but as months passed and the courtship became complicated her program went awry, and then there was a crisis. She was pregnant.

Out-of-wedlock pregnancies were fairly commonplace in that
part of Virginia. They occasioned mild scandal when the news spread, but there was no taint or disgrace if a man “did the right thing” and a marriage ensued. If he refused, people looked on him as a bad sport for a while, until he found another woman, married, and “settled down.” The rejected mother-to-be, on the other hand, faced a lifetime of shame and ostracism.

In either case a schoolteacher’s career was ended. In this terrible moment when she faced ruin, my mother was confronted by a redoubtable enemy. This was her prospective mother-in-law, whose plans for her son did not include marriage with an outsider she heartily disliked.

An obedient son, he had taken the schoolteacher home to meet his mother when the courtship began, and the two women promptly developed a lively aversion to each other. When his mother learned of the pregnancy, she declared violently against marriage. She told him he was a young fool who had been tricked by a hussy ready to stoop to any scheme to trap herself a husband.

She was a domineering woman, who had trained her sons to march to her command. Normally, her opposition to a marriage of this sort would have closed the case against the mother-to-be. This case, though, was different. She was pitted against a woman as fierce as she.

In March of 1925 her son and his schoolteacher went discreetly down to Washington to be married. They were both twenty-seven years old. I was born six months later and immediately became the darling of my doting grandmother. With all her love for me, however, she never forgave my mother, and my mother returned the scorn measure for measure.

Ep Ahalt’s farm looked down across sloping cornfields toward a small village a quarter mile to the south. The village consisted of seven houses and a general store, a few vegetable gardens, a couple of straw ricks, and a scattering of barns, chicken houses, and pigpens. On a summer afternoon the whole place dozed in the sun, under silences broken only by the occasional cluck of a hen, the solitary clack of a closing screen door.

This was the center of the universe in the days of my innocence. Its name, Morrisonville, dated from the early part of the nineteenth century. By the time I came along it could have been appropriately renamed Bakerville, for almost every soul in the community was a member in some degree of the prodigious Baker family, which had settled in the region around 1730.

Why a settlement rose there in the first place is a mystery. The village sat a third of a mile back from the only paved road in the territory, and the sole waterway was a creek so shallow I could wade across it and barely get my feet wet. To get in from the main highway, travelers had to wind through thick stands of brush along a dirt road that could swallow an automobile all the way to the axles in the mud season. When it finally arrived at Morrisonville, this road forked. One branch ambled toward my Uncle Irvey’s house, then lurched to avoid hitting the creek and disappeared into a briar patch. The other branch ran smack through the middle of town as though intending to become a real road, but it lost heart after it passed my grandmother’s house and meandered off in a lackadaisical path toward the mountain.

This was the same road that ran past the Arlington School to Sam Reever’s bootleggery. It came to rest smack against the mountain two miles west of Morrisonville. My great-grandfather Daniel Baker used to live in a log house back there. He was a gunsmith who turned to tailoring after the declining need for full-time gun-makers made the craft unprofitable. Born shortly after the War of 1812, he could still walk five miles carrying a sack of cornmeal when he was eighty years old, and he lived to see the arrival of the twentieth century.

His son George moved down to Morrisonville around 1880 and went into blacksmithing. George was short and on the slender side, not the towering, heavily muscled stereotype of the blacksmith celebrated in Longfellow’s poem. His devotion to Christian worship was remarkable. He required a minimum of two church services each Sunday to keep his soul in sound repair, and after partaking of the Gospel at morning and afternoon servings he often set out across the fields for a third helping at
dusk if he heard of a church with lamps lit for nocturnal psalming.

Shortly before moving into Morrisonville, he had married Ida Rebecca Brown, the daughter of a local farmer. Ida Rebecca was only nineteen at her marriage, but she took to power as naturally as George took to toil. George built his blacksmith shop hard by the stone-and-log house in which Ida Rebecca ruled, and there he pursued a life of piety, toil, and procreation.

He was as vigorous at procreation as he was at churchgoing. In the first year of their marriage, Ida Rebecca produced a son. In the next ten years she produced nine more, including twin boys. In 1897, after an uncommonly long pause of more than four years, an eleventh son was born. He was to become my father. They named him Benjamin.

The line didn’t stop there, though. Two years later there was, at last, a daughter; and five years after her, a twelfth son. Thirteen children was not a record for the neighborhood, nor even very remarkable. One family close by produced children in such volume that the parents ran out of names and began giving them numbers. One of their sons, whom I particularly envied for his heroic biceps, was named Eleven.

How big my father’s family might have become eventually is hard to say, for Grandfather George suffered a stroke in 1907 and died at home, at the still fruitful age of fifty-two. There was a family mystery about his dying words. These, according to Ida Rebecca, were “into midget and out of midget.” At least they sounded like “into midget and out of midget,” though Ida Rebecca never knew if this was exactly what he was trying to say or, if it was, what he meant by it. Nor did she ask him. He belonged to the Order of Red Men, one of those lodge brotherhoods common at the turn of the century which cherished secret handshakes and mumbo-jumbo passwords. Ida Rebecca hesitated to ask him what he meant by “into midget and out of midget” for fear she might be delving improperly into the sacred mysteries of the lodge.

In the eighteen years between Grandfather George’s death and my arrival in Morrisonville, Ida Rebecca established herself as
the iron ruler of a sprawling family empire. Her multitude of sons, some of them graying and middle-aged, were celebrated for miles around as good boys who listened to their mother. If one of them kicked over the traces, there was hell to pay until he fell obediently back into line. In Morrisonville everybody said, “It’s her way or
no
way.”