Hillbilly Heart (5 page)

“I will go fishing,” I wrote. “I will go skinny-dipping. I will play baseball. I will ride my motorcycle.” And here I took a long, dramatic pause. I sensed the entire class was hanging on my words. What ignorance was I going to impart? I didn’t let them down as I said with breathless melodrama, “From where the sun now stands, I will learn… no more… forever.”

All my classmates laughed, and so did my teacher, Mr. Holt. He gave me an A—and more important, he encouraged me to be creative.

But my most important lessons came when I was riding around with my dad while he was teaching me to drive. One time I was trying to back out of a tight spot. I kept going back and forth, back and forth, turning the wheel one direction, then the other. Laughing, he said, “Remember this day, Bo. Life is a series of adjustments.” My dad’s front seat was always filled with a mess of papers; if you were to get in my car today, you’d find the same thing—CDs, songs I’m working on, and reminders of meetings. But his were notes about people and the problems that really mattered to them.

One day, out of the blue, my dad announced, “We’re going to pay a visit to John Samson and see how he’s doing.”

I’d never heard of John Samson. I asked, “Why?”

“He got cheated out of all them funds he’s supposed to be due for that black lung he caught in the coal mine, and he’s going to need some help fighting for that money.”

Later, we visited Sister Sheila out on Route 1. Her culvert was stopped up from a flood and my dad was trying to get it cleared. He explained, “If we don’t get that fixed, her creek is going to overflow again and all the gravel will wash out of her driveway.”

My dad didn’t just talk about helping people and getting things done. He lived it. Whether I realized at the time, I took that powerful lesson to heart, as I did so many other lessons from the school of real life.

Another branch of my education revolved around a baseball diamond or a basketball court. I celebrated when the Big Red Machine won their first pennant, listened to the Muhammad Ali–Joe Frazier fight on the radio, and mourned the 1970 plane crash that killed seventy-five people from the Marshall University football team. That crash happened less than twenty-five miles from my house, and it was the most tragic event that happened close to us.

When I was in seventh grade, I made what seemed to be a monumental decision in my burgeoning athletic career. I stopped playing basketball. The coach was stunned. “Cyrus, you could be the best player on the team,” he said. “Are you sure?”

I was. I didn’t tell the coach this, but I felt bad when my mom and dad were trapped on the same bleachers, under the same roof, during my basketball games. Other sports were played outside and in spaces that allowed more distance, especially for my mom.

“Sir, I think I should just focus on baseball and football,” I said.

“Is that what you really want?” he asked.

“I think it’s for the best,” I said with the utmost sincerity, trying to show that I had given this a lot of thought.

Sports kept me confident and focused. Robbie Tooley and I tore up the football field. But baseball was my favorite because it brought out the warrior in me. Although I started out playing all positions, I had settled in at catcher by the time I was eleven.

As soon as I strapped on my gear, I turned into a field general, a quarterback… and a scrappy one at that. My teammates called me Blood. I’d fight at the drop of a hat. If a batter struck out on
the third strike, I’d show him the ball, as if to say, “Here it is, here’s what you missed,” just to rile him up and get under his skin. Or if a runner slid into home plate with his cleats high, I made sure he got tagged first. As long as he was out, that’s all that mattered.

I needed that toughness when Papaw Casto died suddenly after a massive heart attack. Not only did my heart overflow with sadness like I’d never known, but I was also passed over at about that same time for the baseball all-star team even though everyone knew I was the best catcher in the league. Crushed, I rode my bicycle to my papaw’s grave at the Flatwoods cemetery.

I remembered my dad’s words—“Life ain’t fair.” But my papaw would have had something else to add. He was a baseball fan and had come to nearly every one of my games.

“How could this have happened?” I said. “I miss you so much. I know if you were here you’d tell me something to make me smile.”

I sat there for a long time, looking at the grass, slapping at insects buzzing past, and listening to the quiet. Before leaving the cemetery, I said a prayer.

When I arrived home on my bike, the coach of the all-stars was there, talking with my mom and Cletis in the front yard. When he saw me, he stuck out his hand and said, “There’s my all-star catcher.”

I stopped in my tracks. “What the—?”

“We were looking at the team and realized you weren’t on it,” the coach said. “Everyone assumed you’d made it. We need you, son. You’re our catcher.”

I broke out my supersize grin, looked over at my mom, then at Cletis, then at the coach, and finally up at the ceiling. “Thanks, Papaw,” I said silently.

It wasn’t the last time I would think someone up high was keeping an eye on me.

CHAPTER 4

Silence Speaks Louder than Words

I
WAS NEARLY A
fourteen-year-old fugitive. A developer began building homes in the woods at the end of Long Street. I watched the bulldozers clear the trees and level the land. I was horrified and angered. That was sacred ground. I couldn’t fathom the loss of my sanctuary, the wooded retreat where I went to hide out and think. It was also where Indians had lived and hunted for hundreds of years before anyone thought of putting in dozens of one-story tract homes.

Even if it was legal, it felt wrong, so I did my best to stop the pillaging. I snuck out at night and put dirt in the bulldozer’s gas tank. I also tore up the insides of a few tractors. I prayed I wouldn’t hear the sound of those diesel engines starting up in the morning.

Unfortunately, while I may have annoyed some folks when they showed up for work, they continued, unhindered. Soon the woods disappeared and houses were built. One day I saw a guy who’d moved into a new house take a bird’s nest out of a tree and bust a bunch of baby bird eggs on the sidewalk. I thought he deserved payback.

Late one afternoon, I went out there with my friend Joe Preston. I knew the builders stored cans of sulfuric acid for dissolving extra concrete. We took a couple of cans and walked back to where
the baby-bird killer lived. We threw the acid against the side of his house and wrote ugly things about killing baby birds on the walls and fence in red paint. It looked like blood.

As we turned to run away, I noticed the neighbor’s bathroom window was open, with a large jar of Vaseline on the shelf in front. In a single motion, I grabbed it and chucked it on the sidewalk, where it shattered. Back then, the jars were made of blue glass and it made a horrendous mess.

That night, the police came to the house. My brother knew about it and said the state police were taking fingerprints. Joe and I snuck through a couple of backyards and saw the cops. By this time, I felt bad about having torn up that guy’s property. It was a horrible thing. Maybe we had taken it too far. But I didn’t want to go to jail and neither did Joe. So we decided to leave town… on our bicycles.

We headed out toward Greenbo Lake. We spent a good part of the night on our bikes, but at some point we turned back and went to Joe’s house. After making sure the coast was clear, I went back to 2317 Long Street. Nothing happened, no one asked any questions, and I never brought it up.

For me, it was the rare escape.

I wasn’t a bad kid, but I sure wasn’t an innocent one. Getting in trouble was my way of dealing with the conflicts of being from a broken home. My parents’ lives were so different, and it created a mess of confusion for me. I dreaded conversations with new people, knowing that they’d eventually ask me about my family and if I had any brothers or sisters.

Always trying to be honest, I’d say, “Yeah, I have one brother by my mom and my dad, one brother by my mom and my stepdad, one sister by my dad and my stepmom, two stepsisters from my stepmom, and one stepsister from my stepdad.”

Every month, my mom and Cletis struggled to pay their bills. My dad and Joan did better. It was hard for me to reconcile having hardship and joy in the same family. I guess that’s where the phrase
broken home
comes from.

A year or so later, my dad made his first run at public office. He lost, but I never heard him say so. Instead, he made it seem like he’d learned what it was going to take to win the next time. “Everything was in God’s timing,” he said. Then he added, “There are only two things in the middle of the road—yellow lines and dead possums.”

That’s one of the truest sayings, ever. I still say it to this day.

In 1975, my dad ran again, for the Kentucky House of Representatives, from the ninety-eighth district, and this time he won. We worked hard on his campaign. Kebo and I put up posters all over town, so I attributed the win, at least in part, to my staple gun. I don’t remember my dad celebrating his election. Not even a victory dinner. He went straight to work the next day.

Soon afterward, he quit the steel mill and went full-time with the AFL-CIO. As he canvassed the state, his passion for helping people took on an even more pronounced purpose.

Not long before, my papaw Cyrus got an infection in his lungs and passed away. He was eighty-five. His was the first funeral I attended where he wasn’t preaching. It was strange to not have either of my grandfathers in my life anymore. After my parents divorced, I’d leaned on my grandfathers, and while it was sometimes a curse to be known far and wide as the preacher’s grandson, there were definitely benefits, too.

Take for example the day Mrs. Fight, the meanest teacher at McDowell Elementary, caught me and my brother bombing her house with apples. She was an older, heavy woman, with gray hair. My dad remembered her as mean from when she had been
his
teacher. Kebo and I were getting even, I guess. As soon we heard her yell at us, we ran away.

We didn’t expect her to chase us. She was a scrappy old lady. We ran to my papaw Cyrus’s house and went inside just before Mrs. Fight arrived. She knocked on the door a few minutes later and let my grandfather know what had happened. “Preacher Cyrus, them boys right there just pelted my house with apples. I want you to bring them out on this porch and whip them!”

My papaw stood between us. I was imagining the paddle with
holes in it she kept in her classroom. She had beaten me, as well as my brother, my dad, and hundreds of others through the years. But she wasn’t going to get us this time.

“Mrs. Fight, you know boys will be boys,” he said, stretching out his frame to its fullest six feet three inches before closing the door on her.

What could she do? He was the preacher.

Payback came a few years later when I was playing with matches and accidentally set my papaw’s bathroom on fire. To this day, I can still see the hurt in his eyes as he stood in the doorway, surveying the damage, after I had put out the flames.

“What did I do to make you hate me?” he said.

Without waiting for a response, he walked away. It was the most severe punishment I have ever been dealt. If I could take back one moment of my life and trade it in, that would be it.

After my papaw was gone and no longer preaching, I quit going to church and took my juvenile delinquency to a whole new level. I was fourteen, and many kids that age were starting to experiment with alcohol and marijuana. Only I didn’t experiment: I just went straight for it.

There was a guy who lived with his folks a couple of houses down from mine. He was five or six years older than me and, as far as I was concerned, the coolest dude on the planet. To me, he was like the Fonz on
Happy Days.
I saw him one day with a sack of grass and yellow rolling papers. I didn’t even know what it was, but I watched, completely enthralled, while he rolled what I thought was a cigarette. I forgot to mention he had a yellow Corvette to match his papers. He also had a motorcycle and pretty girlfriends… lots of them.