The Coffin Quilt (20 page)

Next morning Ro never got out of bed at all. I went upstairs to find her dead. Pa buried her in Dils Cemetery, other side of Pikeville. He never said why he didn't take her back to Blackberry Fork and bury her with the others. We didn't ask.

I think I knew.

I think we all did, though none of us ever spoke the words. I think might be I was the last one to know about Ro and what she was about. But I thank God I came around to knowing.

All the newspapers carried news of her death. They played it up, all the things we'd rather forget. How
Roseanna McCoy was the one who caused the feud between the two families, how a war had been fought over her. Like Helen of Troy. Imagine! My sister!

Trinvilla and Will didn't come to the funeral. Reverend Thompson was still in Pennsylvania. Johnse Hatfield didn't come, either. None of the Hatfields came. I think my family would have killed them right over her gravesite if they did.

Might be if I'd given her the note she would have rallied. I think of it as saving more lives. Though at night when the house is quiet I mind that I probably lulled her by not giving it.

I think how strange this fight was between our families. How the killings, the raids, the maiming, the burning, and loss of property and home was all so bad. But the things we didn't do when we should have were just as bad.

Ma didn't give Jim permission to send for Pa and form a posse. I didn't give Ro the note from Johnse. People who knew didn't tell the judge that Ellison Mounts wasn't to blame for killing Alifair. And the wrong man was hanged. Oh, I tried to tell Pa. We had a regular fuss about it. But he wouldn't hear it. "Somebody has to hang for killing Alifair," he said I told him it wasn't right, that I'd go to the judge myself, and he laughed and said no judge would listen to a woman, look how they'd called Ma a liar in court, and she was there. So I knew he was right.

The things we don't do are just as bad as the things we do in this life. It can drive you pure daft, if you think about it.

I have thought about it. A lot. Which is maybe why I've told Mr. Cuzlin I want to take that exam and get into normal school. And try to become a teacher. Might be some good will come of it that wouldn't be if I just sat around here taking care of Ma every day and brooding. Ma will get taken care of. Let Adelaide come home and stay for a while I've decided to do it.

Think on it. Something good coming out of something a McCoy did. That's a hoot, isn't it?

I've not seen Yeller Thing again and I don't expect to. I still have Ro's Coffin quilt. And someday soon I'll burn that, too.

A
LTHOUGH THERE HAVE
been other famous feuds in America, the Hatfield-McCoy feud is the most famous and widely recognized. Like most recognizable events in our history, it has now been elevated to the realm of folklore. Having achieved this status, there are many versions and interpretations, the most popular being that it started in 1880 when Roseanna McCoy of Pike County, Kentucky, ran off with Johnse Hatfield of West Virginia.

However, by 1880 the bad blood was already evident between the Hatfields and the McCoys. Some say it started during the Civil War (what the clans in West Virginia and Kentucky then called The War Amongst Us) when Ranel McCoy's younger brother Harmon, who had come out for the Union, was home on leave and killed by West Virginia bushwhackers who were Hatfields as well as Confederates, men who had come
home to find that their part of the state had pulled away from the rest of Virginia and become Union.

Was this when the seeds for the bad blood were planted? Nobody knows. But we do know that the Civil War conditioned men who fought in it to kill and to hate, and that in many instances they went right on hating and lulling after it was over. This happened especially in the West, where it gave rise to many notorious guerrilla gangs or gunfighters. And in this far-flung region of the country, the West Virginia-Kentucky border, where nobody kept count of who was doing what, where the mountain people held to their own code of ethics. So in actuality we can say this feud was a continuarion of the war.

At any rate, the bad feelings that rose from the lulling of Harmon McCoy smoldered and surfaced again after the war in 1878 when Ranel McCoy lost his hogs, which he alleged were taken by Hatfields. A trial followed and Ranel McCoy lost. The enmity that ensued here was kept under control, apparently, until the elections of 1880, when Roseanna McCoy, Ranel's prettiest daughter, ran off with Johnse Hatfield, the handsome son of Anse Hatfield, nicknamed "Devil Anse."

Ranel McCoy considered this act a betrayal by his daughter and revenge against him by Devil Anse, and the feud was fed by it and went on with fighting and killings becoming a way of life for both families until 1889. Hatfields and McCoys took to shooting each other on sight. Arrests in home territories always resulted in acquittals, since every other deputy was a relative of the family on their home turf. Posses were constantly
formed by both parries to cross and recross the Tug Fork of the Big Sandy River and invade "enemy" land. As the feud gained momentum, farming was neglected and land was sold off to get money to invest in hiring detectives, to pay hired guns, and to buy ammunition.

The worst of the bloodshed happened on New Year's Eve in 1887, when Hatfields attacked Ranel McCoy's house on Pond Creek on the Blackberry Fork in Kentucky. The open gunfire of the raid caused the deaths of Ranel's daughter Alifair and his son Calvin. During the battle Ranel's wife, Sarah, was beaten and nearly killed, and the house was burned to the ground.

Newspaper accounts called this New Year's Eve attack worse than any ever committed by Indians on the pioneers, the worst in Kentucky's history.

Yet somehow, after all the killings and hatred, the warfare between the two clans eventually ended. One possible reason was the advent of commercial coal mining in the area. Developers would not abide such behavior and pressured the law to end it. Some even offered a reward for the capture of old Devil Anse, who hid out in the hills until he died in 1921.

The feud, which had lasted so long in the steep and rugged ridges of the West Virginia-Kentucky border, was over.

Hatfields became respectable mine operators. McCoys went back to their lives, too, cultivating the land, raising ginseng, keeping bees, breeding cattle, hogs, and sheep, and displaying many of the traits and talents the people of these parts are famous for—the traits that mark the pioneer, the survivor, the breaker of the land,
the raiser of the family, the churchgoer, the good neighbor. The most famous American family feud disappeared into the annals of American folklore, and today most people may recognize the Hatfield-McCoy names, but know nothing about them at all.

***

W
HEN
I
TOOK
on the project of this novel I immediately saw how vast and far-reaching the story was. So I knew I had to contain it. If one does factual reading about the feud, one will discover that many characters involved in it, but not central to the telling, are not in this book. I could not encompass everything in the Hatfield-McCoy story. For instance, where was Josephine, the oldest in the McCoy clan, born in 1848? She does not figure in the feud and was apparently married and gone from the area, so I did not involve her. The same went for Lilburn, a son born in 1856, so I have him off "seeking gold."

I made Fanny, the youngest, the protagonist, because she was just the right age to tell the story in 1889, and her recollections, which go back to a child of seven and, in one instance, earlier, are viewed and processed as a child would see things. Obviously, with her siblings being all ages, the story would vary and the interpretation be different if told from the eyes of any of them.

I have followed religiously the chronology of events—the stealing of Ranel McCoy's hogs, the trial that followed, the meeting of Johnse and Roseanna at the elections of 1880, the killing under the pawpaw trees,
and everything else that is rooted in history. But, as with all my books, the when and where means little if you don't have the why of it. And the why of it is not supplied in history. We can only guess at the emotions that compel people to do what they do. But the why of it is what makes up historical fiction.

So, as with all my books, I have supplied the why. For instance, there is nothing in my research that tells me that Alifair and Fanny didn't get on, but there is Fanny, the youngest in the family. And there is Alifair, twenty-nine and still living at home when she is shot on New Year's Eve in 1887. Why is she still single and living at home when most young girls in these hills were wed at sixteen? Well, she must have had a distinctive character. Perhaps she was too strong willed. Or perhaps she was intent on pursuing some interest that meant more to her than marriage. So I made her a "healer." Yet, not having wed, she would be wanting to see to the household in the ways of a woman, and with her mother sickly, she would want to take over the McCoy kitchen. And pan of that would be bossing around little Fanny, maybe even picking on her and taking out all her frustrations on her. So I have the tension between Fanny and Alifair.

The characters of all the others in the family pretty much follow where history leads me. Big brother Jim was a sheriff's deputy. I gave Floyd the occupation of running the still and making toys and the others duties of raising bees and hunting because in a family of this size everyone would have had their own chores based on their talents or specialties.

Therefore, as with every historical novel, the interaction of the characters is my own invention. The characters are mine, after history gives me what it knows about them. Yet I made up little. I did not have to. The story is enough in itself. Sarah McCoy, the mother, was over religious and did hold back her husband from running raids against the Hatfields many times. She did beg Devil Anse Hatfield for the lives of her boys at the schoolhouse and promise not to send for her husband, based on his promise to her, which he did not keep.

Ambrose Cuzlin, Fanny's teacher, is just about the only character of my own invention, although he is a composite of teachers of the time and place. Yeller Thing is a mythical creature of my own invention also, although ghosts, boogers, witches, and haints were very much a part of the culture of this time and place. Tales of eerie encounters were told and retold around the old stove or fireside at night. In these heavily wooded mountains, where actual panther cats, snakes, and bears waited to harm humans and Bible reading was a regular daily activity, superstition seems to have reigned. Death affected the whole community because people needed the support of their neighbors in those days. They supported each other in bad times and celebrated together in good times. The enemy could be nature, the weather, bad crops, a black bear, a wild hog, fire, or a scream in the woods at night that could be a panther cat or a witch on a rampage.

People knew evil when they saw it. They planted by signs; some were healed by faith, others by natural remedies. If you feared something you made a cross in the
dirt with your toe, spit in it, and made a good wish before you left the house. This is only one of many superstitions that got people through a time when there might be no doctor, there were no medicines, sometimes no schools, and little information filtering into their lives from the outside world.

According to my research there really was a Belle Beaver in the area at the time, a "fallen woman" who was driven out. Her role in the story is of my own making.

In history, the feud just quietly came to an end one day. I have Fanny in the possession of a note from Johnse to be given to her sister Roseanna when she is dying. Roseanna, in actuality, just seems to have withered away, as if she willed herself to die. As did brother Bill, after Bud was killed.

As for the Coffin quilt—it was a unique quilt made by women in these parts. Women made quilts to satisfy artistic as well as practical needs. A pioneer girl learned to use the spinning wheel, loom, and needle wheel young. It was part and parcel of her education, along with keeping house, cooking, caring for livestock, and planting a kitchen garden. Girls started making "kiverlids" or coverlets at a young age. In my book, Roseanna didn't have one when she met Johnse. She was too busy being popular and attending social events. So when she stayed at the Hatfields she took up the Coffin quilt, which has meaning on several levels. It is not only to serve as a warm bed comforter for her and Johnse, it is the symbol of her hoped-for marriage, and of the death and destruction that her relationship with Johnse comes to represent. Indeed, of all the mountain crafts practiced
by these very inventive and talented people of Kentucky and West Virginia, the Coffin quilt, which to them served as a kind of record of family births and deaths, stood out for me as unique and representative of this feud, which in scope, individual foibles, passions, and strengths rivals anything in classical Greek tragedy.

Donnelly, Clarence Shirley.
The Hatfield-McCoy Feud Reader, by Shirley Donnelly.
Parsons, W. Va.: McClain Printing Company, 1972.

Eastman, Mary, and Mary Bolte.
Dark and Bloodied Ground.
Riverside, Conn.: Chatham Press, 1973.

Federal Writers' Project of the Work Projects Administration for the State of Kentucky.
Kentucky, a Guide to the Bluegrass State.
New York, N.Y.: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1939.

Gillespie, Paul E, ed.
Foxfire 7: Ministers, Church Members, Revivals, Baptisms, Shaped-note and Gospel Singing, Faith Healing, Camp Meetings, Foot Washing, Snake Handling, and Other Traditions of Mountain Religious Heritage.
New York, N.Y.: Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1982.

McCoy, Truda Williams.
The McCoys: Their Story as Told to the Author by Eye Witnesses and Descendants.
Pikeville, Ky.: Preservation Council Press of the Preservation Council of Pike County, 1976.

Stuart, Jesse.
Men of the Mountains,
1941. Reprint, with a foreword by H. Edward Richardson, Lexington, Ky.: The University Press of Kentucky, 1979.