Family

In another edition titled “What’s Your Genre?” I told the short story “Family” and posted a link to the Mildred Haun Review homepage. The links on that page are broken, and the journals cannot be accessed. This is unfortunate since the Mildred Haun Review is a fine publication of Appalachian culture. The content ranges from poems about Appalachia to a short paper about Magick (sic). Fortunately, I still have a copy of the story. Here is the story, “Family.”

Family

One grandma died young.

At age 12, mama became her nurse. She helped the lady of the house to the porch so she could sew in the sun. Her father called her “our little nurse.”

Each morning she packed her daddy’s lunch, an unasked question on her lips the day he dropped a pistol into the lunch box.

The miners were on strike. He walked the picket line wary of company goons. “Don’t let anyone in the house. Those company men are tricky.”

He once said that a man walked up to him in the mine, conversed for a few minutes, and faded into the wall.

Another grandma succumbed to madness when her husband abandoned her with all those kids. The orphanage kindly welcomed Papa. Two maiden aunts took him in so he could go to high school.

Now I have gone and done it. I have dropped my guard and wonder how much I should let you see through my disguise. Perhaps I will let in just a little more light.

We may have been poor, but we owned land. The garden fed us all summer. Mason jars of beans, tomatoes, and corn fed us most of the winter, supplemented with rabbit and pheasant from the old man’s game pouch. Trips to the store were occasional for grits, coffee, sugar, and bacon. Mama’s hens provided eggs until the zoning commission said they had to go.

Some nights, I slept in my tent. Daytime, I read in its shade, my companion a hound dog, barely grown from a pup. I named her Babe after Paul Bunyan’s blue ox.

I read every story I could about that legend of a man. Paul Bunyan’s frying pan was so big two lumberjacks skated across its surface with slabs of bacon strapped to their feet. They greased the pan for the dozens of eggs he cooked and ate for breakfast each morning. When the blue ox Babe stopped for a drink, the Round River ran dry.

Before I left fundamentalism behind, they dunked me in the water:

Three times!
Once for the father!
Once for the son!
Once for the Holy Ghost!
I emerged primarily unchanged.

NB: The other links in the story “What’s your Genre?” are tested and working. https://rayzimmerman.substack.com/p/whats-your-genre