There is nothing more spetacular than what Mother Nature can show at sunrise or sunset.

What a breathtaking sight!

Our mother owned a piece of property on a plateau half-way up the hillside across from our previous home. When we had lived previously at Scuddy, this was where we did a lot of our gardening. Dad bought the house next to it from his former father-in-law for eleven hundred dollars. The house had originally been a two room log house, but later, a kitchen and storeroom had been added. There were thirty-five acres of land with a huge amount of timber, a barn, and lots of grazing land. There were a lot of fruit trees. There was a deep well next to the porch. Two apple trees were so close to the porch that we could reach and get some. There were plenty of paw paw and persimmon trees. Paw paw trees were not too tall. They were pear shape with several large seeds. They were deliciously unique. We also had a large wild strawberry patch. This piece of property was the very best that anyone could have ever owned. There was a sled road from the main road leading up the hill for a quarter of a mile. Then, the whole piece of property would open up. It was a huge plateau that we called a table with green grass and a real nice house and all those fruit trees. A huge barn was nearby. There was a stream running down on the right side from a coal mine; just large enough to put your feet in and dream. The view from our porch was spectacular. In the evening, we could hear our neighbors down below talking. We could see across to the other mountainside where some of our friends lived. If we wanted, we could raise our voice and talk to them. Dad would be rocking his chair on the front porch and trying hard not to go to sleep. Finally, when the chickens went to roost, he would get up and go to bed. A little later, he would tell the rest of us to come to bed.

I had noticed some willow chairs on a neighbor's porch and I thought that they really look great. Since the construction was very simple but were very strong, I thought that I could make those from the many willow trees on our property. Without my father knowing, I ordered a saw and a hammer from Sears and Roebuck by C.O.D. the price was $2.98. Two weeks later, he came home from shopping and said that there was a package from Sears and Roebuck that he never ordered. He looked at me and asked if I had. I told him that I had because I wanted to make some willow chairs to sell. He was very upset that I had not told him and he was going to return the package. A neighbor was visiting at the time. Dad asked the neighbor what should he do. The neighbor told him that maybe he should go ahead and pay for them to see what I could do. Dad gave me the money to pick get the package. I made several porch chairs. Willow wood was the best to use because one could bend it into almost any shape without its breaking. I was able to either sell them or take a trade for one. Baxter said that when he went back to the farm to visit a few years later, there were a couple of chairs still sitting there. When I began selling antiques, these rustic willow chairs were some of the hottest items on  the market and even today they are in great demand.

Dad started farming again. He was raising three hogs in a pen he built and was growing lots of vegetables. He, Fred, and I had shaved the weeds off about two acres of land to plant corn. He needed a mule to do the plowing so he bought one, Barney. People in the mountains owned mules. There were very few horses. A mule is a crossbreed between a male jackass and a female horse. It is infertile. A mule is smarter than a horse. A mule will eat until it is full and will stop. A horse will eat until it it can eat no more. A mule knows when a load is too heavy and will not pull it even though you can whip it unmercifully. A horse will kill itself by pulling too heavy a load. The mule is a very sure-footed animal. Thus, it is used in the mountains more than a horse.

Dad  bought a three year old mule named Barney. Well, Barney was something else. Dad was very religious. One day, we three were in the cornfield with Dad doing the plowing and Fred and I would be doing the hoeing. At first, Old Barney was doing fine until he bit the top of a corn stalk, Dad slapped his side with a plow rope and said stop it. About two more  rows, he got another one. Dad said again in a louder voice "stop it". Another two rows and he did it again. This time, Dad stopped and went up to him and in a loud voice, yelled "Damn you, I told you to stop it" and slapped the Ole Barney with a big switch. The mule stopped and would not move. It took some time to get him started again. Fred wanted to laugh so badly that he looked as if he were going to explode. He could not hold it any longer. He said in a loud voice to Dad that he had just lost is religion. Dad put the switch down and took off after Fred. Finally, he stopped running and told Fred to get back and start hoeing corn. Fred came back, but he couldn’t stop giggling. We finished plowing the corn and went home. Dad told Mother what had happened. She told him to forget it and ask for forgiveness for his cursing and he did. Later in life, he was ordained as a Free Will Baptist minister and attended the church at Happy.

He wanted to build a smoke house for his bacon and hams. As I stated before, there was a lot of timber on our property, but it all was on top of the hill. Dad would cut down four huge trees with an ax, trim of the branches, and chain them together. He would hitch Barney to the logs and bring them home. He needed a lot of logs so he had to make several trips. Marcus and I would cut them into sizes and notch them. Dad would get on one end and Marcus and I would get on the other and lift them into place. This was going pretty well until one day, the logs clipped Barney on the back legs. Barney was skittish and he would always take off running if something scared him. Needless to say, Barney started going down the hillside at full speed. Dad had the rope around his arms and couldn’t get loose. After about a hundred yards, Dad was able to let go of the reins. Further down the slope, the logs hit a big rock and the chain broke and Barney kept running. Dad came home all scraped and bruised. He old my mother that he had a mule for sale. Mom asked him how was he going to get the rest of the logs that he needed down the hill. He said that he would pull them by himself. He would tie two logs together and pull them down that hillside. We finally finished the smokehouse just before we had to slaughter the hogs. We were one of the few families that had meat all winter. Little did we know at the time that there would be a shortage of meat in the grocery stores next spring. We had more than enough for ourselves so Dad sold some of his bacon and hams to the local grocer. We made a few dollars and other people had some meat.

He bought another mule that was about twenty years old. I used to ride him quite often around the pasture. Sometimes I got up enough courage to race him at full speed. I found out that it was much easier to ride at a faster speed. One afternoon I was riding about full speed when Fred ran out and shouted "stop". Stop he did, but I kept going and landed on my stomach. The breath was knocked out of me and Fred ran up to me and asked me if I were hurt. I got enough breath to ask him why he did that. He said that he just wanted to know if he said stop, the mule would stop. In the winter months, Marcus and I would haul coal on a sled to some of our neighbors for fifty cents a load. We used to make movie money that way. The last load that we hauled was to a woman who lived about a hundred yards up on the hill. There was a lot of snow on the ground and it was cold. She said that she would give us fifty cents. We would have to carry it up to her house in burlap bags. We hauled the coal to where we had to carry it, but I told Marcus before we carried the coal, we should get paid. He agreed so we asked for our money. The lady said that she only had a quarter in script and would pay us the other quarter when she got it. We wanted the money that day because we were planning to go to Vicco to see a movie. We told her that we were not going to pack that coal up that hillside in that snow for a quarter because we knew that we would never see the other quarter. We took the coal home. Dad told us that he had his doubts about this woman paying us. He gave us the fifty cents to go the movie. This was the same lady who had said that she had seen the pilot in the aircraft..

In the fall, we started school again at the same school before we left Scuddy. I was now in the seventh grade. There were also Fred, Baxter, and Robert Alvin attending school. Things had changed while we were away. The school was now divided into two sections with a curtain down the middle with the first four grades on one side and the upper grades on the other. Our neighbor, Betty (Elizabeth) Mullins, was teaching the younger students and her daughter Norine was teaching the higher grades. Betty had an eight-grade education and Norine had finished high school. She had graduated from Mt. Carmel High School at Vancleve, about eight miles north of Jackson on Highway 15. I had a pretty good relationship with the two, but was never very close. Even though they were not college graduates, they were knowledgeable teachers. I was back with the children who I had as schoolmates from the primary grade. It was as if I had never moved away.

One day, Norine announced that she had made arrangements for our school to play a ballgame against the Georges Barnch school. Georges Branch is a hollow between Scuddy and Vicco. That is one game that I will never forget. The ball that we always played with was a round stone with black tape around it. She had bought a new softball for us to take to the game. We had never seen one before. We had to walk about two miles to the school. Some of the children were too small to go so they had the day off. The rest of us strutted all the way there bragging how badly that we were going to beat them. We got there around ten and they were waiting for us. All the children and some parents were around the ballfield laughing and joking. We were to bat first. It was three up and three down. I was playing in the outfield and I did not get a chance to bat. The first batter on the other team hit a ball over my head and scored a run. The second batter hit the ball so hard that it split the seams and was completely flattened. It was destroyed. I have never heard of this happening again. We had no other ball so the ballgame was over. We threw the ball into the woods and walked home. We were devastated. I hope that kid made it into the major leagues.

In the middle of the winter the branch would freeze over. As kids, it never bothered us because we could skate on it without any problems. It was fun. One Friday evening, Betty made the announcement that we were not to walk on any ice going home. If we did, she would whip us on Monday. To get home, we either had to walk across a willow log over the branch or on the ice.Several of us chose the ice. On Monday, Fred and I put a book inside our clothes to protect our rear end. I was sitting there with a silly grin when she asked what was the matter. She had forgotten about the licking. Three of her pets had been skating with us and I wanted to test her to see if she would whip them. I reminded her about her promise. She told everyone that skated on the ice to come forward. Fred and I stood up, but the girls didn’t. They denied it. I told Betty that she was not going to whip just Fred and me. Fred and I went to the cloak room to remove the books. That is when he and I decide to jump out a window and go home. On the way home I met Dad and he asked me why I was not in school. I told him the whole story and I was quitting school. He gave me a long look and said, " Son, you can quit school if you want. If you quit, you will wind up in the coal mines like me. If you want a better life go back to school and take your punishment and graduate. The only way that you are going to make something out of your self is with an education". Fred and I went back to school the next morning and took our punishment. I got off pretty easily, but Fred was brutally whipped. I never did have any have any more to do with the three who did not confess. If I had known that they would get away with it and gotten the whipping that we got, I would have kept my big mouth shut. If this had happened to me today, I would have had them up on charges. First of all what one does outside a playground is no business of a teacher. It is the parents’ responsibility. Second, Fred’s punishment bordered on brutality.

During the school year, two graduate students from Mt. Carmel High School in Vancleve, Ky. came to our school. Mt. Carmel was a religious high school and most of its graduates would become missionaries either in the Kentucky Mountains or overseas.  They were allowed to speak to the students about their religion. Can you imagine this happening today? They had a contest to see who could remember the most Bible verses that they would assign us. They would come each week and test us. I won the contest and I received a New Testament as a prize. Little did I know at the time what I had accomplished. They contacted Mt. Carmel and told them about my family and me and recommended me for a free eight-grade through high school education. After completing the school year, I found out about this and I gladly accepted. This was in 1945.

Meanwhile, Watson was with General Patton's army in Germany and we kept up with the news on the radio on how the army was advancing. My mother wanted to live long enough to know that her son was safe before she died. When Germany surrended in June, we received a letter from Watson that said he may be shipped to Japan to fight the war there. Finally the Japanese surrended  on August 15th.

On August 16th, my father informed me that she had taken a turn for the worse. He told me to go to all of my aunts and inform them that she was dying. I was thirteen at the time and I started walking through the mountains to each one's house. Aunt Bertha Asher lived at Fusonia, Aunt Amanda Johnson lived at Viper, Aunt Melvina Stogner and Aunt Sally Hall lived on Masons Creek, and Aunt Cynthia Shively lived at Sassafrass. They were all able to come to see my mother before she died on the 19th. On the 21st, they put her casket on a sled and it was hauled to the bottom of the hill where a dirt road led up to the cemetary. A group of men carried her up to the graveyard. The entire community was there to pay their respects. When the service was over and they started to lower her into the grave, three of Uncle Taylor's daughters sang "Will the Circle be Unbroken".

I told my father that I did not want to go to Mt. Carmel. He told me that for me to go to high school was my mother's greatest desire. So on August 26th, my father took me to Mt. Carmel. This was the last time that I ever saw this home.

Will the Circle Be Unbroken

Ada Habershon
1861-1918

Charles Gabriel
1856-1932

Original Version of

Will the Circle be Unbroken
1907
Lyrics by
Ada Habershon
Music by
Charles Gabriel

There are loved ones in the glory,
Whose dear forms you often miss;
When you close your earthly story,
Will you join them in their bliss?

Refrain

Will the circle be unbroken
By and by, by and by?
In a better home awaiting
In the sky, in the sky?

In the joyous days of childhood,
Oft they told of wondrous love,
Pointed to the dying Savior
Now they dwell with Him above.

Refrain

You remember songs of heaven
Which you sang with childish voice,
Do you love the hymns they taught you,
Or are songs of earth your choice?

Refrain

You can picture happy gatherings
Round the fireside long ago,
And you think of tearful partings,
When they left you here below:

Refrain

One by one their seats were emptied,
One by one they went away;
Here the circle has been broken—
Will it be complete one day?

Carter Family

Will the Circle Be Unbroken
Lyrics by
A.P. Carter
Music by
Charles Gabriel

I was standing by the window
On a cold and cloudy day
When I saw the hearse come rolling
To carry my mother away

Refrrain

   Will the circle be unbroken
   Bye and bye Lord bye and bye
   There's a better home a waiting
   In the sky Lord in the sky

I said to the undertaker
Undertaker please drive slow
For that body you are carrying
Lord I hate to see her go

Refrain

Well I followed close behind her
Tried to hold up and be brave
But I could not hide my sorrow
When they laid her in that grave

Refrain

I went back home Lord that home was lonesome
Since my mother, she was gone
All my brothers and sisters crying
What a home so sad and alone