Running on Red Dog Road Read online

  “There’s quilts in the car and coffee’s perking,” Grandma answered.

  Grandpa and Grandma started Cales Chapel, a church named after them, in the nearby mining town of Coal City in 1939, the year I was born. Grandpa preached there every other Sunday. Me and my sister Vonnie were going with them so Grandpa could baptize the people who got saved during the winter.

  We climbed in the backseat among the quilts.

  The mountain dropped off close to the edge of the road, sheering down through layers of hairpin curves so tight our old Buick headed back in the opposite direction every time we went around one. Vonnie felt carsick, so Grandma helped her climb over to sit in the front seat between her and Grandpa. Even my hard-to-turn insides felt uneasy when I looked at the steep drop only an arm’s length away.

  Grandpa caught my eye in the rearview mirror.

  “Don’t you worry none,” he said. “We’re a whole rabbit swerve from the brink.”

  I looked at my sister. Eyes half closed, she was nibbling a Saltine and sucking sips of lukewarm water from a fruit jar. Her blonde hair had sweated through and left a damp spot on the car seat. She had stuffed the end of one of Grandma’s handkerchiefs in

  each ear to muffle the groan of the engine, giving her the look of a flop-eared bunny.

  A measly rabbit swerve.

  I craned my neck to peer over the edge. The sour that rose up burned my throat. I swallowed hard, trying to remember to breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth. We finally reached the valley and turned onto a narrow dirt road that led to a clearing. Grandpa pulled in next to somebody’s beat-up truck and stopped.

  I loosened my grip on the passenger strap I’d been hanging on to.

  Dressed in a suit that had probably been baptized before, Grandpa waded three feet deep into the roiled-up river. A rope looped around his waist reached to a tree on the muddy bank, and half a dozen deacons tied themselves along the rope like rags on a kite tail. The new converts straggled into a loose line, waiting their turn to make their way out to Grandpa. Family and friends stood on the bank to lend support. Others came just to watch.

  “I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.”

  Grandpa leaned the good brother back until he was clear under the water. He came up shouting, “Amen!” and “Hallelujah!” Others came up gasping and spewing river water.

  The brand-new washed-in-the-Blood-of-the-Lamb Christians dribbled up the bank and groped for raggedy towels to sop the water from their eyes. They huddled under quilts in the bed of a borrowed truck on the way back to the church, and I got to ride back there with them. Some just-cleansed soul started singing “Shall We Gather at the River,” and others joined in. Somebody else tried to get “Are You Washed in the Blood?” going, but that one petered out after the first verse.

  “Praise God,” somebody said.

  “Amen,” somebody answered.

  A thermos jug of coffee passed from hand to hand.

  My grandpa and grandma belonged to the Pentecostal Holiness Church, and it defined them. It was a tough religion to live up to. You had to pray a lot, read the Bible, and spread the word if you were Pentecostal. Grandpa particularly liked to spread the word. A retired coal miner turned evangelist by the time he appears in my memory, he spent every spare dime starting churches and holding revivals in neighboring towns, God and Grandma leading him every step of the way.

  There were a lot of things you couldn’t do if you were Pentecostal. You couldn’t cheat or lie or steal or dance or chew tobacco or cuss. You couldn’t act foolish. Of course, you couldn’t drink or smoke or go to the movies or murder anybody or take the Lord’s name in vain.

  You couldn’t wear feathers either. It said so in The Rules.

  You couldn’t gamble. Grandma wouldn’t even allow cards in the house. I guess it was in case temptation got the best of me and I went to gambling all the Monopoly money away. She had reason to worry. Sissy had a pack of real playing cards with pictures of sailboats on the back. Sometimes we’d play gin rummy all night long. We’d eat a whole stack of Ritz crackers smeared with peanut butter and white Karo syrup, washing them down with red Kool-Aid. Next morning, Sissy’s momma said it looked like a couple of little pigs had been rooting around in our bed.

  “Why, that stuff ’s not fit to eat,” Grandma said when I told her about the peanut butter and white Karo. She sniffed a little when she said it. She wouldn’t have allowed crumbs in the bed, but I don’t believe that had to do with being Pentecostal.

  I reveled in the wrongdoing more than Sissy did because of gambling being such a big sin in my house. Her religion was easygoing about things like playing gin rummy all night.

  She was a Methodist.

  I decided I wanted to be a Methodist too.

  Sissy invited me to go to church with her, and Grandma let me go since the Methodists were holding a service to honor the men who were off fighting in the War. The red brick church had a steeple with a big cross on top that lit up at night. Wine-red carpet covered the floor, and candles burned on a long table in front of the pulpit. The Methodists sang songs as foreign to me as if they were in another tongue: “I Come to the Garden Alone,” “Out of the Ivory Palaces,” and “Fairest Lord Jesus.”

  Three young men walked down the aisle to the front. All were in uniform—one Army, one Navy, one Marine. They stood stretched so tall it looked like they were trying to climb right out of the necks of their uniforms and go home to their mommas again.

  Mothers with sons overseas were asked to stand and some of them were crying.

  Sissy’s preacher read out loud from Isaiah. “But they that wait on the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.” He talked some more, but he never did get wound up like Grandpa. When he finished, we sang “Onward Christian Soldiers” and “God Bless America.” I knew the words to those. We put our hands on our hearts and said the Pledge of Allegiance while the men in uniforms saluted. One of the deacons put out the candles with the back of a spoon.

  Sissy’s daddy took us by the Dairy Queen for a double cone of vanilla with a curl on top. On the way home a spring shower dimpled the dusty road. I stuck my head out the window and opened my mouth.

  Soft summer rain fell on my vanilla tongue.

  “I do not know why in the world you have such a time with bee stings,” Grandma said. “Wouldn’t happen if you did what you were told and kept your shoes on like any reasonable person because you know perfectly well that Mr. Lilly’s honeybees are all over the place this time of year and now here you are with a foot swole up big as your head and having to use a piece of kindling to hobble around—are you listening to a word I’m saying?”

  I pulled another splinter off my makeshift cane.

  “Yes ma’am,” I said.

  I’d worn a mud poultice for an hour to keep the swelling down and draw the poison out. Now Grandma wanted to slather the sting with Vicks. She thought Vicks was the remedy for any bite or itch or sting, whether the culprit was chigger or mosquito, poison ivy or poison oak, honeybee or yellow jacket. Of course she used Vicks anytime I hinted of a sore throat or coughed a couple of times. If slicking me down from my neck to my belly button or stuffing it up my nose didn’t work, she’d put a big spoonful of the salve in a basin of hot water, throw a towel over my head, and make me breathe the vapors. When all else failed, she’d have me swallow a glob.

  “Might help some and won’t hurt any,” she’d say.

  When I bloodied my leg shinnying up a tree or split my knee on the red dog road, Grandma reached for the brown bottle of iodine, using the stopper that came with it to paint great swaths of orange on my skin. As she swabbed, she blew on the hurt place to keep it from stinging. I still squalled. I hoped she didn’t go for the iodine to doctor my foot.

  Grandma forgot all about my sting when a siren blared into the night and drowned me out. We r
ushed to turn lights off and pull shades down. We yanked curtains closed. Although we hoped the blackout was just for practice, you never really knew. We didn’t want a glimmer from a flashlight or candle to give away our position to Japanese airplanes that could at that very minute be circling overhead, ready to bomb 211 Fourth Avenue. We sat in the stairwell like we were posing for a family portrait, afraid to look in case we saw our fear reflected in Grandma’s eyes.

  “No need to be afraid, we’re in the hands of God,” Grandpa said. He led us in the Twenty-Third Psalm. “Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil . . .”

  About that time a signal sounded to end the blackout.

  Grandma bustled about turning on lights and opening shades, and the shadow of death and the fear of evil were no longer upon us. Grandpa lit a fire in the stove and put the percolator on. Before long the plink, plink, plink of the coffee perking could be heard, and the smell filled the house.

  “Come on down, Rindy, I’ve got your cup waiting for you,” Grandpa hollered upstairs.

  “I’m coming, Clev.”

  “Well, you might want to hurry it up—they’s a letter from New York I clean forgot to give you because of that blackout putting us all in the dadgum dark.”

  “Clev, you know I don’t like that word.”

  “Why, dark is a perfectly fine word,” Grandpa said.

  Grandma said for him to stop his foolishness and read the letter to her. Grandpa told her he thought she’d want to read it for herself, but she said she had left her glasses upstairs. He started reading, but it was too low for me to hear. I was tired from all the commotion, and although I tried, I couldn’t keep my gritty eyes open.

  3

  The Color of India Ink

  My mother was coming home for a visit. You would have thought it was the Queen.

  Grandma gathered old newspapers and vinegar water and set me and Grandpa to cleaning windows, him on the outside and me on the inside. She attacked the oak floors with Johnson’s Wax and elbow grease while Grandpa and I slung the cabbage-rose carpets over the fence and beat the devil out of them. Any cobwebs hiding near the ceiling were brushed away with a broom covered with an old shirt that she’d cut the buttons off to use later.

  After she washed and ironed the kitchen curtains, Grandma decided they wouldn’t do after all, so she made new ones. She sent Grandpa to paint fresh whitewash up five feet on the fruit trees. It looked nice, and it kept the boring beetles out of the cherry and apple and plum trees that shaded the back yard. When she had a few minutes to rest, she pinned starched doilies on cardboard like butterfly specimens. And every time she caught me and Grandpa sitting down, she assigned us another job.

  There was no escaping Grandma when she got to cleaning.

  The car spraddled over the whole road. It was the same indigo blue color of the bottles of thick India ink we dipped our pens in to write line after line of whorls and loops in penmanship class.

  “That’s a Buick Roadmaster,” Grandpa said. “I expect an automobile like that might cost a man a thousand dollars.”

  My mother was in that car.

  She had a new gentleman friend, and he was in that car too.

  The man went around to open the door for my mother. Her platform spike-heel shoes swung out first. She wore a Kelly-green suit that tapered at the waist then flared into a peplum. A matching green hat set forward on her head, the black veil fluffed a little. The red fox stole that draped around her shoulders snapped a toothless mouth onto its own bushy tail. Sparks of light flew from a jewel-studded watch pinned on her lapel. She looked like a movie star I once saw a picture of in LIFE magazine. Claudette Colbert maybe, although I’m not sure about the name. When she hugged me, I smelled the scent of gardenias.

  The man’s hair was thinning, and he had some extra weight spread all over his body. His smile was big and crooked and had a dimple stopping it at each end.

  Mother told me to say hello to Leo Reinbold.

  “Hello, Goldilocks,” he said. “I put something for you in my suitcase. Let’s go find it.”

  The something was a tiny gold locket shaped like a book. It had roses of pink gold on the cover. Inside was a picture of my mother and one of me.

  Mother showed Leo the spare bedroom with the attached sunroom, the windows lined with Mother’s collection of salt and pepper shakers. There were more than a hundred sets. Women put ads in the backs of ladies magazines, trying to collect a set from every state. Mother would send little moonshine jugs to a woman in Idaho who needed salt and pepper shakers from West Virginia, and she’d get a set of grinning Idaho-potato shakers back. I never heard of a woman who didn’t hold up her end of the bargain.

  Mother was looking for her favorites, miniature bottles filled with red wine some woman sent all the way from California.

  But she was not about to find them in that sunroom.

  I was sure of that because Vonnie and I had stolen them. We were planning to risk hellfire by drinking the swallow of forbidden wine and refilling them with grape pop before anyone was likely to notice. My sister lost her nerve but egged me on until I twisted a top off and tipped the bottle to my tongue. The taste was bitter, not at all the fizzy sweet I expected. I rubbed my tongue hard on my shirt sleeve, leaving a wide purple track that I knew would puzzle Grandma when she did the wash. When I screwed the cap back on, Vonnie and I couldn’t match up the torn seal, so we hid both bottles, hoping we’d think of some way to hide our thievery. We soon forgot all about it.

  Mother looked puzzled as she scanned her collection.

  “Looky what Grandma made,” I said, drawing her attention away from the missing shakers and onto Venus, now modestly covered with a pink-flowered apron. Mother reached to yank the scrap of cloth off, but Leo held a hand out to stop her.

  “Let’s leave it,” he said. “I think pink suits her.”

  And so we did.

  Before supper, Grandpa asked Leo if he wanted to go with him to milk the cow.

  “Sure,” Leo said, “I’ve never seen a cow in person before.”

  Grandpa and Grandma laughed and called him a city boy, and Leo laughed too.

  We went on long country drives in the big car that smelled like brand-new shoes. We found the best homemade raspberry ice cream. We walked up mountains with no trails. Where icy water poured down the rock face of a cliff, we cupped our hands and drank from the mountain.

  After Leo and my mother went back to New York, the house turned quiet and empty. I didn’t remember it being so quiet before.

  I overheard Grandpa say that Leo was a prince of a fellow, but he was a heathen. He didn’t even come from a Christian family, not that they weren’t likely fine folks.

  Grandma agreed that did have to be taken into account. She didn’t expect he’d ever win a beauty prize, but she sure did like him.

  Grandpa said Leo told him he was in the diamond trade.

  Grandma said well that explained the fancy watch pinned on my mother’s suit. Why, Leo had to be twenty years older than her. And he was from New York City for goodness’ sake.

  They both prayed Mother would come to her senses.

  And she did.

  Leo tried to convince her to marry him and she considered it, but in the end she couldn’t do it. “Some things thrive if you take them way off and transplant them,” she told him. “But not us.”

  Our roots were in West Virginia.

  And that’s where we would stay.

  4

  Strung on Fine Wire

  The women sitting shoulder-to-shoulder in the church pew in front of me were dressed as drab as church mice. Every dress or suit was black or navy or gray or . . . well, there wasn’t another or.

  “Why don’t the church ladies wear pretty dresses and makeup and jewelry like my mother does?” I asked Grandma.

  “Those things call attention,” Grandma explained. “As for the makeup and the jewelry, painted-on beauty and artificial adornment can’t hol
d a candle to the natural beauty God gave us.”

  I wasn’t so sure about that.

  The church ladies didn’t seem so sure either. Some of them must have thought face powder didn’t count, so they dusted it on with little regard to matching the tint to their complexions. I sometimes saw the telltale fallout on navy crepe-covered shoulders in the pew in front of me.

  The women didn’t wear shorts or pants or dresses cut below the collarbone or above the elbow or knee. Pentecostal women didn’t show much skin. A few brave souls satisfied their vanity by wearing their hair upswept into fancy whorls and twists. On Mother’s Day, and any other day that gave them an excuse, those same women decorated themselves with homemade corsages of flowers and ferns and ribbons, which was against The Rules. But to their credit, I never saw a one of them wear feathers.

  Grandma didn’t use perfume, but a time or two I saw her take the brown bottle of vanilla out of the cabinet and dab a drop behind her ears. Once I even saw her splash some on an old handkerchief and tuck it in the front of her dress. Some of the ladies wore Johnson’s Baby Powder and Evening in Paris or Blue Waltz perfume. The scents diffused into an invisible cloud that moved with them as they busybodied across the one-room church in twos and threes.

  Grandma stood out among them. Although only average in size, she was an imposing woman, and the other church ladies followed her lead. I never heard her raise her voice in anger; she never needed to—her bearing carried a certain authority. She never sat down at home without her Bible or some piece of mending in her hand. Idle hands are the Devil’s workshop, she often said. Hardworking and soft-spoken, a leader—Grandma had the gift of grace.

  She was of Scotch-Irish heritage, with fair skin, blue eyes, and dark hair that glinted with red in the sun. Like most Pentecostal women, my grandma’s hair had never been cut. Fashioned into braids wrapped around her head or wound into a bun at the nape of her neck, it fell past her knees when she took it down. Between washings she used a gold brush inlaid with mother-of-pearl to brush a mixture of lemon juice and water through her hair, and I sometimes caught the scent of lemonade as she passed. The brush belonged to a dresser set with a matching comb, hand mirror, and clothes brush, plus a jar she used to hold big fat hairpins. Before she went to bed, Grandma plaited her hair into one loose braid, then she brushed the tangles out of my blonde pigtails and plaited my hair into one long braid just like hers.