Billy Coffey

storyteller

Forgotten America

The wedding is held inside a small Mennonite church shielded by mountains so thick and lush that it feels as though the sun is a mere passing stranger.

Two things come to mind as I gather up my family. One is that hunting season isn’t far off, evidenced by the slight chill in the air and the gunfire off the high ridges. The other is that there is apt to be no farming going on this afternoon, at least not close by, because all the farmers are here.

One whole side of the parking lot is occupied by trucks stained with dirt and mud and manure. An old Ford is parked near the doors, its bed stuffed with apples fresh off the trees and ready to market. Men gather beneath a narrow wedge of porch. They wear jeans not long plucked from the clotheslines where they had been pinned to dry and Sunday shirts, ones with snaps rather than buttons. Talk is low and slow and centered upon the goings on of the mountains rather than the wider world, one being a place of silences and mysteries that enchant, while the other is by their judgment becoming a thing near unrecognizable with each passing day.

Children skitter. Women pass in plain dresses offering waves and hugs and pecks on the cheek.

The bride stands in a patch of grass down below the church.

Her hands hold a bouquet of wildflowers that may well have been plucked and gathered from the banks of the quiet stream beside her, where there runs water so fresh and clean that it could be bottled straight and sold to rich folk. She smiles at the camera pointed at her, and in that grin is the promise of long years ahead.

Inside the church, the groom waits at the first pew. Those who will stand with him lean and talk. All are dressed in their finest Wrangler jeans, many of which possess a light, almost white-colored ring at the back pocket where a can of snuff usually rests. Country music drifts through speakers. Bluegrass. Songs of love and loving and the difference between.

The flower girl comes down the aisle in an old wooden wagon pulled by the ring bearer, each knee-high and grinning. The bride appears. We stand. The ceremony itself is of the simple kind, as all good ones are: a brief sermon, a long prayer, an exchange of rings that ends with a kiss and a series of whoops from the back. And I feel joy here. Much joy.

Afterwards we all move to a nearby barn where the reception is held, a wide and clean space decorated with strings of lights that will adorn future Christmas trees. The air is heavy with the smells of barbequed chicken and fresh biscuits. On the opposite end, the doors are opened to a wide pasture filled with hills and cows. The new couple enters to more cheers (and more whoops from those thinking of the wedding night). Farmers talk. Children play. Women—quite a few—gather in the center of the barn. They hike their dresses and kick away their shoes, high-stepping as “Rocky Top” blares from some hidden place.

And me, friend? I sit in a small corner of this barn, gaping at all this food and music, these smiling faces, and what I think is this: these are my people, kin by blood or marriage or just plain time. Folk of the hills and hollers who live out their lives now in much the same way as was done a hundred years ago, a season and a prayer at time.

In some ways my people are enjoying a brief moment in the spotlight, courtesy of an upcoming election based in no small part upon their perceived anger.

All those talking heads are right on that point. The whole lower class in this country—and in Appalachia particularly—are ticked off indeed. They are tired of being mocked because they are poor, and they are tired of being ignored because they are the wrong color poor.

But aside from this, I find my people are not overly enthused about politics—part of that wider, unrecognizable world. I’ve heard only one mention of the election in all my time among the mountains today, this from an old man who sighed in a heavy way and said, “Don’t make a damn which one gone win, we’ll get a rich Yankee Democrat either way.”

Maybe that’s so.

I’ve no doubt that come November 9, most interest in my people’s problems will fade.

The cameras and lights that have been turned to their hardships will go out. The stories of an epidemic of suicide and drug abuse will go unwritten. A people proud and self-sustaining—the sort of folk you would pray to have close when everything goes to hell—will fade once more into the lonely places that both bless and curse them. That is a sad thing to say, but it is expected. We’ve reached a point now as a country where everything is political, the downtrodden most of all.

And yet I take some small comfort in the fact that life will go on here in the simple way it always has, connected to soil and tress and unspoiled fields tended by those who understand what it is to hurt and love and gain and lose. Even here, here especially, there is joy.

There is singing and dancing and praying. And as I sit and smile and look out on all this, I think maybe those are three words for the same thing.

The lost love of freedom

Battle at Yorktown lithograph courtesy of Google images.
Battle at Yorktown lithograph courtesy of Google images.
A 2009 survey revealed that 83 percent of adults do not possess a basic understanding of the American Revolution.

More than one third did not know in what century the war took place, some placing it even after the Civil War. One in four didn’t know which country we fought, much less why.

Such revelations of our current historical ignorance frighten me, though I can’t say I’m surprised.

Who cares what a bunch of rich white slave owners did a few hundred years ago?

Well, me.

The Colonial period through and beyond the founding of our country has long been my favorite period of history, in no small part because I count myself a Virginian above most everything else. Here in the Commonwealth, the past is always present. It’s like the mud that gets left on all those mountain paths after a long rain—you can’t help but get in it and then go around tracking it everywhere.

Our valley is littered with crumbling homes said to have been hewed from the calloused hands of those who stood against King George III. The ghost of a brokenhearted bride whose betrothed was felled by an English musket ball is said to roam our nearby wood, doomed to wander the ridges in silent mourning, dressed in her wedding gown as she searches for her love. Each spring when the farmers turn their fields, all manner of artifacts are driven from hiding and back into the sun. One can find arrowheads and spearpoints, even the occasional cannonball. It is no mystery why some say Virginia is our most haunted state. The centuries are like the fields beyond my window. They are constantly being turned upward and driven from hiding.

My olden kin had already been well established here when our war for independence began. They were Irish mixed with a bit of Cherokee by then. These mountains were their home. Sadly, I know little more of them than that. I don’t know what my people were doing during the Revolution, though I can make somewhat of an educated guess based upon all I have ever known of the Coffey folk. Two possibilities come to mind—either they were fighting the Redcoats wherever and whenever they could, or they were holed up in the hollers wanting only to live their lives as they saw fit and to be left the hell alone.

Those seem the only valid choices. The Coffeys I know, the ones here, are strange creatures. I state this with no malice or offense intended, as I am one. We tend to live close to the land, are self-reliant, eager to help a neighbor in need and yet covetous of our own privacy. Most of us—the vast majority, if I am honest—possess a healthy distrust of authority in any form other than the Lord God Almighty. We will fight you if we must (and sometimes even if we must not), only to then turn and help bind your wounds once that fighting is done.

Maybe things were different back then, when our country was young.

Maybe my people then were not as they are now. But most of me doesn’t think that the case. Times change, as do things, but people change seldom. And I’ve found mountain folk change not at all.

Still, I wish I knew what choice my fathers of old made. There is nothing in me that allows for the prospect their hearts sided with the King George; that distrust of authority seems too deeply seated and must have come from somewhere. But of course a dislike of one side does not necessarily mean an allegiance to the other, even where freedom is involved.

I would imagine freedom was a thing easily enough had in the Blue Ridge back then, so far as it was removed from the world. It is easy to think we made our own way here, and without interference from any or all else fave the dry seasons that threatened our crops and the cold winters that left us hungry.

It would have been an easy thing to spend those long years between April 1775 and September 1783 holed up in our own hillbilly paradise. To fight soil and beast rather than Cornwallis and Gage.

But a quick search of Google shows quite a horde of Coffeys listed as members of the Continental Army, serving as officers and soldiers both. We did take up arms. We laid down our plows and let our fields rest in order to march off under threat of death. We stood for revolution, knowing full well that loss would brand us traitors.

Tonight I will gather my family and walk around our neighborhood, oohing and ahhing at the fireworks that explode over us. We will likely visit my parents and stand close as Dad honors his own Fourth of July tradition by emptying his .30-30 into the blue Virginia sky.

Dad, he would have fought. My father would have been on the front lines, cussing and giving old King George the finger.

Me, I’ll likely bear witness to all of that and wondering what I would have done those centuries ago. Would I have stood for what was right and true, or would I have instead sought to keep to my own peaceful corner of the world and prayed for those who stood for me?

That answer seems an important one, because that looks to me the choice each of us must still make all these years later. To stand and do our part to ensure this great country continues on strong and free, or to choose instead to tend to our own affairs and our own lives and damn the rest.

The story is told of a European who visited the newly formed United States in the years following the war. He and his American relative were roaming the capital when they spotted President Washington walking alone on the other side of the street. The European was shocked at the sight of a ruler making his way alone and unbothered. In a panic, he asked his relative where Washington’s guards were.

His relative stopped cold and slapped his own chest, saying, “Here is his guard.”

I want a country like that again.

I want a people of differences and opinions united in both a singular love of a freedom born of blood and tears and a profound sense of duty toward the protection of it.

For freedom is a rare thing in this world, and easily taken from those whose only wish is to be left alone.

From those who would rather sit and pray for others to stand.

Finding hope in the hollows

image courtesy of photo bucket.com
image courtesy of photo bucket.com
I remember hearing an old Thanksgiving story first told to me in the dim past of the 1970s, back when most everyone here was poor but didn’t care because if you were rich you were crooked in some way, and at least we were honest. It was a tale of the mountains, and how there was once the Childresses and the Campbells and you were on one side or the other.

Theirs was never a famous feud on par with the Hatfields and McCoys, nor did their disagreement involve gunfire and murder. Mostly, it was a war of words. This in no way means the situation was any less dire. You will never know a hate more pure and powerful than the sort that burned for a Childress in the heart of a Campbell. Unless, of course, it was the enmity for a Campbell in the mind of a Childress. A whole generation was raised up in it, kids taught from birth that whichever family across whichever holler was an abomination to the Lord and all goodness.

I never did hear back then how it all started. In fact, I doubted then (and still do) that anyone knew. The Hatfields and McCoys went to war over a stolen pig. I expect it was something similar in this case, a small thing that got twisted into something large either through an abundance of boredom or the brokenness of the human heart. Really, that’s about what all wars come down to, isn’t it?

Anyway. About that Thanksgiving:

Right along with turkey and pumpkin pie here is the tradition of the Thanksgiving hunt, when most of the men and not a few of the women take to the woods in the early dawn to shoot something they can brag about at the table. Being good mountain folk, the Childresses and Campbells were much the same. And so it was on that long ago Thursday morning that a Campbell tracking a buck came across the distant shape of a man who had fallen from his tree stand. Thinking the injured was either kin or Christian, he ran to offer aid. It was only upon turning the man over that he realized the victim was neither. He’d done caught himself a Childress.

Yet rather than leave him there to limp out of the cold wood alone, the Campbell gathered the Childress up and piggy-backed him all the way to his truck, nearly four miles off. Once safe, there was no invitation from either for anything further. No request to come eat, certainly no offer of prayer and blessing. Still, the story was told and told again by both parties. There were a few dissimilarities, but both parties involved managed to say the same thing: “Shoot, he looked like kin.”

I’ve been thinking about that story a lot lately. Not whether it was true or not (it was a tale told by an old man, after all, and old men are never so interested in truth as they are in Truth), but how it applies all these years later. As I wake this Wednesday morning before Thanksgiving, I find country and a world that hasn’t been more divided in my memory. People are scared, and because we’re scared we’re mad, and because we’re mad we’re saying all manner of crazy things and spotting all manner of lurking monsters. We’re not speaking to each other more as much as shouting. More than anything else, we see one another as set in boxes not of gender or race or religion, but ideology, and in so doing we lose a great deal of the empathy so lacking in our public discourse. People are a lot easier to hate when they’re not seen as people at all, but the sum of their opinions.

Which is why if I have one Thanksgiving wish this year (and if there is even such a thing), it would be that all of us could go out in the woods or a little while. Walk among the ridges and trees and see that this old world is still a pretty nice and peaceful place. And especially to run into each other out in the hollers, stripped of all that anger and fear, and see that shoot, we all look like kin.

A day’s work

image courtesy of photobucket.com
image courtesy of photobucket.com

Though I’ve never been one to engage in talk both detrimental and salacious, I will say this: There is trouble down at the Howard farm. That in itself is not gossip, but fact; things between Clive Howard and his son Darrell have been spoiling for years now, ever since Darrell proclaimed his intent to leave, and you don’t have to be a farmer to understand what spoils eventually rots, and what rots will inevitably die.

Way it was told to me, Darrell knew long before high school that farming would not be his future. His first trip to the cemetery guaranteed it. The Howard farm rests along two hundred acres of bottomland, in a holler just off the ridge road in the western part of town. Beautiful place, that farm. Wish you could see it, the way the willows curl up along the riverbanks and how the wood there carry the scents of cedar and pine in the winter and honeysuckle come summer, the deer that gather in the fields just as the sun dips over the ridges, the barn, a red so bright it looks slick. And at the border between corn fields and pasture, the four oaks rising like thick fingers into an empty sky and the white gravestones beneath them. Nearly twenty of them all told.

The Howards have farmed this land for generations; most of them are buried beneath those oaks, from Nathaniel Howard (“b. Dec 3, 1758 d. Mar 20, 1819,” reads the stone) to Robert Howard, Darrell’s own grandfather, who passed from this life to the next the summer Darrell turned ten. There are moments in all of our lives that come with a kind of slow focus that will define all the moments after. That’s what happened with Darrell that day. Standing there with his momma and daddy, tugging at his Sunday suit under a hot morning sun as the preacher read the Psalms and they all cried and sang, Darrell looking out upon all those bleached stones set against hard earth, knowing there would one day be others. There would be his daddy’s and his momma’s. One day, there would be his own. That’s when Darrell made the quiet promise that he would never be a farmer. He would break free of that hollow, make himself a life.

He’d seen enough of the future Clive had for him already. The early mornings spent milking the cows and feeding the hogs, the slop and the mud, the cold, the heat. Planting in spring and praying for rain and warm weather, only to watch as God said No and sent nothing but a scorching sun that turned the green corn a withered brown. The calloused hands, the aching back. Sunburn in August, windburn in January. All of it to scrape by as the prices of beef and corn plummeted, the only security what Darrell’s momma had canned to store in the pantry. For Darrell Howard, that was no sort of life. He wanted more from the world, and that’s why he’s leaving come summer. The university first, and then a proper job. Someplace in the city. Downtown, with a view of the skyline instead of the ridgeline. Suits instead of coveralls. Early retirement. The country club.

In Darrell’s own words, “An easy life, because that’s what living should be.”

Thus far, Clive Howard has not taken well to this news.

It isn’t that he views his son’s goals as less than the life Darrell had been born into. Whether sitting in a corner office or plowing the back forty, so long as Darrell works, Clive will be happy. And yet Darrell’s decision cuts deeper than mere employment, deeper than even carrying on the generations who have farmed the bottomland. It is work itself, and the place it will have in the life of Clive Howard’s son.

We are meant for toil, that’s what Clive would say. He would say the land is in his son’s blood, the fields and pasture as much of Darrell as the marrow to his bones. He would say the sweat that stains his brow and dirt packed hard beneath his nails, that ailing back and those calloused, hardened hands, are not the mark of a life spent in hardship, but one spent with purpose.

The Howards have always worked their acres believing such. They have been raised up in that same bricked farmhouse and laid down beneath those same towering oaks since the Revolution, and in all those long and lean years between, saw little more of this world than what lay between the ridgetops. None of them enjoyed what Darrell would call an easy life, and yet they each found this one truth: This world is not meant to be easy and our work in it is not meant to be short, because that work becomes a living prayer.

(This post originally appeared on the High Calling Blog, November, 2014.)

Back in the Summer of 69

image courtesy of google images
image courtesy of google images

That dry season I told you about a couple weeks back is nothing more than a memory now. It’s been raining here for so long that people can’t even remember when it began. Days upon days, one long and soggy line. The creeks are full and the grass is back; everywhere you walk makes a squishy sound. No downpours, at least not yet. Just that steady sort of falling water that starts out making you feel comfortable and ends up sinking into your bones. The ground is saturated now. I hear more rain is coming, the kind that keeps interrupting the radio with screeches and buzzes and warnings of rising rivers and washed out back roads.

Whenever these parts are hit with this much rain, invariably someone will mention 1969. Usually it’s an old timer, like the ones who hang around down at the hardware store or on the benches outside the 7-11. You’ll say hello to them and keep going for your new hammer or a bottle of Mountain Dew, and they’ll draw you in. Old timers like that have all the hours in the world to talk. And since so many of them have spent their lives coaxing food from the black dirt on their farms, weather is their specialty. Weather and memory.

“You think it’s wet,” they’ll say, “you don’t know nothing. You shoulda been here in ’69.”

I wasn’t, of course. I missed what happened here back then by three years. But I know many who were not so fortunate.

In August of that year, a tropical wave formed off the coast of Africa and swept westward along the 15th parallel into the lesser Antilles, where it became a hurricane south of Cuba. The National Weather Service named it Camille. It made landfall on August 18, crushing Waveland, Mississippi. From there Camille tracked north, through Tennessee and Kentucky. Then it veered hard right through West Virginia and into the Appalachias, where it ran smack into Virginia’s Blue Ridge.

That was August 19, 1969.

Nelson County, just over the mountain from us, suffered worst. The rains came so hard and so utterly fast that it defied human reason and nearly touched the Divine. Some even called it judgment for a people who had strayed from the Lord. Houses were swept away, cars tossed like playthings. Whole towns and families lost, disappeared. The very contours of the mountains were shifted and changed by walls of mud. In the end, twenty-seven inches of rain fell in less than five hours. The National Weather Service stated it was “the maximum rainfall which meteorologists compute to be theoretically possible.”

One hundred and twenty-three people perished. Many more were never found. To this day, their bones lie somewhere among the fields and vales. It was estimated that 1 percent of the county’s population were killed that day. Most perished not by drowning but by blunt force trauma, the water throwing them into the nearest immovable object.

The destruction and loss of life was so complete that Camille was stricken from any further use as the name for a hurricane. People here won’t even utter the word. It’s always The Flood. Nothing more than that needs saying.

Then again, maybe I’ll say a little. Because what gets added on the end of that nightmare across the mountain was the grace and kindness shown after. The government appeared en masse in the days and weeks following the storm to clean up and rebuild, but it was the untold thousands of volunteers who did most—the farmers and mountain folk and more church groups than anyone could count, people who knew those mountaintops and hollers well. My daddy and granddaddy were among them. They moved slow through all those shattered homes and marked the ones that had become tombs. They carried pistols in their hands because of the million snakes that had been washed from their dens.

For years Grandma kept a picture she’d taken of the sky on the day the Camille left on her mantle. It was black and white instead of color, but you could still see how black the sky looked, how evil. But you could also see as plain as day how in the middle of that picture the clouds had parted in the perfect shape of an angel to let the sunshine through.

It wasn’t the first time tragedy and hardship had visited this part of our world. It won’t be the last. But if there is any comfort to be had in such times, it is the same comfort that was found in the late summer of ’69—God is still there, still watching, and there will always be good people who will rush to your aid and help you repair what life has born asunder.

Amish family reunion

Two summers ago:

image courtesy of photobucket.com
image courtesy of photobucket.com

I spent much of this past weekend at the Amish church along the edge of town, attending a family reunion that turned out to be larger than anything I could have imagined. Uncles and aunts, brothers and sisters, and more second cousins than I can remember. All descending upon that quiet little church with the softball field and the see-saw, and an ancient blooming oak that looked down upon us all.

My mother’s maiden name is Kanagy—a proper Amish name if you’ll ever hear one, right up there with the Yoders and Schrocks and Zooks. The family center is still in Lancaster County, though the years have flung the Kanagys to all corners of the country. It was a strange thing, hearing that. The Coffeys have always been in these mountains. We always will. I suppose it’s an unwritten rule that we should never roam far from our family’s bones. And yet Saturday we parked near vehicles from Kansas, Colorado, and Delaware. Sunday, it was mostly Ohio.

Many of them I’d never seen (though many remembered me as a child, one even commenting on numerous occasions that I smelled very good as a baby—a tidbit of information that never failed to make my son giggle). Others I’d seen only in passing and only years before. And yet all of them looked familiar in the way family always does, whether it was the way all of their faces had the same shape or the way everyone’s laugh seemed to lilt at the end. We all shared something important. We wandered and mingled and introduced ourselves, and we all felt that tugging of a thin cord wound around us all, placed there by some long-ago kin.

Not that things always went so smoothly. My mother’s Amish heritage gave way to the Mennonite faith when she was a child. The Mennonite in her fell away (at least in practice) not long after she married my father. I was raised more conservative country than conservative Mennonite, which was why my family showed up in jeans and capris rather than the accustomed plain blue pants and white shirts, or the plain blue dresses and white bonnets.

tattoo(Also this rather important point: If you should ever find yourself in the company of a hundred Amish and Mennonite people and you yourself are neither Amish nor Mennonite, take care to cover the ginormous tattoo running from your shoulder to your elbow. This, I found out the hard way.)

So yes, there was some getting used to things. But the vast majority of my distant relatives were more than happy to put our outward differences aside, eager to use the opportunity as a chance to see how the other half lives.

I was pleased to find many of them had kept up with my wife and children and had read my books. Just because you’re Amish doesn’t mean you’re dim. Indeed, the Kanagy’s are an intellectual lot; in my wanderings around the reunion, I met several preachers and one college professor. Reading is considered not only necessary, but pleasurable. The classics are most encouraged. Dickens is widely read.

(Which brings another rather important point: Amish people do not read Amish fiction. In fact, many of them had never heard of such a thing— its mere mention brought the very same shock and laughter my son offered when he heard I’d smelled excellent as a baby.)

I imagine much like most families, what truly brought us together was the food. Your typical Amish fare—bean soup, moon pies, barbequed chicken, fresh bread, and spearmint tea made to such perfection that I could not help but drink it and think of my own grandmother. We stood in that gathering hall to pray and we said our amens, and when we sat to eat we found that despite all of our differences, we were still all the same. Because that’s when the tales began.

One after another, each fired in succession. Tales of days gone by and times when the world seemed a better, fresher place. The hardships endured. The ones who have gone on. The ones who have come to take their place. And when we shared each of these things we shared not only our memory, we shared ourselves.

I won’t see many of them again until the next reunion. Though from what I hear, this one may be the last. Too many of my relatives have grown too old. The distance is too great between us for the traveling. Its wearying to the bones.

If that’s the case, I can rest knowing I spent my time wisely this past weekend. I learned much of my past. And I learned this as well: what binds a family together is a thing deeper than blood and body, it is story. And that is the story of us all.

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