The woman was whacked out on some kind of narcotic concoction according to the movie. Some of the stuff she and the kids did to the boarder girl brought up some memories of my own. No one burned me with cigarettes or carved words into my skin but portions of my childhood were a bit colorful to say the least.
We were living in Thaxton, Virginia, which is near Bedford, which is near Roanoke. High up on a hill in a 3 story Carriage Inn with a half mile long driveway and white horse fences all along it.
My stepfather worked in Roanoke or Lynchburg and my mother stayed home and did who knows what. I was always out on my pony. About that time I was being sexually abused by a friend of my stepdads so ... home was not where my heart was to say the least. Also my mom and stepdad were fighting a lot, and I was sad over leaving my dad in Alabama. I rode around the property for the most part: it was about forty acres and I was satisfied I guess, riding around... I reckon I was somewhere around nine years old. Might have been ten or eleven.
At any rate, one day I was riding my pony around the front yard and looked over to see a girl on a pony a bit bigger than mine, sitting there at the front gate which was closed to keep horses in while they grazed in the yard. I went over and spoke to her and she said I should come riding with her some time. I said I'd ask my mom and she said she'd wait.
My mom let me go with her. Her name was Becky. I rode with her a few times up and down the road out in front of my house until a few weeks later she invited me to her house.
My mom said yes. So off we went to Becky's house. It was a couple miles down the road, further than I'd ever ridden away from the house in that direction.
The first few times I went over there I wasn't invited inside. We rode around the property and she showed me their hog pens, and the hogs, and introduced me to her uncle and her grandma who took care of her.
The uncle was always out tinkering with something such as a hog fence or a tractor or the Studebaker pickup. Gramma was always on the porch in a rocker, snapping peas, or whatever else she might be up to, I don't recall. Gramma, and uncle, both had fewer teeth than I did. Some missing. Their clothes were not really all that new, and quite often you'd see uncle, or Becky and always grandma, in bare feet.
Eventually I spent more and more time over there and got invited in. The house was pretty dark. It was quite odd. The furniture had been nice once but was saggy, dusty, dark. The paint was peeling off the walls and everything had a greasy grimey sheen to it. The photos on the walls were the most puzzling to me: pictures of people in coffins. I never did wrap my mind around that and have not seen it since... Becky spoke of the photos in whispers, saying "That there is my momma" or "I dunno who that is." No one sat in the house much: not in summer.
The kitchen however was lit up a lot and the door always open and the windows too: and there was always some kind of pork product cooking in large pots on the wood stove.
That was something else I had not seen before: a wood stove. I didn't know it until one day I stayed over for the night, but they did not have electricity.
Staying the night meant some fearsome ghost stories told by candlelight made all the more hair-raising by the photos of actual dead people in the next room. People in coffins with their hands crossed and their eyes closed and their hair all slicked back or curled in ringlets like a doll's.
God forbid you had to pee in the middle of the night, because the floor boards creaked which made the hound dogs wake up and then they might howl at something they heard outside.
Plus you had to light a candle or the lantern if you had it that night. I brought a flashlight if I could smuggle it out of my house.
Eating breakfast was unusual there. It was a jolly affair, because it meant a lot of work and that made you anticipate it. You had to bring in some wood and get the fire started in the stove and you have to carve some bacon off the slab and it was really very salty.
(when I later read "Little House on the Prarie" I was already familiar with salt-pork, by golly). Eggs were picked right from the chicken coop and fried up in a cast iron skillet along with the bacon. Bread was home made and torn off in hunks or sawed off with a big knife and then toasted over the flames of the stove.
We washed the dishes outside in a big pot of hot water from the stove. It was interesting to say the least.
I must have become a regular fixture over there because some of my other memories involve riding in the back of the Studebaker heading to town to get something at the store and being handed a little bottle of something that looked like water.
Becky said "here, have some of this!" and I took a swallow. I thought my throat was on fire. I spit it out. She laughed at me, and her uncle laughed from the cab of the truck and handed me back a silver flask and said "Try this, it's store bought".
Apparently, Becky had thought it would be funny to hand me some moonshine. And her uncle thought it might help if I washed my mouth out with Jack Daniels, green label.
I took a large swallow of that JD, and ... that trip to town got a whole lot more fun.
Turns out Becky's uncle did some moon shining up in the hills of Virginny. Turns out it's handy having a couple of very young girls in your truck when you are running moonshine, for who would think it?
One evening I was over at Becky's and uncle said it was time to butcher the hogs.
I had not ever even put any thought to where the bacon in slabs had come from. Then it quickly dawned on me that they were raising and killing pigs to eat.
Now when I see some kind of voodooistic woodsy ritual on tv (think "Survivor" when they cut a team member) I think of the night we killed and gutted us some pigs.
I say we, because I got my hands dirty, you betcha. It involves shooting between the eyes, first off. Gotta be right between the eyes, or the pig suffers, I declined to try that in case I might miss.
Then comes the lopping off of the head with a huge machete. I declined that too, not having that kind of strength.
I did get to carry a bucket of innards that were taken out once the pig was slashed open, and I did get to scrape the hair off the hide once the pig had been boiled.
i did get to carry the firewood for the fire to boil the pig. It is not a really clear memory, that pig-butchering, mainly because by that time I'd developed an ability to drink that moonshine. A fruit jar of it and I was happy as a ...pig in mud.
I do recall the fire under the boiling tank, and I do really remember well the pigs' heads sitting on wood blocks/tree stumps... facing me. I do remember uncle seeming like it was all totally normal, just like my stepdad would think his getting in his SAAB every morning to go to work was totally normal, not giving it a second thought and in fact, being quite proud of it.
I do remember wearing a pair of Becky's coveralls used just for the slaughter. My clothes were in the house, in that dark house waiting for me.
Becky and I took a bath together that night, in the tub with the candles around, water warm from the stove for us, grandma had made us up our tub since we'd done the hard work.
The next day there was such a great smell in the kitchen and Becky asked me if I would like to try some of the food that was cooking, and I thought I would until uncle saved me by telling me what it was.
(Chit'lins). I sort of wish I had eaten it now: just to say I had. It would be so punk.
A year or so later Becky and uncle and grandma moved to the hills and I went to visit them for a couple weeks. At which time Becky had gotten her period and managed to thoroughly traumatize me by chasing me around the house with a bloody menstrual pad saying it was going to happen to me, which made me cry for hours. Becky also 'played' with my 'thing' calling me by her boyfriend's name and I'd pretend I was asleep.
I liked it, sure did. I wished I didn't have to pretend I was asleep... and I wished Becky wasn't so mean... and our days were spent out on our ponies in the woods looking for trouble of some sort, and sometimes finding it in the company of mountain boys and mountain girls and moonshine and cigarettes and dope.
Sometimes there would be potato chips and sometimes a moon pie from the store in town.
That house had electricity thank the universe... Becky and sometimes a friend or two and I would sit by the creek telling spooky tales or talking about the mountain boys we'd met and messed around with, watching the house and waiting for grandma to call us in. when she called us in we'd go but usually we managed to sneak out again.
It was a wild time. I don't think my momma had any idea what I was up to all that time, she'd not ever been to Becky's uncles house down the road and she certainly hadn't been all the way up to the hill country to see the new place.
I sometimes wonder what ever happened to Becky and the rest of the clan.. I'm sure grandma is gone by now. uncle too maybe. Becky: who knows.
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