Twig Benders:: The Village That Raised Me

By Cate Bailey

Parents and teachers cannot possibly teach children everything they need to know to become reasonably successful adults. Children observe all the influences around them, good and bad, and then decide what to pull out of them.

This is how the village raises a child. This is how my village raised me.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Mar 7, 2014
• ISBN: 9781490828695

Cate Bailey

Hillary Clinton’s book, It Takes a Village, made me think about the village I grew up in, and I realized that those people really helped determine the person I became. So I drew lessons from specific events, and these stories are the results. Out of respect for the people I have written about, the names and the stories have been fictionalized, and I have moved them all into Lakeville. But in recalling events I knew about as a child, which may not have been the way they actually occurred, I saw how to deal with challenges I met as an adult. I am now happily in my third marriage, and my family includes my four children with my first husband, who died in a auto accident after a terrible mental illness; the child and grandchildren of my second husband, who died of cancer after 26 wonderful years; and the children, grandchildren, and stepchildren of my third husband, who has taken us all in as his. Our family includes nine children, twenty-six grandchildren, and soon to be eleven great-grandchildren. My roots grow in Tennessee, Pennsylvania, California, Florida, Iowa, and Kentucky, but we live in the same Mississippi county Danny has always lived in, which also raised my mother. Danny and I love RVing (when the garden isn’t coming in). We’ve found that people are the same everywhere, once you get past their speech. And God is God everywhere, loving His creation.

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Copyright © 2014 Cate Bailey.

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ISBN: 978-1-4908-2868-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4908-2870-1 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4908-2869-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014903999

WestBow Press rev. date: 03/04/2014

Contents

DADDY TOM AND THE HIRED HAND

THE GIFT

THE GOLDEN TRIANGLE

MRS. SPINSTER

TRULY GOOD PEOPLE

THE SCHOLAR

THE BEATEN

THE PIANO LADIES

THE ENTREPRENEUR

A FINE ONE

THE BOOTLEGGER

THE MATRIARCH

THE EXOTIC

THE FAITHFUL

THE HOBO AND THE WATERING RITUAL

This book is dedicated to Mama.

I wish you could have gotten the first copy.

FOREWORD

Just as a young, tender twig can be bent to grow into a shape that is not what it would have been without a particular influence, the characters of a village influence the direction a child will take into adulthood. A child is born an observer, a listener. Before she can speak, she knows what words mean. Before she understands morality, and the basis of it, she recognizes when something is wrong or when something is good.

This book is a collection of stories about characters in Lakeville, the 1950’s village that raised me. It was a village spread out on the banks of the growing Kentucky Lake, populated by commercial fishermen who ran trot lines, farmers who eked out a living on red clay that barely covered red gravel, and a smattering of professional people who liked the idea of living fifteen miles out of town. Fishing camps were starting to be plunked down on unproductive fields so people could drive out for a weekend of boating and fishing between hard weeks in the office or the recording studio. Some families were pulling their new houses out behind trucks and crowding them on new little roads in trailer parks, which all had to offer indoor plumbing before they could rent their lots. Most of the older houses had wells in their backyards, and outhouses. The telephone lines had eight parties, four of whose rings you could hear and four you couldn’t. The main social events were basketball games, school plays, graduations, community club meetings, and, of course, church.

I was blessed to be born to very good parents, who gave me guidelines for forming judgments and helped me interpret some of the events that took place in the community. They used every opportunity to reinforce the teachings of Jesus. But there were, of course, things that I didn’t talk with them about, things that they didn’t know I knew about, and things they thought I shouldn’t know about.

But they couldn’t shield me from the life that was going on around me. These stories have a very strong element of truth about them, but it is truth that I observed as a child in elementary school or as a teenager. How much of it was actual, rather than perceived, truth I cannot say even now. But it was the truth that formed the adult I became, and these people were my twig benders.

Of course, I have changed names and families and even melded some characters together and pulled in others from other communities. I had to put together the bits and pieces I knew to make a whole story, so some of it is pure fiction, but I’m not sure I could tell you which parts came solely from my imagination.

I should note that these stories represent only small slices of my character’s lives, just incidents they lived through, not their whole being. But I think we don’t learn nearly as much when life is going smoothly as we do when there are hard things to deal with. It is the sad times that force us to look inside ourselves and pull out our strengths and search for answers, and this is much easier when we have seen others do it.

Most of the lessons I didn’t realize at the time these things happened. It was later, when something happened to me or to someone I knew, that these events came back to me. My old friends’ struggles showed me either what to do or what I definitely did not want to do. The people I grew up with shaped my responses to things that might otherwise have overwhelmed me.

I am older now, about to become a great-grandmother, and most of the people I have written about, if they really existed, are gone. I have changed their names and their situations and fleshed out their stories, and any resemblance to an actual person is mostly the result of a vivid imagination. But if anyone believes he can identify any of these characters as some loved one, please know that I love them too. Some of them were actually my family, with our lives intertwined for a long time. They are part of my past and my present and I gladly share them with you.

Oh, how blessed I am to have known them all!

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DADDY TOM AND

THE HIRED HAND

True friendship overcomes everything, even prejudice.

"A friend loves at all times, and a

brother is born for adversity."

Proverbs 17:17, NIV

T om Pate lived eighteen miles out of Lakeville, on the other side of Dover, but being my granddaddy he made the trip four or five times a year when the weather was nice. The drive took him a good forty-five minutes, which he said was too long to spend cramped up behind a steering wheel, and the way he curled around the top of the wheel, I could see how he would get cramps. Besides, the closer you got to the river and the lake, the curvier the road was, and Daddy Tom didn’t like to meet those crazy drivers who didn’t even slow down for the curves but would barrel right around them at forty or forty-five miles an hour. In spite of the hazards of that road, he would occasionally holler for my grandmother to Gitcha hat, Alma, we’re goin’ to James’s. She would say Aw, Tom, I just got started on these peas, but all the time she would be washing her hands and putting the peas in the ice box and getting her hat, because once Tom had decided something, there wasn’t anything else to consider.

So Tom Pate was a member of the community because he would come a few times a year and be very polite to everybody, and the neighbors respected him just because they respected my Daddy and he was my Daddy’s father.

Daddy Tom wasn’t too crazy about our closest neighbors, who happened to be a tramp on one side and Aint Lena and her bunch on the other, within sight but not hollering distance. Daddy Tom said you couldn’t ever trust a man who couldn’t settle down on a piece of land and stay there (which might have had some truth in it), and you couldn’t trust Negroes (which he said the ugly word for) and that’s what Aint Lena’s family was, at least mostly. There were also Mr. Locum and his daughter, who owned the house we were renting and still lived in a couple of rooms, but they seemed like family so they didn’t count.

Now before I can tell you about this one particular visit Daddy Tom made to Lakeville, I have to tell you some things about him earlier, so you can understand what kind of people he and his pal really were.

Daddy Tom was always making pronouncements like those about tramps and Negroes, and nobody would argue with him. He