Empty Promise Places: Growing Up in Appalachia

By James Bond

Empty Promise Places follows a boy and his family as they attempt to survive the life they are given. He knows nothing different until modest glimpses of others' lives show him a vast world apart from his own. This story is sure to appeal to fans of The Glass Castle and will ring true for many in Appalachia. It will perhaps astonish readers who are unfamiliar with the everyday lives of those growing up in poverty.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Newman Springs Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Feb 24, 2022
• ISBN: 9781638815037

Book preview

Title Page

Copyright © 2021 James Bond

All rights reserved

First Edition

NEWMAN SPRINGS PUBLISHING

320 Broad Street

Red Bank, NJ 07701

First originally published by Newman Springs Publishing 2021

Cover Art and Interior Photographs © 2021 by James E Bond

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission of the author, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

ISBN 978-1-63881-502-0 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-63881-877-9 (Hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-63881-503-7 (Digital)

Printed in the United States of America

This work is dedicated to my mother in recognition of her sacrifices that enabled our survival and lessons she taught that I am still learning years after she has gone.

Contents

Preface

Prologue: Fort Wayne, Indiana, 1993

Remington, Virginia: The Arey Place, 1948

Indian Camp, West Virginia: The Duke Place

Ambridge, Pennsylvania

Ambridge, Pennsylvania: Front Street

Ambridge, Pennsylvania: Marshall Alley

Aliquippa, Pennsylvania

Indian Camp, West Virginia: The Bean Place

Indian Camp, West Virginia: The McCartney Place

Tennerton, West Virginia

Ivy, West Virginia: The Hawkins Place

Parris Island, South Carolina

Camp Geiger, North Carolina

Ivy, West Virginia

Preface

I have always imagined a writer to be loquacious rather than taciturn, one who has an eye for the noticed, but generally unremarked, bits of the human experience.

I have few words and often think I have noticed little of the human experience. Sitting in the last place of my former life, watching the house getting slowly more empty, feeling like I was watching my life disappear into the back of a truck, I tried to make sense of how I got to this. I began to reflect upon the people and events that have made contributions to the things I know and the person I am. Regrettably I have only recently begun to fully appreciate those contributions.

The idea for this book began in those moments when I had spent my day with strangers, packing the things that had made each new place seem familiar. I will, no doubt, make an inaccurate account and be less than complete in capturing the spirit of important people who surface within these pages. Many of them are dead and cannot hold me to account. Oddly that increases my responsibility to accurately report their contributions, yet I am constrained by failing memory and incomplete understanding.

The characters in this story are real people. The events depicted are as real as my memory or modesty allow.

The cover photograph depicts the Bond kids, circa 1959–1960, at Aunt Myrtle Wilt’s house after Sunday school at Indian Camp Church. Shown left to right, rear to front, are Josie, Joseph, James, Marguerite, Ford, and Wilda. Aunt Myrtle’s was a convenient stopover between the McCartney place, where we lived, and the Indian Camp church.

Prologue

Fort Wayne, Indiana, 1993

It was the end of the day. My aching back implied that much had been accomplished that day, yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that I ached as much from an accumulation of failures as from accomplishments. My body was tired from the packing and moving. My mind was tired from the repetitive review of the reasons why.

It was the end of the day but had the weight of the end of something larger, something more important than a mere day. I was sitting on a box that had already been packed. From my vantage point at the junction of the kitchen and family room, I could see the living room to the right and the den to the left, as well as the front hall, where the movers went back and forth, loading taped boxes and pieces of furniture onto the truck parked in the driveway. The floors of all the rooms I could see were littered with a haphazard assortment of boxes, pieces of tape, packing paper, and the little bits of debris common to uprooting everything after leaving it untouched, maybe since moving in. The wall-to-wall carpet was marked with indentations where furniture feet once rested and patterns of dust where the vacuum never reached. Nail holes and shadow outlines on the walls marked former locations of pictures or posters that had made the home uniquely ours. I was surprised to realize I could no longer remember which was where.

I had some experience with these activities—emptying one house in order to move its contents to some other house. I had moved throughout childhood. I had moved every two years, on average, during a twenty-year Marine Corps career. I had moved to this place a scant two years before. This time, it was different. This time, the feelings of anticipation and apprehension were mixed with sadness, a sense of failure, a feeling of guilt.

In those moments, my mind strayed from thinking about the fact that I hadn’t eaten all day, from wondering when the movers would be finished, from what I had to do here before driving to the next place, from thinking about what I had to do first at the new place, from wondering if all this was the right thing to do, to wondering if I had made a serious mistake—or several. I looked around and thought about all the places where I had done this same thing, leaving one house to move on to the next.

As a child, I moved where my parents took me. Each of those was named somebody’s place, where the somebody’s name was always someone else’s, never ours. As an adult, I moved where the Marine Corps ordered me to go. In each of these adult moves, my wife and child moved also. Their needs and wishes guided aspects of the move. This time, I was doing it alone. My daughter was away at school. My wife had left some months ago to pursue her new life. I was leaving a successful job where I had friends.

I was tired of moving, yet I still wanted to see new places and experience new adventures. I began thinking of all the places that I had lived and tried thinking of the new place with the same anticipation as with those. This time, it was difficult to shake the lethargy that gripped me. This time, it was as if I did not want to go but had given some other part of me permission to go. A part of me wanted to get on with the new life—a clean break, a new start. A part of me was afraid that if I left this place, my now-ex-wife and daughter could not find their way back. I was moving all this stuff because I felt, in some unreasoned way, that I had to keep the things that they had cared about in order to make the place home. Or was it just me that cared? The accumulation of things had taken years. Was I holding on to things because they were expensive to replace? Was I now the caretaker for what my broken family cared about? Or was I substituting it for the family I no longer had? Was it just that the things defined my home, and I needed them in any new place?

The home was disappearing box by box, piece by piece, into the moving van, leaving just the shell of another place. Those things had taken a lifetime to acquire. Some marked the momentous occasions when we finally could afford to bring home some piece that we could not afford previously—something that would fulfill a needed function, or maybe enhance our home. Others were things that somehow found their way into the house without me knowing exactly how or understanding why they were allowed to stay. I had moved many times before. Maybe that was why the things seemed to define home more than the home itself. Now that they were in disarray, there was no home, only a place. Time to move on.

Remington, Virginia: The Arey Place, 1948

Let’s start at my version of the beginning.

Remington is a small farming community, a wide spot in the road along the Rappahannock River in northern Virginia, roughly 140 miles upriver from the mouth. A dated gas station and a mix of modest buildings mark the town location. Many of the buildings, once representative of their owner’s pride, are now made similar to their neighbors’ by the peeling white paint from their clapboard exteriors and a general air of neglect. The infrequent concrete walks have yielded to the frosts of winter and the thaws of spring; the ragged cracks now choked with weeds and wild grass, the heaved-up sections awaiting the careless toe. Occasional silos on the rolling lands that surround the village still mark the locations of farms that thrived in another time. In the distance to the west, the blue gray green of the rising land marks the eastern foothills of the Blue Ridge mountain range. This was my birthplace. In a later time, after many years and place after faceless place, I visited there without knowing exactly where we lived when I was young. I was going back, trying to gain some understanding of my life from what remained of where it began. I wanted to be connected but was not. The blue-gray hue of the hills to the west reflected my state of mind.

My parents, George and Verna, and my sister Josie arrived in Remington sometime in 1947 or 1948, from Buckhannon, West Virginia. George and Verna were newly married, with a young baby, and seeking an opportunity in the postwar boom that, so far, had bypassed the Mountain State.

Mom, Dad and Jude

Both were born and grew up near Indian Camp in Upshur County. Dad was born March 17, 1923. Mom was born November 19, 1924. Since Buckhannon is the county seat for Upshur, everyone from the county identified himself or herself as being from Buckhannon once they left the county. Both parents went to country schools near their parents’ farms. I think Dad finished the third grade and Mom, the fifth.

Dad was a strong man, about 6'1" tall and 185 pounds, with broad sloping shoulders and long arms, thickened with muscle from hours of manual labor on the farm. His black hair was thick and usually unruly. Bushy black eyebrows covered the forward ridge of his skull and shaded dark-brown eyes. His hands were large and thick through the palms with short meaty fingers. Stiff black hair covered the spaces between the knuckles.

Mom was about 5'3" tall and 125 pounds. Her skin was fair with a light covering of freckles before the years in the sun and hard work took their toll. Her skin and reddish-brown hair with clear blue eyes and full lips gave her an English-Irish look. She loved to yodel and dance the Irish jigs.

I was born in Remington, actually Warrenton hospital, about 7:30 a.m., on a relatively cold December 2, 1948. I think Mom was ready to stop carrying me around. She often remarked later that I was a big baby. I hope she meant that in the best way. She had been around my older sister, Josie, since April 1947, so she was probably not anxious to have another brat underfoot so soon.

Dad holding Jude and Jim

Mom said I was named James after one of the doctors in Warrenton hospital. Each time Mom relayed this story, a small smile played on her face. I think Mom found the doctor appealing in some way.

Mom told me later in life that I was breastfed. She always said it with a laugh, as if I was the reason she stopped feeding kids from her breast. All through life, I admit to a similar fondness for women’s breasts as I had then. To my credit, I did stop expecting to get food that way.

Dad worked on a dairy farm, with a large herd of cows near Remington, for a man named Ed Arey. I think it was in Culpepper. His job was to clean the barns, feed the cattle, attach the milking machines to the cows at milking time, and the other variety of things there are to be done on a working farm. Since he was from Buckhannon, West Virginia, I never knew how he got the job. It seemed that in those days, men went to a job where one of their friends worked who knew when there was an opening. There was a feed-and-grain store in Buckhannon called Arey’s Feeds, or something similar, but I don’t know if that was the connection.

Mom had a favorite Jersey milk cow in Remington. She referred to it as Jersey and used to talk about it being gentler and giving more milk than cows we owned later. In later years when we were chasing one that had broken through the fence, or we had one that kicked over the milk bucket, she would talk about Jersey and how much she missed her.

Dad often told a story about two stray cats who wandered into their lives while at the Arey farm. These cats had apparently decided that Mom and Dad were the people who were going to adopt them. They stayed underfoot for Mom despite her every attempt to get rid of them. One day when Dad returned from work, he found the two cats draped over a clothesline, tied together by their tails. When he cut them down, they ran in opposite directions and were never seen around there again. Mom could be a problem solver. Dad usually laughed when he told this story, but I could tell that he learned something new about Mom that day.

In all the following years, I remember cats around the farm, particularly if we had rats in the barn. Mom would occasionally mutter something about those damn cats, usually as she scattered them from the milk bucket or something else they weren’t supposed to be around, or if mice in the house or rats in the barn surprised her. Even while muttering and stomping at the cats, she would sternly reprimand us kids if she found us mistreating the farm animals.

My brother Joe was born here on Halloween 1950. Now Mom had three kids under four years old. Joe says that when he was in Mom’s favor, she said he was the best Halloween treat she ever got. When he was out of favor, she said he was the worst trick ever played on her.

When Mom talked about the Arey place later, she often included the story about my sister Jude taking a shit in Dad’s hat.

Dad discovers Jude has shit in his hat.

I think Mom enjoyed that memory, and Jude came to be proud rather than embarrassed about it.

In later years, Mom seemed to feel a fondness for the time she spent on the dairy farm in Virginia. Often stories of the good times would include something that happened there. I don’t know if it was because the marriage was still young, and life seemed good, or if she measured those times against later ones. Maybe she still had the optimism of youth, not yet aware of the burdens her life would accumulate or the sacrifices she would have to make.

Indian Camp, West Virginia: The Duke Place

I don’t remember how we moved. It seemed that my memory came into being sometime after we started living at the Duke place. My older sister, Josie—nicknamed Judy, Jude for short—had been born in West Virginia, before our parents took her to Virginia, but I’m not sure where they lived then.

It was called the Duke place, since that was the name of the family who owned it when we lived there. Sometimes people would say the old Duke place since the Dukes still lived a little farther down the ridge. I guess where we lived was the original home.

The Dukes had a rough reputation as a family. Some of the younger ones had brushes with the law for drinking or fighting, or both. Everyone we knew seemed to have some whispered story about the Dukes that would shock the listener. Once I heard Mom talk to Dad about staying there with three little kids while he worked away.

Dad said, Aw, they ain’t gonna bother ye. Besides my dad and mom are just down the road. The Duke place was a couple of miles down the Indian Camp Ridge from Dad’s parents, John and Rena.

I remember the Duke place as a large white clapboard house. The living room seemed large, dominated primarily by the potbellied Burnside stove. I don’t remember many furnishings. There was a front door facing the road from the living room, but I don’t remember it ever being used. The two windows had white lace curtains. I had the sense that they had been left by the previous occupant.

A combination barbed wire and rail fence, showing years of neglect, separated the house and small front yard from the dusty road. The fence line had been planted with flowering bushes in years past. These had long since overgrown and were left untouched. A large maple tree anchored one corner of the yard.

The kitchen was just large enough for one counter across the shorter end and one plank dining table with a bench behind and a few cane-bottomed chairs. There was just enough room to squeeze between the refrigerator and the plank table to the stove. The rear door of the house opened out of the kitchen to a stone step and hard-packed dirt, littered by scraps thrown out with the dishwater and a variety of small items, including silverware that we would use to dig in the dirt. Across the hard-packed dirt was a cellar with a rickety door and lots of weeds. In the rear side yard, there was a small outbuilding, which housed some long-forgotten rusty tools. There were holes in the floor where weak spots in the planking had given way. Honeysuckle and ivy grew over most of the shed.

Two paths, the width of a car track and partially overgrown with grass, led from the road into the yard at the side of the house. A rusty truck with rotted upholstery and summer bees sat next to the evergreen trees that provided a small break between the paths that passed for a driveway and the neighboring pasture field. In the summer, grass grew tall along the fences and other places where it couldn’t be easily reached with a scythe or where it wasn’t routinely trampled by the frequent passage of feet. Dad walked to his dad’s to borrow a scythe when Mom became too worried about snakes in the tall grass.

My strongest recollection of the Duke place is watching Jude trudge off alone through the snow, going to that mysterious place called school. She was in the first grade. It was a long trip alone for a five-year-old girl. To go, she walked through the field behind our house, down through the woods to the house of Uncle Basil (Base for short), Dad’s brother. There she met their oldest son, Ronnie, and continued the trip to school with him. She hated going to school. I remember a morning when I awoke early and found Jude and Mom in the kitchen having a loud discussion about what Jude was supposed to do. The snow was fresh and deep, and