Shattered: Intoxicated A Toxic Environment

By Arlene Hayse

The word Shattered refers to the sound akin to when someone crashes a car. Usually the windshield gets shattered or broken. I like to think of it as when domestic violence hits the household; it usually shatters the household environment or the child's world. ¬ This book was written to give the reader an insight into the subject.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Covenant Books, Inc.
• Release date: Mar 24, 2020
• ISBN: 9781646701186

Book preview

Hello

I would like to introduce myself. My name is Arlene Hayse. I was born on March 26, 1971. I grew up in a small town in the backwoods of Kentucky. Way down in the holler, up under in the woods and hills, the remote side of the country, sheltered way back in God’s country, where we say y’all, whataboutit, whattago, up under, down under, whatchamacallit, and other words like that. Down home as country as ya get.

As a family of my parents with six children, we lived mostly off the land. My dad raised three gardens every year: an early garden, a late garden, and a potato garden. The land we lived on had apple trees and other fruit trees, blackberry bushes that produced blackberries. We would can and eat from those pickings all winter. There were a lot of resources that were all over that countryside which we fed off of.

We didn’t own the two-hundred-plus acres we lived on. Our landlord Maurice Golf, from Louisville, Kentucky, owned the property. My parents rented the four-room shack for twenty dollars a month. It had no indoor plumbing. It contained a living room, a kitchen, and two bedrooms. There was an outhouse on the side of the creek bank. It was a four-room shack.

We lived right on the side of the dirt gravel road. We had a huge yard to play in on both sides of the house and in the back, not counting the field of pastures we roamed in and the wooded hillside. We even played in those gardens. The creek banks made such wondrous playing grounds. The trees we climbed were adventurous.

Our landlord Maurice would come down on the weekends. He would take the wagon with a couple of his horses and go riding. He loved it. He would bring his cooler of beer and also had sodas in there for us kids. I guess he got away from the city life. He always kept about a couple horses there and we had a pony called Ol’ Pete. We could go ride those horses anytime we wanted, and we did as little children unsupervised.

We made that land our playing ground too. We played on the creek banks, the hay bales, and the embankments were our exploratory play area. The old oak tree was our monkey village climbing range. We would climb up and down it all the time, swinging from branch to branch. Our parents did do activities with us. We played kickball; dodgeball; green light red light; Simon says; duck, duck goose; Bubble gum, bubble gum in a dish; and many other children’s games. There were times when our parents left us alone and we would play hide ‘n’ seek in the house. We had a lot of furniture and the dressers were high off the ground. We could climb high and not get it. With all six kids, one would be blindfolded and spun around while the other hid.

We all lived in that four-room shack, all eight of us. That’s not counting the cousins who would come over or the friends who spent the night. The house was full and running over. My dad loved living like that and loved all his kids. He loved his family living way out in the remote countryside. Facing the road for whoever stopped by, his work shed was back behind the house on the other side of the creek. One side was his shed and the other was the chicken coop.

We ate well, not just off the gardens. Every night there were beans, cornbread, and fried potatoes plus whatever else they fixed. We ate well off those gardens because we were very resourceful with what we had. The gardens didn’t only provide for our families but also many of our kinfolk and neighbors. Man, Dad loved to pick one of his great, big, humungous watermelons when people stopped by. Those juicy delicious watermelons fed everyone there.

We canned every year. I said we because all us kids helped. We cleaned those canning jars every year before summer. We the kids washed those canning jars. We all helped plant the potatoes. My dad was very direct on us helping plant that acre of potatoes. He plowed while we planted. The huge amount of potatoes filled that floor of the cellar and lasted throughout the winter. We had plenty of potatoes to last us all year long until next planting season.

We picked apples from the apple trees on the land and blackberries from the blackberry bushes, mulberries from the mulberry tree. Even though the peaches were bought, my parents bought bushels to can and freeze to last through the winter. It made great for cobblers and pies. Have you ever ate a homemade fried apple pie? Talking about delicious. My dad’s fried apples were just as good as my mom’s. We got the chickens straight from the yard because there was no KFC in our neck of the woods. My mom would order baby chickens from the mail. The UPS truck would deliver a box of live baby chicks. The chicken would lay eggs and sit until they hatched more baby chickens. We also had eggs for breakfast. We didn’t go to the store. We went to the chicken house for our eggs. At the other house down the road, we even had a cherry tree. That was until the lightning got a hold of it and it eventually stopped producing cherries.

We drew water from the small well just outside of our house. We used it for cooking, drinking water, and made a lot of Kool-Aid with it. We also used it for taking baths and whatever else we needed it for. We watered the animals from the creek water. In the summer, we played in that creek and took baths there. No big deal because at least we were clean. Our four-room shack stayed clean. It was small and it didn’t take much to clean it with: a broom, a mop, and a little bit of soap. We started helping with chores at a very early age: the dishes, laundry, gardening, and feeding and watering the animals. After doing laundry with a ringer washer, we hung the clothes out on the clothesline. In the winter, we had to hang them all in the living room because when we hung them outside, they just froze.

Now those clotheslines sucked when you were playing hide ‘n’ seek or tag in the dark. You could be running and run right smack-dab into a clothesline. You would get knocked right off your feet. When you heard a hard thump and someone choking, it was ’cause they just got knocked the slap out. They had been what we called clotheslined. That made it easy to find someone when you hear that thump. We all had done it many of times. It sucked getting smacked across the throat by one of those clotheslines. Catching you across the throat and ka-thump you went, right smack on the ground.

At times we would climb the old oak tree. We would see who could climb the highest and reach as far to the top as one could go. Our neighbor Loretta would always make it to the very top. We would ride the horse. We rode those horses all the time. My cousin Troy and I were riding one day. We came around the bend at the top of the hill, galloping fast around through the path of the horse trail. Then all of a sudden, ka-thump! We got smacked right off that horse into a sitting position, the same way as we were sitting on that horse. Man, did that ever hurt. That tree branch was more like a limb that smacked us hard. We never saw it coming. One minute we were riding and the next on our behinds on the ground. We hit that ground hard. Neither one of us could walk down that hillside without the pain in our butts.

My dad worked in handles. He would cut trees down then cut them into stump blocks. Then he would strip the bark off the stumps with an ax. Next he would take cut sections into handles. Over the years my dad had a six-pack throughout his life into his sixties. The muscles my dad had in his arms were humungous. He had this from working the blocks and handles all day. Then he chopped wood that would last us through the winter. He gave a lot to the kinfolk we had and I’m sure to neighbors as well. But we had plenty. No wood was wasted, ever. The bark was used for kenneling to start the fires and help the fires keep going throughout the night. There was nothing like waking up to a warm stove fire.

Working like we did as kids gave us a backbone you just can’t get anywhere else. We had home-cooked meals every night. My dad and brothers would go hunting and fishing, which made for a great supper. There was always a big jar of pickled baloney on the table, along with a jar of molasses, canned jellies, crackers, and such. There were times we ate butter sandwiches and sugar sandwiches. Yeah, it don’t sound good now. We ate tons of vegetables from the gardens: fresh tomatoes, beets, and the carrots were as orange as you could get. We ate turnips, strawberries, melons galore, cucumbers, corn, peppers, all sorts of things. Yummy!

When it was winter, we would pack the wood slabs in the porch to keep it dry for the stove. That was a continuous job. That porch was also our playground. Thinking about it, that porch was very handy. One of the freezers sat on it. It was a place we hung out a lot. When people stopped by, we sat out there visiting. People were not allowed to bring alcohol or drugs on our property. Our dad forbid it. If they were drinking, that had to stay by their car by the road.

We had plenty of animals for pets: cats, dogs, puppies, horses, rabbits, chickens, and birds. We had a cat that had nine lives. Literally, this cat got hit and ran over. It would lay there for days, not move a muscle. Then about week would pass by and it would bounce right back up. Shocking, but it would pull through whatever took him down. We had a cow once. Using the milk from it, we churned butter. My parents loved buttermilk and cornbread. Yuk! But there are many people that like it. Not me! When later down the years I met a woman in the restaurant business who was very good to me and my son, she asked me one day if I liked buttermilk pie. I was like, No way, I hate buttermilk. She was excited about making me this pie. She said to me, You’re gonna love it. I just know. When she made that pie and I tasted it, wow, I shut my mouth. It was delicious. I almost ate the whole pie. Man, that pie was yummy.

As little children, we attended Head Start. We loved going to that school. We learned so much and got to go on field trips. The bus would come get us and take us to school. We had so much fun. The teachers and staff were so good to us. They even curled our hair, took us places, and just spent quality time with us. I loved my teachers. They taught us many skills and lessons we would remember forever.

When we started elementary school, things were great. Again the teachers were the best. By the time third grade came around, school was the best thing that ever happened in my life. We made peanut butter in class that year. The teacher would catch up on the soap operas we watched over the summer. School was good to us and for us. It was just in the winter when it snowed real bad the bus had to let us off the end of the road. We had to walk home, which seemed miles away. It took us an hour or so to get home. Walking home in the snow wasn’t fun. But school was and I loved it.

Every year, when school would let out for summer, we would walk four or five times a week down to the lake to go swimming. That was fun. We had a lady down the road that would pick me and my twin sister up for summer Bible school. We loved going. I guess we went six or seven times I know of. We had no real biblical influences other than the few times when our mom showed us pictures in the Bible. So summer Bible school was great.

When I heard God’s name mentioned as a child, well, it was mostly when our dad got mad because of the truck tearing up or something broke. All you could hear was a bunch of cuss words coming out of his mouth. We knew not to go near him or get in his way. We heard him say a lot of things that came out his mouth that were angry. Calling God’s name, he was really mad when he said it.

Many of our kinfolk on our mom’s side of the family were a bunch of havoc-raising heathens. I loved my uncle Kenny and aunt Jeanie. Uncle Kenny was a big ol’ teddy bear. He just lived down the road. But when they all would get into it, man, here they would come hopping and hollering, shooting at each other, cussing and raising nine kinds of havoc. Crazy is what it was bringing, that hostility and violence around a bunch of kids. They didn’t do it when Dad was at home. But mom would allow it and hide our aunts in