A Place That Was Home

By Julia Nunnally Duncan

A chance encounter with a forgotten childhood friend makes a woman take stock of her own shortcomings through the years.A rural family's peaceful Sunday night is disrupted by a frightening, unexpected visitor.A charming blind student brings a new perspective to an emotionally distant teacher.A woman is eyewitness to a neighbor's struggle with alcoholism and the tragic outcome of his problems.These incidents and many others are captured in A Place That Was Home.Chronicling a Western North Carolina woman's experiences from the 1960s to the present, the twenty-one personal essays in A Place That Was Home vividly depict a regional world in which families live, work, and worship and others suffer from dire circumstances.A Place That Was Home invites the reader into this compelling world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Histria Christian
• Release date: Aug 30, 2016
• ISBN: 9781632132956

Book preview

Table of Contents

Title Page and Copyright Information

Acknowledgments

Grandma's Bed

His Voice

Patricia

Watching Television

Our Intruder

Homesick

Portrait in Chartreuse Satin

Eclipse

Salesgirl

The Picture of Benjamin

Something in the Music

In My Car

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

Jim

Wild Man

Pat

Man with the Wagon

Light in Darkness

Charlie’s Knife

Their Secret Meeting

His Slice of Heaven

Dancing with the Best of Them

Lost Child

I’m Not Anorexic

Bee Stings

A Place That Was Home

About the Author

A Place

That Was

HOME

Julia Nunnally Duncan

eLectio Publishing

Little Elm, TX

A Place That Was Home

By Julia Nunnally Duncan

Copyright 2016 by Julia Nunnally Duncan. All rights reserved.

Cover Design by eLectio Publishing. © 2016. All rights reserved.

ISBN-13: 978-1-63213-295-6

Published by eLectio Publishing, LLC

Little Elm, Texas

http://www.eLectioPublishing.com

First Edition.

5 4 3 2 1 eLP 21 20 19 18 17 16

The eLectio Publishing editing team is comprised of: Christine LePorte, Kaitlyn Campbell, Lori Draft, Sheldon James, Court Dudek, and Jim Eccles.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge certain resources and individuals for their valuable information regarding McDowell County history:

Marion (Images of America), by Kim Clark and the McDowell House Project Advisory Committee.

McDowell County: 1843-1943 (NC) (Images of America), by James Lawton Haney & the McDowell County Historic Preservation Commission.

The McDowell County Public Library for allowing access to Ancestry.com and other online archives.

Dr. Jim Haney, McDowell County historian, for his insights about the Southern Railroad system.

Herbert Augustus Davis (1918-1983), my uncle, for taking an interest in me and perceiving my curiosity about local history. His written memories about Clinchfield Manufacturing Company and life in its mill village during the early twentieth century have been invaluable.

Virgil Lee Davis (1932-2010), my uncle, for supporting my literary work during the last years of his life. In using incidents from his adventurous childhood in this book, I hope I have honored him, as that was my intention.

And especially, Madeline Davis Nunnally, my mother, for all the stories she has shared through the years about her childhood in the Clinchfield mill village. Because of these stories and our frequent drives through the Clinchfield community, this place has become so familiar and dear that it seems like home to me, too.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the publications in which the following essays appeared, though in somewhat different form: Grandma’s Bed in Women’s Spaces Women’s Places; Patricia in Evening Street Review; Our Intruder in Germ Magazine; Portrait in Chartreuse Satin in Clothes Lines; Salesgirl in drafthorse literary journal; certain sections of In My Car in The Stone Carver; Charlie’s Knife in It’s All Relative; Dancing with the Best of Them in Feile-Festa; Lost Child in Evening Street Review; I’m Not Anorexic in Audience Magazine; and Bee Stings in Prime Number Magazine.

The narratives in A Place That Was Home record true incidents; however, a few names have been changed, though most remain authentic.

But the home tie is the blood tie.

—Eudora Welty, Place in Fiction

Grandma's Bed

The sky was dark, the air frigid, and stars pulsed in the expanse over my father and me. He carried me, wrapped in a blanket, from his car to the white frame house where I would spend my day. Once inside he placed me on the settee, bent over to kiss me goodbye, and I kissed him—once on each cheek, as was our custom—savoring the aroma of his aftershave. He said goodbye and reminded me that he would be back in the evening to take me home. My mother waited in the car for him to drive them to work.

In lamplight, this front room was dim with a yellow glow. The coal stove in front of the bricked-in fireplace shed a pungent smell, but its warmth crossed the room to me.

My stay on the settee was brief. I had barely dozed off when Grandma helped me to a dark, adjoining bedroom, where a tall bed, covers turned down, waited. In this room was a second fireplace, also bricked-in but with no stove. Resting on its mantle was a set mousetrap. Grandma had warned me not to touch it. Near the bed stood a vanity with a brush, comb, hairpins, and hand mirror. I climbed into bed, and Grandma covered me with the cold sheet and heavy patchwork quilts. I shivered under the covers, my flannel pajamas helpless against the drafty air. As I lay there, I thought about my father and mother, worrying that something bad might happen to them during the day.

But soon Grandma returned, stood at the foot of the bed, and pulled back the covers from my socked feet. Against my soles she placed a hot brick wrapped in a cloth diaper. Immediately a wave of warmth passed from my feet into my body, and I burrowed deeper into the bedclothes and fell wondrously asleep. Here I remained two hours until Grandma came to rouse me to get dressed.

When she found my empty baby bottle beside my cheek, its contents of warm Nestle's Quik-flavored milk long gone, she made no fuss that a four year old still sucked a bottle. She never teased me, though she knew that I was ashamed of a habit that I couldn't let go. Like my parents, she seemed to understand.

After a visit to the outside toilet, which was down a path behind the house, I spent the rest of the morning playing in the side yard near the woods. My toys were an old tablespoon and a pie pan. I dug rich, black dirt, spooned it into the pan, and patted it into a mound, making a mud pie. Grandma stayed inside preparing a real meal. At dinnertime, I sat across from her at the kitchen table. She was a strong woman, with large hands, iron-gray hair that she kept braided, coiled, and pinned behind her head, and dark eyes topped by thick eyebrows. She wore a cotton housedress and an apron. We ate mashed potatoes, thick, chunky, and salty; turnip greens, tender and greasy and smothered in vinegar; and cornbread, thick-sliced and deliciously charred on top. We drank cold, creamy milk. After we ate and she covered the dishes with the white linen tablecloth, we went to the front room, where we cracked black walnuts for a cake she would bake for my parents. Then we settled in and watched her favorite television shows: Queen for a Day; Art Linkletter's House Party; The Edge of Night; The Secret Storm. Soon I would hear the crunch of my father's car driving up the long gravel driveway. Grandma fetched me the grocery bag that held my pajamas, blanket, and bottle, and I waited for my father to knock on the front door.

This day was as others had been for the past year and would continue to be until the first grade stole me away. After that, during the summer months, my parents' work shifts changed or other babysitting arrangements were made. But even then, from time to time, I returned to this house, a short walk from my own, to play with this woman's visiting granddaughter—the girl who informed me this woman was not my grandma. She is my grandma, I argued then, but time would make me realize that she was an elderly neighbor, whom my parents had hired to take care of me while they worked in the hosiery mill. Yet she may as well have been my grandma, for she never treated me differently from her own grandchildren. At Christmas, she continued to reserve for me on her front room mantel a large Christmas tree lollipop, shiny green with red candy decorations and a gold icing star. It waited alongside identical ones for her grandchildren.

And a few years later, as she lay gravely ill in the local hospital, lapsing into delirium, she told her daughter she needed to get home to fix dinner for me. Her daughter told me this as my parents and I stood outside the hospital room in the dingy hallway. I have never forgotten this moment. Suddenly I knew for certain my importance to this dear woman who must have truly thought of me as her grandchild, as I had once thought of her as my grandma.

Soon I stood alongside her youngest daughter at McCall's Funeral Home and looked into the casket, her daughter grasping my shoulder and saying, She loved you so much. My family had never spoken openly about our love for each other, so I didn't know how to respond. But I remained for a while, looking down at her face. In my way I knew I loved her too.

These days my own thoughts conspire against me: I anguish over my father's death, worry about my mother's health, and fret over the wellbeing of my husband and daughter. At such moments I feel very alone. But when this happens, often at night, I close my eyes and think about a bed in a dark room. It is cold at first. Suddenly something solid, warm, and soothing is pressed against my feet. It is as if Grandma is there to see that I am warm.

Then everything is all right again.

His Voice

Quick Draw McGraw was my first friend. I don’t exactly mean the Hanna-Barbera cartoon character, although of course that cartoon was my first introduction to Quick Draw. My friend was the doll that Knickerbocker Toy Company produced in 1959, which my father bought for me at Sears when I was four.

This doll, a blue plush horse that stood upright on white hooves and featured a soft vinyl face with blue eyes and a red smile, soon became Quickie and was my constant companion. I slept with him, traveled with him, and gave him a voice—not at all the voice of the TV cartoon character. Like a ventriloquist, I spoke for Quickie but truly believed his voice was his own. I merely channeled it.

One Sunday my family and I traveled thirty miles to visit my mother’s sister Helen in Drexel, a town near Morganton, and my companion came along. Upon return to our home in Marion, to my horror, I discovered I had left Quickie in Drexel.

A longer week had never existed than the one I spent without my friend. But my aunt and uncle surprised us with a visit the following weekend. My mother and I spied their car pulling into our driveway, and when she saw my uncle Louis stepping into the yard holding Quickie, she said, Lookee who’s come home.

I was a bashful child, prone to hiding when relatives visited, so I fled to my bedroom closet.

I wouldn’t come out to face my dearest friend, whom I had longed to see for six long days and nights.

Finally, my mother brought him to me, and all was right in my world again. He soon talked to me, assuring me he wasn’t mad that I’d left him in Drexel; he had had a good time there. But I was more careful with him after that. Only in his absence did I see how much he meant to me.

Quickie is featured in a photograph taken at my sixth birthday party. He and I both don birthday hats, and I am holding him over my cake, as if to let him blow out the candles. Of course, Quickie would have been there to help me celebrate.

Quickie aged, as we all do. My collie Laddie got hold of him and chewed off his right ear. My brother bit a hole in the tip of his nose. His hind hooves became frayed, and I stitched the rotten fabric back together. I also fabricated a little red smock for him from an old dress of mine, so he wouldn’t get chilled (we had no central heat in the house, so most of the rooms stayed cold in the winter).

As time passed, my interests changed. I spent more time with Laddie and with my human friends, so eventually Quickie was relegated to a baby crib upstairs. He would remain there until a few years ago, when I brought him to my house, where he is displayed in a guest bedroom, along with other stuffed animals, model horses, and troll dolls from my childhood.

Quick Draw McGraw was my first friend and my first horse. I have been lucky enough to own three real horses—an Appaloosa, a quarter horse, and a Tennessee walker—at various points in my life, and I continue to have an abiding affection for horses. I believe that the little fabric toy horse that was such an integral part of my early childhood instilled in me this love of horses. But more importantly, he taught me that you can love