Growing Up Read Online Free PDF Page A

business trip to Richmond. Debt-ridden from timber speculation and uninsured out of respect for God, he left his family destitute.
    The year was 1917. My mother was in college at Petersburg—Papa had had grand plans for his children—but she had to quit and go to work. Her education qualified her to teach school, but not for the choice assignments. To find jobs she traveled northward, out of the genteel old Tidewater culture, where her family had been “quality folk” for 250 years, and into primitive backwaters where mountain children came barefoot to school and dropped out after fourth grade to take dollar-a-week work in the fields. Her youth became a succession of two-room schoolhouses, boarding with families of preachers and farmers prosperous enough to have a spare couch to rent for a few dollars a month.
    In her middle twenties she came at last to the Arlington School in the northernmost reaches of Loudoun County, a two-room schoolhouse at the foot of the Short Hill Mountain. A few miles beyond to westward lay the Blue Ridge, a few miles to the north, the Potomac River.
    Four hundred yards to the west, between the schoolhouse and the mountain, lay a festering center of sin, a bootleg whiskey still operated by the celebrated anti-Prohibition guerrilla Sam Reever.The dirt road running past the school carried a steady traffic of horseback riders, buggies, cars, and strolling pilgrims to and fro in ceaseless quest of moonshine.
    My mother hated whiskey and admired men who could leave it alone. In her family the men never used it. “Papa,” she told me over and over again, “never touched a drop of whiskey in his life.” She believed alcohol brought out men’s innate brutishness, made them foolish and quarrelsome, and destroyed their ability to make something of themselves. The traffic outside the schoolhouse saddened and disgusted her. So many of the men looked so young to be traveling that road to perdition.
    When she was outside for recess with her students one day, a sputtering old Model T en route from Sam Reever’s coughed and died right beside the schoolyard. She watched a lanky, dark-haired young man step out, lift the hood, and peer in at the engine. He wore a shapeless gray cap, coarse work clothes, and heavy clodhopper shoes.
    After studying the engine, he opened the tool chest on the fender and took out a wrench and a Mason jar. He had the cap off the jar and was lifting it to drink before he noticed her watching him from the playground. “Like a gentleman,” she later recalled, he quickly put the jar out of sight, flashed her a broad smile, and lifted his cap in salute.
    He was still tinkering with the engine when recess ended. Back in her schoolroom, her anger about his exposing children to the sight of whiskey was softened by feelings of sadness. What a shame for such a nice-looking young man to be ruining his life with whiskey. He looked like a man who might be able to make something of himself if a good woman took him in hand. Her chance to do so came a few days later.
    She was boarding at Ep Ahalt’s farm. Ep owned the biggest barn, the mightiest silo, and the fanciest house in the neighborhood. Ep’s wife, Bessie, a tiny, sweet-tempered woman with grown sons, was different from most women thereabouts. She too wanted her boys to make something of themselves. She fretted about all the bad influences, all the temptations to idleness whichsurrounded her sons. One of those tempters dropped in one evening. He wore a shapeless gray cap and arrived in a sputtering old Model T and knocked at the door asking if Walton was there. Walton, one of Bessie’s sons, was not there, for which Bessie was probably grateful, but the schoolmarm boarder was, and Bessie, being the soul of politeness, introduced them.
    He was tall and lean in the angular, graceless mountaineer style. His hands were rough, callused, competent. Workman’s hands. Not at all like Papa’s hands. He was not at all like Papa in any