Tags
Ashland, blind, Ed Haley, Ella Haley, history, Jack Haley, Kentucky, Lawrence Haley, life, Luther Trumbo, Mona Haley, Nellie Muncy, Noah Haley, Pat Haley, The Waltons, West Virginia, Williamson, writing
The more I played for Mona, the more Pat’s little dogs barked at me — especially when I got up and danced. Their commotion caused Mona to say, “We always had an animal. We used to have an old blue-tick hound named King and every time Pop would play the fiddle he’d howl. Uncle Luther gave him to Pop when I was a baby. I don’t know if it was as much Pop as it was Mom, but they all loved King. All of us did. He was smart. He was a good hunter. He taught all the dogs in the neighborhood to hunt. Everybody wanted to hunt with him — they come from miles around to borrow him to go hunting — and someone stole him one time and he was gone about a week and when he came back blood was running out of all four paws and he just flopped on the front porch. He had a broken-like front paw right here in the first joint. He was young then. We had him till he died. He growed old and died. I was about fourteen when he died — maybe thirteen.”
I wondered if Ed ever used a seeing eye-dog and Pat said no, although Ella did. She said the family had a pet dog named “Jaybird” when she married Lawrence.
I could tell that Mona was in the mood to talk, so I put my fiddle away and told her about our recent research on Milt Haley. When I told her that Milt appeared to have been an illegitimate son of Nellie Muncy, she immediately told me how Ed visited a family of Muncys around Williamson, West Virginia. Her memories of such trips were vague.
“I remember a place we had to go in an automobile so far and then we had to cross the river in a boat to get to where we was a going — in a rowboat — but I don’t remember where it was. It had to be in West Virginia somewhere. I remember a store building where we went and we slept upstairs over that store building. I remember Pop getting real mean and mad at Mom up there one night and I wanted to crawl under the covers and pull it on me. He was getting real nasty with her.”
I asked Mona what they were into it over and she said, “Sex, I reckon. He wanted it and she didn’t want it and he said he had to have it. That’s how nasty he was — but he didn’t say it in those nice words. My dad happened to be drinking that time, too, so it made it that much worse.”
Trying to lighten the memory, I told her that sex had been a sore spot with married couples for thousands of years.
Pat said what was remarkable about Mona’s memories was the fact that Lawrence had never said a bad word about his father.
“He never talked bad about Pop,” she said. “Of course, he was Momma’s boy.”
Mona said Ed only whipped her once.
“It was on my birthday and I was getting ready to cry and he said, ‘Four, five, six.’ That’s the only time he ever whipped me. I do remember a time that Jack and Noah got into a fight and they was young men. And Pop jumped up — he wore suspenders — and he had them down. He jumped up to part them and got a hold of each of them and his pants fell down. The fight stopped and we all started laughing.”
Pat said that happened at 1040 Greenup after she’d married into the family — “right out on the front porch.”
Mona added, “But he had long underwear on.”
That fond memory caused her to say, “You know, The Waltons remind me a lot of the way we were brought up. We had a pretty good family life. We’d tell each other good night and stuff. Lawrence and I usually slept with Mom.”
Pat said, “Scratch each other’s backs,” and Mona said, “Yeah.”
I asked if Ed came around and kissed every one goodnight at bedtime and Mona said, “No, no. Mom did. Pop didn’t. If she’d tell him to go see about one of us, why, he would.”
For entertainment, the family gathered around the radio or listened to Ed’s “wild stories.”
Brandon Ray Kirk 