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In Search of Ed Haley 22

08 Saturday Dec 2012

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Early the next morning, Lawrence and I boarded my Cadillac and drove out of Ashland across the Big Sandy River into West Virginia. We drove past little towns named Kenova and Ceredo on I-64 then turned off onto Route 10 just south of Huntington. For the next hour, we weaved our way on this curvy, two-lane road toward Harts, cruising past small settlements named Salt Rock, West Hamlin, Pleasant View, Branchland, Midkiff and Ranger — all situated on the Guyandotte River. Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, we saw a tiny green and white sign planted to the right of the road reading “Harts, Unincorporated.” Just past it was a beautiful two-story white home, which Lawrence quickly pointed out as the place where Ed’s mother was murdered in the Hatfield-McCoy Feud. Excited, I quickly pulled over and took a picture, then took off in a cloud of gravel and dust.

Lawrence and I turned right onto a narrow paved road and snaked our way up Harts Creek, bypassing a high school, trailers, Depression-era framed houses and newer brick homes. It was beautiful country. Cold weather was barely gone and the hillsides were a faint blush of green buds. Lawrence motioned toward the creek — which was up somewhat due to spring rains — and told again how difficult it was to get up Harts Creek in his younger days.

“Biggest part of the time, you was down in the creek bed there, if the weather was right. If it was times like this you had to take to the hillside but the road usually followed the creek bed. It seemed like it took us all day walking up here, but they didn’t have the roadway up on the side of the hill like this.”

After a ride of some fifteen minutes, we reached Trace Fork, the place where Ed Haley was born over one hundred years ago. We drove a short distance up the branch to the site of Peter Mullins’ cabin, which had burned or been torn down about fifteen years earlier. Lawrence pointed out the only remaining relics from the original farm: a lonely tree and an old smokehouse.

After taking in the sights and smells, we went to see Joe Mullins, who lived in a small white house just down the bottom. We first met Joe’s daughters, Connie and Loretta, who said Joe had gone to Chapmanville and would probably be out for most of the day. Lawrence introduced himself as “Ed Haley’s son,” which caused Connie to giggle and say, “Oh, yeah. Don’t we have a picture of him?”

Loretta said, “We got a lot of pictures.”

“The old fiddle,” Connie said. “Remember the old fiddle that used to be up there in that old house?”

What old house?

“That old smokehouse up there at the old house,” Connie said. “There was an old fiddle up in the top of it.”

There was more giggling, as if the two had just shared a secret joke.

I said to Connie, “You don’t think you could find that do you, just to see it?”

She said, “No, I doubt it.”

Loretta said, “We could probably find the picture.”

Boy that would be great.

“I don’t know about right this minute. How long are you gonna be around?”

“Long enough for you to find that picture,” I said.

The next thing I knew, Connie walked us to Uncle Peter Mullins’ old smokehouse and flung open a door. I took a few steps inside — past old furniture and piles of God-knows-what — and quickly spotted a decorative metal lid with Ed and Johnny Hager’s picture on it. In the picture, a copy of which I had first seen at Lawrence’s, Haley was slim and decked out in a suit with a derby and dark glasses. Hager stood beside him with a banjo. Lawrence said it was taken at White Sulphur Springs in eastern West Virginia.

At some point, Connie showed us a large, framed portrait of a woman she identified as Ed’s mother, Emma Jean Haley — the same picture Pat Haley had seen on her visit to Harts Creek several years ago. Connie said Lawrence could have both pictures.

Deep Secrets

08 Saturday Dec 2012

Posted by in Pearl Adkins Diary

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     “Diary dear, I can tell you many things I can’t no other,” Pearl wrote on October 31. “You keep secrets that no one knows. I’m going to confide in you. I love another. I have said I could no other but one, but I’m not quite sure now. Kindness goes a long way to create love. It’s not good looks. I never knew til now. Oh Lord, what makes me always love some body that don’t love me. But they are so kind I can’t help but love him some but I don’t want to. I never thought of loving him until a certain thing happened. I dreamed so often of him making love to me. Oh Lord, let that love for him cease for I don’t want it ever to be. I want my one I always loved.”

     “This is the last day of our beautiful October weather,” Pearl continued. “Many here to day. October month here me. Oh Lord let us all meet again. Goodby October’s bright blue weather and sad the crimson autumn leaves but sadder that one of her sisters was sick. She was fixing to go and leave me dirty and as always my heart told me Dear was coming and I didn’t want to be so dirty. She quarreled at me for wanting to be cleaned up. I cried till my eyes was all swollen up and red. So you see how it is when you can’t do any thing for yourself. You go blank. Well, after I cried she went and cleaned me up but before I got my slipper on he came. It seems that he is always in a hurry. After he was gone I couldn’t help but think of a song: ‘I grieve that ere I met three, Faith fair would I forget thee. Can river thee? Never! Farewell, farewell forever! We have met, and we have parted yet uttered scarce a word like a guilty thing, Started when thy well-knowing voice I heard,’ Oh, how well those words are formed. I couldn’t have wrote my feelings better if I had tried.”

     “Sunday morning again,” Pearl wrote a little later. “Word came to Mother as I expected but I never seen him — only his well loved voice I heard. He sit down out in the yard and stayed a long time but being an old cripple I couldn’t go out to even get a look at his sweet face. Oh Lord, how I would like to speak his dear name as I can write it but I dare not for none of the folks don’t like him a great deal. So I love him on in secret as I have so long. Dear boy, I love you — love you as I can love no other.”

Fleeting Years

07 Friday Dec 2012

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     The latter portion of Pearl’s second diary closes with a cluster of entries dated from February until June for an unknown year. Thereafter is a smattering of monthly entries.

     “No sadder or lonelier day ever passed over my old head,” Pearl wrote on February 7. “It will long be remembered by me. I never have hardly suffered as I did to day. My very heart was breaking. My yearning for what I knew not.”

     Pearl was obviously inspired to write by some misfortune, although she never specified the source of her troubles.

     “Oh God, what I suffered last night,” she continued the following day. “I cried till I couldn’t cry. No one seemed to notice my sorrow. Physical pain would be better than this some times.”

     Pearl’s happiness was at an all time low.

     “If I could have courage to go through with what I think of doing so often,” she wrote. “It’s a terrible thing to think of doing but I can’t. That would be far better than to suffer for maybe years on this old world of pain and woe. Lord help me to overcome my weakness of courage. Make me, dear Jesus, have something to want to live for. Oh Lord, help me to bear my troubles.”

     It seems, based on the above entry, that Pearl was perhaps contemplating suicide at that point in her life.

     “What a storm is brewing,” she wrote later in February. “The wind is roaring in the trees on top of the hill. The storm is on. The rain is pouring but the tempest out side is not much greater than the tempest in my breast. The storm is over. It is the beginning and ending of everything. Now, if I could only walk, my cup of happiness would be running over.”

     “Oh, the troubled sleep I had last night,” she wrote the following day, on a Wednesday. “The snow is falling so fast and the ground is covered every where. The beautiful snow. This reminded me of a day some years ago, those short fleeing years for me. I was just a kid then and with a kid’s thoughts my future was beautifully paved then but that was short lived.”

     “Today I was sitting alone in the kitchen by the stove with the odor of soup beans going up my nose,” Pearl next wrote in an undated entry. “Mama’s voice floats in on my hearing, singing ‘Shady Grove’ to the baby. Cora is over at Inez’s in bed a groaning with her side. Marg’s wanting a new hat. All of these things is passing through my jumbled up brain. I only wish my good old Friend would come for a talk to me so much. I can’t think.”

Pearl’s Last Request

06 Thursday Dec 2012

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     In August 1925, Pearl’s diary resumed, at first with a small upbeat entry.

     “Pearl and I all alone talking our secrets,” wrote sister-in-law Inez Adkins on the evening of August 3. “Best friends on earth.”

     Following this happy note, Pearl’s writings turned depressingly morbid.

     “My last request,” she wrote on August 14. “I don’t feel that I shall be here so very long at the longest. Friends or relatives, when I die, I want to be buried anywhere where the rest of the family is buried. I want a white casket (a coffin will do). Cover it with white satin if you can’t get white. Any other nice white good will do but I would rather have it satin. I want a white shadow lace dress with a narrow white ribbon — not more than four of them. I want a light blue princess slip. If you can’t get the lace dress, get a georgetta crepe. If you can’t get crepe, get white satin. Put two rows of lace up the front and small bows of ribbon up the front too, or you can have streamers at the neck. Get them as near as you can if you are able to buy them. Buy what I said. Buy as near to it as you can. Comb my hair like I wear it in life. Powder me first a little bit. Remember Pearl.”

     Then came one of the more powerful entries in the entire diary.

     “No, there is not the slightest hope I shall ever be any better than I am now. It is not a pleasant prospect. It is just the thought of it at times that makes me worse. There is days and weeks at a time I don’t want to see any one. My sister tells me it is more my temper than my misfortune that afflicts me and perhaps she is right. I hate people because they expect me to see a blessing direct from God. In fact I am nothing more than a miserable clod on the face of the earth. I wish I could have a house all to myself where I could do as I please. None of them don’t seem to understand me or my way and I need some one to stay with me that could really understand me.”

     “We could live an ideal existence,” Pearl continued, shifting the direction of her thoughts toward the object of her affections. “Nothing would please me better. I am sort of death’s head at home. I’m nothing but an annoyance and a burden to mother. I expect they would be glad if I could make a change like that. I could never be with out you. I don’t know how I ever did get along with out you as long as I did. It seems to me my life must have been cruelly empty. I love you very dearly — you have done more for me than talked with me. I think you have very near saved my soul for I was becoming very hard and bitter when you came. God has surely sent us to each other. You must think that my deformety is all I have to bear.”

     “When God made the cripple he made the mistake of implanting in the poor deformed breast a heart like that which other people have — a heart to love,” Pearl wrote. “Hush, that is something that ought to be buried as deeply from sight as the heart itself. I am a fool to even give it a breath of air to feed upon. Does one think there is no design in that? Do you believe that I shut myself in these four walls because I despise all the world for its strength and beauty? I am not quite as bad as that. Perhaps it is my physical condition that makes me so very weak…; but I can not endure to look upon his face, to hear him speak in his kindly tone to me to know that the only feeling in his soul is pity; and but for that I should be less to him than the very dirt beneath his feet. Oh God! Do you think there is nothing in such suffering as mine? Can you see no further into it than the mere pain that rocks my wretched body? I can tell you it is ghostly. I cannot bear even to look into his face because I know that I shall see there the pitying smile that has grown hideous to me. To know that it can never be different! That I must be like an accursed log until I die, arousing nothing more than pity in the breast of any one. I should at least have the memories of the past — happiness to feed my empty heart. I could look back and say, ‘I was happy then.’ Oh it would be so much! So much! My life.”

So Close

04 Tuesday Dec 2012

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     The second volume of Pearl’s diary is filled with entries that specify a month but not a year. Chronologically, it appears a hopeless case, however there are two main clusters of writing periods, from February to March and from February to June. It’s not clear if these are overlapping time frames or if they refer to spring months for different years.

     The bulk of the material seems to take place in 1925.

     Volume 2 begins on January 30, 1925 when Pearl wrote this: “My heart is just as heavy as on that sad day. I’ve lost almost all interest in life.”

     Her dissatisfaction with life more than likely had something to do with her inability to find a companion, which she blamed on her handicap.

     “Sunday morning dawned cold and blue,” she wrote in February. “I had a feeling he was coming. I had not long to wait for he came real early. To my surprise he came in and set down so near me that I could have kicked him with my foot. He got up for some thing and when he set down again he set down on a bed that my chair was tilted back again. He was so clost that time his knee was against my knee. If he had only knew how I loved him and how his nearness caused my heart to beat wildly, he might not have set so clost to me and caused me to suffer untold misery. He got up to spit and motioned for a girl that was there to get in his place. Of course, I would have much rather for my darling boy to sit there as her but I couldn’t stand it no longer. I was afraid Cora would come in and see my confused look and guess the cause of my blushed face. As I have said she didn’t like him. Probably would talk about him. I would rather for them all to talk about him than her for she can say such hurtful things. No body likes to hear some one they love talked about. I love him and I can’t help it. Oh Lord, grant my earnest prayer. Cause him, oh Lord, to love me as I love him.”

     The mysterious object of Pearl’s affection was clearly the primary motive for her taking up a pencil and recording her thoughts.

     “Sunday morning all gone but just mother, Inez and me,” Pearl wrote in March. “I was primping up a little. I had one shoe on and one off when some one knocked at the door. Inez jumped to open it and who should it be but my sweet dream boy who came in smiling so happily and as always sit down facing me again and what causes him to sit down facing me always so clost too I can’t tell. It all happens just as if I had planned it out with him but a higher power rules our feeling. It must be the Lord’s will. I should love [name omitted] but he never speaks to me no more than if I wasn’t in miles of him but I would rather that than pity from my dear for I couldn’t stand it. Well, he didn’t stay long.”

     “News of a joyous nature but not satisfying,” Pearl wrote later in March, “but it will be after while. Every little drought is sweetened by… Aw, I don’t know what.”

     “Diary dear, you are the only thing I can tell my days and sorrows to,” Pearl wrote even later in March, “but it has been some time since I have told you any thing much of interest.”

     In the subsequent months of early summer, Pearl took a break from her diary-keeping, preferring instead to scribble down various items of interest.

     “The happier persons are those who don’t have much sense and don’t seem to know it,” Pearl wrote.

     Poems followed.

     “If to me your heart is true, send me back my bow of blue. If of me you sometimes think, send me back my bow of pink. If for me your love is dead, send me back my bow of red. If you do not wish me back, then send this bow of black.”

Dinner

03 Monday Dec 2012

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     “I got up with a bad tooth ache,” Pearl wrote in August or September, probably in 1924. “Mother got a good dinner and I could feel that he was coming but you see I couldn’t tell. They were all gone but Inez and Watson for Watson is married now. Inez and I are very good chums but I can’t tell her this secret of him, for she don’t like him to very well no how. If she was to know I’m in love with him, she would get real angry and maybe tell Cora and mother. Cora just hates him and she would say things that hurt my very heart, so I had better keep it a secret from all. Mother wouldn’t say any thing but I would feel so ashamed to be where he is at if she knew I love him. Such a thing never entered her mind that I might love some body. If she ever thought of such a thing she never said any thing about it. To go back to my story. As I said, Mother had a good dinner but he never came till evening but he did look good in his blue suit but he never stayed long to my sorrow. Oh my tooth did hurt and so did my heart.”

     “Me and Inez have kept house,” Pearl wrote early in November. “They all have been gone all day but the children. I have a tooth ache again. My jaw is all swollen up. Oh Lord, my tooth and jaw. Won’t I be pretty when he comes for I feel he is coming. I do hate to look like this for he won’t think I’m pretty I know — but I do love him so much.”

     “He came last night and stayed all night,” Pearl wrote the following day. “It was after supper. We were all sitting around the fire. I was sitting on the bed. He came in and set down beside me just as if he knew I wanted him to. Of course I wanted him to but I blushed to the roots of my hair to have him so near me. None of them ever dreamed I loved him and I don’t guess he did either. I guess God led him to come and to sit down beside me for God alone knew how much I loved him.”

     “Thank God my prayer has been answered,” Pearl wrote on Tuesday, November 11. “I see him now coming. Oh Lord, just a glimpse that was all. My sorrow is too deep for me ever to tell. I have loved you dear so long that you shall never know it by me telling it. The wound you have caused on my heart is always about to heal, but if I live and get till I can’t walk I’ll get even with you.”

     “All is over and for ever,” Pearl wrote on Wednesday. “Prayers are answered to some extent,” she wrote the following day. “Friday evening is the same.”

     “It is a rainy and dreary day,” Pearl wrote on Saturday morning, November 15. “Oh, how heavy the fog is hanging over the field but it isn’t as heavy as my heart.”

     “He was passing by and Cora ran to the door and invited him in,” Pearl wrote in December. “She didn’t know how much it pleased me for her to ask him in for I couldn’t do it myself. It seemed that she should like every one but the one I loved. Well, I hope she will like him better in the future for I hate to love some one they all hate but that’s what I’ve done but I can’t help it. I loved him before I knew it. We don’t love or hate as we will but we love as divine power makes us love.”

Alone

02 Sunday Dec 2012

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     The latter part of Pearl’s first diary is filled with vaguely dated entries spanning from January until July, probably for the year of 1924. Early entries for her second diary seem to fill the summer and fall months of that same time period. Subsequent entries, dated in November and recorded in the first diary, are clearly for 1924.

     “Oh dear, it seems that my dreams are coming true,” she wrote one Sunday morning in January. “Aw, how my heart beats with joy to look from my window and see the one I love with all my heart coming after what had happened. Oh, the day is fleeting. Now, it’s gone and he has gone with it. My heart is gone, too.”

     “He’s here again,” Pearl wrote on a Saturday and Sunday in March. “It makes my lonely life a few sparks brighter to have him near me if I can’t be nothing more to him.”

     “April is here with its birds and its flowers but they don’t make my burdens any lighter,” she wrote the following month. “If any thing, a little heavy to bear.”

     “It is raining this morning,” Pearl wrote on a Sunday in May, “making the day dark and dreary for me. I guess my heart is just as heavy as the rainy air. I am alone and thinking of the one that’s dearer to me than my own life.”

     “Shadows of the night is gathering dear,” Adkins wrote on a July Saturday. “Alone am I thinking of you. My love will never die for you. It’s all true that I love you. You are my sole thought. If something awful happens I will love you still more fondly for my heart yearns for your presence now while the darkness is gathering fast just as my thoughts are still forming my love still deeper for you. Aw, it’s raining. That don’t make me love you any less for I have loved you for months — might have slipped into years. I’m not saying how many years it has been. I think my love is of too long a standing for me ever to forget now. I’ve tried to but all in vain.”

     “Things are just the same as ever,” Adkins wrote later in July. “God grant my prayer that I may see him, my darling, in my sweet dreams. Aw, but he’s nothing more to me than a dream. How my heart yearns for just one look on his handsome face and to hear his sweet voice. I barely see these lines for tears is gathering so fast. Just ready to fall any minute. Jesus, blessed Jesus, stand by me now. Make him love me, oh Lord. Aw, it’s all sad, and the saddest of it all is what it might have been if I only could have walked. Oh God, grant that I may enjoy the pleasures of life that the other girls enjoy. My life has been only one long dark empty dream. Oh, Lord, will my life always be like this? If I could only have died when but a baby. Now, if I had some one to talk to but like always I’m alone. No one cares for me. No one but mother. The rest seeks each others’ company and leaves me alone. Oh God, help me to bear it all. My heart is almost breaking now. Aw, I can’t write any more for my tears are falling on my paper, Shucks, this is all nonsense but I can’t help it.”

     Later in the summer, Inez Adkins, a friend and sister-in-law to Pearl, made a couple of entries.

     “This sad and lonesome evening finds us alone and together thinking of the past,” wrote Inez on Friday, July 11, 1924, “and God bless Margret, Edward and Wetzel at our feet playing.”

What happened to John Fleming? 3

02 Sunday Dec 2012

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On February 28, 1912, I.J. Beverly, sheriff of Wise County, Virginia, wrote Jacob D. Smith, assistant prosecuting attorney in Lincoln County, West Virginia, to inform him that John Fleming — a fugitive on the run — was living in a nearby town called Glamorgan and using the alias of George Fleming. The letter read as follows:

Wise, Va., March 7th

           Prosecuting Attorney Lincoln county, Hamlin, W.Va.

           Have John Fleming in custody. He agrees to come without requisition if I will bring him but refuses to go with your officer. I will bring him if you will pay all expenses and Two Fifty per day. Answer.

            I.J. Beverly

            Sheriff Wise County

On March 8, Smith received Sheriff Beverly’s letter. Three days later, he left Hamlin, seat of government for Lincoln County, for Richmond, Virginia as an agent to secure requisition papers from Virginia Governor W.H. Mann. A little later, he hired G.A. Lenz, a C&O special agent in Huntington, West Virginia, to accompany him to Wise County as a guard. By March 16, Smith and Lenz had delivered Fleming to the Lincoln County jail. On March 30, Fleming’s bail was set at $2,000.

Early in May, the following witnesses were called to appear before the Circuit Court in the State v. John Fleming, scheduled for June 4: Caleb D. Headley, Lewis Cass Gartin, Andrew Sias, Paris Brumfield, Tilden Gartin, W.A. Adkins, M.E. Nelson, Joe Gartin, Tilman Adkins, John Gartin, Grover Gartin, E.C. Lucas (Sr.), Jeff Lucas, Alvin Sias, Harrison Neace, Bob Fleming, Bud Workman, Jessie Adkins, Lewis Lucas, Ben Noe, Levi Rakes, Flora Lucas, Thomas Sias, Samp Davis, Lona Neace, Albert Neace, George Fleming, Robert Adkins, T.B. Hatfield, Peter Mullins, Ike Fry, William Adkins, Floyd Mullins, Harlan Mullins, Mary Burns, Lula Burns, Jane Moore, Zack Neace, Bill Neace, Abe Noe, Floyd Workman, Wiley Lucas, Dr. Jenks Adkins and Little Cane Lucas.

Days later, John Fleming escaped from the county jail using tools given to him by his brother, Willard. A warrant was issued for the arrest of Willard and placed in the hands of Boyd S. Hicks. According to records maintained at the Lincoln County Circuit Clerk’s Office: “Whereas Burnie Smith has this the 4 day of June 1912 made complaint upon oath before M.D. Hilbert, Justice of said county that one John Fleming was confined in the Lincoln county Jail, being so confined to answer to a charge of shooting with the attempt to kill Caleb Headley, and while in said Jail as a prisoner awaiting trial on said charge, one Willard Fleming did on or about the 10 day of May 1912 willfully and feloniously give and cause to be given the said John Fleming prisoner as aforesaid certain saws, chisels, and other implements for use of said John Fleming in effecting escape from said Jail, and by means of which said saws and other implements he the said John Fleming did saw the bars in said Jail and make his escape there from.” On June 5, Willard Fleming, Matthew C. Farley, Lewis Maynard and Zac Williamson posted Fleming’s $1000 bond.

In an effort to re-arrest Fleming, the Lincoln County Circuit Court issued capias warrants for him on October 29, 1913, December 21, 1914 and March 29, 1915. Fleming was no where to be found.

With John out of the way, his former wife, Lizzie Fry, felt safe enough to remarry. On November 8, 1915, she married Boss Keith. It’s not clear if she had ever married Charley McCoy, the man whose cuckling of Fleming had prompted the ’09 shootout.

In the years following Fleming’s escape, surprising details surfaced about his role in the shootout at Fourteen. “The Fryes and Headleys were blamed for Grandpa Hariff’s death,” said one local man in a 2003 interview, “but an old Frye woman sent word on her deathbed who killed him. She said it was his first cousin, John Fleming.”

Meanwhile, the court continued to issue capias warrants for Fleming on November 14, 1916, February 16, 1917, April 11, 1919, April 5, 1921, April 19, 1922 and December 29, 1922.

Finally, on March 26, 1923, according to Law Order Book 17 at the Lincoln County Courthouse, prosecuting attorney Jacob D. Smith, “with the assent of the court says that he will not further prosecute the defendant John Flemmings, of the Felony of which he now stands charged in this Court. It is therefore considered by the court that the defendant John Flemmings be acquitted, discharged and go thereof without delay.”

By that time, Fleming was probably dead.

“John Fleming went back to Virginia with someone,” said Willard Frye, a nephew to Lizzie, in a 2003 interview. “He got off his horse at a stream to get a drink of water and when he bent down at the stream this man shot him in the back of the head.”

In Search of Ed Haley 14

02 Sunday Dec 2012

Posted by in Ed Haley

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I asked about Ed during that time period. Lawrence said he stayed in a little room just back of the kitchen, which was furnished with a chair, cot, wardrobe and small radio. His fiddle was always on top of the wardrobe, although he seldom played it.

“He listened to the radio quite a bit,” Lawrence said. “You surely have heard of Vaughn Monroe, his version of ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky’. Pop had a transistor radio he carried up to his ear. ‘Goddamn,’ he’d let out, ‘That’s some tune.’ Cause he felt hell was a place where you had to do something you done all your life. I never heard him try to play it but he’d listen to it and listen to it. He’d say, ‘That’s some hell, ain’t it?'”

Pat said, “Pop would shiver when he would hear ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky’. Pop heard it once or twice on that little radio he carried, and he kept his ear right to it.”

I found it strangely odd that Haley had such a high opinion of the tune — maybe he just liked the words.

The cowpokes loped on past him and he heard one call his name,

If you want to save your soul from hell a-riding on our range,

Then, cowboy, change your ways today, or with us you will ride,

A-trying to catch the devil’s herd across these endless skies.

Yippee-yi-ya, yippee-yi-yo, ghost riders in the sky.

Lawrence said Ed eventually gave up on music broadcast over the radio and started tuning in to programs like “The Shadow.”

“We had a great old big crank-up record player and we had a great old big stack of thick RCA records a quarter of an inch thick, I guess,” he said. “They played a lot of them. I guess they learned some pieces of music off of that. ‘Over the Waves’, I guess that’s been around for a hundred years. Pop was pretty good at those slow pieces, too.”

Pat said she never had a real conversation with Ed, so I guess he kind of kept to himself. She remembered him having a white, foot-long beard, which he was very proud of and combed out every day. She said she had a picture of him with Lawrence and Ella in the back yard at 2144 Greenup but couldn’t find it. It was taken in the fall of 1950, when Lawrence was called back into the service.

Around that time, Bill Bowler, a blind guitar player in town, came and asked Ed to play a gig for the grand opening of Freeman’s Shoe Store in Ironton, Ohio. It was kind of a big deal — there was some type of parade going on. Pat said, “We were so happy somebody had finally got him out because he just all of a sudden stopped playing.” Lawrence drove the two over in his brother Noah’s car, then came home. Pat said, “Larry had hardly got back and was telling his mother, ‘Yes, he sat Pop down with Bill Bowler,’ and the next thing we knew Pop came through the front door just cursing a blue streak.” Something had really upset Ed at the shoe store, but the family never did know what happened or how he made it home. Lawrence said, “He just saw that they wasn’t nothing over there for him. He didn’t tell me that I done wrong by taking him over there or anything. He just wasn’t happy, so he didn’t stay.”

Not long afterwards, Lawrence saw his dad play for the last time at Charlie Ferguson’s. He said Noah got him so drunk that he sat down on the floor and played until he fell over. I wanted Lawrence to show me how Ed was playing at Ferguson’s, which he did after joking, “Now John, I don’t want you to involve me in what my dad did.” As he sat there in the floor with my fiddle, Pat laughed and said, “Oh boy, this was a good idea.”

Pat told me about February 3, 1951, the snowy day Ed passed away at home.

“It was very, very cold. My son Stephen was born January 27th, and it was exactly a week later. Pop was in the front room listening to the radio and he came through our bedroom around three o’clock. He had my daughter Beverly on his shoulders and he took her off and he rubbed his head in her tummy and he said, ‘Mmm, you smell so good. You don’t smell like those pissy-ass babies out in the country.’ The children in the country apparently didn’t wear diapers a lot of times and we always kept rubber pants on Beverly and of course the baby powder. After my father-in-law had played with my little girl, he went through and asked my sister-in-law, ‘Patsy, when will supper be ready?’ She was fixing dinner and she said, ‘Aw shortly, Pop.’ And he said, ‘Well I’m going to take a nap.’ He had a room in the back of the house. And we had a nephew Ralph Mullins living with us. He was born in 1946, so he was about five years old. And he took little cars and he was running them up and down while Poppy was napping.”

Pat said, “And when Patsy got dinner ready, she called for Pop to come to the table. My mother-in-law got a little bit irritated because Pop didn’t come. Larry and his brother Jack had been working on a car outside and they went in to check Pop.” Lawrence said, “Mom went in and lifted up his hand and said, ‘Ed.’ Shook his hand, you know. She said, ‘I can’t get him awake. I know he’s alive. I can hear him breathe.’ Well, when she was lifting up his hand, you know, she was pumping out his last breath of air.” Pat said, “And the boys told their mother then that Pop was dead. But the whole time Ralphy had been playing with his cars, so Pop apparently did not cry out in pain. That was it. He just passed away. It was a massive coronary that took him.”

“Pop died just as peaceful a death as could be, I reckon,” Lawrence said. “He died in his sleep.”

When the Ashland newspaper ran Ed’s obituary on Sunday, February 4, 1951, it mistakenly referred to him as the “flower huckster” of Winchester Avenue. Much to the embarrassment of the family, the newspaper had confused Ed with Bake Lee, a blind man in the area who sold pencils and flowers on sidewalks. Bake usually worked the streets with his wife, Lula Lee, an old schoolmate of Ella’s who played the mandolin and French harp.

“Mr. Haley, who had been blind for 65 years, was a familiar figure on Ashland’s streets, having sold flowers in the 1400 block on Winchester Avenue for several years,” the paper partially read. “A resident of Ashland for 35 years, he was born in Logan County, W.Va., a son of Milton and Emma Mullins Haley.”

Lawrence showed me a copy of his father’s corrected obituary: “HALEY: Funeral services for James Edward Haley, 67, retired musician, who died Saturday at his home, 2144 Greenup Avenue, will be conducted at 2 p.m. tomorrow at the Lazear Funeral Home with the Rev. Lawrence Colliver officiating. Burial will be in AshlandCemetery. The body is at the funeral home.”

No one played the fiddle at Ed’s funeral.

“Had a little organ music,” Lawrence said. “I don’t reckon they was anybody he’d care for playing at his funeral.”

Pat said she heard that Ed didn’t look “natural” because the funeral home had shaved off his white beard. Ella had his favorite flower, morning glory, carved on his tombstone.

Romance

01 Saturday Dec 2012

Posted by in Pearl Adkins Diary

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     At that time, Pearl’s head was full of dreams. Based on entries in her diary, she had become fixated on a local beau who made occasional visits to the Adkins home.

     “It’s been a many sad and dreary days since I had last seen him,” Pearl wrote on February 6, 1922. “I almost count the hours and minutes of his absence. So why worry? Life is what we make it. Oh dear, when shall I see you again?”

     “Oh, you are here,” she wrote later that day. “As I looked up from my work I gazed straight into the kindest eyes I’d ever seen — deep and unfathomable like a well of clear, pure water where my famished soul might drink. His clear sweet voice broke the spell, and I dropped my gaze while the hot blood burned over my neck and cheeks. It has the same affect now as I write this as when it happened. It causes my heart to beat wildly and my hand to tremble so I can’t work at my sewing.”

     The following day, Pearl’s thoughts drifted away from romance and more toward her handicap.

     “A day remembered by me if by no other,” she wrote on February 7, “but no one remembers me or my lonely life. Shut up here a helpless cripple for all this time.”

     Four days later, on February 11, Pearl was stirred to write again about the object of her affection.

     “Oh, I wish I could see my darling boy this evening. It seems that every one comes — all but the one I love.”

     “Now alone in my little hut,” she wrote on the 12th, “but my thoughts and dreams has wondered to one in a far distant country.”

     “He has completely gone out of my presence but not out of my mind,” Adkins wrote on March 14. “He is always with me in my day dreams. He will never be mine but nothing can prevent my loving him forever and ever. I see him now as I last saw him as he stood gazing out the window at the mist and rain. Aw, how he looked and looked as if he was grieving about some thing. He made a sad picture. It makes me cry when alone and to imagine him standing there. Oh God, that could I shut that out of my mind my life wouldn’t be so lonely. I don’t see what makes me always think of him when I know he cares nothing for me. All there is left for me to do is hope and pray for his love.”

     On March 29, Pearl wrote, “Oh, what a sweet dream I had last night and I feel that it’s coming to pass. Why shouldn’t it come to pass? Haven’t I suffered long enough?”

What happened to John Fleming? 2

01 Saturday Dec 2012

Posted by in Big Harts Creek, Culture of Honor, Fourteen

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While John Fleming was away serving a term of imprisonment at the West Virginia state penitentiary, his wife Lizzie returned home to live with her father, John Henan Fry, at Fourteen. “Aunt Lizzie ran away from John and came home to Fourteen,” said Willard Frye, nephew to Lizzie, in a 2003 interview. She secured a divorce from Fleming and began an affair with Charley McCoy, a man who newspapers later dubbed a “bitter enemy” to Fleming. Fleming didn’t take the news well. He swore that he would have her back after his release.

On Saturday, March 13, 1909, Fleming was freed from prison. On his way home from Moundsville, he made preparations to recapture Lizzie from McCoy. “When John Fleming returned home from the penitentiary, on his way back, at Huntington, he proceeded to supply himself with the necessary guns and ammunition to start a young war in Harts Creek district,” reported the Lincoln Republican of Hamlin, West Virginia. “It is said he stated to parties on the G.V. train that he would go to John Henan Fry’s home, where his former wife was staying and have her or kill every man on Fourteen.”

“When the intrepid John got back to his native haunts,” reported the Republican, “he got his brother Bob Fleming and together they proceeded to the home of their cousin, Herf Fleming, who was a merchant and a very good citizen and persuaded him to go with them to go to the home of John Henan Fry on their desperate mission.”

Hariff, born illigitimately in August 1878 to Lucinda Fleming, was a first cousin to John and Bob. He had settled in West Virginia around the same time as the other Flemings where, in 1896, he married Delphia Workman. In the summer of 1899, after killing a local bully in self-defense, he had moved with his wife and children to Clintwood, Virginia. Not long before cousin John’s release from prison, however, Hariff had returned to Harts Creek. At the time of John’s visit, he lived at Workman Fork with his family.

“The good wife of Herif’s — Delphia by name, pursued her husband with tears in her eyes to stay at home saying that Bob and John had just been in trouble and was going to get into it again,” reported the Republican. “But as vengeance rankled in the bosom of John for the man who wooed and won his wife in his absence to the pen, he plead with his relatives and companions to pursue their journey.”

Hariff told his worrying wife that he would use the trip downriver as an opportunity to get back a yoke of cattle he sold to a man on Ten Mile Creek.

Before making the trip to Fourteen, Fleming reunited with his familiar confederates, including Charley and Bill Brumfield. These men, like Fleming, had only lately been released from prison for their role in the Adkins conspiracy case. All together, they constituted some of the more mischievous outlaws in the community — men who newspapers claimed had “terrorized Harts Creek.”

“John sent word that he was coming to get his wife, but Aunt Lizzie’s family sent word back to not try it,” said Mr. Frye.”They came with the Charley Brumfield gang.”

The Fry clan was ready for them.

“My dad was there,” said Mr. Frye. “He was Aunt Lizzie’s brother. His brothers were there, too. Uncle Caleb and Albert and Anthony. Poppy was 19 years old. The Fryes and Headleys and Neaces gathered in ambush in barns and behind trees.”

Upon reaching the vicinity of the Frye home, “John Fleming called for his former wife” to leave with him, the Republican reported, “which she refused to do whereupon the trouble started, and John Henan Fry, who was a small, weakly man, started down the branch at about a 2-40 gait.”

At that juncture, someone began firing.

“The guns became much in evidence,” reported the Republican, “and a general shooting affray took place. Herf Fleming was killed by a bullet from a Winchester said to have been fired by Charley McCoy the new lover of the recent Mrs. Fleming who had secreted himself on the hillside in the woodland near the home of his lady lover. He shot into the bunch and shot John Fleming through the arm, and then it is said, sought safety in flight.

“It is useless to state that Mrs. John Henan Fry and children were scared so Mrs. Fry went under the bed after her husband had run off and left the home; but she had a son there and a young man by the name of Caleb Headley who went out at the rear door of the little home and came out to see the result of the battle whereupon John Fleming leveled his pistol on them and maliciously attempted to murder these two unarmed and helpless boys, his aim was so accurate that he cut a lock of hair from Caleb Headley’s head.”

This Caleb Headley was the 19-year-old nephew to John Henan Fry.

“The former Mrs. Fleming,” wrote the Republican, “seeing that she had no further protection against this desperate criminal capitulated, not for any love or affection she had for him but by being put in fear of her life, started to leave with him, and after going a short distance, being stung from his wounds, and remembering his cousin, Herf Fleming having been killed, sent her back to see after him; and she returned to the bullet riddled little home to tell her mother and brothers and sisters that the battle was over for the present, at least.”

“Grandpa Hariff was shot through the shoulder and down through the stomach,” said one grandson, in a 2003 interview. “He lived a while. A little child, maybe named John, came and told Grandma Delph about it. Samp Davis took a wagon with a mattress and bedsprings on it to get him. Ene Adkins and Bud Workman went too. Grandma killed a chicken to make Grandpa a dinner but he was already dead when the wagon got there for him.”

Regional newspapers carried the story. On March 17, 1909, the Marion Daily Mirror of Marion, Ohio, offered a piece titled “Desperate Men Shot.” That same day, the Times Dispatch of Richmond, Virginia printed a story titled: “Shot From Ambush: Members of Feud Gang in West Virginia Waylaid.” On March 20, the Watchman and Southron of Sumter, South Carolina gave one account (“Feudist Shot from Ambush.”) On April 16, the Times Dispatch reported this: “FREELING, Va., April 15 — Hariff Bryant, formerly of this county, was killed on Hart’s Creek, in Logan county, W.Va., according to a late dispatch. He was engaged in an altercation with one John McCoy, a member of the old Hatfield-McCoy feud, when the latter fired the fatal shot. Bryant was about thirty years old and married.”

By that time, county authorities had initiated proceedings against the belligerent parties.

“The next grand jury after the shooting John Fleming was indicted and charged with the shooting at Caleb Headley with intent to kill, and Chas. McCoy was indicted and charged with the murder of Herf Fleming,” the Republican reported.

Unfortunately, many participants in the case had fled West Virginia to avoid possible legal entanglements.

“Poppy and Jesse Headley went to Virginia for a while,” said Mr. Frye. “There were no indictments brought against them.”

John Fleming was also gone. It was later learned that he left West Virginia and traveled to Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee. A capias was issued for him on January 4, 1910, March 16, 1910, March 30, 1910, June 30, 1910, October 8, 1910, January 9, 1911 and February 8, 1912.

“Grandma Delph put out a reward of $500 or $1,000,” said a Fleming descendant.