You know, Pa could play the fiddle and dance and call square dances. Everybody liked Pa. The mayor and big shots in town, the poor people—just about everybody liked Pa. He had Ma pack lunches for us in a straw basket so he could take us kids out on summer picnics, usually to the gravel pit for swimming. In the fall he liked to take us out bird-watching and got binoculars for everyone and would point out the birds. There was all kinds of different ones in those days. The best present he ever gave Tootie was a book on tropical birds, and she used to tell Pa she was going off into the jungle someday to see birds like this. Ma never went along on the picnics—she always worked the store—but she was glad for us to go.

All of us girls were pretty, but Tootie was the best. She looked like a movie star. She looked like Rita Hayworth. All the boys was after her. She cut her hair short and dressed like a boy, but her beauty came through; you just couldn’t hold back that kind of beauty. Pa was drinking bad by then, losing money, giving it to women, ruining his business, taking money from Ma. She kept her store money in Dutch Master cigar boxes or White Owl boxes, and he would get to drinking and just take it from her until she got to hiding it. One time he pulled out a .32 pistol and stuck it in her neck up in the bedroom because she wouldn’t give him any money. She was pregnant with Moonie at the time and nearly lost her. Pa called Ma filthy names and kicked her down the steps. It was terrible, but in those days things like that was common, Pa being drunk—scenes like that you used to hear about regular and think nothing of it. That’s just how life was in those days.

When Pa pulled out his .32 that was the only time he ever laid a hand on Ma, but he had done worse things. All of us girls had to run the store while Ma laid there in bed worried about Pa and went into labor. No sooner did Ma give premature birth to Moonie, the fifth girl, than Pa came home sick to death. They brought him home because he had gone blind drinking bad moonshine booze. It was Prohibition times and he ruined his liver. I remember the doctor said there was nothing they could do. Pa screamed something horrendous and vomited blood all over the bedroom for five days before he died. We girls had to take care of him. Ma was busy with Moonie and wouldn’t have anything to do with him, and he laid there and died in the same bed where his youngest daughter had just been born.