A Blair Mountain Memoir

Shenandoah measured her life from week to week – from Saturday afternoon to Saturday afternoon, really. That was when she walked down the unpaved street to her father’s shack beside the railroad, made sure his icebox and larder were full, and changed the dressing on his draining gut wound. Granny Synnestvedt, the village midwife, took care of the latter chore during the week, while Shenandoah was away in Clarksburg. This Saturday afternoon ritual went on for a good part of the last year of Gash Farnham’s life, but to Shen it had begun to feel like a life sentence after the second week. Human beings – what the hell are they? Bags of shit, that’s what, Shen thought as she wrinkled her nose at the smell. And why did she have to walk down to Kielbasa Row every week? A veterans’ hospital: that’s where the poor old guy should have been, with nurses to look after him, doctors to give him a shot of morphine when the pain got so bad he started shrieking and cussing. The white-lightning moonshine he kept in a dirty Mason jar beside the bed dulled his pain, all right. At worst, it’s only greasing the wheels to the end of the line for him, she thought. But still ... Clean sheets and proper nursing. Why was old Farnham such a stubborn old son of a bitch? Not that there were any veterans’ hospitals in West Virginia. Not in 1921. Not even after federal troops skirmished with their own countrymen at Blair Mountain over the rights of coal miners. “You take that old Winchester 74 down off the kitchen wall and blow my head off before you put me in any god-damn Army hospital,” Gash had said to Shen when she first brought up the subject. “It wouldn’t be an Army hospital, Pap,” she’d said. “It’d be one of them new hospitals. Government runs ‘em. Veterans’ Administration. You’re a veteran, ain’t you? You fought over in France.” “Like hell. It’s a federal bullet opened me up in the first place. Up Blair Mountain last month. I ain’t having no federal bandages and medicine. Them bastards was shootin’ at United States citizens.” And that was the end of it. Shenandoah measured her life, week by week, Saturday to Saturday, and watched her father slip away over what seemed an eternity. Actually, it was twenty-seven weeks.