Saints and Sinners

Saints and Sinners

I don't remember when I first realized I wasn't always very nice, not really sincere either. Up until then, I thought I was very spiritual, righteous even, on the right track, headed for Heaven, friends with Jesus, smart and built for success. I achieved some success. The rest? ... myths.

How did I come to see myself for who and what I really am? Because of my cousin, Janelle. The cousin I used to call, Janelle the inept." On my worst days, it was, "Janelle, dumber than mud." I think it's a story worth telling.

****
I lay in my little bed, but I was not asleep. It was near midnight. I knew this because My Uncle Billy was going to work. He worked the "hoot owl" shift in the coal mines. He slipped into the room which I shared with my cousin, Janelle. She was one year old, and she still slept in a baby bed. Uncle Billy had a Coca Cola bottle, those little green ones of years gone by, filled with milk and topped with a nipple. He leaned over and put the bottle in Janelle's pudgy little hands, kissed her forehead, and he was gone. As best I can remember, he made that bottle until she was at least six, maybe seven years old. By this time, I teased her unmercifully about the "titty bottle." She cried, but she never refused it, and she never told on me, mostly because I threatened to tell all her friends at school. I'm pretty sure that's when I learned the art of intimidation.

Janelle was just so easy. Christmas of 1948, when she was three and I was six, she woke me up crying. She cried a lot.

"What's wrong with you. Go back to sleep. You woke me up, dumbbell."

"Santa didn't come to our house." She sobbed even louder.

"What? What are you talking about?"

"I went downstairs. There's nothing under the tree. Santa didn't come. Santa didn't come."

By this time she was getting pretty loud, and I knew she would wake up her parents. I had to think quickly. "Janelle, Santa will get here. You forget. This is West Virginia. With all these mountains, dirt roads, houses close enough to peek in each other's windows, this is his last stop, the very last stop. It takes longer." That calmed her down. What really had happened was her parents went to a party, got a little or a lot high on booze and fell asleep. I thought it was very funny, but I didn't let on.

"You really think he's coming?"

"Yeah. But you have to get under the covers and pretend to be asleep. Santa never comes when children are up and awake. Even you have to know that. The Shadow do." That was from my favorite radio show. "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow do." I laughed at my own joke. "While you're covering up, I'll just go make a phone call to the North Pole and see just where he is. Maybe's he's in Bluefield by now."

Janelle jumped in my bed, pulled the covers up and sucked her thumb. Her titty bottle was in the crib, and I wasn't about to get it. I slipped out of the room and went downstairs to her parents' room. I grabbed Uncle Billy's foot under the covers and yelled, "Get up, get up."

"Whuh, what?"

"Janelle is crying like a drowning kitten. Santa Claus didn't come last night. Get it? Santa Claus?"

"Oh lord, Billy. We forgot to put out Santa's gifts. Get up and get started. I'll make some coffee. Go keep Janelle company, Rosie, until we call you."

"Kapeesh." I can't remember where I got that word, probably from my older brother who actually got to go to the movies. He lived with our grandparents, as did my other brother, and visited me maybe once a month, when he thought about it. He was ten. He always brought me the funnies from the Sunday paper. I loved to read about One Brow in Dick Tracey and my brother knew it. He promised to get me a Dick Tracey watch, but he forgot.

Anyway, in about thirty minutes, Aunt Selma knocked on the door. "Come on, girls. Santa Claus has been here!"

Janelle jumped up like a Jack in the Box and screamed. "You were right, Rosie, he did come! Santa did come."

"I never lie, Janelle. You know that. Let's go see what the old man got you."

"Is Santa an old man?"

"Like I said, would I lie?"

****
Move up to when Janelle was fourteen, and I was seventeen. She hung around me like wasps in summer near a lemonade stand. I was trying to read a book. I read many books. The family put up with it. They thought I was a little eccentric or, in their words, a bookworm. Janelle hated it when I ignored her to read or listen to my Elvis records. She sat on the arm of the stuffed chair I always sat in because the only decent lamp in the room was beside it. She had a mayonnaise sandwich. Shivers go up my arms now just remembering. I hate smacking of the lips while eating. It just grosses me out. She sucked and slurped and smacked her lips with that sandwich until I put the book down and started slapping her around. That was preferable to her than my reading. Eventually, I gave up and did what she wanted which usually was to go outside on the lawn and wrestle with the neighbor's sons. I might mention here that Janelle got married at age seventeen and had three children before she was twenty.

She was a pretty girl with blond hair and big blue eyes and legs up to there. When I joined the debating society in high school, she became a majorette in junior high. She and her friends would come to our house, and I would put leg make up on all of them. Why? Beats me. Just because I could, I guess. I was Valedictorian of my senior class. Janelle made C's and D's, and her mother cried every report card day. I heard her mother say once, "Why can't you be like Rosie and make A's." Janelle said, "Who wants to be like Rosie." I had to laugh. I had plain brown hair down to my waist, straight as a poker. Pale blue eyes that always looked myopic, from reading too much my MawMaw said. I was chubby although my legs were nice too. I couldn't show off my legs in leg make up though. I belonged to the church.

Not just any church but #24 Free Will Baptist Church, #24 being the number of the coal mine it was built closest to on the highway leading up the Long Row where we lived. Union miners lived there with their families. Eventually, Uncle Charlie and my grandfather made management and we moved to "Brick Row," a step up in that particular caste system.

#24 FWB as it was known did not allow women to wear makeup or curl their hair or eyelashes or, God forbid, wear slacks. Dancing was the Devil's work as was any kind of sexual activity outside of marriage and a lot inside marriage too. We didn't have a piano in the church but one old guy had a tuning harp, and Miss Maggie played a juice harp sometimes. When I was seven, I was elected treasurer of the Sunday School. I had as much as $80 to $100 at any given time. I had to watch it closely. I had to keep it at home and some folks would "borrow" from it if I wasn't careful.

Eventually, Janelle would sing duets with me in church. It went like this. After the announcements, we all knelt on the floor and prayed. After that was the special song, meaning us, and then the preacher preached. Sometimes, it didn't go well.

"Rosie, I forgot the words."

"You better not have forgotten the words. I'll kill you."

"I swear, I can't remember them," she whispered.

"We went over them a hundred times. Remember the words, Janelle, or I'll make you sorry you were born."

Most of the time, the words came to her. One time, however, I sang the alto harmony part by myself through an entire verse. When we got home, I pinched her hard. We sang together for another year until I left home.

****

I left home two months after I graduated high school. I took a bunch of state and federal exams and was offered a job at the Veterans Administration. It was in Huntington, a long drive from #24. I was finally getting away. I had survived. I knew if I worked hard, made good grades and didn't get pregnant, I would get away.

I was very successful at my job and got promoted often and moved around a lot, new office for each promotion. I eventually married, had one child, one divorce and never remarried. About once every ten years, I would go home just to visit Janelle. She was still not the brightest girl ever born, but she might have been the sweetest. She actually is a Christian in the best sense of the word. To this day in 2008, if I am ill, I would rather have Janelle pray for me than see all the doctors in Idaho. Our kids are grown. We look amazingly alike, both with lots of gray in our hair now. We still have good legs. We raised our children, paid our bills, took care of our dying parents and grandparents and stayed in touch.

The only thing I regret is how I felt about her way back then. I never mention how I felt and she doesn't either. I sometimes wonder if she knew. If so, she has never treated me any differently.

****

"Happy birthday, Rosie! Happy birthday to you."

"Oh lord, Janelle, you remembered what I'm trying to forget." I was pleased. We talked for two hours, mostly "do you remember so and so, and so and so died, and so and so had their bowels cut out, etc." Janelle has all the news. I don't remember half the people she talks about but I love to hear her talk, even on the telephone. Janelle seems happy. Her husband quit beating her years ago when he quit drinking and joined the church. Yes, #24. It's still there although the mine is long gone.

My father left when I was eighteen months old. My mother left soon after and didn't return until I was fifteen. While we became friends, we were never like mother and daughter. I never had anyone who felt like a parent to me. I felt in charge, on my own, with God's help of course. Uncle Billy and his wife let me live there, bought my food and found hand me down clothes, and I got by, but they didn't treat me like a daughter. I would have given all the brains I had, dumped all the books, gave up my classy job, all of it if I had been loved as Janelle was loved by one and all. But, you know what? Janelle loves me.

* All names and identifying information embodied in this story have been changed in the interest of privacy and/or security.

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