Every time I go to West Virginia it seems that I am being adopted by someone else's family.
My high school friend Tabatha brought Amy and I down the week after our graduation to spend a week on the holler where her mother's side of the family lives. I talked Tabatha and Amy into piercing my ear for me, which I quickly regretted with loud obscenities when they picked a needle too small. Later that summer, my dad's then-fiance Leah drove us down to her parents' home for a weekend of card games and adventuring in the woods. That was the week Josiah convinced me to bike down their steep gravel driveway; I came limping back to the house with a bloody hip after I used it as a brake.
This past weekend I was officially adopted into a happy mess of McCray, Matheny and Mitchell relatives at an annual family reunion that Dave's Granny Rena and her cousins hold in their small birthtown of Nitro, West Virginia. The wide Kanawha (KA-NAW) River cuts through the soft Appalachian foothills, Nitro cradled softly in one of her bends, a long-faded Mayberry boomtown. But the residents of Mayberry haven't all passed on yet.
We met them there, at a potluck feast held at a shelter near the river that afternoon, and most of them were triple our age. But all of them are such good people. I dominated cornhole with old cousin Danny for more than an hour, and then came in and sat next to affectionate Aunt Doris. Her Alzheimers keeps her from finishing a single thought or sentence, but she was cheerfully content to pat my hands repeating, "But that's ok, that's ok," laughing innocently.
After lunch, some of the group crossed the Nitro - St. Albans bridge, the bridge that Dave's great-grandfather had worked on, and made our way to Great Aunt Reta's house just up the hill past St. Albans. The air smelled of the natural gas leaking from the mountains and the house quickly filled with energy and people, all eager to meet me and adopt me into the family. But of all those loud wonderful people - Mary Katherine helping raise her grandson, and Rogey who works night shift as a guard down at the prison, or blonde Patty with the skulls on her necklace and earrings and shirt - of them all my favorite was Great Aunt Reta.
Reta is Dave's Granny Rena's older sister and she has lived in West Virginia her whole life. When she was a young lady, back in the days when Nitro was a boom town with 5 chemical plants, her job was to come early in the morning and take samples of all the products for testing in the lab. One day she ran into her boss and he turned to the man next to him and asked, "Bill, have you met Reta, our lab girl?" Bill and Reta reached their 63rd wedding anniversary this past weekend. I love Aunt Reta for her spark and her spunk, her compassion and her determination, and her damned good humor.
As the bulk of the family members trickled away before the sun fell, leaving behind half-eaten potato salad and none of the homemade pies, a small cluster of people remained in the living room, including Aunt Reta, Granny Rena, and Pappy Brooks (Rena's husband). The three of them had all graduated from Nitro High School at the end of the forties, and the old stories started coming out.
Beautiful earthy stories, tales that felt like digging carrots out of a garden. Pappy Brooks recalled the truck ride with his brother-in-law Ronald when he first mentioned to him this great lady he meant named Doris. Aunt Reta remembered a time when she was grocery shopping with her young daughter Denise and tight on cash; after the store owner's wife, Mrs. Duncan, rung her up and they were walking out Denise said, "Mommy, she gave you more bills than you gave her." And on a different occasion, Bill's car needed new tires but there was no extra money for it. He went and talked to Mr. Duncan, who gave him four new tires and said "Just pay me back when you sell your house." Granny Rena recalled Halloween night of 1949 when she was dressed like a pirate and Brooks walked her home for the first time. "His eyes were so red, you could travel from here to Los Angeles on his bloodvessels," Pappy Brooks said at one point, describing an alcoholic mechanic he knew. Granny Rena made fun of her sister by reminding her of the time her high school boyfriend had given her a diamond ring for her April birthday, and then told everyone else that it was an engagement ring.
They told sad stories, too, like cutting down sick apple trees. Doris had a son named Terry who died because he choked on his bottle milk and drowned. Rena and Reta's cousin Clarence owned a bakery in St. Albans; his wife died in a car accident that his daughter survived when she was eight, and then Clarence himself died of a heart attack in her sophomore year of high school. The two years before her graduation she lived with Aunt Reta, and now owns an alpaca farm in Kansas. She had been at the house earlier that day, looking hungrily at the old pictures of her parents that Granny Rena had brought with her from Cleveland.
I wrote it all down, every precious word I could capture as I listened. Aunt Reta and I were the last to turn in, and I scribbled the last details while she drank a glass of milk and watched the news. She grew bored during a story of a pair of African-American parents starting a youth baseball league to better a bad neighborhood, and I made a comment, something neutral. "I ain't got nothing against Negroes" she replied. "The way I see it, there are good and bad Negroes, just as there are good and bad Whites." She then leaned forward in her rocker and confided, "And I ain't against abortion either." And it was in that moment of confidence that I completely fell in love with Great Aunt Reta.
I crawled into bed next to Dave shortly after, happy and proud to be a McCray.
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