No Heroes: A Memoir of Coming Home

Hot Rod to Haldeman

Rita and I decided to picnic in my hometown of Haldeman with sandwiches and bottles of cold L-8, Kentucky’s only native soft drink. Its official name is Ale-8-1, or “a late one,” because it arrived on the market after Coca-Cola. L-8 is affectionately called swamp water or mule piss, and must be drunk cold from a long-neck bottle clamped between your thighs while driving.

I drove the Malibu with my left arm draped out the window in true country style. A large sign proclaimed the future site of a country club and an exclusive golf community. Trees were cut down and roads laid out. New houses clung to denuded slopes as if dropped from the sky. The entire enterprise reminded me of a trailer court for the affluent. “HickorY PointE,” proclaimed a sign in large letters. If you squinted, they formed a new word— HYPE.

In Morehead I pointed out to Rita where I’d bought my first bike and shot my first game of pool. I know the eight miles between town and Haldeman better than I know the face of either of my sons. I know the shadows of the land, the stone outcroppings high on the hillside, the silhouette of the tree line at dusk. As we drove, I gave Rita a running commentary on the road — the two straight stretches where you could pass a slow car, the tobacco warehouse, the turn up Christy Creek where the old drive-in movie theater was built on a landfill. Now it’s gone and a new grade school sits there. I stopped at Big Perry Road and told her about the school bus wreck. Farther on was Little Perry Road, a long dead-end hollow that followed a creek in classic Appalachian style.

The sky was so crisp and taut you expected it to snap in the wind. The leaves of a silver maple turned their bellies to the breeze and the tree looked covered with snow. We passed Gates, a community reduced to a railroad whistle post. At Hay’s Branch I made the turn to Hay’s Crossing, and showed Rita where a bunch of us boys once swam naked in a shallow muddy pool. One of us cut his foot on glass. A boy threw someone’s shoes into the water. Somebody cried and somebody got mad. I couldn’t remember which boy I had been.

It was not the land that Rita enjoyed, nor the stories of my past, but the Malibu. The throbbing engine thrilled her. She loved its speed and power. She sprawled luxuriously in the front seat, and said she’d lived in New York apartments that were smaller. The term muscle car came from the tremendous horsepower harnessed beneath the hood of cars in the late sixties and early seventies. Manufacturers in Detroit upped the ante until they were putting race cars on the street — Chevelle, GTO, Charger, Barracuda. Rowan County muscle cars were jacked up in the back with mag wheels. Large speakers sat in the rear seat wired to eight-track tape players bolted beneath the dash. A roach clip on a feather hung from the rearview mirror. Some drivers draped a flag in the back window — a Jolly Roger, the Stars and Bars, Kentucky’s seal of the Commonwealth, a peace sign, or a giant marijuana leaf. People held drag races in Haldeman and across the county in the community of Farmers. Cars would burn rubber and fly low. Lucky boys drove them to high school, where everyone admired each other’s ride in the parking lot. I rode the bus from farthest out in the county. I didn’t own a car and the family rig was a yellow Volkswagen squareback that was severely embarrassing.

We sped past the ball diamond and voting house in the widest spot between the creek and the road. This was Haldeman proper — the woods, two hollows, a creek, three hills, and dirt roads connected by animal paths. To reach a neighbor’s house by car meant driving out your ridge and off your hill, following the creek to their hill, driving up it to their ridge. Walking through the woods was much quicker. Fifty years ago, the company store became the Haldeman post office, its flag fastened permanently to a pole that the postmaster, Avanelle Eldridge, carried outside every morning and belted to a fence post. At night she moved the flagpole inside. During winter, Avanelle heated the post office with a woodstove, until the government closed the facility.

At the top of the next hill was the county line, where the bootlegger sold beer, wine, and whiskey. His shack was abandoned. I bought my first whiskey there, saying it was for my father. I eased the big Malibu around the building, and made the turn toward Molten Hollow.

As a kid, I walked through the woods to Haldeman’s only business, Georges General Store. The air smelled of floor oil. You could sit in an old leather chair by the wood-stove and drink pop forever. Three refrigerators stood against one wall, and everyone knew the contents — eggs and milk in one; bottles of pop in another; baloney, cheese, mustard, and mayonnaise in the last. Hand-hewn shelves held light bread, Vienna sausages, and dusty cans of soup.

To get there, you walked a dirt road along the ridge and descended a weedy path to the creek below. You followed another dirt road to the hardtop and crossed it to a creek. Searching its bank invariably produced enough pop bottles to trade for candy. I remembered Mom sending me for cigarettes but the store was closed. I crossed the swaybacked board that spanned the banks. Georges wife answered the door and said they were eating supper. She handed me the store key in exchange for the money, saying she’d give me the change when I returned the key.

Nine years ago I saw George’s cash register in the window of an antique store in town. I stared at it, remembering how the money drawer remained perpetually open. Now it is shut forever. When I think of George’s, I’m not recalling the actual event, but the last time I remembered it. In this fashion memory reclaims itself like land after a fire.

I showed Rita my grade school, built of enormous chunks of stone. So few children complete high school that the grade school offered an elaborate graduation ceremony with cap and gown, pomp and circumstance. My proudest day was being selected as valedictorian of my eighth-grade class. Past the school we followed Bearskin Creek up Bearskin Hollow along Bearskin Road, which crisscrossed the creek according to terrain. I took Rita to the top of the ridge near New Sill Graveyard where I first smoked a cigarette. I tried to explain my desire to visit a dead town, surrounded by evidence of its former glory. Haldeman flourished during the 1920s — boasting a train station, high school, saloon, barbershop, public gardens, tennis court, even plumbing and a baseball team. Beneath the humped hills were thick veins of unique clay that made hard bricks. Their ability to withstand enormous heat made them ideal for building kilns in the factories up north. The Haldeman Brickyard was the biggest employer in the region. Then Mr. Haldeman sold the town and moved away.

When I grew up, the town consisted of two hundred unemployed people. My grade school held a huge trophy case won by the high school that had been shut down sixty years before. Old railroad tracks traversed the land. Yellow bricks emblazoned with the name “Haldeman’ reminded every child that our hometown had once mattered. Now it was like the bricks — broke and crumbling, embedded in the past.

Rita and I drove up my home hill. I stopped at a slight plateau, where the old path cut through the woods, now grown over with weeds, indecipherable from the brush and saplings. I continued past the Gob Dump, a gray substance on which nothing grew, evidence of a long empty mine. I played kickball at the hilltop, using a low clay-dirt hill for first base, the tip of a buried rock for second, a locust branch as third. Home plate was a vague area of shade. One ridge road held the house I grew up in, where my parents still lived. Other roads held the Henderson homeplace, Randy’s trailer and woodshop, Faron’s old trailer, the Sam Bowen house now empty and in disrepair, Dixie Blizzard’s old place presently occupied by people from off, the Fraley man who moved here from Carter County thirty years ago and was still regarded as a stranger although his sons were Haldeman boys, and the Hortons’ old place now occupied by one of the Messer boys, whose family had lived on the hill longer than anyone. I was home. The roads were paved and the children gone.

I drove sedately down the hill to Buffalo Hollow. The road tightened and turned to gravel, then dirt, and finally became twin ruts with grass between. I parked the Malibu in a wide spot and cut the engine. Rita scooted close to me. I explained the history of Buffalo Hollow as a site for romance. She told me she was glad I’d brought her here.

On the way home we played Lynyrd Skynyrd on the car stereo. Rita sat beside me on the bench seat, exactly as I’d hoped a girl would sit twenty years ago. I kissed her at a traffic light. When the color turned green, I chirped a black mark on Main Street. Rita laughed and put her feet on the dashboard. We drove through town in five minutes. We stopped by the grade school and picked up our kids and took them to the Dairy Queen for dilly bars.