A Dynasty of their Own

     The older I get, the more confused I get.
Not that I can't think straight most of the time;
but some of the time, I guess, my thinking does
get awfully confused, and I wonder if I know any-
more who I really am.

     Over the years, I always thought I ought to
remember everything and not forget anything, and
as a result my mind has gotten all cluttered, like
an attic full of junk, where I can never find what
I need, although I know its there.  What's even
worse, the place is so stuffed, that I can't even
make my way into it.  All the useless memories
that I have collected for seventy years!  I start
to I move some of it out of the way; I get dis-
tracted; and I forget what I was looking for in
the first place.

     I'm at my best early in the morning, when I
first wake up, then for a few minutes, or when if
I'm lucky, for a few hours, my mind is clear as a
bell, and it's as if my life had been all neat and
orderly, which it hasn't, and I remember things
distinctly as if they had happened yesterday and
some I am very proud of, some I don't really un-
derstand, and some I wish had never happened.  So
here's what I remember this morning.

     I remember the old white school house on the
knoll overlooking the valley and White Top Creek,
with the two large mountains, Mount Rogers and
White Top, the majestic backdrop of the theatre of
my childhood.  A lumbering town was built here,
almost a hundred years ago, where the valley had
broadened into pleasant green meadows, and the 
meandering creek could be dammed for a mill-pond.
The sawmill has long since been dismantled, the
rails and the ties have been taken up, and a dusty
pot-holed single lane road has replaced the rail-
way as Konnarock's only link with the outside
world.  Along the roadside singly and in clusters
stand the pitiful shacks, built merely of boards
sheathed with tarpaper against the winter wind
outside, and papered inside with pages from the
catalogues of Montgomery Wards' or the Congression-
al Record.

     Almost everybody is very poor.  They are,
most of them, unemployed by choice, eking a piti-
ful living tending their tobacco allotments, and
selling a few gallons of milk to the truck that
courses up and down the road every morning.  I too
grew up in such a shack.  It was all my father or
any of our kinfolk could afford.

     The school that I remember, harked back to
more glorious days.  It wasn't your ordinary one-
room country school house where all the pupils
from first grade to high school are taught in a
single room.  The school house was in fact an
impressive white clapboard, two story structure,
with four large classrooms, two grades to each room,
on each floor, with a large auditorium upstairs,
which was where Mr. Edmundson, the principal, announced
that Austin was not coming back to school.  But that
is the *end* of the story, and if I think backwards,
it may be because my life is at, or near its end,
which doesn't mean that it works to tell a story
backwards.  The school, to get back to my story,
was in fact much bigger than any barn in the val-
ley, and was it largest structure, except for the
old shell of a community church which still stands
in the next hollow over; but I'll tell you about
church some other time.  This morning its the high
school that I have on my mind.

     They called it the High School because even
though it started with first grade, it did indeed
go through the 11th.  When it was built around the
turn of the century, it must have been unusual in
those back woods to have a high school, or perhaps
to have any school at all.  In any event,  when I
went there, the school was much too big for the
little village; it had been built when Konnarock
was a bustling lumber town. But when the depres-
sion came, when the mountains had been stripped of
all their virgin timber, when the lumber mill
moved out, there were left the eroding hillsides,
the muddy creek, the little shacks by the side of
the road, and the large white high school on the
knoll facing the majestic mountains and the rising
sun.

     That's where I went to school, or maybe I
should say, that's where I had recess, because re-
cess is what I remember best about that school,
and I guess recess is really most of what there
was.  To be sure, there were regulations about
school hours, how many periods in a school day,
and how long each period should be.  Mr Edmundson,
he was our principal, said we didn't have to pay
any attention to them rules, cause they came out of
Richmond, and we wasn't going to let any of them
city people tell us how to run our schools.  So
school was mostly recess, and in recess is where I
got most of my schooling.

     There was about a dozen of us in my class,
and I can remember them now as clear as a picture,
even though when I run into one of them in the
store I don't hardly recognize them no more, ex-
cept for the one I married.  Anyway, aside from
her, the one I remember most vividly is Austin,
because Austin was different.  All the girls, and
some of the fellows thought there was something
special about him.  I guess there was, and that's
what got under my skin.

     The game we used to play at recess was doc-
toring.  As soon as the bell went off at recess,
and Jim and me had figured out how to set it off,
so it used to go off quite early; as soon as the
bell went off for recess, we'd all twelve of us
run out to the little meadow that was our play-
ground, and before we even got there somebody
would shout, "Let's play doctoring."  because doc-
toring was the game we all liked best and was in
fact the only game I remember that we ever played,
although there must have been others.

     Doctoring was in fact a topic of much inter-
est in Konnarock, because Dr. Boatwright, who had
been the company doctor when the Hassinger Lumber
Co. still owned and ran the town, had moved over
to Marion after the company folded.  Almost ten
years had passed since there was a doctor in Kon-
narock, and a lot of babies had been born, a lot
of little younguns had died, a lot of people had
got bit by dogs or cut theirselves with a knife,
or chopped their feet with a axe, or mashed their
fingers with a hammer, had gotten dead drunk on
moonshine, had gotten old and short of breath and
dropsied and died, all without a doctor being
there to help.  Just the preacher, and he always
said "Jesus Saves", when it was obvious that Jesus
didn't save, at least not right then and there.

     So it seemed natural for us to play doctor-
ing.  We turned it into a very elaborate game.
The old woodshed at the edge of the meadow was the
hospital. The wheelbarrow was the ambulance.  We
had nurses and orderlies, ambulance drivers, po-
licemen, sick boys and girls, mothers and fathers
of sick children, and grownups who were sick them-
selves.  There was girls about to have a baby,
(just pretend of course, not for real, like nowa-
days) There was boys pretending to be girls and
girls pretending to be boys, just like nowadays
also.  But there was only one doctor.  And he was
the most important.  And of course everybody want-
ed to be doctor.  So we took turns.  One day Joey
was the doctor, the next day it was Jim, and then
it was my turn.  The girls got to be doctors too.
That seemed a little strange at first, but we got
used to it.  As a matter of fact, if it was me,
and if I was going to die anyway, I'd choose a
pretty girl to be my doctor any day, if she would
promise to give me a hug and a kiss when it's my
time to go.  But that's not what I was going to
tell about.

     So we took turns, and we slipped easily from
one role to the next, except for Austin.  He was
the real doctor, and everybody knew it.  Of course
Austin took turns with the rest of us, but even
when he pulled the wheelbarrow as the ambulance
driver, even when he directed the traffic as the
policeman, even when he cleaned up the mess as the
hospital orderly, it seemed to me that he was the
real doctor.  And I think most of the rest of them
felt the same way.

     When it became Austins turn to be the doctor
then suddenly our game stopped being a game and
became real, and we started telling him really
what was the matter with us, where it was that we
had pain, or what it was that worried us.  Austin
was a quiet sort of boy, he would just listen, and
then he would say, "Well you know, I'm not a real
doctor."  and when he said, "I'm not a real doctor,"
I felt like he *was* the real doctor.  And then
he'd tell us what he thought, which never did make
much sense to us, but it made us feel better just
having had a chance to talk to him.

     I don't know why Austin should have been such
a good doctor, except that he was different; and a
person wants their doctor to be different; they
don't want to be operated on by an automobile me-
chanic, or have their wounds tended by a hair-
dresser.  Austin was a real doctor because he was
different.  And that's why we all admired him, and
why we all hated him, or at least, that's why I
hated him.

     The fact that Austin was different didn't
show up just on the playground.  In class, when we
did have class, before Jim and I had set the re-
cess bell off, when the teacher didn't know the
answer to a question at the end of the chapter,
she would ask Austin, and he would tell her, not
bragging or smirking, but just natural like, as if
that's the way it was supposed to be, him telling
the teacher the answers, and we admired, and we
hated him for that also.

     Austin's family was different, too.  They was
furriners, and didn't have no relatives nowhere in
our neck of the woods. Wasn't related to the
Blevins's, or Penningtons' or Hayes's or Walls'.
They come from up north somewhere. Austin told me
onced it was from an island as far from the main-
land as it is from Konnarock to Marion, and I nev-
er figured out why they come here or what they was
doing here.

     They didn't live in no shack in the bottom
neither.  They built theirselves a house on a hill
overlooking the valley and all us ordinary people
living in shacks by the side of the creek.
Austin's father was a tall broad-shouldered man
with a face like the prophet Isaiah in the church
bulletin.  His mother was a woman with gleaming
white hair, not a speck of make-up on her, obvious-
ly no longer young, but who looked as if she could
never grow old.  Their house, it was like a
palace, I was in it once, and I never seen such a
place, with real paintings on the wall, of the
ocean at sunset, and of sand hills under a winter
sky. Austin said, that was the island they came
from. And the floors was covered with these fancy
carpets in blue and crimson. Austin said they came
from the East, and that's why they were called
oriental carpets. And on all the tables there were
silver candlesticks, some of them sprouting limbs
like maple trees. Like I said, I never seen any-
thing like it. It gave me the hebejebies. And over
the door Austin's father had put a sign which I
couldn't read, painted ever so neatly in white
letters.  I asked Austin what it meant, and he
said: You wouldn't understand. So I took a pencil
and copied it down, and what it said was:
      WIR HABEN UNSER EIGENES FURSTENHAUS.
Over the U in the last word there was two liitle
white spots, and I couldn't tell if they was supposed
to be there or not; they looked like birdshit to me,
but if they was, it was the neatest I've ever seen,
and the bird that put them there must have been a
special bird too, to have had such good aim.

     So I showed my papa, who don't read English
very well, what Austin's people had on the sign
over their door.  He looked at it and said it was
Greek, and he couldn't read it, but he guessed it
didn't mean much more but that they was uppetty
furriners.  I guess that's when Austin really
started getting under my skin. When we was playing
doctoring, I'd sometimes kick him real hard, so
see what he'd do, but he never did nothing; he
pretended he hadn't noticed, or that it was an
accident.  And that made me madder than ever.

     Finally it got so bad that I couldn't stand
it any more.  I guess what set me off was that
Elsie, the prettiest and also the smartest girl in
the class, obviously had a crush on Austin. She
couldn't get enough of him.  When he was the or-
derly, she wanted to be the cleaning woman, when
he was the doctor, she wanted to be the nurse, and
when she couldn't be the nurse, she wanted to be
the patient, and then she'd tell him a long story
about how she couldn't sleep, and had headaches,
and was nervous, and how much it helped her just
to talk to him.  It was downright disgusting, and
I couldn't take it any more. So one day when Elsie
had finished cooing her complaints to Dr. Austin,
I'd had enough.  I picked up some gravel off the
ground and started throwing rocks at the trees on
the slope back of the meadow.  I have good aim, I
hit each one of them plumb in the center of the
trunk. So then, I watched out of the corner of my
eye, when Austin was standing in the clear; all by
himself, I let him have it, the biggest rock in my
pocket, straight in the face.

     It knocked him down. I saw Elsie run over to
him and cradle him in her arms. I felt awful.
Elsie's sister Jean, run inside to tell Mr. Edmundson,
the principal.  He come running out. And asked who
dunnit. Everyone said they didn't know, cause
they're all my buddies.  Well Austin, he wasn't
hurt so bad after all; when he fell down, he was
just faking. With Mr. Edmundson on one side, and Elsie
on the other, they walked him over to Mr. Edmundson's
old Chevvy parked in the driveway.  He wouldn't
let Elsie come along, and she cried.  I watched
them drive up the hill to Austin's house the one
with the birdshit sign I told you about.

     After a while Mr. Edmundson come back, by his-
self. He didn't say nothing. Austin never did come
back to school. In assembly that week, Mr. Edmundson
said after he had made all the other announcements
that Austin had dropped out of school. He added: I
guess we've lost our best student. Nobody said
anything more about it.  Not even Elsie. Two or
three weeks later I asked her for a date and she
accepted. We got married the summer we both fin-
ished high school.  Until this morning I never
told anyone the story about Austin, and maybe it
was a mistake to tell it even now.

Copyright 1995, Ernst J. Meyer