Appalachian Gold isn’t like Texas Tea—it isn’t oil, coal or even gold. It’s the culture of Appalachia which is more than 500 years old. It’s classic country music of Loretta Lynn and Patsy Cline; rock-and-roll music by Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis; and the old-timey, bluegrass music of O’ Brother, Where Art Thou? It’s half-runners, ramps, potato cakes, fried apples, deviled eggs, three-bean bake, pepperoni rolls, chicken-n-dumplings, slaw dogs, red velvet cake and blueberry pie. So much food! But most of all, it’s the stories of the Hatfields and McCoys, the underground railroad, Matewan and Blair Mountain, Mothman and my families’ stories.

Gramma had a story similar to Loretta, Elvis and Jerry Lee: she married a man who came back from WWII to work in the mines and was much older than her. He was also her polar opposite:  quiet, stable and boring (to her anyways.)  She then proceeded to have five children–all characters.  She was 18 when she had my mama. She had a son and another daughter with Granpa. Then came her last daughter, Denise, who was the product of a secret affair with the town sheriff. I came next, the product of two kids who didn’t know what they were doing or what they wanted. Daddy took off and Mama wanted to give me up. But Gramma and Momaw (my great grandmother Hatfield) said they would take me.

Then Gramma and Granpa divorced. Gramma had another affair and had my uncle, Louis. Keep up here—I have an uncle who’s a year younger than me. Confuses the hell out of everyone. Gramma was only 37 when I was born. Her oldest child, Mama, was only 19 when she had me. When I went to school and learned averages, it was really confusing. The teacher listed all the grandmothers’ ages. We get to me and I said, “44.” “No, not your mother, your grandmother.” “That is my grandmother’s age.” I always got funny looks, even more so when I tried to explain how I had an uncle younger than me. When we were little ones, Gramma treated Louis and me like her twins. We went everywhere together, dressed in similar fashion—we were pretty babies.

Anyways, my growing up with Mama’s siblings made Denise feel much more secure because we looked alike. We were both blondes with green eyes.  The rest of her siblings were dark haired with brown eyes—except for Louis, who was blonde with blue eyes, but he knew who his father was (Gramma married him.) Fast forward to her adulthood: Denise just ended marriage number two. Before marriage number three, she moved in with Roger, a really tacky hillbilly that no one wanted to claim as a fellow hillbilly. We have a lot of pride and don’t like the Beverly Hillbillies, Dukes of Hazzard or Deliverance references. But Roger was like the worst stereotypes about us. He lived off grid, in a shack in a hollar, stealing electricity, water and cable from his neighbors. He also had missing teeth and was a drunk—he looked rough. We all thought Denise had lost her mind to live with him.

She invited us to have dinner with them and we went to be polite. Southern etiquette meant we had to be polite from the get-go. We all piled into two cars: Gramma, me, Kim (2nd daughter,) her husband Brian, their little boy Joshie, Louis and his new wife none of us could stand—I’ve always called her Jabba the Hut (she was that big and mean.) We parked the cars on the side of the highway next to the river—that’s as far as civilization went. Some ancient hillbillies built a rope and plank bridge across the river. I’m serious when I say it looked like the one in the movie, “Romancing the Stone.” We crossed it gingerly. On the other side of the river, there was a clearing of trees in the hollar. Someone, maybe Roger, had cleared it and put his shack on it and a root cellar nearby for canned produce (I wouldn’t go near it because it attracted snakes.)

Everyone took their positions: Gramma and me on the porch, Louis, Jabba, Joshie, Brian at the horseshoes and Denise and Kim in the kitchen. I don’t know where Roger was. Suddenly, there was a ruckus under the porch. Roger comes running around from the back of the shack with a broom. He reaches under the porch and grabs two fighting dogs by their tails and separates them. While they’re still fighting (I mean, trying to tear each other’s throats out) he’s beating them with the broom with one hand and yanking on the tails to separate them with the other hand. The dogs are howling in pain, snarling in rage and Roger’s shouting and cursing at them. Gramma and I are clutching each other in horror and I’m thinking, What Hillbilly Hell have I gotten myself into?!! Cue the banjo music! He finally separates the dogs (who run off in opposite directions yelping and howling,) and announces dinner is ready.

The food I described earlier is a standard get-together dinner for hillbillies. We also had sweet tea, Mountain Dew and Coke. (Hillbillies are such fans of sugary drinks that we call them Mountain Dew Mouth when they have missing teeth like Roger. Those pre-Meth days had such an innocence about them.) We ate outside on a picnic table set up near the horseshoes. We ate dinner without much drama, except for Jabba making snide remarks at Denise or me, who were easy targets because we tried to be the peacekeepers of the family. We have always fought the Hatfield blood boiling in our veins. Not Gramma, nor her Popaw Hatfield, nor Gramma’s second husband nor even Mama–they’ve all killed or attempted to kill people. And many others in the clan were avid hunters and served in the military. We definitely don’t come from pacifist stock.

After dinner, it was getting dark and we’d had enough bullshit to last us for the rest of the year and wanted to leave. This was a problem. Living off the grid meant no lights, anywhere in the hollar. And it was a moonless night. You could hear critters in every direction, but couldn’t see them—it was unnerving. We decided to leave in smaller groups, holding hands with a flashlight at the front of the group. Louis and I put little Joshie between us as we headed out. Kim could be heard yelling from a distance, “Take care of my baaaby!” We yelled back into the pitch black night that we would. Louis said he could see the bridge was coming up. I put Joshie in front of me with both arms around him. He held Louis that way in front of him. We stepped together slowly. Suddenly, I heard the crack of wood and the bridge swayed violently. Joshie and I screamed. I heard Kim in the distance, losing her mind. I couldn’t see anything in front of me. I mean nothing. I still felt Joshie in my arms. I felt ahead of him. I was touching the top of Louis’ head!!! He said he was okay. A plank broke under his feet but his body caught around his hips. His feet were dangling below the bridge. We worked to get him out of the tangled rope and broken wood. Then we all crawled the rest of the way across the bridge to the other side. We called back that we had made it. We got to the car and Joshie and I got inside. Louis went back to help the rest of the family across that damn bridge (I’m surprised we didn’t lose Jabba forever in the river’s rapids—such a shame she has such good luck.)

When we were all together, we started in on the predicament of Denise and Roger, still back at their Love Shack in the hollar. “What the hell was that? We’re never going back there ever, ever again!” And we never did.

Denise moved on and married and divorced husband #3—another piece of work. Afterwards, she told me, “At least I’ll get this sonofabitch’s social security!”