An Unbelievable Day With Aunt Louise

An Unbelievable Day With Aunt Louise

The highlight of my twenty-year career as a private eye had to be the time I was asked by my aunt, one Gladys Van Hoffman, to find a woman she knew growing up in Mannington, West Virginia. Aunt Gladys moved up to Wheeling after college, had worked hard, married well and prospered greatly. I wasn’t enthused about the mission, but I hopped into my aging Ford sedan and headed south anyway. My car was a humble one, with black paint peeling everywhere and front fenders that were so loose they flapped—or waved. Whenever oncoming traffic saw me they didn’t know whether to head for the berm or wave back, and it had a lot of rattles. Every time I hit a large pothole it sounded like two skeletons making love on a tin roof using an empty soup can for protection…but it had a good heater.

Ruggles Avenue was a normal street in small town coal country directly off the main drag with small, one story, clapboard homes in normal states of disrepair. Some were privately owned and some were “company houses” owned by employers who made sure the tenants were only one payday away from destitution. My subject of inquiry was independent of any and all villains who would raise their thumb and see her face. Louise Alma Wells was a feisty smoker, drinker and storyteller whose barren womb had given her a soft spot for small children, handicapped old men and grieving widows throughout Marion County. All those that she liked referred to her as “Aunt Louise.” All those who thought carelessly enough to anger her called her “that crazy woman in Mannington.” As it was a raw day in November 1968 I hoped she was near, and I had every intention of becoming likeable as I knocked on number 225.

“Yes?” she asked.
“Morning, Mrs. Wells. I’m Jake Johnson, nephew of Gladys. I assume my aunt told you I was coming?”
“Told me? Hell yes…wrote me once and called me twice. I hear your Aunt Glad-ass has given up the hard stuff, real staunch against it now. You aren’t one of those dry-dicks, are ya’?”

I hadn’t heard that term in years. A “dry-dick” was a cop who enforced bootleg liquor laws, going all the way back to Prohibition.

“No ma’am. I’m actually a private investigator doing this pro bono.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Just for the hell of it.”
She looked me up and down and sideways. “Well…just don’t stand there letting out all my cookin’ vapors. Pretty soon I’ll have every dog in the neighborhood down here. Come on in.”

She closed the door and headed straight for her stove, opened the firebox door and threw two lumps of coal in, then turned to me and said—

“How tall are you, Jacob?”
“Oh, about six foot three.”
“How much you weigh?”
I stalled a little before I answered. There has to be a reason for that question, I thought.
“Right around one hundred eighty pounds or so.”
“Sit down at the table. You’re too skinny—you’re gonna’ eat something.”

After three hotcakes cooked in bacon grease, and two sausage patties, I sat back with a strong cup of coffee watching my short, plump grey-haired host clean up. She wore a plain white ankle-length dress with blue polka dots, a full apron with pockets and the usual stains gained from hours in the kitchen. I guessed she was in her late sixties, with dark brown eyes, high cheekbones, a long thin nose and a side profile that I found familiar; I just couldn’t figure out why. When she was done she poured herself a cup and motioned me into the living room, or “parlor” as she called it. Then she filled the Warm Morning Heater, stoked it, sat in her Lay-Z-Boy, lit a Pall Mall and invited me to sit in the armchair beside her. Everything I’d heard about her was true.

“Care for a little ‘Irish’?” she asked as she pulled a flask from her apron.
Ah, a woman after my own heart, I thought. It was leather bound with the initials E. W. burned into the flaps.
“Don’t mind if I do, thank you.”
“One finger or two?” She not only knew how to cook, she also knew how to back-alley measure.
“I’ll start with one…for now.”

Giggles, nothing but ornery giggles.

“So…your aunt is doing her…memoirs? I hear that’s what they’re calling it nowadays.”
“Yes she is,” I said, “and she especially wants to write about your brother Charley and Ellis.”
“Oh yes…Charley and my Ellis. Now there was a pair, I tell ya’. I swear I heard a mold crack when I put them both in the ground. Got ‘em buried out back, you wanna go see?”
“Maybe after another finger.”
“O.K. How ‘bout we just stay here by the fire and drink coffee ‘till we see two moons.”
I re-thought that idea; I had to drive home. She took another sip, inhaled deeply and turned to look at the picture of her two men on the fireplace mantel. The taller one had an axe in his hand and the shorter a long handsaw. She began.

“Well…let’s see, where do I start. I guess it all started in nineteen hundred and thirteen up on old Miller Mountain. Charley and Ellis grew up together with the Well’s farm and the Phillips’ farm, that’s us, only a holler apart. We all lived outside of Webster’s Springs and they got a job as loggers with the Cross Creek Mining and Lumber Company. My Charley was always tall and thin and sickly as a child, but Ellis was short and stout and hard as nails, and he took Charley under his wing and sort of protected him. Now Ellis was the smallest of the five boys, and his brothers always played tricks on him and beat him up all the time. One day his daddy, Joshua, got tired of that and decided to teach him how to fight. He took a hundred pound bag of feed and hung it to a rope with a cast iron hook from one end of the barn to the other, then he’d make Ellis punch it all the way across and back. He kept telling him ‘left foot forward, left hook, right foot forward, right cross, don’t stop ‘till your man is down, then drop your hands, ‘cause it’s over.’ His brothers only picked one more fight with him, and the—are you writing any of this down?”

I snapped out of my mesmerized coma and found paper and pen. When she talked, it was like she was singing the story; the way it flowed out of her. I made a note to pay more attention to her details, or I might not get any more of her “coffee.”

“Let’s see…where was I? Oh yes, Ellis got so fed up with their tormenting he challenged his oldest brother and proceeded to wear him out. Poor Abner had so many teeth missing in the front, after Ellis got done with him, we’d tease him and say we were gonna put a candle in his mouth and hide him in the closet ‘till Halloween. Nobody in town or all around would mess with Ellis after that, and that’s a fact. But he became awful competitive later, and after him and Charley had their contest he settled down.”
“What contest” I asked.
“Let’s have some more coffee, sonny, this is my favorite part.”

She brought the pot in and opened the magic flask, as she called it. She switched to two fingers, while I stayed with one—I had to be able to spell. She took a big gulp and continued.

“Everyday it was the same thing. They’d leave the camp and head up the ridge, saw and axes in hand. They’d cut and chop ‘till noon and break for lunch, then Ellis would grab one handle of the two-man-six-foot-long saw. He just kept staring at Charley ‘till he grabbed the other end, and then they’d start slow at first and speed up. Ellis was fifteen for fifteen and Charley was so tired of getting beat he made up his mind—not today, not on this day—he was gonna beat him. That long shock of his straight brown hair fanned his face like a metronome, keeping perfect time with the back-and-forth strokes, and all of a sudden Ellis let up and Charley knew he had him and BAM!…Charley’s foot slipped on the wet grass and blood spurted everywhere.”

“Good God!” I exclaimed. “Did it cut him bad?”

“Cut him? Damn near amputated half his leg. But my Ellis knew what to do. He took the red bandanna off his forehead he used for a sweatband, ‘cause it was August then, and made a tourniquet to stop the bleeding, put his fedora over Charley’s eyes and told him not to look down or he’d smack him. He wouldn’t have done it, but the boy didn’t know that. He took his t-shirt off and wrapped up the wound, and told Charley to get on his back and he’d carry him back down to the camp. Charley protested—you can’t carry me that far Ellis, it’s a mile back—but Ellis just gave one of his cold, hard stares. ‘Don’t tell me what I can’t do boy, now hop on,’ he said. All the way down Ellis kept saying over and over, ‘left foot forward, left hook, right foot forward, right cross,’ ‘till he got him down.”

“Now the foreman was a man called Arden Sloan. He was a cantankerous cuss, but very fair with his men. He put Charley in the big tent and looked the gash over. It was about twelve inches long and three inches wide and down to the bone. He could do some minor first aid, but he knew he was out of his league, so he got young Eugene Timmer to go get our momma. Eugene was slow of mind, but strong of heart, and the best horseman in all of Webster County. He was the camp go-for—you know, go for this, go for that—and he took off in a cloud of dust. I saw him coming along Robert’s Ridge a mile a minute, and I was still a pup, but I knew something was wrong. He come flying into the front yard yelling ‘Miss Sequoia, Miss Sequoia--”
“Now wait a minute ma’am, her name was what?”
“Sequoia…Sequoia Phillips. My momma was a full-blooded Cherokee maiden, and a beautiful one at that. People say I look a lot like her when she was young,” she said with a wink.

Now it started to make sense. I could see the Indian in her; I don’t know how I missed it.

“Well…did she fix him up?”
“Did she ever. Momma told me, ‘go fetch my healing poke Weezey.’ That was her pet name for me. Her and Eugene took off in a flash and when she got there she knelt down by Charley and chanted a prayer. ‘Man Above, please help me heal my baby,’ and then she went to work putting on herbs and salves. Then she wet a large tobacco leaf and covered the wound with it—she swore by the healing power of tobacco—and fixed up a special tea to fight his fever.”
“I take it he got better,” I said, as I made sure I wrote ALL that down.
“Yes sir, he did. Within a week it started to scab over a little and more each day. Charley used crutches for about three months and then he started to walk around, but he always had a bad limp. He was so self-conscious about it no one was allowed to see the scar, except for Estella of course.”
“Who was she?”
“That was his first and only wife. He married ‘Stella and I married Ellis the next year, both services the same day. Charley just adored that woman, and stayed right by her bedside ‘till the day she died. She had cancer—the female kind—you know?”
“What did all of you do then?”
“Well…everyone else had died off but us, so we moved up here for work at the No. 9 mine. Charley and Ellis worked together on the conveyor belts—did I tell you Charley only had one arm?”

My first impulse was to lean down and roll up my pants legs, because the bullstein was getting deep--I knew my shoes were covered and ruined. I put my index and middle fingers together and pointed them at my cup.

“No…I don’t believe you did,” I said as she obliged me.

“Well, yes sir, he did. Him and Ellis were working on a belt splice when someone turned the belt on and it caught Charley's shirtsleeve. Ellis ran all the way up beside him trying to yank him loose, but the belt motor just sucked it in and cut it off right below the shoulder.”
“And I take it Ellis saved the day again.”
“Well, Ellis figured if he was gonna hang with Charley he’d better learn some first aid, so he stopped the bleeding ‘till Doc Lee got there. After Charley healed up they started the first taxi business in this town.”
“So Ellis drove and Charley was the mechanic?”
“No, no…Hell no. Charley drove and Ellis fixed it when it broke down.”
“Now wait a minute Weezey…I mean Mrs. Wells. How did your brother shift gears and drive too?” I asked as I took a mega gulp.
“Enter old Doctor Lee. He fitted Charley with a leg brace that polio people wear and Ellis welded a rod on it that fit around the gearshift lever. All Charley had to do was let off the gas and move his leg to the right and left—that was my Ellis’ idea…of course. People would come for miles around just to take a paying ride and then watch him gas it up and check the oil. If it wasn’t for that scab coal truck that went left-of-center I’d still have both of ‘em with--are you awake?”

The next thing I remembered was the sound of pots and pans and bacon sizzling. I looked down to see myself wrapped in an afghan, and felt a pillow behind my head. I can’t speak for the canine world but those vapors sure drug this old dog to the kitchen.

“Morning, Jacob. How ‘bout a cup of coffee?”
“Yes, ma’am, that’d taste good.”
“How do you like it?”
“Cream, one sugar, and no fingers…please,” I said as I rubbed my head.
“Funny what that flask can do to a person, don’t ‘ya know,” she said with that lovely giggle.

I ate, cleaned up, put my coat on and got ready to leave. I held out my hand.

“Well, Mrs. Wells, it’s been a pleasure. I hope to see you again someday.”
“I’m sure we will, Jacob. And by the way, call me Aunt Louise, now give us a hug.”

I gave the sweetest, kindest and most notorious liar I’d ever met a big bear hug and a peck on the cheek, then I went my way. I stopped at the only gas station in town, a Texaco, to fill car and coffee cup. I walked in and told an old man who had “Junior” on his name-tagged jacket what I wanted and proceeded to fill my thermos.

“Calvin, you got a customer out here,” he said to someone in the back room.
“Be there in a minute, Pap.”

As Calvin walked past me at the coffee machine I detected a loud clop-clop. I turned to see a man, maybe twenty-ish, with a right boot that had at least a six-inch heel. When he opened the door with his left hand I noticed his right arm was a lot shorter that the other and his hand was very small and deformed. As he walked to my car it didn’t move at all, and I knew instinctively he suffered from Polio. I watched as he popped open the hood and laid it on top of his head until he pulled the latch-rod into place. Then he took a large red rag, folded it in half and laid it across both feet. He pulled the dipstick out with his good hand and then laid it on the rag. He then folded the rag over with his right foot and swiped the dipstick dry and then in again to get the reading. He put in a quart of oil for me and filled the tank. As I walked out to pay him I had one question on my mind.

“Young man, let me ask you something. Did you ever know a man named Phillips?”

He looked at me with a large, wide grin.

“You mean Uncle Charley?”