Childhood Ghosts

Along the Little Coal River, impacted in the gloomy heart of the West Virginia coal fields, lies Madison, West Virginia, my childhood home.  I count among my earliest memories there, birthdays, Christmases, lost toys and teeth, acorn-throwing battles, my first bicycle, and fireflies twinkling in summer’s periwinkle dusk– each tinged with the visceral melancholy of childhood remembrance, and vivid as the smell of loamy soil under my small, bare feet.

In summer, I gamboled on thick grass to the lazy whine of cicadas. In fall, I strode nervously out into misty white mornings – clad in stiff denim and scratchy wool – toward the new-built elementary school that smelled of fresh paint, pencil shavings, and Elmer’s glue.  In winter, trees jutted like snaggled rake teeth into the gun-metal sky, their feet covered in dingy white drifts. In spring, snow lingered and the air rang with winter’s dying chill while cardinals and blue-jays returned from their austral forays to find the dogwoods budding.

I remember a glorious, golden sunset looming through the greenish glass of my parents’ wood-grain paneled station wagon.  Glen Campbell’s “Rhinestone Cowboy” punctuated the clouds’ expansive, salmon architecture. I remember at 5:59 AM Eastern – before Saturday morning cartoons – the Indian-Head test signal would appear on our Zenith TV accompanied by a 1 kilohertz tone to test the Emergency Broadcast System.  Immediately after, Old Glory waved to a brassy rendition of the Star Spangled Banner, and then came John Denver’s “Country Roads” set to a dissolving series of oil-on-canvas renderings of flowery meadows, mountains decked in a patchwork of autumnal colors, and covered bridges spanning trout streams nestled deep in the hollows of our beloved Mountain Momma.  For me, the 1970s are strung together in this way; a multicolored macaroni necklace of memories and melodies, dearly cherished, then boxed and cloistered in the musty attic of my experience. 

During this garishly wall-papered era, my paternal grandfather, Gordon T. Ikner Sr., died of obdurate alcoholism. My few clouded memories of “Paw Paw” are wreathed in tobacco smoke. He sat, bearded and smoking, in a worn brown leather armchair, sipping iced whiskey from a tumbler. His gruff voice occasionally barked military-sounding orders. He kept a loaded 9mm Luger in a kitchen drawer. Once, while I was left in his care as a toddler, my mother returned to find him dozing and me playing with the pistol on the speckled tile kitchen floor. In the ensuing shouting match, she was as unyielding in her disgust as he was in his insistence that since the safety was on, there had been no real danger. 

Shortly after he died, my grandmother, Mary Martha, sold their modest home – two hours away in Charleston – and came to live with us.  It was a return to her own childhood home. Weeks before her sixth birthday, her father, Fred Clayton Fenimore, had died from internal injuries in an ambulance following a mining accident. She had ridden in the ambulance during his horrible final moments. She brought with her a Dictaphone, a green IBM Selectric typewriter, two reel-to-reel tape recorders with several reels of 3M tape, an implacable sadness, and her childhood ghosts. To my knowledge, she did not bring the pistol. 

The train tracks ran parallel to the Little Coal River, many miles from the Fenimore house on the corner of 2nd street and Route 85. At least twice daily, the blare of horns in the distance would announce a passing coal train. On frequent errands, we would idle at the crossings. I would stare up at my mother, impatiently scowling in her leathery driver seat, waiting in exasperation as black and yellow Chessie System cars clattered by.