Belvedere

When I was growing up, I was considered by my family to be the pet pig. This was because I was the baby of the bunch, and for 12 years I remained that. During this time, I was doted on and given free reign of the place, and I got by with a lot more than I probably should have.


Me at age 2. Those pants prove I was at the height of fashion.


I’m pretty sure that I was my granddaddy’s favorite grandchild, and I could get anything out of him or do anything and it’d be just fine. He was so proud of me, he’d tell people, “That boy can drive hen shit to gunpowder.” That’s how good I was.

Now this isn’t to say that the other kids, including my brother who is only 18 months older than I am, were slighted in any way, I’m just saying that I got by with more than my fair share because of my pet pig status.

I remember one time when we lived on the farm, I got a BB gun for my birthday. I was out playing in the side yard and my brother was in the upstairs window, making faces at me. He apparently thought he would be safe from my vengeance, but I proved him wrong when I shot at him through the window. He dodged to the side, but I waited until he poked his head back in front of the window to see if I was still outside. When he did, I fired again, and just like that, another windowpane bit the dust. This continued until I had shot every windowlight out of that upstairs bedroom. As soon as I’d shot out the last one, Jason hollered out, “Mom…Matthew’s outside shooting out the upstairs windows with his BB gun.”

Mom then came outside and investigated the situation and took my BB gun away, and told me I was going to have to pay for those windows, and she was taking by $2 allowance to do so. It wasn’t but maybe a half hour later, and after a long talk with my granddad, that I got back my BB gun. He also gave me $2 and told me not to shoot out anymore windows...and not to tell mother about the money!


Me, my Granddad and my Uncle Tom in 1986. Notice my beaver-teeth pose!

I remember how I used to stay overnight with my granddad and we’d go riding around in his huge red International station wagon named “Belvedere”. Belvedere had a front seat, a back seat and an enormous back end that usually was filled with kids and chainsaws. I know those two don’t mix, but I remember always hating to have to find a seat bakc there so you wasn’t riding up against a chainsaw chain.

One time, when I was about 5 years old, just me and my granddad was coming back from Riverton in Belvedere (by now you’ve probably realized I never missed a trip to the store). At that time, I only knew my numbers up to 100, but the speedometer in Belvedere registered up to 120 miles per hour, so of course I wanted my granddad to sink the needle in the straight stretch going out through Germany Valley so I could see it. However, since I didn't know how to say, “a hundred and twenty”, I instead said to my granddad what I knew, “Go Twelve-O, granddaddy, go twelve-O!”

Well, Belvedere might have registered 120 mph, but it certainly couldn’t go that fast, looking back I doubt that it could have went 120 mph if it was falling straight down a well. Granddad used to have a saying about how much power Belvedere had, he would say “This ol' car couldn’t pull a sick woman off of a shitpot”. I believe that says all you ever need to know about Belvedere!!

Let’s suffice it to say that Belvedere never did go “Twelve-O”.

The School Halloween Party

I remember growing up, we always had a Halloween Party at school every year. It was always held on the Friday before Halloween. The school was Kindergarten through 12th grade, all in one building. The party started around noon and parents and the community were welcome and it always drew a big crowd. Prizes were given for the best costume, the scariest, the funniest, the prettiest, etc. It was quite the honor for students to win a prize at the annual Halloween Party, and us kids usually went out of our way to come up with a good costume so we could win. There was also lots of food to eat (cakes, cookies. etc.) and lots of candy. The community really came together to celebrate the occassion.

The Burns kids usually won for our costumes, primarily because Mom would help us make them. She told us we won because we had homemade costumes. I'm sure this was just her way of re-assuring us that our costumes were as good as everyone else's, who usually had store-bought costumes. Mom would let us decide what we wanted to dress up as for Halloween, and then she'd give us idea's on how to make that costume the best it could be.

I especially remember one year, I was probably in 2nd grade, and I couldn't make up my mind what to be for Halloween. I wanted to go scary, but the year before I was a vampire, and I didn't want to repeat that one two years in a row (although I made a fairly decent vampire).


Me as a vampire, a few year after this story took place.

My aunts told me to dress up like some movie star, primarily because they were all in love with Don Johnson and whatever the flavor of the month happened to be at that time. My Uncle Tom wanted me to be a motorcycle driver, because he was going through that phase and for some reason constantly watched "Any Which Way You Can" on our old disc player. Everyone I asked for help with coming up with an idea seemed to give me idea's that I just didn't care for.

When the annual Halloween Party was growing close (only a week away), there had been some commotion at school. My Aunt Aim had gotten into a fight with another girl and Mom and my granddad had to go into school to meet with the principal about it. Well, we Burns' have always been clannish and when one of us were in trouble, all of us were in trouble. When the time of the appointment came around, and we knew Mom and my Granddad were at the principal's office, all of us kids just walked out of class and right into the school office where the secretary was located. We were all going to attest that the fight was not my Aunt Aim's fault. Of course, all of our teachers were right behind us. Me, always being the mouthy one, and because I was the pet pig, said to my teacher when she kept telling me to return to my classroom or face the consequences, "Why don't you go somewhere where somebody wants to see you." Well that just threw the fat in the fire. That teacher started yelling at me, but my Aunt Tam quickly came to my rescue. She told my teacher, "He ain't a damn dog and you aint gonna talk to him like one." Well that just further infuriated the teacher, to the point where she was so mad that she was shaking. The school secretary knew us and how we were really good kids at heart, and knew that we were all there simply to take up for our Aunt Aim, told the teacher, "Why don't you go on back to your classroom and I'll have the principal take care of this." Well that got the teachers off our backs, and the secretary told us to have a seat until the meeting was over. Well, we didn't wait, we all barged into the meeting in the principals office and all started telling how that other girl was always picking on my Aunt Aim and how the other girl threw the first punch, and it wasn't my Aunt Aim's fault that she had "cleaned up on the girl who's mouth overloaded her ass". (Those were my Aunt Tam's exact words...we found out long before that you couldn't get in trouble for cussing in the principals office). Well, Aunt Aim was exonerated but the rest of us got sent home for the day so the teachers could cool off a bit, which was fine with us because we had all planned on returning home with Mom and my granddad anyway. What we didn't figure on though was the teachers that we had ticked off were also the costume judges at the Halloween Party!


Me, my brother and Dad, about the time this story took place. As you can see by our dirty shirts, "We played hard."

But it wasn't long before one of us did think of this, and we all figured we wouldn't win anything at the Party. Especially considering word got around that the teachers had made their brags that none of us would win anything at the Halloween Party. When we went home and told everyone, we were all in a huff. Then, my granddad struck on a great idea. Mind you he wasn't much of a provider, but he did know how to get things accomplished when times called for it. He came up with a plan to scare them into letting us win. His plan involved scaring, but not necessarily threatening, the principal who lived just down the mountain from us. The principal loved to ride his horses out on the road every evening around 6 O'clock, and we all knew that. Furthermore, my granddad remembered how the principal's horses were scared of his loud truck (it really was a rattletrap), so much so, that the principal had asked my Granddad a few weeks before if he would turn off the motor of his truck when he passed them along the road, so that the horses wouldn't get so frightened by the truck. But, now that all of us kids were facing some culpability for our wayward actions, all bets were off. That evening around 6 O'clock, my granddad took a drive down the road, and sure enough, there was the principal riding along on his ol' skittish mare. Seizing the opportunity, my granddad raced alongside of him, revved the engine of the old truck and that mare took off like a bullet. Granddad said she took to bucking and kicking and that the principal eventually ended up laying in the side ditch. Granddad stopped and helped him up, and said to the principal, "It'd be a real shame if my kids and grandkids don't get a fair shake at that Halloween Party next week." The principal agreed that it would be, but nothing else was said between them.

As the party neared, I had fianlly decided on a french clown costume, Mom sewed me up one out of spare cloth, and she came to school and painted my face before the judging. Oh, but the teachers gave us all some drop-dead, dirty looks, but it was obvious to everyone with a set of eyes that the Burns kids really did have the best costumes of anyone there. We overheard the teachers (judges) talking amongst themselves and several of them were still not going to allow us to win anything over what we had done the week prior to the party. Then the principal walked over to the judges, and whispered something to them. My teacher got so mad that she stormed off and refused to take part in the judging, but when the winners were announced, every last one of us Burns kids won some sort of prize!

As I recall, the prize for winning was a goodie bag and bragging rights. We all looked like cats who swallowed the proverbial canary when we lined up for photographs. Soon after being announced winners, Mom said it'd probably be best if we all "got out of Dodge" so we loaded up into the back of granddad's old pickup truck and made our way back up the mountain. I can still remember my granddad saying to me as we walked by the group of judges as we were leaving, "I reckon we showed them, didn't we Hackey?"

Whew! It's no wonder I was meaner than a striped-eyed snake!

Jack and Jenny

I remember when I was growing up on the farm that we had two old donkey’s, a jack and a jenny, which we gave the ever-original donkey names of Jack and Jenny. We only used them to plow up the garden in the springtime so most of the time they pretty much just wandered about the farm whenever and wherever they pleased. I remember they were inseparable, and they would stand for hours along the fence line out by the house and just nuzzle one another. Being meaner than a striped-eyed snake, I’d sometimes get so annoyed by them that I'd sneak away from everyone and throw rocks at Jack and Jenny just to get them to move. They’d just look at me with those big ol' sad donkey eyes and walk off to a more secluded location where they’d again nuzzle each other.


Cows on the farm.

Nobody ever knew where Jack and Jenny came from, they were on the farm when we moved there several years before. Mom and Dad asked the man who owned the farm about to how old Jack and Jenny were, and he said he didn’t know. He said he was 45 years old and from the time he was a kid, he always remembered Jack and Jenny being there. I also remember in the building out from the house, near where we had a doghouse for our Saint Bernard named Tuffy, there was hanging on the wall two old leather harnesses. The leather was cracked and the metal tarnished but I recall that someone, probably my granddad, decided to oil up the leather and clean up the tarnished metal so we could use the harnesses on Jack and Jenny. Well, when they were cleaned up, the metal turned out to be brass and boy did those harnesses ever shine. Even I realized just how pretty Jack and Jenny were in those harnesses, to me they seemed to step a little higher and seem a bit more regal whenever they wore them.


The building where the harnesses were found was near here.

But like I said, Jack and Jenny led a pretty good life on the farm, but Lord could they ever get on your nerves with the incessant nuzzling of each other. It was day in and day out, every time you'd see them, they’d just be standing around nuzzling each other. I remember complaining about them to my Granddad, and he would just tell me, “They’re old. It’s hard to tell how long they’ve been here. Just let 'em be.” They weren’t any fun to aggravate anyway so aside from the occasional thrown rock, I typically ignored them. That is until the one day when we found Jenny laying dead in the road. Jack was standing beside of her and was nuzzling her.

Well as you might imagine, moving a dead donkey is a chore. Whenever a large animal would die on the farm, we’d get the tractor and using a chain, we’d drag the carcass back into the woods to an out of the way location where the foxes and possums and buzzards would clean it up. We never buried the large animals, probably because have you ever tried to bury a cow or a donkey? But it just so happened that the part of the road that Jenny died in was in part of the road that we couldn’t get around with the tractor. And to get to the place back in the woods where we dragged the dead carcasses to, we had to go down this road. But it was blocked. The road was narrow there, and one side dropped into the holler and the other side was a steep hillside so there was no way to get around it. My granddad thought he could drive the tractor over Jenny but us kids wouldn’t hear of that, so he had to drive the tractor all the way to the other end of the farm, then down the main road to the gate at the end of the farm road that led up into our farm…and back to the spot the road where Jenny lay dead. It was about a 4 mile trip to go around the farm just to return back to nearly the exact same spot that you had just left.


The old farm road.

But that done, a chain was quickly hooked to Jenny’s carcass and it was dragged back into the far corner of the farm woods. Jack closely followed along behind, head hanging low the whole time. Of course, we felt sorry for the old feller, but to us kids, this was prime entertainment so we followed along behind Jack and the tractor and thus became a makeshift funeral procession for a dead donkey.

After reaching a secluded spot back in the wood to leave the carcass, it was quickly unchained and left there. A few of the kids jumped on the tractor for the return trip, and the rest of us walked back. But everyone noticed that Jack was not accompanying us back home, he just remained there beside of Jenny’s carcass, nuzzling her.


The far corner of the farm woods.

The next morning, Jack didn’t show up for his morning bucket of oats, so we all figured he was still back in the woods with Jenny’s carcass. Mom told us to take the bucket of oats back to him and let him eat, and she told us to get a halter and lead him up to the pond for a drink of water. She reminded us to be gentle with Jack because as she put it "ol’ Jack is probably going to worry hisself to death." Well, us kids took off up through the meadow by the house, which was a shortcut to the far corner of the farm woods, and we made our way back to the spot where we figured Jack would be. Sure enough, we found him standing there beside of Jenny’s now bloating carcass, still nuzzling her to get up. We hollered for Jack to come and eat, and we waved the bucket of oats in the air for him to see. Jack turned to look at us, and even took a couple of steps toward us, but then he turned back to Jenny’s carcass, nuzzled her, and then just collapsed. We then took off running to him, hollering like a pack of banshee’s, but as we found out when we reached him, Jack was dead.


The old farmhouse.

We ran home and told Mom what had happened, and she didn’t really believe us, I reckon she figured that Jack probably just fell over from exhaustion or something. But she and Granddad got in the truck and drove back to the far corner of the farm woods, where she discovered that Jack was indeed dead, and he had fell right beside of Jenny. Mom was quick to point out to everyone how Jack and Jenny’s muzzles were touching. Mom stated matter-of-factly that Jack had grieved himself to death, and she commented that old people are like that too. She told us that when an old man or an old woman dies after they have been married for a long time, the other one would soon follow them to the grave. She continued with how it just seemed like old people can’t get along without each other, and that they seem to lose their will to live. Then she looked back at Jack and Jenny and sadly said, “Jack just didn't want to live without Jenny. Well anyway, they are better off now.”

Belvedere

When I was growing up, I was considered by my family to be the pet pig. This was because I was the baby of the bunch, and for 12 years I remained that. During this time, I was doted on and given free reign of the place, and I got by with a lot more than I probably should have.

Me at age 2. Those pants prove I was at the height of fashion.

I’m pretty sure that I was my granddaddy’s favorite grandchild, and I could get anything out of him or do anything and it’d be just fine. He was so proud of me, he’d tell people, “That boy can drive hen shit to gunpowder.” That’s how good I was.

Now this isn’t to say that the other kids, including my brother who is only 18 months older than I am, were slighted in any way, I’m just saying that I got by with more than my fair share because of my pet pig status. I remember one time when we lived on the farm, I got a BB gun for my birthday. I was out playing in the side yard and my brother was in the upstairs window, making faces at me. He apparently thought he would be safe from my vengeance, but I proved him wrong, I shot at him through the window. He dodged to the side, and I waited…he poked his head back in front of the window to see if I was still outside, and when he did, I shot again. Another windowpane bit the dust. This continued until I had shot every window out of that upstairs bedroom. As soon as I’d shot out the last one, Jason hollered out, “Mom…Matthew’s outside shooting out the upstairs windows.” Mom then came outside and investigated the situation and took my BB gun away, and told me I was going to have to pay for those windows, and she was taking by $2 allowance to do so. It wasn’t but maybe a half hour later, and after a talk with my granddad, that I got back my BB gun. He also gave me $2 and told me not to shoot out anymore windows...and not to tell Mom!

Me, my Granddad and my Uncle Tom in 1986. Notice my beaver pose!

I remember how I used to stay overnight with my granddad and we’d go riding around in his huge red International station wagon named “Belvedere”. Belvedere had a front seat, a back seat and an enormous back end that usually was filled with kids and chainsaws. I know those two don’t mix, but I remember always hating to have to find a seat where you wasn’t up against a chainsaw chain.

This is exactly was Belvedere looked like on she was fire engine red! Photo from motormint.com


One time, when I was about 5 years old, just me and my granddad was coming back from the store in Belvedere (by now you’ve probably realized I never missed a trip to the store) and I only knew my numbers up to 100. Belvedere registered up to 120 miles per hour, and I wanted my granddad to sink the needle in the straight stretch going out Germany Valley. However, I didn’t tell my granddad to “Go a hundred and twenty”, instead I said what I knew “Go Twelve-O, granddaddy, go twelve-O”!! Well, Belvedere might have registered 120 mph, but it certainly couldn’t go that fast, looking back I doubt that it could have went 120 mph if it was falling straight down a well. Granddad used to have a saying about how much power Belvedere had, he would say “It couldn’t pull a sick woman off of a shitpot”. I believe that says all you ever need to know about Belvedere!! Let’s suffice it to say that it never did go “Twelve-O”.

A Bought Lesson

There was about twelve of us kids that grew up together, and mom done all the cooking on an old cast-iron wood cookstove. Lord, was it ever hot in the house in the summertime. Remembering it now, I’d say it was even too hot for flies to come inside. I truly don't know what kept Mom and the older girls from having a heatstroke sometimes. Mom could make everything on that old wood cookstove except pudding, which she burned every time. It would be so hot in the house in the summer time a person could hardly breathe, so by necessity we left doors and windows open all night. I remember several times, Mom cooked outside over an open fire simply because it was cooler to do so.

My Grandad's house, where this story takes place.


With having all the doors and windows open all night, hoping to catch even the faintest of mountain breezes to cool down the house, you know it was only a matter of time before something got in the house…and when it happened, boy howdy was it an experience to remember. You see, one night a skunk got in the house. We heard it walking across the kitchen floor, tick…tick… tick, went its claws on the floor. For those who heard it, they just thought it was a cat, but then we smelled it. Lord Almighty and Katie-bar-the-door was it ever strong, so strong it burnt your eyes.

A cousin of the skunk in this story.


Well being the genius that he was, my Granddad got out of bed and made some noise hoping to scare the varmint away, but instead he only succeeded in getting the skunk to hole up under the kitchen cabinet. The smell was even stronger by then…so strong the smell stuck in your mouth…and something had to be done. Well, growing up he'd always heard if you shot and killed a skunk immediately it wouldn’t spray so he decided to test that old theory out. He grabbed the old 12-gauge shotgun from the bedroom, loaded it and hunkered down on the floor so as to provide a clear shot under the cabinet. After the shotgun blast, and a subsequent skunk spraying, I can vouch that the old theory is simply not true, a skunk does spray regardless!! Lord, how that house stunk, the skunk smell was so strong that the smell just hung in the air and there was even an oily film of skunk spray all over everything.

Having no indoor plumbing everyone had to take baths in the big metal washtub out in the yard, only instead of water we used tomato juice, which someone said would help…it didn't! Finally we'd heard about a newer remedy for getting skunk smell off of you...vinegar and water douche!! I know you must be laughing by now but it worked, it really did.

Of course we still had to scrub down the entire house from joist to joist several times over, boil all the clothes in scalding hot water with vinegar in it and get new furniture (there was just no way of fumigating the couch and chairs). As Grandmaw Mary always said, “A bought lesson soon ain’t forgot”, and this lesson was dearly paid for by all of us. Soon after the skunk incident, we got bottle gas and a gas cookstove, so we didnt have to leave to door open anymore due to the heat. As I recall, Granddad also invested in new window screens and screen doors for the house too!

P.S. Last year I shared this story with a cousin in Ohio, and she shared it with her son, Boy Chuck (his daddy is Mr. Chuck) who has a radio show up there. Boy Chuck loved this story so much he used it as the basis for a Mothers Day story that he told on his program. It was very well done. It was my first (and so far only) taste of fame!!