Hillbilly Heart (3 page)

With Kebo’s encouragement, I did exactly that, scaring the crap out of one driver who jammed on his brakes, probably convinced he’d narrowly missed hitting a kid. I got scared and never did that again.

Kebo and I spent Sunday mornings driving to and from church in my mamaw and papaw Cyrus’s four-door Buick. We passed the time in the backseat by trading miniature football helmets, toys, and plastic rings we purchased in the machines at the gas station and Hills department store. We also spent many hours in the nearby woods, fishing, tracking down animals, and exploring. We found arrowheads and climbed trees, sometimes pretending to be Daniel Boone, other times pretending we were Apaches or Cherokees. Our great-grandmother was part Cherokee.

I know I’m painting a kind of idyllic picture of my childhood, but that’s the way I remember it, until the strains of my mom and dad’s fighting became more common than not. Looking back, I know these were the moves people who had married young had to go through as they realized they were different as adults than they were fresh out of high school. I hated hearing the fighting. It tore me up. I didn’t understand what was going on. Nor did I understand why my parents seemed to want to hurt each other.

It didn’t help that my dad was thought of as the Elvis of Southern Gospel. His chiseled good looks and angelic voice were catnip for gospel groupies. After one performance, my mom found lipstick on my dad’s collar. Soon after, she recruited her best friend to help spy on my dad. She put Kebo and me in the backseat of her car, and the four of us parked outside a bar in Ironton, Ohio, called the Auger Inn. It had a hand-painted sign in front that read
AUGER IN
…
STAGGER OUT
. I don’t recall what she saw, but it was something incriminating. She also spied on him at the Crownsmen’s performances.

I remember some major blowouts. Nothing made me more upset than seeing my mom cry. One day, my brother and I came home from school and immediately sensed a dark cloud hovering above our house. Instead of asking me about the activities in my first-grade class, my mom stood with her arms crossed and told Kebo to take me into our room and lock the door. She explained, “Your dad and I are going to have a fight.”

Indeed, my dad came home and the fighting started. It was horrible. Kebo and I heard plates break, furniture overturned, and a fist go into the wall. Unable to take the screams and cries any longer, I bolted out of my bedroom and wedged myself between them. Everything stopped. In the stillness following the battle, my father glared at my mom and said he was going to leave. Hearing that, I jumped up and wrapped my arms around his chest and wrapped my legs around his waist, clinging like a little monkey.

Without saying anything, he walked past the living room, which was in total disarray, and outside, down the five green steps, and past the birdbath. Finally, he wiped his tears, kissed me on the forehead, and got in his car. Kebo stood nearby, and my mom watched from inside the door. My dad turned on the ignition, backed out of the driveway, and disappeared over the hill. He never returned again to live under that roof as a family.

From then on, there was no question that life ain’t fair.

CHAPTER 2

Back When I Was Young

I
DON’T KNOW WHY
I liked to torture myself. But I did. Unless I had a ballgame, I still went to every Crownsmen Quartet performance, and each time, as I had always done, I asked my dad if the group had Papaw’s song on the list. Except now, my dad’s emotional reading of the lines about his “own sweet family, a wife and little children dear,” destroyed me inside.

I suppose I intuitively understood the power music had to move people, even when it hurt, and man did hearing him say those words hurt. I couldn’t reconcile those lines with our vastly different reality. After the split, Kebo and I spent weekdays with my mom and weekends with my dad, who eventually bought a home on fifteen acres in Argillite, Kentucky, about ten miles from Flatwoods. I prayed they would get back together and make our family whole again. But that day never came. Instead, I found myself torn between two worlds.

The divorce didn’t stop my parents from fighting. Whenever my dad dropped us boys off at the end of the weekend, Ruthie would find all sorts of reasons to let him have it. Once, before he married Joan, he made the mistake of coming to the house with his new girlfriend. When he pulled up to the house in his girlfriend’s shiny new convertible, with his girlfriend next to him, Ruthie went ballistic.
She grabbed the lady’s jet-black bouffant by the roots, yanked her out of the car, and literally kicked her ass. Kebo and I and all the neighbors watched. My dad managed to separate them and get his girlfriend back in the car.

After he peeled out of the driveway, Ruthie apologized to the neighbors for her unladylike behavior.

“Ruthie, if it makes you feel any better, you stomped her ass right there in the ditch,” one of the neighbors said.

On July 17, 1970, my dad remarried: a very nice woman named Joan Ward. She was educated and wore nice clothes. She had been married before and had two daughters, Cheri and Lisa, both older than Kebo and I. On January 19, 1972, Joan gave birth to my little sister, Angela Leigh Cyrus. Not long afterward, my dad was driving me back to 2317 Long Street when he said he was “getting ready to make a move.”

I didn’t know what he meant.

“I’m getting ready to make a move so that you and your brother will live with me all the time,” he explained.

I suppose he thought he could give us a more stable life at his place, but my heart sank. I wanted to say, “Daddy, please don’t do anything. Everything is fine like it is.” It wasn’t fine, or maybe it was in its own way, but I couldn’t imagine leaving 2317 Long Street or my mom. Nor could I begin to tell my dad about the pain, anger, fear, and other complicated emotions that were going through my head at that moment.

Like a lot of kids who feel overwhelmed and confused, I was sullen and moody, and with all those feelings inside me, I didn’t know how to express myself. So I just sat quietly. That’s what I did with my dad. I just shut down.

To his credit, he didn’t press me. He kept driving, and after a while he turned the radio back on.

But his notion turned into a custody battle. Soon a hearing date was set and Kebo and I were told we would have to go into court and talk to a judge about where we wanted to live. It was scary. Each of my parents spoke to us privately about wanting what was
best for us, while intimating that it would be best if we chose them. “You do see why living with me and Joan and Angie would be best for you, right?” my dad asked. My mom said, “Now you guys tell me. Y’all want to stay here, right?” As far as I was concerned, there was no right decision… only wrong. Someone’s feelings were gonna get hurt. But I knew my mom needed me.

I was aware of when the court date arrived. From the bits I heard, relatives from my dad’s side painted my mom as inferior to my dad, and some of our neighbors went in and did the same in regards to my dad. It was ugly. The last cards in the deck were me and Kebo. No one wanted us boys to be put in the position of talking to the judge, but finally that day came. Papaw Casto drove us to the courthouse in his red Ford Falcon. I don’t think we spoke a word the whole time.

For some reason, though, Kebo and I never made it inside. To this day, I’m not sure what happened, but we pulled up in front of the courthouse, got out of the car, with our hair combed and dressed in our nicest clothes, and someone came out and spoke with my papaw. A moment later, he told us to get back in the car and drove us back to 2317 Long Street, where Kebo and I lived for the rest of our childhood and beyond.

Back then, especially in a God-fearing town, divorce was uncommon and brought a great sense of shame. It didn’t help that my grandfather was the town’s preacher and his church was a focal point of the community. At school, I was the only kid whose parents were divorced. I heard the kids whisper about me.
Cyrus’s parents are divorced. Does that still make them Christians?

It didn’t help that I was insecure about my appearance. Nothing on my face seemed to fit right, not my ears (they stuck out), my eyes (too big for my head), or my teeth (they were crooked). Ruthie kept my hair short, in what was called a butch cut. One day in first grade, a bunch of big kids from the eighth grade formed a circle around me and laughed. The oldest of them was a very hairy, scary midget. He scared me the most. He pushed me and said, “Come on, fight
me. I’m your size.” He pushed me again. “Come on.” I broke free and ran home. That night I started saying a new bedtime prayer: “Dear God, I know I’m ugly, but when I grow up… just make people think I’m funny. Amen.” It became known as my “nightly prayer.”

I found refuge in the nearby woods, where I learned the calming effect of Mother Nature. One of my favorite things was to pretend I was Geronimo. Papaw Casto had given me an old rifle that no longer worked, and it looked identical to the one Geronimo is holding across his knee in the famous photograph of him from the Smithsonian. Instead of walking directly to school, I detoured into the woods and climbed a tree that my brother and I called “the song tree.” We used to sit in its branches and make up songs. If I could sit in that tree and imitate the calls of the birds or see a deer or a rabbit or a squirrel or even a red-tailed hawk, I was happy.

I would sit in the tree for five, ten, or even twenty minutes—however long I could until I heard the first warning bell from school. By the time I reached the baseball field at McDowell Elementary School, the second bell would be ringing. I would usually make it to class just after everyone else had sat down.

“Boy, why are you always late?” my teacher once asked.

“I ain’t late,” I replied, heading straight to my seat without stopping. “I’m right on time.”

Money was tight in our household. My dad’s small salary mostly went to his new family, and Ruthie cleaned houses for a living. Somehow she always managed to find an extra hamburger to fry up if Kebo or I had a friend drop by; or if I needed a new football helmet, she made sure I got one. But we were practically the only family in all of Flatwoods that didn’t have a telephone. I dreaded the beginning of the school year when the teacher made each student stand up and say his or her name, address, and phone number. Again, I heard the whispers.
Whoa, Cyrus doesn’t have a phone? Yeah, he’s the one whose parents are divorced. Wow, no phone. They probably still use an outhouse at his place.

One of the saddest days of my life was when my mom sold her beloved piano, which had belonged to her mother, so she could pay
the power bill and buy us clothes for Christmas. I think it was the saddest I ever saw my mom. Later on, when I started Russell Middle School, I met kids from Bellefonte and Kenwood, the two rich areas, and I realized how much of a divide there was between us and them.

We couldn’t even afford a membership at the community swimming pool. When the summer heat and humidity got unbearable, Kebo and I cooled ourselves off with a garden hose on the front lawn, trying our best to ignore the laughter and the sounds of classic rock blaring over the loudspeakers at the nearby pool.

My best friend was Robbie Tooley. He showed up in third or fourth grade, the new kid in a school where we all knew each other, each other’s parents, and each other’s grandparents. Something else made him stand out, an aura, the way he immediately claimed a space for himself. Whatever it was, Robbie had it. His clothes were nice, his hair was slicked back, and he seemed self-confident, especially for a new kid. He was so different that I had a feeling someone was going to try to take him down a few rungs. Sure enough, they did.

By the end of the first week, word circulated that a couple of the school’s bullies planned to take him down a notch or two after the last bell. There was a pond along the path everyone walked home, and word was they were going to confront Robbie there. Robbie got the message, too. Rather than cower or take another route, though, he made it known he planned to fight back.

I thought he was crazy.

After school, I followed the crowd to the pond. But instead of watching the new kid get beat up, I watched Robbie kick the crap out of two tough guys who thought they were going to teach him a lesson. It was the coolest thing I’d ever seen, like a scene out of the movies. Afterward, as Robbie dusted himself off, I stepped forward, helped him pick up his books, and told him my name. We were best friends from that day forward and that helped me.

My poor mom was the definition of snakebit. Bad luck seemed to dog her. Even now she recalls, “If I had one good day, four bad ones
followed.” Kebo and I didn’t help. She had a succession of boyfriends after she and my dad divorced, but we scared most of them off. As the unofficial Ruthie Protection Squad, we pulled out all the stops whenever we decided one of her dates wasn’t good enough, including one guy who owned a car dealership and was crazy about Ruthie.

He even gave her a car—a used car we nicknamed Ragsy because we stuffed the gas cap hole with a rag. I don’t remember whether we ran him off or she wasn’t interested in him. Another one, a perfectly nice gentleman, gave me a terrific birthday present, an official leather NFL football signed by the commissioner, Pete Rozelle. Under different circumstances, it would have been the greatest gift in the world. But I was in Ruthie Protection mode. I went into my bedroom, got out a hunting knife, and cut the ball into shreds. Then I returned with the mutilated ball in my hand, grinning like a crazy clown.