My Children Are More Precious Than Gold

My Children Are More Precious Than Gold

Story Inspired By Author's Grandmother Veder
Bishop Bright

Fay Risner

Cover Art

All Rights Reserved by Fay Risner

This book published by Fay Risner at
Smashwords.com

Copyright (c) 2015

All Rights Reserved

By Fay Risner

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters,
places and incidents are used fictitiously, and any events or
locals are entirely coincidental. Excerpts from this book cannot be
used without written permission from the author.

A short story version of this book was
entered in the 2006 Arkansas Writer's Conference in Little Rock,
Arkansas in the category Arkansas Pioneer Branch NLAPW Prose. The
short story was awarded third honorable mention.

Dedication

This book is dedicated to my
grandmother Veder Bright. Though she has been gone for over thirty
years, her love of family has carried down through the
generations.

Also, I dedicate this book to Genon
Williams, a woman who became a part of my family. She was someone I
admired for doing things her way.

Preface

In the early sixties, I needed to make
a family tree as a homework assignment at school. I asked Grandma
Veder Bright, my mother's mother, for information about the Bishop
– Bower side of the tree. Grandma took a shoe box off a closet
shelf and looked through the contents for birth date of her
siblings. As she searched she showed me pictures of her family when
they were young.

One thing led to another as I learned
about what it was like for the Bishops, living in the Blue Ridge
Mountains near Riner, Virginia. The afternoon flew by for me as
Grandma told me her stories about her mother's family having money
and land. Before the Civil War, they owned slaves. Two of Nannie's
brothers fought on opposite sides of the war between the
states.

Nannie Bower married Jacob Bishop
against the wishes of her parents. He wasn't consider good marriage
material according to the Bowers. His family was poor ridge people.
Nannie's parents opinion didn't stop her from marring the man she
loved.

I met most of Veder's ten brothers and
sister later in their lives. Most of them came to see Veder and her
husband, John, as often as they could. So by looking at the
pictures of them in their youth and getting to know the older
versions, I developed a sense for what they must have been like as
children, living under Jacob and Nannie's roof.

From what Grandma Veder told me about
her early life, I realized their story was not a Walton family
tale. Therefore, I didn't write a factual story. Just one with
versions of Grandma's stories that reflects what it was like to
live near Riner, Virginia in the late 1800's and early
1900's.

Prologue

Bess Bishop Thompson drove her car as
close as she could get to the rubble. She climbed out, leaning
heavily on her cane. She had to pick her way carefully through the
shaggy brown grass and waist high weeds to keep from
falling.

Ahead of her was a termite infested
wood pile that used to be the Bishop family log cabin. The rock
fireplace, covered with wild honeysuckle and moss, stood in the
middle of the rubble, a monument to days long gone and age old
memories. Bess plopped down on a tree stump, the remains of the
yard's mulberry shade tree that she used to play under.

She shivered when the northerly breeze
hit her. Pulling her shawl tighter around herself, she rubbed away
the goosebumps on her arms. She should get back in the car where it
was warmer, but a melancholy urge tugged at her to stay put just a
little longer. After all, she hadn't come all this way to leave so
quickly.

The trees, in full dress on the ridge,
were a vibrant color palate of reds, oranges, and yellows. Bess
remembered that vivid sight so well. Just one of the many reasons
she loved living on the ridge. Moments, memories and sounds
flickered through her mind like the reel of film at the movie
theater.

She could hear the laughter of her
brothers and sisters coming from the cabin heap. Her mother calling
loud and clear above the ruckus for the younguns to settle down.
Her father's baritone voice mixed into the din as he read a story
to the children near the warmth of the stone fireplace.

Bess decided it was just as well way
back then in 1903 that she and her family didn't know how the year
was going to play out. Not that every moment of the twelve months
were that bad, but the way January started out should have been a
warning to the Bishops if they had been paying attention to bad
omens.

Chapter 1

The Brown Woolen Scarf

One January morning in 1903 in the
Blue Ridge Mountains of Montgomery County, Virginia, Bess Pope
shivered as she listened to the north wind’s mighty roar. With a
sound akin to the wail of a prowling panther, the wind announced a
snowstorm's approach to the hollow before it pounced on the log
cabin. A constant tap - tapping of sleet mixed with wet snow began
to drum on the cabin’s tin roof. By lunch time, Jacob and Nannie
Pope and the other ten children realized as Bess did that the
blizzard had arrived on their portion of the ridge.

Six years old Dillard gulped down the
last bite from a stewed rabbit leg, and tossed the bone on his blue
and white enameled plate. Then he slid off the handmade, wooden,
ladder back chair and ran to the only window in the combination
kitchen and living room. Standing on tiptoes, he flattened his nose
against the pane. His blond hair, curled like tightly coiled
springs, created Os on the frosty glass where he pressed his
forehead to peek through a clear slit near the top of the
window.

He stared beyond the ripples of
drifting snow banked on the porch that grew larger each time he
looked. Dillard daydreamed of playing in the snow. In his
imagination, he saw fierce snowball fights and making snowmen in
the front yard with his brothers and sisters when the storm finally
ceased.

Bored, he declared, “Still snowen,”
Anxiously waiting for the snow to stop, he continued to watch the
haze of snowflakes swirl across the yard.

“
We know that without ya
tellen us, Dillard,” five year old Veder snapped at him, ready for
a fight. She didn’t like being housebound in the winter anymore
than he did.

“
Cass, Bess, and Alma,
stack the dishes, and I'll heet the water,” ordered their dark
haired, chunky mother, Nannie. She leaned her wide hips against the
kitchen work counter for a moment and wiped her forehead with her
faded cotton, work dress sleeve.

Ten year old Bess, who resembled her
mother in many ways, studied Nannie when she spoke and noted the
fact that her round faced mother paused to rest at the counter.
Nannie looked tired, and that worried Bess. She wondered if any of
the other children had noticed their mother didn’t look well. With
all the work Nannie did for her large family, it was no wonder she
seemed tired. The work appeared to be too much for her of
late.

Bess intended to say something to Cass
when they were alone. Born in between the older boys, Cass, twenty
years old, worked along side her mother. Mama told her things she
wouldn't mention to the younger children. Cass would know if Mama
wasn't feeling well. Bess picked up the tin plates one by one and
scraped the rabbit bones and scraps of food all on one plate. One
of the boys could take the scraps to the coon hounds to chew on
later. She stacked the rest of the plates and carried them over by
the dish pan.

Cass made several trips with the tin
cups to set them on the work counter. Tall, slim and plain looking
with a wide mouth and no chin, Cass's pleasant, but bashful, wide
smile took up most of the lower half of her face. As the Bishop
family enlarged over the years, Cass, one of the older children,
proved that she wasn't afraid of hard work as she worked along side
her mother.

Pretty with honey colored hair, nine
year old Alma did her part by walking around the table to gather up
all the silverware then carried it to the work counter.

Holding the long handled, aluminum
dipper to one side with her thumb, Nannie tipped the wooden bucket
to pour water into a large, tin dishpan. Carrying the pan carefully
so she wouldn't spill the water, she placed it on one of the round
lids on the wood cook stove's hot, black surface.

“
The rest of ya younguns,
let's get out of the women's way. I'm goen to sit next to the fire
fer a spell.” Their father, Jacob, picked up a small kindling stick
and stuck the end into the fireplace flames. He lit his pipe, threw
the stick in the fire and puffed away as he eased his short, stocky
frame into his rocking chair close to the crackling, red and yellow
flames dancing over the logs in the large, rock fireplace. He
combed his fingers through his thick, dark brown hair to flattened
it. Then he leaned forward, extending his calloused palms toward
the fire’s warmth.

The younger children rushed to
position themselves on the floor near their father, squealing and
shoving to move each other out of the way.

“
Ifen ya younguns don't
have anything better to do than fuss with each other, that
Christmas tree needs took down. It's turnen brown and droppen
needles all over the place,” suggested Nannie. She figured it was
best to keep her restless younguns busy so they wouldn't be
squabbling with each other. Lately, the racket got on her
nerves.

“
It's sticky, Mama. Do we
have to take everythin offen it?” Lillie's light, brown pigtails
stretched down the back of her faded, blue dress when the plump,
eight year old frowned up at the tall, cedar tree standing in the
corner of the room.

“
Leave the popcorn strings
on it fer the birds. They will be glad fer feed they don't have to
hunt when it's snowen like this. Take off all the tinsel and the
star. Stick em back in the Christmas box fer next year,” instructed
Nannie.

She spread a Red Rooster feed sack,
dish towel over the bowls of leftover fried potatoes, turnips and
green beans she'd placed on one end of the long, wooden table.
“Well fer once supper won't take too long to fix with all these
leftovers,” she said to Bess. It wasn't hard to hear the sound of
relief that filled her mother's voice. Nannie wouldn’t have to
spend a lot of time standing over the hot stove cooking the next
meal.

Surrounding the cedar tree, Lillie,
Veder, and three year old Lydia, stood on tiptoes with arms
stretched up, gingerly pinching off all the silver tinsel they
could reach without getting stuck by the tree’s needles. Twenty two
year old Sid, eighteen year old Tom, and sixteen year old Don,
picked off the tinsel higher on the tree, and thirteen year old
Lue, being the tallest, stretched his lanky frame on tiptoes to
lift off the gold foil star on top the tree.

“
The tree's cleaned off,
Pap,” Don announced, dropping the last piece of tinsel from his
chubby fingers into the wooden box marked,
Christmas
.

“
Good! Reckon I'll drag it
off when I go check the cows,” drawled Jacob.

“
Snow's still comen down
good, Pap,” Dillard forecasted from his post at the
window.

Dillard felt a cold dampness ooze into
the soles of his heavy woolen socks. He looked down and frowned at
the sight. A trail of water trickled along the wall from the line
of tallow slicked shoes that sat beneath the row of winter coats.
The small stream pooled under his feet.

No one had overshoes or boots in those
days so animal fat scraps were rendered by heating them until the
lard melted out. Tallow was spread on the one pair of shoes Pap
made each of them each year. That coating kept the shoes water
proof and softer.