Here’s a short piece I found in Patrick’s West Virginia Stories folder. While there was an ODT version (junebug.odt) dated 6 July 2014, it was unchanged from the 26 April 1999 junebug.wpd version he’d saved elsewhere. Since today is the 26th of April it seemed like a good day to share it. The piece is clearly incomplete, with tantalizing hints of other stories undefined.

Our mother herded my brother and me onto the Greyhound bus. She was taking us to stay with cousins who lived out in the sticks, somewhere between Mt. Hope and Beckley. We sat in the back, and I got sick from the exhaust fumes coming in the window, or the winding roads, or whatever.

The last time she had dumped us with relatives, it was in Charleston with Pat Harrington. Mr. Harrington had given me a beating for shoving Pat headfirst into a metal garbage bin. I don’t think I did that. I think it happened in playing stick ball, nobody’s fault. I think then my mom was in the hospital having our sister Sue.

Where she was going to this time I can’t remember, though it must have been during the war, and maybe she went to visit our father at the Great Lakes training center. Somewhere along the line she also had a hysterectomy, so that might have been it.

The Greyhound stopped off the ribbon of concrete and we dragged our suitcases up the aisle. Jewel and Johnny were there to meet us. They were both tow headed and skinny. He wore denim overalls without a shirt. You could tell he was tough by the muscle under that thin chest and those sinewy arms. Jewel must have been about eight years old, and I judged Johnny to be eleven or twelve years old to my nearly eleven.

The driver set our suitcases on the berm and got back on the bus. Our mother hugged us both, told us to be good, and climbed aboard also, the pneumatic door hissing shut behind her.

Johnny and I stared each other in the eye. Looking into his pale blue lights was similar to gazing into those of a shoat measuring the distance to have at you. Jay, beside me, was looking at Jewel’s feet. She wore no shoes, but the yellow dust powdered her ankles like thin leather. She was eight or nine, I guessed, with a mischievous grin on her face. Her dress was a flour sack with holes for her neck and arms. At least our mother took tucks here and there to make Sally’s clothes Quaker stylish. Sally was our sister, staying with other cousins back in Oak Hill.

“They’re just as likely to put all five of them in the same bed,” I heard her telling Aunt Viola.

At this point the story ends, except for the following list:

The piano
The tire swing
The swimming hole
Corn hole
The spring
“Think it’ll keep?”
The June Bug

I wonder about the stories behind them.

Patrick

Patrick Meadows 1934 – 2017.