Cold Turkey at Nine: The Memoir of a Problem Child

by Earl B. Russell

Overview

Having been born on April Fool's Day, author Earl B. Russell likes to imagine that in an early sign of his precocious nature, the doctor dried him off, held him up for his mother to see, and then listened as the baby looked at his mother and exclaimed, "April Fool!" Russell's mother knew he was a problem child right off the bat. At first glance, his older brother told everyone Russell would never amount to anything-so much for making a good first impression! As his life began in a rural Tennessee farmhouse, disappointing both his mother and brother, he had nowhere to go but up.

In his tragicomic memoir, Russell traces his unimaginable post-World War II life in the American Heartland through zany and introspective accounts that reveal horrific tragedies, soul-searching life lessons, and amusing adventures. Beginning with his upbringing on a poor farm, Russell shares compelling narrative from his coming-of-age journey as he encounters unspeakable losses, revels in the joys of marriage and family, climbs the academic ladder, and confronts a forty-year-old family secret. Along the way, the problem-child-turned-adult finds himself in raw academic brawls in the halls of ivy, conferring with world-renowned retinal researchers, and crossing paths with astronaut Neil Armstrong, Mickey Mantle, Queen Elizabeth, and Prince Charles.

Cold Turkey at Nine is an engaging story of resiliency, love, and one mischievous little boy's path as he explores how ordinary people deal with extraordinary circumstances.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781475985825
Publisher:	iUniverse, Incorporated
Publication date:	05/21/2013
Pages:	268
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.61(d)

Read an Excerpt

COLD TURKEY AT NINE

The Memoir of a Problem Child

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By EARL B. RUSSELL

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2013 Earl B. Russell
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4759-8582-5

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CHAPTER 1

Part 1—Prologue

There is no coming to consciousness without pain.

—Carl Jung

Nolen Robert and I agreed that I would take Daddy to buy a suit and other things needed to get him ready for Mother's funeral as soon as he was released from jail. Nolen Robert was completing funeral arrangements, including transferring Mother's body from Erin to Clarksville for a visitation that evening. I drove Daddy from the jail to a department store in a mall off Riverside Drive where we bought him a new suit, shirt, tie, belt, socks, and shoes. As we shopped—rather quickly, I might add—I was struck by the image of Daddy still dressed in that same plaid shirt and undershirt with the bloodstains below the neck, the one I had first seen him wearing in the jail the previous day. Nolen Robert or someone had arranged for him to change from the bloody pants he had on at the time of his arrest. I never knew why all of the clothes Daddy had been wearing the day before had not been confiscated by the authorities or why he had not had a chance to shower and put on clean clothes.

Then came what was perhaps the most bizarre and painful experience of my life. I drove Daddy home with his new clothes by mid-afternoon. Arriving at the house where Mother had been alive early in the morning the day before brought a pain I had never felt in all my life. Daddy and I made a tearful entry into the living room of the suddenly eerie house and proceeded back to their bedroom and hung his new clothes in the closet off the hallway where Mother's clothes still hung as she had left them. Daddy picked out some clean clothes and I walked with him through the dining room, then the kitchen where the tragedy had played out the day before, to the small bathroom that Daddy and Mother had built in a part of the old screened-in back porch a year or so after I had married. Neighbors had cleaned up the kitchen, but walking through it had to be hell for Daddy because it was hell for me, with memories of happier times and what I knew of the current tragedy pouring over me like a waterfall.

Without speaking much at all, through tears in our eyes and choked voices, I began to help Daddy remove his shirts and other clothing to take a shower. When he removed his plaid shirt, I could see that his white long-sleeved undershirt had been soaked in blood from his wrists almost to his elbows. Inexplicably, I took his bloody undershirt, put it in the sink, and began washing Mother's blood out of his shirt. It didn't seem right to burn the shirt, but it didn't seem right to be washing it with my own hands, either. At any rate, something inside compelled me to wash out the bloody shirt while Daddy got in the shower.

Within the hour I left Daddy there to rest and drove to Nolen Robert's house where the cars of several relatives and close friends were parked. He and Penny had worked out the final details for Mother's funeral to be held the next day, but they had been unable to talk to their children Glen, Ruth, and Tim—ages twelve, nine, and seven, respectively—about what had happened. Certainly they knew a terrible thing had happened from overhearing conversations in the house, but no one had sat with them to explain it and give them a chance to ask questions, grieve, or otherwise talk about it. Nolen Robert and Penny asked me if I could take the children for a drive and stop somewhere and talk to them about what had happened. They just didn't feel like they could do it. Of course, I agreed.

Nolen Robert asked Glen, Ruth, and Tim to go with me and we quietly got in the car and drove away. Glen sat up front with me and Ruth and Tim sat in the back seat. We headed east on Highway 13, not knowing exactly where we were going. This was no time for small talk—we all intuitively understood that. I drove past Penny's parents' house and their sawmill and pulled into the empty parking lot of Don's Skating Rink and Café less than a mile further east. I turned in the car seat so I could see all three of them and began to explain what happened with Mother and Daddy, their Granny Russell and Granddaddy Russell, as accurately as I could without the vivid details.

I stayed with Daddy that night, sleeping in the bed that Nolen Robert and I had shared growing up. The same bed where my wife and I awoke around dawn two or three years earlier to see Mother standing beside me, staring intently down at us in silence except for the odd smacking of her severely-dried, cracked lips.

CHAPTER 2

Part 2—Growing Up Years, 1944-1963

We are all immigrants into a new time.

—Margaret Mead

I was a series of disappointments from the start, but nearly three decades passed before I understood the depth of the disappointment my mother felt from the time she learned she was pregnant with me. Making matters worse, after she adjusted to the idea that I was on the way, she had her heart so set on me being a girl that she could hardly believe it when Dr. D. H. Atkins, who attended my birth in our farmhouse, broke the news to her that I was a boy. The cruelty of the moment was exacerbated for my mother by my birth on April Fool's Day.

In fact, I like to imagine that in a very early sign of my fluky precocious nature, as soon as Dr. Atkins dried me off and held me up for Mother to see, I looked her square in the eye with a toothless smile and said, "April Fool!" My very appearance—an especially bewildering moment for my mother—was my first cruel prank. She knew I was a Problem Child right off the bat. More trouble was coming. I later saw myself in a remark by Mark Twain, "My mother had a great deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed it."

"Huh! He's so little he never will amount to anything!" This was my six-year-old brother Nolen Robert's assessment the moment he first laid eyes on me that April Fool's Day evening. Daddy did not offer an opinion as far as I know.

Thus began my life in our rural farmhouse in Montgomery County, Tennessee. So much for making a good first impression. I had nowhere to go but up.

But in spite of all that, I am proud to be among the nearly one million people in the United States who were born on April Fool's Day. This explains a lot about my personality, as I often tell people when they appear perplexed by something I do or say. The quirky holiday of my birth has given me a license in a way to rationalize my behavior and attitudes, a license to be different and to take pride in it. Abundant evidence for this is woven throughout this memoir.

But there is a larger, more important story here. It is as Margaret Mead observed, "We are all immigrants into a new time."

Daddy and Mother, as Nolen Robert and I called our parents, were farmers, having come from farming families about sixty miles as the crow flies northwest of Nashville. They each had an eighth grade education. Daddy had one day of high school education, but on that first day his teacher took the class out to collect bugs, and he concluded that he could do that on his own so he never went back. Both of our parents were avid readers of the Clarksville Leaf-Chronicle, the oldest newspaper in Tennessee, and Mother was an avid reader of the Bible. She did not drive, so every Sunday she, Nolen Robert, and I got ready for church and Daddy took us in the pickup, dropped us off, and came back shortly before church was over and waited for us in the parking lot.

I took where I grew up for granted into young adulthood, came to avoid it because of the painful memories it evoked, and was later drawn back to it to reach a clearer understanding of myself, my family, and other people who had a profound effect on me. Place is of extraordinary importance in my story, as I suppose it is in everyone's story. Over time my bittersweet memories of home have become less bitter—and sweeter. Place is always with me.

My place was Montgomery County in northwest Tennessee. It is still a largely rural county in a farming region noted for livestock and tobacco. The county was named for pioneer John Montgomery whose Scottish family immigrated to Virginia in the 17th century. He served in the Revolutionary War and was founder of the county seat Clarksville, a historic city at the junction of the Cumberland and Red Rivers, incorporated in 1785. The Scotland of Montgomery's origins will unexpectedly and significantly come into my story much later.

Several things from my early childhood that stand out are the soothing sound of rain on our tin roof, the dusty gravel road about forty feet from our front door, our wide front porch, the catalpa tree in front with foot-long pods in late summer that we called Indian cigars—yes, I smoked a few but tobacco was much better—cardboard crates full of baby chickens, our wood-burning stove in the living room that was piped into our chimney about seven feet above the floor, our dining table of delicious foods that became a desk for homework or a place to spread out the newspaper, cats milling around the back of the house, hogs in the fenced-in lot behind two of our chicken houses, and the smell of mud around the ponds in our cow pastures.

The only grandparents I knew were Daddy's and their farm was about a mile south of ours. Pappy and Mammy, as we called them, had seven children and Daddy was the baby of the family. Pappy was widely loved and respected and served for many years as the superintendent of Sunday school at Shiloh Cumberland Presbyterian Church, where we worshipped, a position that Nolen Robert would hold many years later. Their house was on the southern edge of a wide creek bottom with their front porch facing a limestone bluff. A cemetery sat at the top of the bluff with another large, beautiful hill to the east. Beneath their long back porch facing the creek was the beginning of a small swampy area that lead to a shallow pond. Clumps of cattails grew there, and the muddy area between the house and the pond was dotted with circular mounds of little mud balls made by burrowing crawdaddies, or crawfish. In dry weather I liked to walk among those crawdad holes, but I never wanted to eat those little critters. None of our family did.

Pappy was noted for frugality, efficiency, and neatness. He saved everything of any potential value. When I was about eight years old, in Pappy's waning years, I explored his old tool shed that sat in a patch of dried weeds by the one-lane dirt road that led to my grandparents' house. In it I found an abandoned, rusty forge. The shed was filled with sorted piles of scrap metal, cut-up tree branches grouped by size from a few inches in diameter down to the smallest tips of branches. Every pile was neat and ordered by diameter from large to small. An approximately three-by-six-foot shelf was covered with Maxwell House coffee cans, all punctured in the bottom to let blowing rain and snow drain out. Each can contained rusty and bent nails pulled from bygone buildings and fence posts, miscellaneous bolts and nuts, machine and wood screws, and little bundles of wire of various gauges. It was easy to see that Pappy thought all of this stuff may come in handy someday, and some of it no doubt did.

Mammy was not religious from all indications that I saw. She was a snuff dipper with definite opinions. When the NBC News program, The Huntley-Brinkley Report, with Chet Huntley and David Brinkley came on and they looked straight into the camera, she tugged on her long dress and pulled it tightly around her ankles. When I asked her why she did that, she said over the snuff in her lower lip, "I'm not going to let them look up my dress!"

Mammy had a habit of sitting in front of their fireplace in the cool months. She sat directly in front of the fireplace, about ten feet from the roaring coal-fueled fire, in a high-backed wooden rocker and rocked gently and steadily. As she talked the tobacco juice from the snuff built up and she began to rock in longer arcs. When it came time to spit out the juice, she rocked at full arc and spit a fine stream directly in the center of the fire on the forward rock. Sparks flew up and she then resumed her normal, slower rocking. She did this so reliably and accurately that she must have had many years of practice at it.

Family gatherings at Mammy and Pappy's house were something to behold when aunts, uncles, and cousins assembled for feasts and stories. Before I started to school, I liked to sit in Pappy's lap and brush his silver, thinning hair when he sat in his rocker on the front porch. He apparently enjoyed it as much as I did because I was allowed to do that quite often. He was always calm and thoughtful. I never saw him get mad or heard him raise his voice.

But after I grew up Daddy told me about "Old Dr. Brake," a country doctor with a full, white beard who made rounds with a horse and buggy early in the twentieth century. Daddy always used the word "old" when he mentioned Dr. Brake. He told Daddy something about Pappy that was meant figuratively, not literally—as I understood the meaning of the story. He said, apparently with a lot of admiration and respect, "Your father is a fine and gentle man, but if you cross him he will kick your ass."

Mother's parents died before I was born. They produced three children, and Mother was the baby. She had a number of half brothers and sisters from her father's first marriage, so I had an abundance of cousins who tended to scatter more widely than my cousins from Daddy's side of the family, partly because there were so many more of them. Mother's father farmed and worked for a number of years in a sawmill until he suffered a crippling injury on the job and was confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. An older distant cousin recently told me this earned him the nickname "Cripple Bob," but it is unclear if anyone ever called him this to his face.

Daddy often spoke of Mother's mother with admiration, and he obviously liked her. He talked about how smart she was, that she was always thinking about something in a way I later interpreted as an intellectual bent. She was an avid reader with a penetrating gaze and a quick wit. Daddy recounted a time at her house when a mouse scampered across the living room floor. He said to no one in particular, "I wonder where that mouse's hole is."

My grandmother reportedly said, without looking up from the book she was reading, "Under his tail!"

Mother had an intense, serious side to her personality, but she also had great passion and a hearty laugh that caused her to move all over in waves of rollicking fun. She had dark, reddish-brown hair and a pale, freckled skin. She was about five feet six inches tall and weighed maybe 120 pounds. She was an extremely hard worker, both in the house and on the farm, doing plenty of chores with Daddy, Nolen Robert, and me. She was the lead singer in our family, often breaking out into song when the four of us were going somewhere in our pickup or working on group projects such as rendering lard around a huge cast iron pot over an open fire on a cold fall day. She preferred to sing gospel songs and hymns such as "I'll Fly Away," "Unclouded Day," and "The Old Rugged Cross."

Before I was old enough to go to school, we had a Guernsey milk cow that Mother milked into a bucket every morning and night. First she gave the cow enough feed to keep her eating while being milked. Mother sat on a three-legged stool, washed the cow's udder and teats, and milked strong streams of milk into the bucket. I liked watching her milk, and when I was about five years old I asked Mother to let me milk the cow. She agreed, went over the milking procedure with me, and situated me on the stool.

But it didn't go so well for me. The cow knew right away that my little hands on her teats didn't feel like Mother's hands at all. I had only milked a few drops when I did something the cow didn't like. She suddenly kicked me with her right rear leg and I fell backwards over the stool into a fresh pile of cow manure. After Mother made sure I wasn't hurt, she got a big laugh out of my mishap, though I had trouble finding all this as funny as she did. While I was normally pretty persistent at learning how to do things, that was my last milking experience.

Mother processed the milk at the house. After letting the cream rise to the top, she skimmed it off for making butter. We drank the remaining milk with meals and used it for cooking and making ice cream in a hand-cranked ice cream freezer. She had a big ceramic churn about two feet tall and ten inches in diameter. It had a wooden lid with a hole in the center for the dasher that was made from a sawed-off broom handle with wood crosspieces that churned the milk.

Everyone who ever sat down at our dining table raved about Mother's cooking. She was a master at simple Southern dishes, and of course she often had great ingredients that came fresh from our farm—young chickens, beef and pork from the steer and hogs we slaughtered each year, Irish potatoes, tomatoes, peas, green beans, squash, cucumbers, and corn. In late summer she canned many of these crops, along with peaches and pears, and stored them in the old "fruit house" built from concrete blocks about forty feet east of our kitchen next to our tobacco field. I liked going to get various things from the fruit house and the earthy smell of its dirt floor.
(Continues...)

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Excerpted from COLD TURKEY AT NINE by EARL B. RUSSELL. Copyright © 2013 Earl B. Russell. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Preface....................     xi     

Acknowledgments....................     xiii     

Introduction....................     xvii     

Part 1—Prologue....................     1     

Part 2—Growing Up Years, 1944-1963....................     5     

Part 3—Triumphs and Tragedies, 1964-1986....................     89     

Part 4—A New Life, 1987 to the Present....................     137     

Part 5—Epilogue....................     225     

Appendix—Places I Have Lived, with Dates....................     239     

Selected Bibliography....................     243