One of My First Schools-Upper Heath Creek School

I think I was seven or eight years old and we lived on this small mountain (hill) when school started that year.  It was very hot as August usually is in West Virginia and we had no new shoes to wear.  In those days, new shoes was not in our budget then or later.  If we had any sole on the bottom and a string or strap to hold them on...we had shoes.

The school house was I think about a mile up the holler.  It was one room and hung from the side of the hill.  Under the lower side of the building we children would play on rainy days.  My very favorite game was to find a small mound of dirt with a little hole in the top of the mound.  We would squat around this very small mountain and call "Doodle Bug, Doodle Bug, come to your Mother".  For some reason and I have no idea why or how, but a very small little bug would come up out of that small mound of dirt and just sit there.  It looked something like a ladybug, but it was black.  I have no idea why it came to our voices, but it did.  Soon it would go back down.

Inside this school building there was two rows of desks from the front to the back.  Each desk would hold 3 to 4 children, depending how big we were or how much we would hit each other.

I remember a big old boy with long yellow hair usually sat in front of me.  He was never clean and he had lice.  They would walk around on his neck where his long hair was.  Sometimes they would get on me.  I always knew when I had some of Rufus' lice because my head would itch.  Once in a while it would be my imagination.  When I would really have the lice, my mother would put some kerosene on my head and leave it for a while.  Then she would wash my hair with Fels-Naptha soap.  The smell  of kerosene and then the soap was awful, but it killed the lice until next time.

Rufus was one of the oldest boys in the school and there was a family of Johnsons with four children who also went to school.  Their names were Polly, John, Graham and little Annie.  I liked the girls, but the boys were bullies.  They had a father who was a bootlegger.  He made his own whiskey and sold it out of his home, so they always had lots of money and nice clothes.  I envied them then because they always looked pretty and brought nice lunches to school.

One day all that changed.  Mrs. Johnson decided she wanted a younger man, so she hired Rufus, the boy with the lice, to shoot her husband, old J.B. through the head. Rufus sneaked up to the window in J.B's room and shot him through the head with a shotgun.  It wasn't long before the sheriff arrested poor Rufus.  He told on Ollie (Mrs. Johnson) and said Ollie had paid him to kill J.B.  They were both sent to the pen for a long time.  I was relieved to not have Rufus and his lice, but I felt sorry for the girls. They were my friends.

I can't remember or never did know why Mama moved from this house and down into the holler.  This little house was made from logs and was very small.  We now were right on the little road, so we saw a lot more people.  We were also right by a small creek, but could not swim in it.  It was dirty from a coal mine and slick gummy water, I guess from the gas wells. Anyone who owned a few acres and had enough money got a gas well.