"I don't think Erma likes us very much," I said.
"She's just an old woman who's had a tough life," Mom said.
"They're all sort of weird," Lori said.
"We'll adapt," Mom said.
Or move on, I thought.
THE NEXT DAY WAS Sunday. When we got up, Uncle Stanley was
leaning against the refrigerator and staring intently at the radio. It made
strange noises, not static but a combination of shrieking and wailing.
"That there's tongues," he said. "Only the Lord can understand it."
The preacher started talking in actual English, more or less. He spoke
with a hillbilly accent so thick it was almost as hard to understand as the
tongues. He asked all them good folk out there who'd been helped by this
here channeling of the Lord's spirit to send contributions. Dad came into
the kitchen and listened. "It's the sort of soul-curdling voodoo," he said,
"that turned me into an atheist."
Later that day, we got into the Oldsmobile, and Mom and Dad took us
for a tour of the town. Welch was surrounded on all sides by such steep
mountains that you felt like you were looking up from the bottom of a
bowl. Dad said the hills around Welch were too steep for cultivating
much of anything. Couldn't raise a decent herd of sheep or cattle,
couldn't even till crops except maybe to feed your family. So this part of
the world was left pretty much alone until around the turn of the century,
when robber barons from the North laid a track into the area and brought
in cheap labor to dig out the huge fields of coal.