Chapter Ten

The camping trip! Wow, that took Jake back on an instant memory ride. He had not thought of the camping trip since they had gotten back from it. It had been a completely happy time for his family. One of the few that he could remember.

The Dunbars were not a family that took regular summer vacations. Even though Lucille worked at home and could get away anytime, Edward could not. His teaching schedule tied him down during the school year. When he was not doing class work he was coaching a team to bring in extra money and he was always driving the team bus to away games. During the summer months he took a job cleaning up at the factory, again to pay the bills and put food on the table for Jake and Sam. Teaching only paid him a salary for nine months out of the year and they had to eat. Getting away for a vacation was a luxury that the family could not often afford.

But Edward made an exception in the summer of 1973. He realized that year that his small family was at one of life’s turning points. Sam would be graduating this year and moving out of the house at some point after that. Jake would be finishing junior high school and would be ready to start his high school adventure at the close of the summer. Edward and Lucille talked it over and decided to take a big vacation trip that would make the summer memorable for the whole family. Edward would not work in the factory that summer as he usually did. Over the course of the year the family talked about and planned where they might go to have a big adventure. Money was a limiting factor and they had to take that into account. California and Florida were probably out, so Mickey Mouse would have to wait until later in their lives. But Edward and Lucille were determined to save some money during the year to be able to afford some kind of vacation and they worked diligently to cut costs here and there to make it all happen. Uncle Bob heard about their plans and came up with an idea to help them afford a vacation as well. But when push came to shove, spending time with each other was the point and it was more important than spending money.

Edward, being a teacher after all, came up with the plan to make the trip an educational trip. There was a lot about the country and about history that he wanted his boys to experience first hand. And there was a lot about their own family and their history that he wanted them to know before they dispersed into their own busy lives. So Edward sat down with Lucille and planned out a three part trip.

First, they would head straight south and wind up in the Western Kentucky haunts where Edward Dunbar was raised in the backwoods somewhere “between Possum Trot and Monkey’s Eyebrow”, as Edward was fond of saying. Second, they would cut across the state to Eastern Kentucky and spend some time in Boone Hollow with the extended Ford family. Finally, they would drive across the tip of several states like North Carolina and Tennesee, just to say that they had been there, and end up in Southern Kentucky at the lake house with Uncle Bob and Verdela for a week long fishing trip. Sam had enjoyed his time there so much last summer that Edward thought it would be good for all of them to kick back there for a week or so and just relax. Plus, it would be easier on the budget to stay with Uncle Bob for a week.

They had to time their trip for a week that Uncle Bob would be able to get away during the busy construction season. June and July were spent at home keeping busy. Sam hung out with his high school buddies for their last summer together. They tried one last time to get an old Volkswagen Bug to start out in the detached garage. They weren’t very successful, but it gave them a reason and a place to hang out and talk and roughhouse and drink an ocassional surreptitious Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. Jake kept up his paper route to give himself some spending money. He was trying to buy a new ten speed bicycle and one of the cheaper models of the new 35mm cameras that he had seen downtown at the Thrifty Drugstore. He guessed that it would take much better pictures than his old 110 camera did. He also had to pay for the neighbor’s window that he had broken with his new “wrist rocket” slingshot that he had won in a newspaper carrier contest. He had shot a marble clean through the Wilson’s kitchen window and it was fortunate that he hadn’t hurt someone. The wrist rocket was officially retired now, for everone’s benefit.

Edward held down two part time jobs in the early summer that year to help pay the bills while he was off from teaching. He couldn’t accept the job at the plant because he would be gone for August. But he was able to teach driver’s education during the day to summer school students who were trying to get their license and he tended the gas station at the end of the block in the evenings. Lucille even got into the act by taking in some typing assignments for a lawyer that went to their church. He was between secretaries and they were able to help each other out for a couple of months. Lucille borrowed an old typewriter and did the typing at her kitchen table while the boys were outside playing.

Finally, August came and the Dunbar family set off on their family vacation. Their first stop was Paducah where they stayed in a budget roadside motel with an outdoor pool. Lucille stayed at the hotel with the Jake for a couple of days and let the him play and swim while Edward and Sam travelled around to visit with all of the cousins and aunts and uncles in the area. Sam liked hearing the stories of how Edward was as a boy and what he liked to do. They were treated to fried chicken lunches with pecan pie out on the front porch swing as they reminisced and told all of their stories. Edward was a virtual oral historian of the family and could relate the intracies of who lived where and who married who. Lucille and Jake joined them on the third day and sat patiently through some of the same stories that had been told on the days before.

Edward struggled with how to interest Jake in the history of the Dunbar family in Western Kentucky. So far he hadn’t shown any interest and he complained that he would rather stay at the motel and swim. Edward was frustrated by this and he pulled Jake aside and explained that the purpose of the trip was to learn about his roots. Jake tried to be interested, but he didn’t have the maturity of Sam yet and he was restless. Edward was losing patience with the situation and wanted to go out on his own on the last day in the area, but Lucille suggested a different solution. On the final day of that leg of the trip Edward and Jake set out together on their own while Lucille and Sam did some shopping downtown.

“Bring your camera, Jake, and come with me”, Edward said as he headed for the car. Edward would get to indulge one of his favorite hobbies and get to spend some time as well. After several minutes of driving they arrived at a small town on the outskirts of Paducah and they drove deep into the backroads in the country side. Seemingly out in the middle of the country Edward pulled over the car and looked out into the distance. He didn’t say anything for some time. He sat silently looking out over the fields. Eventually he pointed out over at a treeline set back off the road a few hundred yards.

“See that treeline over there”, Edward pointed as they got out of the car and walked a little way down the road.

Jake strained to see what Edward was pointing at. It just seemed to be a bean field of some type bounded by a wire fence that ended at some trees at the base of a hill. He didn’t see any buildings of any kind in the area. “Yeah, I guess I see it.”

“Back in the early twenties this whole area was a large farm. It looked different than it does today, not as properous. Mr. Johnson owned the farm and lived in a big house up over that hill there. He was an influential man in town and he owned a business in the town as well. He was a very nice man as far as I remember and he was very kind to our family. Back in the early twenties my Papa, your Papaw, didn’t have much and was going through some hard times. The pastor asked Mr. Johnson if he had any work for Papaw. He was a Christian man and he took pity on our family. It wasn’t much, but he hired Papaw to help him work the farm. He worked in the fields and tended some of the machinery and such. And as part of the deal, Mr. Johnson let Mamaw and Papaw live in an old wooden shed on the back of the property. It wasn’t much and it had a dirt floor, but it was a place to live. Late one September night that year Papaw ran over the hill and rang Mr. Johnson’s bell for help for Mamaw. Mr. Johnson sent for the doctor from Lone Oak and they came down the road here to that little shack.”

“Why did your Mama need a doctor?”, Jake asked breathlessly.

“That’s the night I was born, Jake. Right here at the back of this field in that little shack”, Edward said.

“Oh wow”, Jake said as he looked around and took in the scene. He lifted his camera and focused on the treeline. Click. He wanted to record the scene so that he would remember it later. Jake knew that the scene was really too far away for his camera and that the picture wouldn’t show much. He wished that he had one of those cameras with a zoom lens that he had seen at a store back home but he couldn’t really afford it. He started thinking that maybe he could do without the ten speed bike and buy the better camera instead.

“Did you live there for very long”, Jake asked.

“We lived there for six or seven years as I recall. When the depression came things got hard and Mr. Johnson had to let Papaw go. Then we all moved into one of the back bedrooms of one of Papaw’s cousins house. We had a pretty good life here until then.”

“A good life?”, Jake asked stunned. “How could you have a good life living in a shack with a dirt floor?” Jake was lining up a shot with his camera looking along the wire fence with some interesting clouds in the background as he asked the question. Even as a young man Jake had some inate sense of composition with his camera and he would make a decently impressive picture using the geometry of the freshly plowed fields and the rolling hills.

“It was the only life I knew and we made do. Papaw made sure that we had food on our table at a time when a lot of people didn’t. We shot rabbits out in the woods for meat and I remember eating beans with every meal”, Edward said with a wry smile as he remembered cooking those beans with Mamaw.

“Where did you go to school? I don’t remember seeing one as we drove here?”

“I didn’t go to school, Jake, until we moved back into town. Not everyone went to school back then. We certainly didn’t have preschool. But your Mamaw tried to teach me from the Bible at home. I learned a lot from her including a passion for reading.”

“Oh, so that’s where you got that.” Jake was trying to frame a picture with his father in it while he talked. He got a profile shot of Edward looking out over the fields that he would eventually carry in his wallet after he got it back from the developer. Edward spent some time quietly strolling around the country road, stopping here and there to imagine where he might have walked and worked with his dad those many years ago.

Eventually, Edward came out of it and said “Let’s get back in the car and move on. Mom will be waiting for us back at the motel later.”

Edward still knew his way around the country and the next stop was a small white country church a few miles down the road that looked like it was still in use. Out in the back was a small cemetary with crooked headstones but freshly mowed grass. “This is where Mamaw and Papaw went to church. This was my first church too, of course. Some of our family is buried out back. Let’s go out there.”

Jake followed Edward out back to the cemetary and he listened as Edward recounted some of the early family history headstone by headstone. There were cousins and aunts and others with odd names that Jake had a hard time keeping track of. Maybe he wasn’t hearing it right, but it seemed like a lot of them had died young from different diseases that Jake had not heard of before. Jake was more interested in the headstones themselves than in the stories he was hearing. He noticed the texture of the faded marble, and the intracies of the carvings on some of the taller stones, and the way the shadows played across the grass between the stones. He took a few photos while his father was talking, only half hearing.

Finally, Edward stopped at one undistinguished stone that seemed to be in the area of some family and he knelt to tend it. He gently removed some of the grass that had overgrown the edge of the stone and carefully brushed away some of the dirt that was obsuring the name on the stone. “Joseph” it said. That was it, just that one word. Edward wouldn’t show it of course, but Jake could tell that this stone meant something to him and it seemed that he was a little choked up.

“Jake”, he said finally. “This is my little brother, Joseph. He died shortly after childbirth from the flu, which was bad that year. I didn’t know him and your Mamaw never spoke much about him, but I know that it broke her heart.”

Jake was silent as he quietly took a picture of his father kneeling by the resting place of the brother he never knew.