It would be easy to criticize the teacher’s method of discipline, but she was gentle with Carson, possibly the first person who was. Intimidated by his size, teachers often sent him to the principal’s office for a paddling. He calmly lay prone on the floor, frustrating the principal, who believed it was a trick to avoid punishment.
Many years later, Carson’s cousin told me that he lived with his grandmother, who suffered from an unrepaired cleft palate, which rendered her articulations impossible to understand. Carson had copied her speech since birth. Before beating him, she made him lie on the floor because it was easier for her to hit him from a chair. After school Carson chopped wood and hauled water instead of doing homework. He was shy and illiterate, and never learned to talk plainly, but there was nothing at all wrong with his mind.
By age ten I read a book a day, two if it rained. In summer I waited for the bookmobile to trundle up the dirt road in first gear, driven by a young female volunteer. She wore a headband and patched bell-bottom trousers, her neck draped with beads. My intense feelings for her were unnameable: I couldn’t look at her, could barely talk. I had a persistent fantasy of driving around the country with her, living in the bookmobile, and reading forever. One day the truck didn’t arrive and I never saw her again.
I’d already read my father’s holdings of pre–World War II fare from his own childhood: The Bobbsey Twins, Billy Whiskers, The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and Tom Swift. I then began his collection of adventure novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, Alexandre Dumas, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Daniel Defoe. I spent an entire Saturday utilizing a short ladder and a long rope to climb a crabapple tree and nail a board to a fork of limbs. There I could sit and read, ensconced away from my siblings. Bees circled my head, but I understood that if I didn’t fear them, they left me alone.
Reading wasn’t an attempt to educate myself. It was my chief escape from a world that, although gorgeous in landscape and rich with mountain culture, didn’t provide what I needed—the promise of adventure, a life beyond the perimeter of hills. I often fantasized that I’d been adopted and had mysterious powers such as flying or teleportation. Books offered the promise of a world in which misfits like me could flourish. Within the pages of a novel, I was unafraid: of my father, of dogs, snakes, and the bully across the creek; of older boys who drove hot rods close enough to make me jump in the ditch; of armed men parked near the bootlegger. If there had been a movie theater or an art gallery, I’d have found solace there. In Appalachia, oddly enough, I had literature.
A new library opened in Morehead. Every Saturday my mother drove to town for groceries, dropped me at the library, and picked me up later. The library had a four-book limit for each person. My solution was to acquire cards in the names of my siblings and the family dog, which allowed me twenty books per week. My first favorite novel was Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh. The primary circumstances of Harriet’s life could not be further removed from mine—she lived in New York City with a nanny and a cook. I’d always identified with protagonists whose adventures stemmed from external circumstances, fantasizing about being Tom Sawyer, Sherlock Holmes, or John Carter. With Harriet M. Welsch, I found someone who created her own internal drama through the recording of her observations. She was more real to me than Tarzan, her life grounded in ways similar to mine. Largely ignored by her parents, she was a loner who wore jeans and sneakers and carried a pocketknife—the same as me. She wandered her neighborhood, interacting with people at a slight remove—exactly as I did. She kept a notebook and spare pens with her at all times.
After finishing the book, I used my allowance to buy a notebook and pens, my first purchase of anything other than comic books and model cars. I resolved to carry pen and paper for the rest of my life and write down my observations, a habit I’ve maintained for nearly fifty years.
To prepare for high school, we began changing classes in the fifth grade. The math and spelling teacher had a homemade paddle, long and skinny, with a carved handle. She employed it more than anyone, always on boys. An odd tradition emerged of signing your name on the paddle after she beat you. I never understood this and refused to sign it, although she hit me often. She administered punishment in the hall, where the errant student leaned forward and placed his hands against the wall. She stood behind him and swung her paddle as if it were a baseball bat.