Appalachian Heritage

Mama's Burden by Juanita Knuckles Pence Mama had told us that she was baptized in a river of floating ice, but all that meant to us, as children, was that it surely must have been dreadfully cold. But men, one day, after we had matured she told us more. "Sit down, children," she said, "there's a few things I think you should know. Of course, you already know how I was baptized, but let me tell you how that come about. To tell you the truth, I'd been wanting to get baptized for quite a spell, even when I was much younger, but seems like something alius got in the way. It finally reached the place where I couldn't put it off. So, here I was, getting baptized in the dead of winter not Jong before your brother Mason was born. "Now there was some that wondered why I'd do such a thing, being as how I was in the family way, and they worried about me riding a horse thirty miles over these mountains to get to where I could be baptized. I kept on telling them that I'd be alright, that the Lord would take care of me. "But first, you must understand that back when I was growing up in Perry County, they didn't have regular church on Sunday. It was a long time between meetings. Just ever now and then they'd call one, and everybody'd go. They'd come from as far away as Hazard and Hyden. Sometimes they'd be as many preachers as say maybe six or seven, and they'd preach all day. Your Uncle Ira Combs was my favorite, but still I never 17 did get baptized. Just kept putting it off for first one thing and another. Then something happened that changed my life forever." Here Mama shifted her position to sit a little taller. A hint of a smile played around her blue eyes, and she brushed back the loose strand of hair which had fallen over her forehead, much like she might have done had she been looking in a mirror. Pinching her dress just above her knees, she modestly placed it lower on her legs, smoothed it out, and went on with her story. "On a warm summer day sister Ida and me was riding our horses down the road when we met up with two strangers riding their horses. We spoke to them but kept right on a going. It turned out they was brothers, and I just have to say that one of them was the best looking man I had ever seen. I learned later that he told his brother he was going to marry that girl with the long blond hair. He was talking about me. "Well, sure enough, wasn't long, just before my seventeenth birthday, we got married and he brought me here to Red Bird. I didn't know no one here and times got lonesome. Seems like the mountains just growed right into each other. Wasn't spread out like they was in Perry. For many years, and several children, we lived up on a hillside, back off the main road. Couldn't see anyone coming or going, and there wasn't a house in sight. Didn't have no Sunday church services on Red Bird at that time. Like it was in Perry, I went when a meeting was called, if I could, that is. Never got baptized though. See, I wanted your Uncle Ira to baptize me, and he never come over in here to do any preaching, and I studied how I'd work it out to go where he was. "Then one day word come that there'd been an awful killing just down the road a piece from the house. Poor old Bige had been shot down without a word of warning. Poor feller. They scooped up the blood where he bled and died, and buried it in a rock pile just up from that beech-tree at the bend of the road. Many's the time I walked on the other side of the road...