The Red Flannel Rag

for his buddies when they came to visit. He mounted a basketball goal on the side of the

chicken house taught me to shoot the ball and to do left and right hook shots. He was my

guard, so I learned to move fast to get around him. In high school, although I was not very

tall, I was the top scorer on the girls’ basketball team because of my left and right hook shots

and my speed.

Aunt Goldie’s daughter, Joyce, taught me how to tie a thread around a June bug’ s

head and let it fly around all day at the end of the string. After she finished school and got a

job, Joyce took me to my first movie, “Cinderella” and later to my first musical movie,

“Oklahoma.” She married a young man from Hopkins Gap named Eugene Cr awford, so she

never changed her last name. They had been married about two years when there was a

terrible accident. Joyce, Eugene, and my cousin Tucker Morris were driving by our house

one November day. It was deer hunting season, so Eugene had a loaded rifle in the back

seat of the car. He asked Tucker to unload the gun. As he ejected the shells from the gun,

Joyce stepped out of the car. The gun went off, and she was shot through the right knee.

I heard the car drive up in front of the house and heard Joyce’s little girl, Barbara,

calling for her momma as she saw Joyce step out of the car; but when the shot rang out, and

I heard Joyce scream, for a moment I changed the scene in my head and before my eyes. It

was not Joyce who had been shot, but a nother cousin that I was not as close to and didn’t

love as much as I did Joyce.

Eugene grabbed Joyce, threw her into the car, and rushed her into Harrisonburg to

the hospital. She lost a lot of blood and eventually lost her foot to gangrene and then the

rest of her leg had to be amputated above the knee.

After the car rushed off to the hospital, I noticed a puddle of blood, flesh, and fat on

the ground where she had been shot. My mother, pregnant with my little brother, was

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