The Red Flannel Rag

Mavis Shifflett

Another character that was important among my Hopkins Gap kinfolk was Aunt

Mavis, my daddy’s sister. She was known in Hopkins Gap and my immediate family as the

best worker and the ugliest person on earth. She was so ugly that I would forget how ugly

she was until I saw her the next time. Then I would catch myself saying, “My God, she’s

ugly.” Aunt Mavis set the bottom line for ugly in Hopkins Gap. It was often said that she

was as ugly as homemade soap, homemade sin, or homemade soup. She was as ugly as a

mud fence, a scarecrow, a hound, as a can of worms, a plastic bag full of assholes, and sheep

shit on a rocky mountain. Aunt Mavis’s ugliness could cause unusual changes such as: she

was so ugly, she would make a freight train take a dirt road and her ugliness could stop the

hiccoughs. Others indicated that she looked like she had been hit by a dump truck full of

ugly or beaten with an ugly stick. It was suggested that she must be a twin because one

person could not be as ugly as she was. Her ugliness got in the way of her daily living as it

was said that she was so ugly she had to sneak up on a tin cup to get a drink of water.

Finally, she was never well liked in her family; because she was so ugly the doctor slapped

her mother when she was born.

Although Aunt Mavis was ugly, she married a very handsome man. They had one

child, and fortunately she got all her features from her daddy.

Since Aunt Mavis was Grandpa Austin and Grandma Molly’s daughter, she

occasionally visited them on Sunday afternoons. If the weather was nice, she sat on the

front porch with Grandpa Austin. John and I were often sitting in the car and had a good

view of the porch up through the front yard. We always knew we would see Grandpa Austin

pee out in the yard, but sometimes we saw things we weren't expecting. When Aunt Mavis

came out on the porch, she pulled her chair over to the porch railing, propped her feet up on

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