We bought an old house in Tennessee. It is not as old as the house up the street that was once reportedly used as a stop in the underground railroad prior to the Civil War, but it has a history. Our friend Jim’s grandparents used to live in the house, and he still lives nearby. He drives past every day. He stopped in with his sister Pat, to meet the new owners of their family’s house. That is how we got acquainted with some the original owners. Jim’s son Danny is the local newspaper publisher and the bedroom upstairs that I use as my office was once Danny’s bedroom when he was a kid. I find that an interesting coincidence.
Aulsie was the family matriarch. She seems to have ruled the family with an iron fist. Aulsie is as far back as we can find as an original owner of the house. She owned about 70 acres on this lot and accumulated land by marrying husbands. Three by our count, and she outlived them all. Our new friends brought us pictures of the house many years ago as well as pictures of Aulsie, who was an old woman before any photos were taken of her. The stories about Aulsie lacked affection, but gave you a kind of a healthy respect for her and a hope she wasn’t still around listening in. One of the pictures was of Aulsie and couple of her old lady friends sitting in the living room, each with a cigar in their mouth.
Pat relates that she was a young girl when she remembered seeing Aulsie on the front porch with a pistol on her lap. Seems someone was shooting frogs in the pond and the old woman was going to put an end to it. When Pat was a teenager, she was staying with her grandmother and snuck out of the house with a couple friends to join some boys swimming at the pond. Aulsie told Pat’s dad that “the boys had no pants on and had whiskey bottles in their pockets.” Her dad was very mad and gave her “what fer” and so she stormed back to grandma Aulsie’s house to defend her honor. She found herself looking at Aulsie, down the barrel of a shotgun.
Her Uncle Garfield lived up on top of the hill in an old log cabin and was the local drunk. Her dad and Garfield would raise a hog each summer and butcher it in the fall for meat. Garfield would trade his hog for cases of beer and stay drunk for weeks. They would send eight-year-old Pat up to find out if he was dead or just still drunk.
Pat and her husband moved into the old farmhouse when they were first married. Her last recollection of Garfield was watching him come down the hill one day while she was eight months pregnant. She picked up the shotgun and walked out on the porch where she dared him to come closer because he was not in range yet. He looked at her and said, “you would really shoot me, wouldn’t you”? She said yes, and he turned around and headed back up the hill.
Life could be rough out in the backwoods Tennessee country and girls learned to be tough to survive.
