Page 35 - Always Virginia

Always Virginia 23

went to check their traps before school, they had caught a skunk.
Needless to say the smell did not get off their shoes before school
and one of the nuns said to John, “John, you smell like skunk.”
And he said, “You’ll get used to it, Sister.” John was my brother
who became a priest. My Daddy and brothers always went coon,
opossum, and etc. hunting at night and had a very good hunting
dog. My brother Jimmie always made cornbread with bacon strips
in it for the hunting dog. Jimmie who was the second oldest after
John, see, turned out to be the owner and cook at Day’s Café, his
famous little restaurant in Carrollton.
Daddy and John and Jimmie would put the skins of their ani-
mals on boards and dry them in the two big rooms we had upstairs
that weren’t used for living quarters where we used to store a few
bushels of good Calhoun apples and Christmas toys (which my
brothers used to sneak in and play with before Christmas). They
sold the animal skins. Daddy did have a fur made for my Mom and
older sister, Norine, then and many years later one matching fox fur
each for me, my Mom, and sister, and sisters-in-law, Mildred and
Rosemary, but he didn’t hunt these latter foxes which he bought.
They also went squirrel hunting all the time (in season) and
Daddy took me one day and we got five squirrels. You had to be
very quiet in the woods so you wouldn’t scare them away. So Daddy
had me stay back and he went a few yards further, but I was right
behind him and he asked me “why” and I said, “Daddy, there’s a
snake up there.” We had lots of snakes in Calhoun County and
many times they were in our yard, because they’d come in on a
wagon with the farmers. My Daddy, being a strict Irish Catholic,
got a piece of some kind of tree limb, burned it, and with the ash
part made a cross on our arm every St. Patrick’s Day to keep us
from getting snake-bitten—an old Irish custom, based on St. Pat-
rick driving all the snakes out of Ireland. My family besides being
Catholic has always been Democrats.
I liked to work in the yard, and would surprise my Daddy and
pull all the weeds or when he’d come home from his U.S. Rural