Stormy Present

This was the way it seemed to Sherrill Poague . . . and so, against her conscience, she climbed out from her bedroom window and went to meet the stranger . . ..

The moon cast a ghostly light across her path. These took on frightening shapes; low bushes seemed like crouching beasts. Then something soft and evil brushed across her ankles and she almost screamed, until she recognized Tabby, her cat . . ..

"Was Tabby, too, out to meet a Tom? Was she, too, hating to go, yet drawn by forces beyond the control of her - beast or human?"

It was dark beneath the chestnut tree, but she knew he was there. She stepped into the darkness . . . Little did she know she had been seen and her father would find out.

Again and again the lash came down . . . but she did not cry out. She had dared to scorn her father’s will . . . and now she dared to scorn his wrath, though his blows brought pain beyond endurance . . ..

His was the stern and unwilling way of mountain men . . . and he had promised his daughter to the widowed preacher twice her age to be wed. He expected obedience . . . not her secret meeting by night with a handsome stranger.

His arm grew weary. Slowly she straightened. For a time they faced each other in silence and then his was the back that bent, the eyes that faltered, and from his arrogant lips came those humble words "I be sorry, my daughter."

The stranger that she met that night and took the beating for came for her when he heard about it and offered to take her away from there. Would she leave with him or would she stay?

The hills held her captive . . . a stranger set her free.

My father was very strict and many times I had my backside whipped with a miner’s belt. Being a man of 5’ 11" and 240 pounds of solid meat, he didn’t realize how hard he could hit. In later years, he would have been put in jail for child abuse, but I thought that that was the way it was. I stayed away from him as much as I could and so did my sister.

By the time I started high school, we had done well enough to own our house. It cost close to 1100 dollars and I thought we were so rich and that we were getting up in the world. Little did I know that we were still poor. Dad worked at several mining towns as a machinist and electrician. In spite of his strictness, I thought he was quite a man even if I was frightened of him. Mother was easygoing, but had a look that made a boy ashamed of himself without saying a word.

I left the hills, during the Korean War in 1951, for four years and returned home for almost a year. I married and left again for Chicago in search of work. There was so little work around my home area that almost all of the boys and girls left for the big cities in search of work. I thought, all along, that the hills would be there for me all my life, but it could not be.

My wife and I remained in Chicago for 33 years raising 5 children before moving back to the hills, retiring from Teletype Corporation.