Copyright © 2002 Ohio University Press.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0-8214-1405-4
Chapter One
THE CUMBERLAND
LIKE THE Valley Queen, the old town of Burnside, where my father was born, is under water. The Cumberland River was dammed to create Lake Cumberland, and the hilltops now are islands. Water skiers and houseboats glide over the surface, while down below, my father's old house, the town jail, and the steamboat landing sink deeper beneath the water and the years.
When my father was in a talking mood, he'd recall some of his past. All his memories were hard: the men spitting tobacco juice on the boys' legs at the saw mill in Burnside; a flock of angry geese taller than he that came at him, clacking their beaks and beating their big wings; he and the other kids racing past the cemetery at dark; long hours in the poultry house candling eggs—holding them up to the light to find the ones with blood spots.
He and his seven brothers and sisters were expected to work. Though the family often took in people stranded in Burnside by low water, John and Charity Coomer, his parents, were not wealthy. My father remembered lunch as "greens and a bit of grease wrapped in bread" and joked that the family meals were "dried apples for breakfast, hot water for lunch, and swell up for supper."
In Burnside, my father was always known as Harv, and that's the way I think of him as a boy and young man. I picture him with a mouth ready to demand his rights and his fists up to defend himself. He was small, the middle boy between his elder brother Stafford and his younger brother Joe. He always claimed "the bigger they are, the harder they fall" a creed he lived by, especially on the river where he became a legendary mate who would "fight a buzz saw."
Harv had only a few years of school, always combined with work at the lumberyard or in the poultry house. He drove a stage coach from Monticello to Burnside in his teens. He never saw the Daniel Boone National Forest that is very near his home town: "You can't eat scenery."
Burnside was a busy little place. Formerly a settlement called Point Isabel, it had become a town just four years after Harv was born in 1894. Steamboats lined the landing where the Cumberland and South Fork Rivers met. They were filled with timber, eggs, and poultry going to Tennessee, and they brought in goods like shoes and furniture from Cincinnati, New Orleans, and St. Louis. Besides the lumber mill, there was a grocery store called Matty's, Wagie Singleton's General Store, several drug stores, churches and saloons, and two hotels, including a big frame Victorian called The Seven Gables, where visiting dignitaries and wealthy guests stayed. With all this growth, and a population reaching two thousand, pigs and cows still roamed the streets freely, merely ear-marked by the owner to be protected from theft. Everyone knew everyone else.
Harv's father, the town marshal, supervised the upkeep of the town's wooden sidewalks and dirt roads, pressing his own boys into service, as well as any others he saw loafing. John Coomer saw that no stranger remained in town after sundown. He detained petty offenders a day or two in the tiny wooden jailhouse and escorted more serious criminals to the penitentiary in Cincinnati.
A man respected by everyone, Marshal Coomer was tall and slim and utterly fearless. He dressed in a black frockcoat and wore his black hat at a rakish angle and a silver star on his breast. He walked with a cocky air, ignoring the danger of his job, though gunfights were common: three U.S. marshals were shot to death in one year.
Harv, who idolized his father, was just six years old when John Coomer was shot in the stomach.
The marshal had been called to Tom Smith's barbershop, a little shingled establishment with the old-fashioned red-and-white pole. He found a man named John Satersfield standing over Smith with a gun and Smith on the floor bleeding onto the wisps of hair that he had just cut from a customer. Satersfield started to run, and when commanded to stop, turned and shot Harv's father, who, in turn, shot and killed Satersfield. John Coomer survived his own wounds, but after this incident, he temporarily left the police and worked on the steamboats that navigated the Cumberland River from Burnside to Nashville.
Harv began hanging around the river. His first experiences on the Cumberland were on log booms, great pens of lumber that had been cut in the hills and left in the river by country people and paid for via mason jars left along the banks with the names of the cutters. Harv walked across the river on these logs, some floating as high as four feet above the water's surface. The work of getting the corralling staves upriver to the sawmill for shipping on the trains was dangerous. The hand-cranked windlasses employed to pull staves from the water could cut a person in two. The water was cold—legend had it that the river where the South Fork and the Cumberland met had no bottom.
With his father on the steamboats, Harv begged to go along and work. John Coomer forbade it, but Harv would cut school and sneak on board the boat his father was on. When it pulled away from the landing, he would pop out from wherever he was hiding. "There I would be," he recalled of those days. "My father just had to put up with me. So finally he just said to me to quit school and go to night watchman."
Harv worked on the packets running between Burnside and Nashville, the Burkesville, the Rowena, the Celina, the City of Burnside, the Patrol, and the Crescent among them. They were typical steamboats of the day, shallow-bottomed, wooden, and prone to fire and holes knocked in their hulls. They navigated packed tight with freight—groceries, hardware, plows, rope, corn—to be discharged at Nashville. There, they would load up with fertilizer, salt, sugar, clothing, dry goods, fencing, and oil.
The Cumberland was a dangerous river. Smith's Shoals at Burnside was seven miles long, and so many coal barges sank there that coal shipping died out. There were Greasy Creek Shoals and Belnap Island where the water was so swift and the channel so narrow a boat coming upstream could not make it through; it would have to be pulled along with a rope.
At Wild Goose Shoals the current was so swift it would hit a boat bow and stern so hard it seemed as though the boat would go right over the wing dams built in the water. "Crazy thing. It would scare people to death to do it," Harv said.
Alma, Harv's older sister, was married to a steamboat man who died working on the Cumberland.
The river's shallow stretches made the work hard. Sometimes cargo would have to be pitched overboard to lighten the load. Wire fencing was thrown into the water and carried down by the swift current to a spot where the men could retrieve it with spike poles. Hogs and cattle were occasionally driven overboard to swim ashore, then picked up fifty or seventy-five feet farther along when the boat reached deep water again.
As night watchman, Harv had a lot of responsibility for a young man. He had to keep fires going in the pilothouse and engine room of the boat he was serving; each day he filled some forty lanterns with oil and assisted the mate in the loading and unloading of freight. While the mate stayed on the boat, Harv took over on the hill and supervised the roustabouts handling the big loads. There might be a thousand coops of chickens, eight hundred cases of eggs, three hundred hogs, five hundred head of cattle.
Harv was never content to stay in one place or one job (we found this out living with him). He convinced his father to give him the higher-ranking and more responsible job of second mate. No license was required, just some knowledge as night watchman, which Harv had. As second mate he stood watch by himself and oversaw the loading and unloading of cargo. The cargo had to be placed aboard correctly because the boats were of such light material that, as Harv said, "You can throw a leak in them very readily." He took his duties very seriously: "It is just the knack of a good mate knowing when there is any strain in the boat by just walking up the deck. He can feel it under his feet. It is just inner knowledge that when you walk up the deck if there is a little strain in the boat, you will feel it."
Harv was nineteen years old. His brother Stafford was also on the steamboats by now, and twelve-year-old Joe was agitating to go along. Harv's father had returned to his job as marshal.
Because of the shooting in Smith's barbershop, John Coomer decided not to carry a gun. The killing of another man, and his own wounds, made him very much against firearms—a hatred of guns that was passed down to his sons. Joe would have nothing to do with them, and Harv always said more people were killed by "unloaded" weapons than by loaded ones.
Every day Harv's father went to the Burnside depot and met the train from Cincinnati to see that there were no troublemakers on it. On August 13, 1913, a friend, Josh Tarter, staggered off the train, drunk. He had gone to Somerset, where there was an open saloon, to get whiskey. Marshal Coomer told Tarter he would have to go downtown for a while to sober up in the jail. Tarter was from a pugnacious clan, but Harv's father had no reason to think an order to "sleep it off" in the little wooden cell would cause Josh to turn vicious. He was taken completely off guard when, as he was led into the cell, Tarter pulled a pistol from his pocket and shot the Marshal in the neck.
Charity was at the jail, bringing lunch to the men, and John asked her to run home and bring him his pistol from his dresser drawer. Tarter was running toward the Cumberland River, and the marshal meant to catch him. When Charity came back with the gun, she found her husband could not stand. He was too injured.
At the river, Tarter asked Ben Brown, the ferry operator, to take him across to the Slab Town side and the road back to Somerset. Brown was unaware of what had happened and proceeded to take Tarter across the Cumberland. Meanwhile, Marshal Coomer, holding his own blood back with a towel, deputized a posse of Louis Ramsey, Lum Evans, Fred Perdue, Loge Hamm, and John Fitzgerald. The men ran to the river. Seeing Tarter on the other side, they called for Brown to return him to their side of the water, but Tarter pulled his weapon and held it on the ferry operator, saying, "I'm closer to you than they are." The posse opened fire, and Tarter was shot in the lower part of his right arm. Tarter shot and killed John Fitzgerald, who died there on the river bank.
John Coomer was brought home bleeding and weak but not dead. With the wound still festering, he even took a bank robber to the jail in Cincinnati. On returning home, he weakened further. He sat about the house, and would beat at his chest. For six weeks the family heard him coughing in his room.
Meanwhile, Tarter had gotten away. John asked that if found he not be prosecuted, for fear Harv and Stafford would get into a fight with the Tarters and get themselves killed. He worried that there would be no one to take care of his wife and young children. Edna, Ina, Sarah, and Jewel were still at home.
On October 1, 1913, at the age of fifty-two, Marshal John Coomer died. To follow his request, the doctor described the cause of death as "unknown."
Charity came to the children and told them their father was dead. She and the girls washed and dressed the body, and the three boys were sent down to Singleton's general store to buy a coffin. The boys were told to get cleaned up, polish their shoes with blacking from the stove, put on their Buckeye hats. They did as they were told and helped the men from the town carry the coffin to the cemetery. No one cried. The family stood stoically as the father was lowered into the Kentucky earth where he was born.
Chapter Two
COCK OF THE WALK
HARV USED TO say, "I believe in one thing and one thing only: the Almighty Dollar!" Of course, this was during the Depression, when one of the biggest problems in life was where our next meal was coming from. But money was always important.
After Harv's father died, the Coomers had little. John left a widow with four daughters and an adolescent boy to raise. Charity and Sarah, the oldest daughter still at home, had to go to work at the Seven Gables hotel. They lit fires in the guest rooms and washed towels and sheets.
Harv was still working on the river and, along with his brother Stafford, was sending what money he could to the family. In order to
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Excerpted from THE RIVER HOME by Dorothy Weil. Copyright © 2002 by Ohio University Press. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.