My paternal grandfather passed away when I was 18. I don’t remember going to the funeral, although I must have. I know that I didn’t attend the graveside service. The cemetery was within sight of my house, and I sat on the back deck and watched from there. It was a nice sunny spring day, not a cloud in the sky.
As the coffin was lowered into the ground, there was a clap of thunder.
I know it was thunder. I eliminated the possibility that it had been blasting at one of the nearby strip mines. These shook the ground, and sometimes threw up a cloud of debris. It wasn’t that. Nor was it any other phenomena that was easily explained.
It was one loud clap of thunder, and then silence.
When the burial party returned home, my mother asked, “Did you hear that thunder?” It was a rhetorical question. We all heard it. There wasn’t any speculation or spiritual debate. It was a sign. My grandfather had been accepted into the next world.
Some years later, my cousin’s father (who was technically also a cousin, but due to age was regarded like an uncle) also passed. We had the same experience at his grave. Warm clear day. No sign of rain. A single thunderclap as the coffin was lowered.
My cousin who had been in attendance at my grandfather’s grave found this gratifying. Its fair to say that our relationships with these men, and the paths they had walked in the world, were complicated. And yet all of us took these signs as a favorable portent. The individual had received life everlasting.
I should clarify that I was not deeply religious and certainly not Christian at this time in my life, nor do I think I really ever have been. But in rural Eastern Kentucky, the biblical is interwoven into the culture. Like the ever-present tobacco and coal smoke, you can’t help but take some of it in.
I have seen this same grandfather go cut a fork from a sapling tree, hold it out before him, and where the tip would dip, water would be found. He did his dowsing for the construction company that employed him as a carpenter and woodworker. He pointed. They drilled. That was how they situated wells on new homesites.
Modern superstitions such as a black cat crossing your path are possibly Medieval in origin. Cats in general were considered ill portents in early Islam. The witch’s cat was frequently cast as the devil in disguise in witch hunter manuals like the Maleus Malificarum.
Poor Bast earned such a bad reputation that feral cat populations were eradicated in many places, leading to a growth spurt in the rodent population of Europe’s cities. The fleas on the rodents carried the germ Yersinia pestis, which spread rapidly through the population. In the end one-quarter to one-third of the people died, leaving whole villages empty of life. We call it the Black Death. Better they should have kept the cats.
No one considered this the least out of the ordinary. Nor was the thunder roll that sent him off unexpected. He had some power about him, though he was a lay preacher in the Hardshell Baptist church. He had the intimate knowledge of nature that comes from relying on it for your food, medicine, and shelter. He knew what every kind of tree was, from bark, leaf, nut, and sap. He knew the wild herbs, and we routinely collected them. American ginseng was part of our autumn harvest, and would go to buy Christmas presents for the grandkids.
He was, generally speaking a good man, but he was also a hard one, and that comes from a hard life in a hard place. I learned things from him, but I can’t say that I ever really knew him. I experienced him when we went hunting or foraging or fishing. I didn’t care for many of those activities so perhaps the distance was as much my fault. In any case, there’s things the older me would have liked to have asked him. I know I have spent much time looking for things in books that I could have listened to when he was around.
Every generation we get away from the dead we lose some of who they were. My children never knew him. He is a complete abstraction. He’s a name for a man in a picture. I had the same experience of my great-grandfather, who was, apparently, the only other left-handed person in memory of our family.
Left-handedness is one of those “signs” in many cultures. Often viewed as evil, or unnatural, it’s a minor genetic variation that is frequently suppressed in early childhood. The term “Left-hand path” is almost synonymous with malefic magic and those who practice it. In Latin, the right hand is “dexter” whence emerges our word dexterity. The left hand is sinister. Well, guilty as charged.
Signs and portents are not necessarily magical. Some of them are quite natural, but people either don’t know about them, or they don’t pay attention to them. Those who do then acquire the prestige of a prophet, simply because they looked around. For instance, I can usually tell you when it’s going to rain. There’s an ache in my left ankle that seems to increase a day or so before a front comes through. I am fairly certain that this is the result of a change in barometric pressure, that my arthritic joint picks up as well as a column of mercury. If I also happen to notice the ants are building their hills up higher, and the leaves on the trees seem to be floppy and turned over, I am sure it’s going to come a gulley-washer.
The ants, of course, are responding to some indicator that they sense in the air or the magnetic field of the earth and preparing for the inevitable flooding of their tunnels by dredging. The trees are pulling the fluid out of the leaf that makes them rigid, in order to be less likely to be torn or pulled off by wind. This is probably, again, some response to changes in air pressure that are sensed in the very cells of the plant.
Okay, so it isn’t Doppler radar. But in context, and in the absence of Doppler radar and other prognosticating tools, it was how the wise knew it was time to put up the chickens and get in the house.
There’s a storehouse of lore about many important survival skills that predate modern industrialization and factory-farming. “Planting by the signs” is as old as the hills, as they say, but likely is a mixture of immigrant traditions and indigenous knowledge that survives in a few places still. The “signs” most typically is the phase of the moon, and then the moon at certain times of the year. This was determined to be most propitious so that the chance of a late frost wouldn’t blight the seedlings that just emerged. If you have heard the term “harvest moon” then you know of what I speak. There are interpretations that it meant a moon so bright you could bring in the crops by it, but that is not right. It was the right moon, at the right phase, in the right month. Any later and there’d be frost on the pumpkins, and you would have lost valuable and vital food. You might find this information in a modern Farmers’ Almanac, which was first compiled for this purpose. You’ll find a lot of other omens and signs there as well.
These two birds visited me this year. The white ibis, bird of Thoth, the Mercury of the Egyptians, arrived on a February morning. That night my wife’s mother passed away. The black crow that came and sat on my balcony arrived a day after my father had died. These can, of course, be seen as coincidence. But I watch the birds more closely now.
As death was always near in mountain life, there were signs to look for. Remember that these people were descended from those who knew the cry of the Banshee or the Wailing Woman. The caterwaul was a creature, like Texas’s jackalope, that has evolved into a tall tale. Originally as a kind of Banshee spirit, its mournful cry presaged a death in the community. I have heard a wildcat screech at times that sounds like the keening of a woman in pain or fear. This is the beast they speak of. Sometimes, of course, it’s the call of a screech owl, echoing over “holler and hill” that mutates into the warning of impending loss. So too, was the call of the whippoorwill. Owls, of course, are birds of ill omen anyway, companion of witches and creatures of the night. But any bird that flew into the house meant that someone under that roof would die soon.
Shooting stars are another sign of bad things to come, at least in the area where I grew up. A meteor was reason to believe death or hard times were on the way. Closer to earth ghost lights and “fireballs” were often seen in the deep woods at night. While many of these may have been optical illusions, caused by atmospheric conditions and the moon or even terrestrial campfires, some of the older generation swore they’d been chased by them. They were often seen near so called “Indian mounds” like the barrow wights of English lore. These earthworks, if indeed they were not naturally formed, carried their own mystique, so the association of protective and malevolent spirits with them is not unusual. There are prehistoric mounds to the western part of the state, and northward in Ohio, so the presence of smaller ones in Eastern Kentucky is not impossible. Unlike their European counterparts, most are believed to have been ceremonial rather than funerary. Yet the spirits linger.
As we moved into cities and towns, and got electric light to drive off the night and weather forecasts on the color TV and geological surveys to drill our wells, much of the mystery and wonder of the old ways quietly slipped into the nothing. I am probably the last generation to have some direct connection with the tales and experiences that give meaning to “superstitions” that may go back to Medieval times or earlier. My children and their peers, and the generation that is coming up, can only respond to it as a recorded abstraction to be read about on the Internet.
Other oracles were based on random outcomes of coin tosses or dice rolls. In the case of the former, a set number of tosses were combined and read as a pattern or value. This value was then looked up in a list. Later, yarrow sticks were then shaken in a bundle. The sticks that fell out gave the meaning. This is known as the I Ching, and is one of the most popular Chinese methods of predicting the future.
While there are certainly still wise folk in the hills, like Byron Ballard, who are recording and bringing forward these practices, there is a difference between living it and reading about it. Like the coal smoke on a brisk fall evening, you breath it in, and it becomes part of you. Otherwise, it’s not the same.
I hope you have found today’s tales worth the telling. I will return next week with more autumn thoughts.