Part 3: Growing up Quick and Mean
Perhaps my father was not of right mind, or a fair amount of alcohol abetted him the night I was born, but without explanation, on November 15th, 1855 I was named after my great-grandmother. Though this is the origin of my pain, my bastard father managed to compound a series of bad decisions when he abandoned my mother and me, only three years later. I was cursed for the rest of my life. He left nothing for us; no money, no food, and certainly no fatherly guidance for a growing young boy. The only thing that my daddy ever did leave us was an old guitar and an empty bottle of booze.
Growing up was quick for me. I became a man without knowing how to be one, and much earlier than most. I fought almost every day learning better how to brawl well before I could ride a horse. It was safe to say if my mother wasn’t dragging me out of the schoolhouse three times in one week, we were having a good week. In the heart of Texas, there was not a place for a boy like me. I challenged everything, especially their all-loving religion often asking myself and others, how a Just God could do this to a boy and still be considered “Just”. A fair answer was never offered nor concluded. We moved a lot, and each town we lived in seemed to mirror the last, a bane for both of us. We were judged everywhere we went, with the fury of the good book knocking us further and further out of the Lone Star state, and causing my mother an enormous amount of torture and pain. It is not good for a woman to be without a man who occupies her house, and she was regularly scolded for not being married. Her anxiety and probably my wild ways eventually led to her failed heart. Without faith, parents, or any friends, I soon became more suppressed from the public eye dipping further into the shadows for many years.
My name and my story traveled from town to town to hide my shame. I worked relentlessly after my mother passed wherever I could wrangle cattle, help in the stables, or brawl in a bar for money. I worked my way all over the south, but eventually ended up in Tennessee, today, in Gatlinburg at this old saloon in a street of mud. The years of pain, the death of a withered and broken mother taken too young, and the hatred for my abandoned youth filled my veins.