My Life ....Part 4

So...
We got the cabin finished and moved in. My mother learned to cook entire meals on a wood stove or over a fire in a block pit outside in the clearing. This was where I learned to cook. To this day, I make some of the yummiest meals over a campfire.
We put a kerosene lamp on the table, one on the counter, and mounted four on the walls, one on each wall, and this was the sum total of the light in our house.
That fall I started in the new school. The craziest part of that was the fact that our cabin sat directly on the Pennsylvania/New York border. It was determined that since my bed was in the PA side of the cabin, I had to go to school in PA. Now, the NY school was about 15 minutes bus ride away. The PA school, over an hour bus ride. The bus could not make it up our hill, of course, so I walked a mile down to the bus stop every morning. In the beginning I did not mind the walk, since after about half a mile I met up with a few other kids that lived below us on the hill. It wasn't so bad. At least, until they found out how we lived.
Once word got around that we lived like the pioneers, and the kids saw my cheap, ugly clothes that were all my mother could afford because of the hours my father spent in the bar every day, life became hell. It got even worse after the day I overheard a group of girls talking about something called "Charlie's Angels" and a woman named Farrah Fawcett. I had no idea who they were talking about, so, wanting to make friends with these girls I decided to join the conversation.
"Who is Farrah Fawcett?" I asked. A shocked silence followed my question, and I knew I had done something wrong. Once they found out that I had no clue as I had no TV because we had no electricity, things got very bad in school.
From that day in the beginning of third grade I literally had no friends. Nobody spoke to me except to say something nasty. Even some of the teachers were mean.
Kids on our hill were particularly vicious. They threw rocks and sticks at me, continually taunting me as I walked up the hill toward home.
Once I got home, I had to get the fire going for dinner, make sure there was enough water for the night, do my homework and peel potatoes for dinner.
When my parents came home every night the same thing happened... my mother would walk in first, and she and I would look at each other. From her eyes, I would know whether my little brothers and I could safely stay in the house, or if I had to take them out into the woods away from the cabin to play until my father passed out on the couch and my mom called us in for dinner. He frequently got violent with her, so I would take the boys further away so they would not hear what was happening and get scared.
It was my job to protect them. No matter how rotten and horrible they were (aren't all little brothers?) they were my responsibility and nobody would hurt them. Ever.
I did not realize how good things were until they got much, much worse.