August 2019
In 1950 I had a puppy, the first of many, and was cradling it in my arms when I saw Dad drive in from the street. I put the dog down and ran to greet him. He gave me a wave and seconds later the dog was crushed to death under his tires. He apologised to me but in the same breath told me the dog had been killed because I had not been careful enough. It was the style of thinking I hated and feared and later came to use to my own ends. When he was dying, when my father was dying, I remember thinking that perhaps he should have been a little more careful. Maybe I’d have had fewer dogs and he would have been better mourned.
In those early summers I would go to Mississippi to stay with my grandfather. By then he was in semi-retirement on what was euphemistically known as a county work farm. It was actually a horrid catch-all for the physically and mentally indigent as well as a small prison, a poor house, quarters for the aged, and a dairy farm. It was there also that the county’s stray dogs were attended to. A pipe from the exhaust of the truck that gathered them up was stuck in an inlet in a box and in 10 minutes or so the dogs were gone. Such, without any explanation of why, was the tenor of my early summers. There was neatness and order, there were mules and barns full of soft-eyed Jersey cattle and there was easy death.
My parents would put me on a cross-country bus in the care of the driver, as was the custom with children traveling alone through the South in those days. I would be handed from driver to driver along with instructions and eventually, my dozen mother-made sandwiches and bag of cherries gone, would fetch up in Greenwood, Mississippi smelling of diesel and ready to be loosed on the farm.
My grandfather would be there waiting, always, sitting in a round green GMC pickup wearing a big Colt pistol and wrapped in mystery and romance. On the way back to the farm we often came across people who needed shooting, for instance people who turned in front of us without signalling. But he would never shoot anybody for me no matter how deserving they appeared to me, although once in the evening after he had stopped at a supper club for a few minutes he did poke his pistol out the window and squeeze off two huge booms and sheets of flame. God, I loved him.
I had the run of this bizarre farm and was made the keeper of the mules right up to the time I figured out how to catch them. With the harnessing skills of an older cousin we got them hitched to a huge farm wagon and took them for a short test run, our driving skills coming from observing the Great Stage Robberies on the silver screen. In the process of fine tuning everything during an early speed run we got a little close to about 50 yards of fence that came down with surprising ease and got me demoted to keeper of the chickens.
The good parts of those summers were wading through the rich smelling deep cribs of feed-corn, finding eggs in hidden places, making sling shots which were not called sling shots, learning to understand the speech of people who had not had teeth in their heads for 50 years, and staying close to those immense darty mules, all ears and breath and always out of reach.
There was an ancient black woman there, I don’t remember now whether because she was old and poor, or old and poor and tubercular. In her dotage she was convinced I was her son, and there was nothing amiss in that logic to me as a black nanny was raising me. This toothless and often incoherent old woman would smile and laugh and natter away at me by the hour while she wove crude potholders by hand. They were shirts she told me and she gave them to me to keep off de chill. Almost every day it was 95 degrees by the time I sought her shade and gentle company and I’ve always been glad that while her mind played some not so pleasant tricks on her as well, it at least let her be cool.
One day after exhausting the possibilities of the corn cribs, barns, lots, chicken houses and the big main kitchen, asking questions until they said they thought they heard someone calling me, after peeking into the cells where the road gang was kept, and supposedly giving wide berth to where the tuberculosis people lived, I sought out my old friend. At the porch of her building they told me she was gone.
“Gone where?”
“Gone,” they said.
After lunch that day I saw all the blacks on the place, even the ones with leg irons, following the wagon and team slowly across cracked and fallow ground to a distant corner of a field that was too alkaline to be of much use. I followed along at a distance walking from stripling pecan tree to tree, rattling the little fences around each tree as I walked by wondering why such care had been taken to protect trees that had never been alive in my memory.
These people were singing and crying and I hung back away from them. As the box came off the wagon and was lowered onto and then into the ground I realised that my friend was in it. It also dawned on me what had happened to my uncle whose funeral I had attended two years earlier and I remember wondering if anybody was careful enough.
When I was yet a tyke, this grandfather retired from the Mississippi penal system and moved to our ranch in Oklahoma to raise chickens and to be near one of his sons. Even though being a prison warden had surely deadened a good deal of his humanity, I think the move should be considered lateral at very best….have you ever been in a sheet-iron chicken house with 3000 chickens in Oklahoma in the summer? Makes you long for something closer to breathable air. Whatever the case, when he was in his early 70s he moved his wife and his stuff and he was suddenly an Okie Chicken Farmer.
Part of the bureaucratic process in moving from Mississippi to Oklahoma is the need to get an Oklahoma driver’s license. Grandad still had that immense GMC truck that he knew would be difficult to parallel park as part of the driving test, so he took his wife’s car, a small Chevrolet sedan. Once he finished the written test (with flying colors he always told us) the trooper got in Grandad’s car which was parked facing the licensing agency’s building and said, “OK, let’s go.”
Grandad pulled the shift lever up to the familiar reverse position, looked back over his right shoulder and stepped on the gas…REVERSE in his truck, but DRIVE in his wife’s automatic-transmission car. He shot forward across the sidewalk and knocked the corner of the Highway Patrol Building completely off! While the dust and steam were still in the air and the bricks littered the sidewalk, before the trooper could say a word, my grandad shouted, “Now just hold on: a farm-to-market license is all I need!”
And they gave him one. According to my family’s house rules, I never rode with him and have all my life been a little leery of elderly drivers.
This morning, Scott, my mentor, flying instructor, editor, fellow Texan and friend of many years emailed me saying that he and his wife were at sea between Sweden and Finland and that while the Scandinavians were not as boisterous as the Portuguese, he and Alex were enjoying their cruise ship and now have a butler named Pascal. A butler? I’ve never had a butler. I’d like a butler. Why couldn’t I have a butler?…all these thoughts were racing through my 74 year old mind as I got in the car, pushed the gate opener button on my key ring, looked in the rear-view mirror, turned over my right shoulder, stepped on the gas and knocked the partly opened gate off its track…dust and bricks everywhere; no steam.
What is the moral here? I forget.