Thoughts From the Front Porch

I have a book that gathers dust in the highest reaches of my library. It shares a shelf with Mothercraft and The Idiot’s Guide to Genealogy. And What They Don’t Teach You in Harvard Business School. The title of this book is Alcoholics Anonymous. I climbed up and brought it down today.

I want to find out the reason that some people, when they are drinking, become completely different people. I’ve seen some, who don’t normally talk much, begin to talk a lot more. And some who are shy become sociable. I’ve heard reports of ordinarily generous folks inviting strangers home to the family dinner. But they don’t change fundamentally. They are more like the humorous person who becomes downright hilarious. Their nature is still essentially the same. Each has a consistent character, whether he has had a beer or three, or a half dozen slugs of whiskey. Or not.

I want to know how it is that a kind and decent sober person can transmute into a raging murderous maniacal drunk? And how do the people he hurts or threatens find the strength to forgive him?

Characters in novels are sometimes one-dimensional; the best ones may have depth and breadth. The good people, in a pretty good read, are almost always good. Heroes in books have few faults, and even those are generally minor. Fictional villains are usually perfectly evil. In life, though, we have all the dimensions. No human being is perfect at anything, even wickedness. Some good thought or deed rears its head on occasion. And in reality, even the most thoroughly virtuous will commit a sin or two now and then. But that’s as it should be. What’s virtue if there’s no struggle in it? It’s as empty as courage without fear.

Alcoholics Anonymous, it turns out, is a book about faith and forgiveness. According to its copyright page, it was first published in 1939. A good year for it. The World War and Prohibition seemed to have joined forces to give cocktails a dangerous and sophisticated allure. Whatever caused it, a whole lot of drinking went on in the middle part of the last century. Prohibition removed the protection of legal standards, so that any old booze would do. Most of it was stronger that it had been before, because hoodlums didn’t want to transport milder liquors, heavy with diluting agents. And a good bit of it was homemade and downright poisonous. The result was more addiction to alcohol and more instances of drunken craziness. Prohibition by another name continued on down into the 1960s in our county and produced our share of bootleggers and home distilled spirits of varying potency and questionable potability.

But what about my two questions? Logic could get me through the first one. Chemistry and psychology and biology—they could give me the solution to that first part of the conundrum, if I were smart enough. And so then we’d could puzzle out what forces of nature and spirit and circumstance compelled to Doc come after Eli on Christmas morning of 1945, with an axe.

We wouldn’t even need those sciences to know why Kathleen threw herself between them and came away bloodied and beaten for her trouble. Her motives were simple and instant. She would not let Doc hurt Eli. But I’d have to refer the faith part of the problem to understand how either Kathleen or Eli could ever forgive Doc for his alcohol-induced lapse out of Doc-ness or to understand how they learned to trust him again. But he was human and they were human, and with faith enough and love enough, they just did.

Aunt Nancy remembers that Christmas morning, the first Christmas after Ross was killed by the Japanese on one of those hellish islands in the Pacific. It had been a dreadful, struggling slog through thick grief for her and for every single person she loved. Christmas might have provided a small bright spot, a tiny star of hope on the horizon. But it wasn’t to be.

Nancy was up early. She saw Kathleen come in the door, sobbing, her pink robe and nightgown splattered with blood. That sight itself was terrifying for an eleven-year-old girl, but the story Kathleen told between sobs was worse. Doc had been drinking for days. She’d wanted him to sober up for Christmas when all the family would be together. He wouldn’t listen to reason, and he couldn’t see her family in the shape he was in. And so she’d asked Eli to come and help her.

The only thing she knew to do was cut off Doc’s supply, and so she and Eli set out to find his stash of alcohol and get rid of it. They’d started the day before, on Christmas Eve, in the places he’d be likely to search out as a last ditch effort to get some alcohol into his body. They searched the bathroom and bedrooms and poured out cologne, cough syrup, rubbing alcohol and hair tonic, anything with alcohol as an ingredient. They’d ransacked the kitchen, dining room, and the utility closet and thrown out all kinds of unlikely suspects, but never found where his whiskey was.

So Eli decided to watch where Doc couldn’t see him. On his way home Christmas Eve just after sundown, he’d waited in the woods back of the house. He saw Doc come out  and go to the shed. Eli crept up and got a good look where the stash was hidden and decided to avoid an argument and come back first thing in the morning, before Doc would be awake.

Next morning just after dawn, Kathleen was up drinking coffee and making sweet potato pie to take to Big Mama’s house for the Christmas dinner. She saw from the kitchen window Eli going into the shed and knew he’d found where Doc’s liquor was hidden. She took a deep breath and felt tremendous relief. Eli would take care of it. Doc would have to sober up now.

A half-minute later Doc stumbled through the kitchen, headed for his shed. Kathleen was stunned for a moment, frozen and speechless with apprehension. The jig might be up. Then she thought “Oh, no you don’t” and got her legs to moving. She ran across the yard after Doc, hoping to delay him long enough to let Eli get done with what he’d come to do. But Doc got to the shed seconds before she did. During those long seconds, he saw that Eli had poured out every drop of whiskey he had.

Anger swept over Doc like none he’d ever felt before. He was blind with fury. It was as if  Eli became everyone and everything that had ever controlled Doc’s life from the moment of his birth. He was the symbol for all Doc’s shortcomings, for all he had done, but mostly for all he had failed to do: for his guilt over not going with the boys who went to war, because he wasn’t man enough overrule his parents who’d said “people of our class don’t go to fight;” for watching Ross, a boy of nineteen, go and die; and for being powerless to assuage in some small degree Kathleen’s grief, her family’s grief and his own. His hand found the handle of the axe leaning against the door jamb. In one motion the axe was over Doc’s head and Kathleen had him by his arm. He jerked his elbow back to pull free, and she felt a blow across her face. Blood gushed and Doc dropped the axe in horror. For a second and for the first time in days he was shocked sober, but then he fell, moaning, to ground. Eli pulled Kathleen out of the shed and they ran. They ran all the way home to Eunice.

There were two entire families who had to forgive Doc: Kathleen’s and Eli’s. In the case of Eli’s family, they relied on the rote-learned words of their Christian belief. Antique King James English, spoken in their Southern American dialect. “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” They prayed it and they lived it everyday. They’d forgiven so many trespasses, big and small, down through the years and their forebears had forgiven more.  Doc’s trespass was only another. Eli believed Doc was a good man in the grasp of the devil and his demon rum. He’d seen many a man ruin himself on rotgut. He’d seen ‘em go crazy on bad liquor, high-stepping and trembling with the jake leg, and then dying not long after. Eli prayed daily that God might loose the devil’s grasp on the Doctor.

Eunice was much angrier at first and more frightened than Eli, but she calmed down and went to Kathleen’s aid. Eunice vowed to pray for Kathleen. Even with a houseful of sympathy and a cold cloth on her bloody nose, Kathleen could not stop sobbing. Eunice and Eli decided he’d best take her on home to her mama and daddy.

Kathleen’s daddy was perhaps the sweetest man who ever lived. He loved all children, even the tiny newborns that most men are slightly afraid of. He was so kind-hearted that he hated to spank his own children. Big Mama used to get so mad because he’d laugh and say to her “Why do I need to spank them, when you do it so well?” or “I just leave the spanking to Dolly, because she seems to get so much pleasure out of it.”

He was the first love of Kathleen’s life, though her step-father. Big Daddy was so unlike, she’d been told, that father she didn’t remember. He had taken her into his heart before she was done toddling, right along with her mother. And she was just as important to him. He loved them both. He was an even-tempered man who loved two strong-willed spitfires. So from her earliest memories, Kathleen grew up adored and petted and looked after by Big Daddy. She’s tease her younger sisters by saying “See? I’m Daddy’s favorite.” And he never denied it. He was, as the Psalm says, “slow to anger, rich in kindness.” Along with his easy-going nature, Big Daddy had a quiet, determined, bone-deep strength that lay in wait for trouble.

When Big Daddy saw Kathleen, sobbing and bloody, the anger came. He did not shout. He spoke deliberately and quietly. He was not a big man. He was not a man who wasted words. And he never cussed. I suspect he thought the appropriate moment for cussing had come when he said, “I’ll kick that son of bitch’s ass till his nose bleeds.” Within a few moments, Big Daddy was in Doc’s house, confronting him with his crime. Their conversation was short, but pithy with meaning. Big Daddy made his point directly and with the kind of imperative fortitude needed to penetrate Doc’s fog of shame and alcohol.

“Doc, you like your life?”

Doc looked at the floor, and nodded. “Yes. I do.”

“Well, if you ever lay a hand on Kathleen again, you will lose it.”

Doc nodded again.

Kathleen and her family forgave Doc, after a lot of praying and a length of time. And he never raised a hand in anger to anyone again, until the night he died.

The Right Southern Corner is a series by Sara Rast
Copyright: 2009 Sara Love Rast. All rights reserved.

The Right Southern Corner

Phantom Ultalight

Let me introduce you to the ultralight aircraft; in my qualified opinion the world’s most dangerous toy. That said, it’s also the most fun you can have in public.

Faced with a growing number of folks who wanted to fly but lacked the money and/or skill level to get a Private Pilot license, the FAA created a new category to cover small, personal aircraft that met certain criteria.  They were to be called Ultralights.  Limited to one seat only, their flight is restricted to open, unpopulated areas only.   Any attendant risk is supposed to be confined solely to its pilot.

Further, the entire plane can weigh no more than 254 pounds and carry no more than five gallons of fuel.  Their performance characteristics are also severely limited.   Most are designed to fly at about 50mph or less; as they say, it’s just fast enough to kill you.  In short, ultralights are built for bare-minimum powered flight.  It was into this arena that I eagerly leapt in the early 1980’s.

My bird, an American Aerolights Eagle, was typical of its genre; a bewildering contraption made of dacron sailcloth, aluminum tubing, a maze of cables, and a tiny  Cuyuna snowmobile engine that produced only 18 horsepower, barely enough to get my 185+ pound physique off the ground.

It was a “pusher/canard” configuration, with the familiar tail section replaced by a smaller wing way out front, and the engine mounted to the rear.  From certain angles, such planes look like they’re flying backwards.

The view from most ultralights is tremendous, mainly because there’s no airplane around you.  You can look straight down, and see straight down.  The wind is always in your face, even when there’s a windshield.  All is right with the world when you’re aloft in an ultralight, or so it seems.

One of the really scary parts of ultralight piloting is that your first flight may also be your first solo.  While I’d had plenty  of experience in Cessnas, this thing was in no way similar, so in essence I was about to solo again for the first time.  Now, there’s something that will make you pause at the end of the runway and think a while.

Jerry Smith in a Trainer

It’s hard to describe first solo to folks who’ve never done it.   I’ve seen guys turn around and bring the plane back without ever leaving the ground.  For some, that’s probably a good idea, as once you leave the ground you will return alive only if you do enough things right.

It takes fast, useful recall of what you have been taught beforehand, and a certain meticulous, focused mindset that you don’t know you have until you try it.   No amount of previous discussion can fully prepare you for what can happen once that wing begins producing enough lift to forsake the safety of the ground.  Freezing up is not an option.  Forget first love; this is the big one, folks.

Well, to shorten what could become a long litany of maudlin moanings about the glory of slipping the surly bonds of Earth, let me state simply that my first flight was totally uneventful.  Over the next three years, I was to make scores of other flights, all of which I obviously survived.  Other than losing power and making several emergency landings due to things like a cracked propeller shaft, a broken throttle cable, and running out of fuel (twice), the Eagle and I performed very well together.  Others were not so lucky.

Our first casualty as a kid who occasionally trailered his disassembled plane to our hangar at Talladega Airport.  On this final day of flying, he had managed to damage a crucial part of his plane during assembly.  The affected part finally broke, causing his plane to fold up like a paper fan and plunge about 500′  into the third turn at Talladega Raceway.

Pilots being what we are, none of us dropped out of the program, but we all made a silent pledge to re-double our efforts during pre-flight checkout.  There are no spare parts on most ultralights; the flawless operation of nearly every one of them is necessary for flight.  That’s something to think about when you’re a couple thousand feet off the ground, hanging by nothing more than a child’s swing seat on a nylon strap suspended from a large aluminum tube.

Flying an Eagle

Next to succumb was a family friend.  He had already completed his flight and was standing next to his plane chatting with a couple of buddies when he had a massive heart attack.  Most of us still feel that something about that flight had literally scared the life out of him, as his plane was a model known to be especially hazardous.

After our move to a private field near Cool Springs, we all began flying in earnest, enjoying the incomparable beauty of Washington Valley and other natural  wonders of the Canoe Creek watershed.  I often flew over Streight Mountain, dropping candy-laden parachutes to my nephews & nieces below.  We landed everywhere there was an open patch of ground, including the rear lot at Homestead Hollow and a hang-glider ramp on Streight Mountain.  Even the cows eventually got used to us and quit stampeding when we roared over their heads.

In one particularly hilarious incident, a buddy and I had landed in a cow pasture just outside of Ashville to rest & refuel from gas cans in our chase car.  We were standing there gabbing when Jack hollered, “Oh, s—t” and raced for his plane.  A huge bull was snorting and getting ready to bear down on us.  Jack managed to get cranked and moving just before the animal got to him.  Meanwhile,  I took advantage of the distraction to take off in the opposite direction.  Jack’s smugness was short-lived, however.  Just before he lifted off, his front wheel plowed through a huge, fresh cow pie.

As the front wheel left the ground, it continued spinning madly until it had flung every bit of that slimy green mess backward.  Jack took a solid load of it in the face and on his new Izod alligator shirt.  The rest went mostly onto his beautiful, meticulously-maintained yellow wing.  Of course, we never let him live it down, and even today it is said that he still hates cattle.

It was the very best of times.  Weekend afternoons usually found a whole gang of us with our families at Four Seasons,  enjoying lots of flying, touch football, kite flying, airplane building, barbecuing, and camaraderie.  Most of the time things went very well, but as with any such endeavor, there were also a couple of incidents of pure panic.  And sorrow.

Four Seasons Hangar & Field

Our trainer caught fire in full view of the pilots’ families and went down out of sight behind a tall tree line.  What they could not know until many eternal minutes later was that this dying bird had successfully deployed its emergency parachute just before impact.  Both men lived to fly again, but not before bucking major headwinds from their spouses.

Not so lucky was the man who took over our operation after most of us had moved on to other ventures.  His machine broke apart directly over the runway, killing him instantly on impact.

With that, the field was soon closed, our barn hangar destined once again to house horses instead of airplanes.

Views from Benny Hill is a series by Jerry Smith.

Views From Benny Hill

It’s fair to say that Doc and Kathleen shocked the community  when they married in 1939.  He took her out for dinner and just kept on driving, straight to the Justice of the Peace. Most folks had assumed that they hardly knew each other, at least that they knew each other as little as two people can know each other in a town where everyone knows everyone else, as well as most of their personal business. They must have been passing each other on the street for years without paying much of attention. And then suddenly, it was a lightening strike. Love at ten-thousandth sight.

That night after they were married, Doc took Kathleen on home with him to the house where his first wife Myrtle had died just four months before, after languishing for many months with tuberculosis. And where Myrtle’s married daughter, Martha, had come home to die of tuberculosis, and had done so, almost exactly a year to the day before her mother.

That’s a world of tragedy for one man in one house. After all those years of death and dying, Doc sorely needed the joy and light in his life that Kathleen could give him. There were other attractions on his mind, of course, but Doc also needed a woman in the worst way to bring some light and air back into that house. Almost as soon as Doc brought her over the threshold, Kathleen went to work lifting the pall of death that had settled over that ill-fated dwelling.

Seeing his home through his bride’s eyes must have distressed Doc. He hadn’t noticed while three or four years’ worth of newspapers, magazines, unanswered mail, and all the ordinary detritus of living and dying had just piled up. He still had every condolence card from both deaths and the envelopes they came in. Cut flowers had died and been left to disintegrate in vases traced by long-gone levels of evaporating water. Old medicine bottles dried up inside and gathered dust on the outside, along with the trays and tables at the two bedsides. Plants had died and from lack of care, then scattered themselves in dessicated crumbs on the floor.

The windows had been covered so long during all that sickness.  Doc, living alone, had just left them covered out of habit. So, years of unseen dust had settled on every level surface and clung to perpendicular ones too. Kathleen’s heart went out to Doc and she wondered, “Has nobody come through the front door but Doc, since he came from that last funeral?”  After one sweeping glance around, she stated plainly, “Doc, I’m going to have to have some help with this.”

So God sent Kathleen the blessing of Eli and Eunice Neeley. From the first day they came in the door, Kathleen often wondered how she ever could have managed without them. They lived a short piece further up the road and off the highway in the house that Dill Neeley, Eli’s grandfather, had built himself on land he bought in 1891 at peril to his own existence. In those days, some folks didn’t like to see a black man try to better himself, even through his own diligence and fortitude.

Eli Neeley was a wise and honorable man. And, as wise and honorable men do, he’d chosen himself a hardworking, honest wife, who didn’t put up with nonsense. On the day Eli married Eunice, he’d moved her into his house where she’d found quite a different scene than the one that had greeted Kathleen. Eli’s Mama Esther and his younger sister Dorcas kept a house that was thoroughly scrubbed and neat as a pin. Not a speck of dust anywhere and a wedding supper on the table.  Eli worked third shift at the cotton mill shoveling coal into the steam furnaces. Eunice came to work for Kathleen. The couple became Kathleen’s rod and her staff, as well as her dear friends.

When Doc went missing, Kathleen would get worried and call Eli, and Eli remained calm as ever. Just said, “Don’t you fret none, now. I’ll git ‘im on back here.” Somehow Eli knew what haunts to look in. And usually within the hour, here he’d come bringing Doc along with him. Often on these occasions, she’d need help getting Doc settled. Eli kept on till he got him bedded down. She never had to ask. Eli thought of fetching Doc for Kathleen as a good Christian act. He would never accept a dime for it.

Eunice was a strong woman. She took one look at Doc’s house that first morning and started in to clearing out the junk. Sometimes, Eunice bossed Kathleen around. On that day, she said, “All right. We got to get us a fire going out here in the back and jus’ keep bring them thangs outta there and burnin’ ‘em till they gone.” She picked up a big stack of newspapers and found a safe spot in the back of the house for the fire. She and Kathleen kept that fire burning for nearly a week.

On her first post-nuptial visit home, Kathleen told Big Mama all about it. “Mama. You have never seen anything like it in all your life. Why I could barely get through some of those rooms. All Myrtle’s clothes still hanging in the closet, like she might walk back through the door anytime and want to change her outfit. Boxes stacked up to the ceiling. It didn’t look like anybody had done anything in that house since before Martha got sick. Eunice saw this box in the top of the wardrobe and brought it down. Set it on the bed and opened it up. She said to me ‘Lawd have mercy. Look at this.’ It was an old robe and nightgown folded up in there. A note fastened to it with a safety pin. The note said, ‘Don’t throw away. Myrtle died in this.’ We were able to get rid of that. Only thing Doc insisted on keeping was a photograph of Martha in a frame. At least it’s clean now.”

Every April, Kathleen and Eunice tackled the spring cleaning earlier than most. And Eli went after the yard and porches and the little house-close gardens. They all knew and dreaded with a dead certainty that come the third Saturday in May, the elder McIntoshes would descend upon the household, prepared to inspect and criticize. No one ever explained why his family had been no help to Doc after Myrtle died, but they expected Kathleen to run a modern machine of a household. They also considered it their duty to offer helpful advice in the proprieties of running a house and dealing with “servants.”  The “servants” to whom they referred were Eli and Eunice. Every time Mother or Father McIntosh said the word “servant” or criticized anything about Eli and Eunice, Kathleen gritted her teeth and said nothing.

Eunice had taught Kathleen a lot about psychology. She heard Kathleen grumbling under her breath and said “Now. It ain’t no use in you starting up with them about us. It’ll just cause ‘em to bow up and get meaner. Be hard on the Doctor too. His folks are just set in their ways and they ain’t a-gonna change. Now, they’re wrong. But I think they just nervous. I don’t know what makes folks be nervous like that. Maybe they cain’t hep it. And we ain’t paying no attention to what they say.”

And every year Eli and Eunice were right there with Kathleen standing up to the McIntoshes when they motored up the drive. While Mother and Father McIntosh were in residence (which was for months on end), Eli and Eunice came every morning early and Eunice stayed till after dinner time. Upon arrival the McIntoshes’ chauffeur, Skids, would disappear till early in the day they planned to start the trip back. Kathleen was never sure what Skids did with himself during those long weeks, but she was always glad to see him when he returned.

Doc’s parents had lived in Gearing for about forty years before entering into a proper retirement in the respectable, and even enviable, retirement locale of Miami, Florida. After respectability, nothing was more important to Mother and Father McIntosh than inspiring a little envy in people. Well, that and regimented living by the clock.

Father McIntosh had a heavy gold pocket watch on a suitably heavy gold chain. Not big enough to suggest a vulgar gaudiness, but exactly the proper size for a  punctilious and punctual retired gentleman, without much place to go. Its tick was so loud from within his watch pocket that it was near to driving Kathleen crazy. (It didn’t bother Father because he was as deaf as those who will not hear. Or deafer.)

The watch’s tick would not have been so vexing were it not for the fact that it reigned over Kathleen’s house. The breakfast was to be at 8:00 a.m. On the dot. Not 7:59. Not 8:01. Two three minute eggs, one half grapefruit sectioned, thin whole wheat bread, lightly toasted. Coffee, not too strong. Instructions for lunch and dinner were similar, only with different specific menus (according to the days of the week) at different specific hours of the day and evening. If his pork chop was thirty seconds late, Father would pace the kitchen with his watch out, making impatient noises. Kathleen and Eunice continued their tasks at the rate they had  already been going. Eunice said it’d do no good for them to get nervous and hurry up. Just make it take longer.

Father would sit at the dining table and stir his iced tea by pumping it up and down with a silver spoon, exactly like a piston on a steam engine. What kept her good crystal glasses from breaking Kathleen did not know. But that’s what Father and Mother had to have. Good crystal, polished sterling, fine linens, washed and pressed everyday. With that ticking watch and that clanging spoon, Kathleen would have to breathe deeply and think of Doc, just as Eunice had told her to. She kept her temper for his sake.

Mother had her own peculiarities. In the daytime, she always wore a wig. Nobody knew what her head actually looked like. As far as they could tell, not even Father had ever seen it. At night she wore a pale peach Victorian lace night cap, lined with fine silk. With ruffles. She had two wigs, a flaming auburn one for weekdays and a subdued and appropriate grey one for Sundays. As if God cared what color hair Mother wore to church. Doc swore he had never seen Mother without one of those three accoutrements on her head.

The first of Mother and Father McIntosh’s priorities, of course, were centered in the opinions of other people. It is so difficult to really control other people’s opinions, but Mother and Father McIntosh did their best. They’d decided early in Doc’s infancy that they wanted a physician in the family and that “Gifford,” as they called their son, would be that physician. He certainly proved to be bright enough. He topped his classes in school and brought home a room full of ribbons and certificates. To be a doctor was the goal they set upon his shoulders, and to please his parents was the moral responsibility they incessantly hammered into his young head. Nothing, in the life of the American upper middle classes of the early twentieth century, was considered more enviable than a son who became a doctor. Unless it was a daughter who married one. And so, the McIntoshes set to work with the determination to have one of each. And they did.

Gifford wanted with all his heart to be an engineer. He liked it. He was interested it. He knew he’d make a good one. But that notion was out of the question in the view of Mother and Father McIntosh. The very idea that he might choose his own career was ridiculous to them. They would not discuss it. And so, at seventeen, Gifford dutifully went down to Tulane and finished pre-med with honors. And then he stayed there and did the same in the Tulane medical school.

But he’d done so well that he received notice of other opportunities. Among them was Harvard Medical School offering Doc a place to study for a specialty. The McIntoshes were pleased with that, but with some reservations. Harvard was good, of course, nice to be able to drop into conversations. But Gifford had gotten a little older and, unhappily for Mother and Father, more independent during his college years. Mother and Father weren’t at all happy with his choice of speciality. Eye, Ear, Nose and Throat? For heaven’s sake there was no money in it. They’d so hoped for a specialist in fashionable diseases to whom they could send their close friends. That small strain of rebellion in Doc, having lain dormant for twenty-four years, was stubbornly resistant to all the moral browbeating and vocal nostrums Mother and Father applied. And it disturbed them no end. They were quite afraid of losing all control.

Gifford spoke of nothing but helping poor rural people, who didn’t even know they needed glasses. If they didn’t know they needed them, what were they missing? After he went into practice, not only did Doc take care of such people, he often did so at no charge and paid for their glasses himself. Mother and Father never heard of anything more ridiculous in their lives. And they never forgave their son for disappointing their expectations.

Doc drank something awful, and that’s a fact. Kathleen did all she could with him. But when he went on a tear it was a sight to behold. Once, during the war years, he drank so much that he passed out completely while driving his car. Unfortunately, at that point in his travels, Doc had piloted his car onto the railroad tracks, but not off again on the far side. The train came through, as trains do, and destroyed Doc’s car with him inside it. But by some miracle (Dr. Miller said it was because he was so drunk), Doc wasn’t killed. He wasn’t even badly injured, at least not so injured that he couldn’t get over it. Could be he just didn’t want to go through another of Mother and Father’s visits. During his recovery Kathleen read him the riot act. She enjoyed those visits from Mother and Father even less than he did, and if he thought he could die and leave them for her to entertain by herself, he had another think coming.

Doc didn’t touch a drop of alcohol during Mother and Father McIntosh’s annual visits. Those dangerous friends of his stayed clear of the house. And for the summer months, Doc did his best to be an ideal son and husband. As Kathleen, Eunice, and Eli readied the house from top to bottom, inside and out that spring of 1948, Doc’s coming sobriety was the only reason in this world they could think of to be glad the in-laws were coming. In earlier years there had been Mother and Father’s automobile to look forward to. Doc’s accident had left the couple car-less for the duration. During the war and for some time after, it had been almost impossible to acquire an automobile. Doc bought a Ford not long after they became available again. After that he didn’t have to endure the looks he’d gotten when asked to borrow Father’s.

But that spring, Doc had been bringing home brochures with beautiful new cars illustrated in them. Fords, Lincolns, Oldsmobiles with V-engines. Byrd Richardson had tried to sell Doc his cream-colored Packard convertible, but Kathleen thought he wanted way too much money for it. Doc was buying this one to suit Kathleen, and he wanted her to have it before Mother and Father arrived. They were certain to disapprove. So Doc and Kathleen went to pick up their new black Lincoln on May 7, 1948.

The Right Southern Corner is a series by Sara Rast
Copyright: 2009 Sara Love Rast. All rights reserved.

The Right Southern Corner

I remember well my grandfather’s house—the one he and my uncles built in Bryant on Sand Mountain in the years 1938 and 39.  To me it was a place of love and protection. A house filled with people.  I was well-along in years before I realized that some of those in that house did not perceive the same love and comfort that I did. My grandfather never told me he loved me, but I knew he loved me and never felt the need to be told.

The early years are shrouded in the developing mind of babyhood.  I was born in July of 1938.  In November of that year our house burned.  Uncle Ralph, who was six years old, was put in charge of watching the babies: my Aunt Inez, who was seven months old; my Aunt Marie, who had just turned two years old; and me, four months old.  When the flames were detected, someone dragged a mattress well away from the house and stationed Ralph and us there in his safe-keeping.

A sure way to get an outburst from Aunt Louise was for me to say that I remember the house burning.  I can’t, of course, but I enjoyed saying it just to hear once again her reaction.  Although the actual memory is not there, I’m sure that the event is deep in my subconscious mind, for I am horribly afraid of fire.  So is Inez, and she is convinced that our fear arises from our watching the house burn.  I am afraid of candles burning in the house.  When we were first married, Gail would light Christmas candles in the house, and I would come behind her blowing them out!

The day the house burned, Granny, the three older girls and the babies were in the house when it caught fire. One of them notice the shadow of smoke on the yard outside the window. Grandpa and the boys were working on the new place the Pa had bought—they had the barn and crib built and had started framing the house.  George Price, who had an automobile, drove over to tell Pa and the boys that the house was burning.

All the food that had been put up for winter was destroyed. An estimated 300 jars of canned fruit was stored in the attic with cotton seed over the jars to insulate them.  Farming tools that were stored on the porch of the house were burned.  The potatoes had been dug and covered with pomace (the remains of cane that had been run through the syrup mill). The fire burned the pomace and nobody thought about the potatoes and a hard freeze the night of the fire ruined them all. The family, numbering about 13, was destitute.  And yet, a half-century later my Granny would say, “But we didn’t suffer.  We had such good neighbors!” My Aunt Louise, however, in her old age was still complaining about all the dried beans she had to eat that winter!

The day after the fire, Uncle Ralph (remember he was only 6 years old) discovered the remains of the tools that had been on the porch, and one by one he dropped them in the well to hear them splash. No tools, no food for the winter, no clothes, no cotton seed for next year’s crop. I’ve often thought of the constitution of my grandfather and the courage it took to face the future. I never heard him mention the fire. That winter a farmer let them live in a vacant house he owned.

I don’t remember choking on a hot potato, either, but I did, and Grandpa saved my life.  He forced his finger between my teeth and pushed the piece of potato down my throat.  Perhaps that’s why I loved him so well!  To me he was a stabilizing force in an unstable world, although the instability came later when I was three years old.

My mother and father had married when mother was fifteen and daddy was 23.  Mother had gone to Granny and told her that she and Nathan Whitten were going to get married.  She asked Granny to tell Grandpa.  Granny said, “You can tell him yourself just like you told me!”  Granny thought Pa would put a stop to the wedding for sure.  Mother went to meet Pa coming from the fields, and she told him of the wedding plans.  Pa reached into his pocket and pulled out $7.00.  He gave it to her and said, “This is all the money I have in the world.  Buy yourself a pretty dress.”  When Granny would tell the story, she always added, “And that’s the way he stopped the wedding!”

So, they were married.  They lived in a log house on the Long Island farm that Pa rented.  The log house was in spitting distance to Pa and Granny’s house. They were married nine months, and Nathan was shot in a drunken altercation.  He died from gangrene that set in from the gunshot wound.  Mother was three months pregnant with me. A superstition was that a pregnant woman should not look at a dead person for fear it would mark the unborn child. Over the protests of some family members, Mother looked at Nathan in the casket—and who knows whether I was “marked” or not. Don’t answer that!

After Nathan died, Mother moved back into the house with Granny and Pa, and it was into this household that I was born, July 19, 1938. By that time Pa had moved his bunch from a farm at Long Island in the valley to a farm on Sand Mountain in the community of Bryant. I was the first grandchild and led the way for a whole passel of about 37 grandchildren.  The year I was turned forty years old, the last grandchild was born, Rachael Hawkins, daughter of Raymond and Dimples Hawkins.

My early years with Granny and Pa are a blur of real memories and borrowed memories? that is, things that I’ve heard told so many times that I think I can remember the events.  For instance, the house burning is a borrowed memory.

Another is a day when I was put on the bed to nap, something I didn’t want to do. I was told to be quiet and go to sleep. Presently a stack of freshly dried clothes that was on the bed tipped over on me, and I said, “Be quiet, clothes, you’ll wake me up.” I was too little to remember that, but I heard it told many times I can see it in my mind.

Marie, Inez and I played under the Little House, which is what we called the crib that had been used for living while Pa and the boys finished the house. Granny and the girls slept in the crib, and Pa and the boys slept in the barn. The Little House was high off the ground and made the perfect cool place to play. We must have rescued hundreds of doodle bugs: “Doodle Bug, Doodle Bug, come out from there! Your house is on fire!”

I remember summer twilight evenings on the porch. Pa in a cane-bottomed, straight chair, leaning back with the chair-back touching the house, his feet on the bottom rung of the chair. Granny also in a chair, and I held securely in the comfort of her love. Strangely I do not remember my mother at all at Granny’s house. I remember others being on the porch or in the yard, but Granny and Pa are the two I clearly identify in my mind.

There are three songs I remember Granny singing there on the porch. “The Boys in Blue,” a Civil War song; “The Letter Edged in Black,” a tear-jerker for sure, about a wayward son whose mother had died; and “Little Mary Fagin,” about a little girl in Atlanta who was murdered. Mother also sang the Mary Fagin song after we moved from Pa’s.

The porch was a place to relax and let the day wind down. For the adults and the children big enough to work in the fields, the days were long and full of hard work.

Pa and the boys had the farm to run, the animals, the fields, the upkeep of the machinery, and the upkeep of the barns, outbuildings and house. Rainy days didn’t lessen the work load, there were jobs to be done inside the barn. In the winter, ice storms and blizzards would slow down the work, but the work had to be done. Animals had to be fed and cows milked and eggs gathered.

The women worked equally as hard. The house must be kept running. Babies had to be tended and for Granny there was a baby every two years from 1918 to 1942! There was one miscarriage when they lived at Long Island, and between Inez and Ola, the last baby, there were 3 or 4 years instead of the usual 2. Louise probably got the most experience taking care of baby brothers and sisters. There were 4 boys after Louise before another sister was born.

There was clothing to make for the family, from underwear to shirts, dresses and sun bonnets.  Sheets, pillow cases and towels were made from bleached fertilizer bags. When the feed companies came up with the idea of colorful printed cloth for their feed bags, they provided millions of farm women with pretty material for their dresses, shirts for the boys, and scraps for their quilt tops.

For a large family, and ours was large, a lot of food was required, and the vegetable garden was Granny’s responsibility. When Granny and Pa were first married, her neighbor, Mrs. Clyde Shirley, said to her: “Lonia, do you want to know how to always have plenty and some you can give to your neighbor?”  Granny said, “Well, I don’t know, but I guess I could learn how.” Mrs. Shirley said, “Well, always plant a row for your neighbor and one for yourself and you’ll have plenty.”

Enough food had to be grown so that it provided for their needs during the summer and enough to be canned for the winter months when no fresh food was available. I once asked Granny about canned tomatoes, how she could tell if they were spoiled or not. I’d read about improperly canned tomatoes killing folks. Granny came as close to making a snorting sound as I ever heard. “They didn’t spoil!” she said.

In the summer during field work time for the men, there were meals to be prepared for the workers. This called for a big breakfast and a big dinner, noonday meal. As I recall, the wood stove was kept in use from the breakfast meal until dinner was cooked. Who can forget the string beans cooked in the iron pot. Potatoes rested on top of the beans and cooked along with them. Then the beans, seasoned with fatback, were boiled down to that perfect taste. Black-eyed peas simmered a long time, too, and on top of them steamed young okra pods. Boiled corn and creamed corn; sun-ripened tomatoes, cucumbers, cornbread, buttermilk cooled in the spring.

I was 50 years old before it dawned upon me one day that we were next door to poverty in those days! But everybody else in Bryant was in the same shape, and in many cases worse off than we.

Besides the clothing, there were sheets and quilts to be made. Bleached fertilizer sacks could be sewn into sheets and pillow cases. The seams of the sheets were felled so there were no rough edges. The pillow cases were sometimes embroidered and edged with crocheted lace. Quilts were pieced from scraps. Scraps from those print feed sacks made lovely quilts, and quilts from the ’30s and 40s are prized by collectors today.

Granny did not have time to piece fancy quilt tops, but her daughters Ruth and Louise pieced beautiful quilt all their active lives.

One of the things that has puzzled me about Grandpa’s house is that I don’t remember summer heat or winter cold. The house was thin as paper, I’m sure, with no insulation in the walls or attic. In the winter, the wood cook stove would help to warm the house; but it was fired up in the summer as well, and then it just added to the summer heat. Of course, every other family faced the same heat and living conditions. The house must have been cold during those mountain winters. There was a heater in the main living room of the house and the stove in the kitchen, but in the bedrooms there was no heat. We must have had plenty of quilts, because I don’t remember being cold.

As I remember, the house had 5 rooms. There were a lot of people per bedroom. I don’t know this for sure, but I would guess that Louise, Marie, Inez, Mother and I slept in one room, and that Newell, Eskell, Raymond and Ralph in another room. And Granny and Pa had a room.

It was a full house, and my little world was complete and happy there. But that would come to an end.

Joe’s Meanderings is a series by Joe Whitten.

Joe's Meanderings