Something Rich and Strange: Selected Stories (44 page)

Still, some good things have happened. When Preacher Thompson offered to resign, the congregation made it clear they wanted him to stay, and he has. But he’s toned down his sermons a good bit, and last Sunday, when Larry handed him a proposal for an outdoor manger scene with you know who playing Joseph, Preacher Thompson just crumpled it up and threw it in the trashcan.

As for me, a lot of people remember that I was the one who said the crosses were unsafe in the first place, especially one person, Harry Bayne. Two weeks ago Harry took me out to eat as a way of saying thank you. We hit it off and have spent a lot of time together lately. We’re going dancing over at Harley’s Lounge tonight. I’m still a little scared, almost afraid to hope for too much, but I’m beginning to believe than even in a fallen world things can sometimes look up.

I
t’s a drearysome day,” Uncle Earl said, hunching his jean jacket tighter around his shoulders, “but maybe it’ll clear up before the service tomorrow.”

I looked out the windshield and figured otherwise. Fog could stay in our valley for days. It was like the mountains circling us poured the fog in and set a kettle lid on top. That grayness came seeping through the walls and into the house too. Bright things like a quilt or button jar lost color and footsteps sounded lonesome.

The road curved and the Tilsons’ farmhouse appeared. A car was parked beside Mr. Tilson’s blue pickup.

“That’s Preacher Winn’s car,” Daddy said. “Probably best just to go on to the field.”

Daddy eased the truck onto the far side of the road and we got out. Uncle Earl took the butcher knives and sacks from the truck bed and we walked down the slope and through a harvested cornfield, damp stalks and shucks slippery under our feet. The cabbage patch was beside the creek. Two of the rows had been cut but four hadn’t.

Uncle Earl nodded towards the field across the road. The fog was thicker here in the bottomland and it took a few seconds to see the tractor. It lay on its side, one big black wheel raised up, the harrow’s tines like long fingers.

“He shouldn’t have been on a hill that steep,” Uncle Earl said.

“No,” Daddy said. “But I’ve known many a man who at least had a chance to learn from that same mistake.”

They set down the sacks and kneeled at two row ends.

“Stay between us,” Daddy said to me. “We’ll cut and you sack.”

They began cutting, left hand on the cabbage head while the butcher knife chopped underneath.

“We’ll be filthy as hogs by the time we finish,” Uncle Earl said, brushing wet dirt off his overalls.

“Try to keep your clothes clean, son,” Daddy said. “I got need for you to do something else when we finish.”

“At least as clean as a ten-year-old-boy can stay,” Uncle Earl said.

I dragged the sack behind me up the row, feeling it stick harder to the ground each time I put another cabbage inside. Daddy and Uncle Earl stopped every few minutes to help catch me up. I followed Uncle Earl and Daddy as they carried six full sacks to the row ends.

“Let’s ease up a minute,” Daddy said.

“Fine by me,” Uncle Earl said.

Daddy put his hands flat above his tailbone and leaned backwards. Uncle Earl sat down cross-legged and took out a pack of rolling papers and a tobacco tin from his bib pocket.

“A day like this you feel your aches more,” Daddy said.

Uncle Earl nodded as he sifted tobacco onto the paper, twisted the ends and lit one end. A car engine started up at the farmhouse. In a few moments the car drove away, quickly invisible except for its yellow headlights.

“We best get back to it,” Uncle Earl said, and picked up the last four sacks we had. “I can cut and smoke both.”

“We’ll need two more sacks, three to be safe,” Daddy said to me. “You willing to go get a couple?”

“I guess so,” I said. “Should I ask first?”

“No,” Daddy said. “There’s no cause to do that. Just go to that shed by the barn. They’ll be some in there.”

“Three?”

“Yes,” Daddy said. “Three’s plenty.”

I left them and made my way through the cornfield and up to the road. The fog thinned as the ground slanted upward. I fixed my eyes on the shed and kept them there so I wouldn’t see the tractor. I had to use both hands to swing the shed door open, then wait for the dark to be less dark. In a back corner, burlap sacks hung above a mound of potatoes. I smelled them as I lifted the sacks off the nail. It was a dusty, moldy smell, but a green alive smell dabbed in it too. I stepped out and shouldered the door closed. Across the road, the bottomland had disappeared. It was like the fog had opened its mouth and swallowed the cabbage patch whole.

The sacks were in my right hand. I squeezed them tighter as I made my way across the road and through the cornfield. Soon after, Daddy and Uncle Earl came out solid from the gray. The last cabbages were cut and gathered and Daddy and Uncle Earl hefted a sack over each shoulder and walked to the truck. Three trips and it was done.

“Twelve full sacks,” Uncle Earl said when he and Daddy had loaded the last one in the truck bed.

“You still of a mind to take it to Lenior today?”

“Yes,” Daddy said, “but I need to ask her if she wants some for canning.”

“Then we better go see,” Uncle Earl said. “The preacher’s gone so it’s likely as good a time as there’ll be.”

We walked across the road and into the yard, where Daddy and Uncle Earl stopped.

“Take your shoes and socks off, son,” Daddy told me. “Then go up there and knock.”

I did what he said and went up on the porch.

Mrs. Tilson opened the door. She wore a black dress and I could tell she’d been crying. She looked at me like she didn’t know who I was, then fixed her eyes on Daddy and Uncle Earl, who stood in the yard with their hands in their front pockets.

“We cut the rest of the cabbage, Faye,” Daddy said. “We didn’t know if you wanted to keep any for canning. If you do, we’ll put it in the root cellar for you.”

Mrs. Tilson put her hands over her eyes. Then, real slow, she let her hands rub hard against her skin, like she was pulling off a mask to see better.

“Sell it,” she said. “That’s what Alec always does. Done.”

“We’ll do that then,” Daddy said. “We’ll see you at the funeral tomorrow but if there’s anything you need done before that, let us know.”

Mrs. Tilson didn’t say anything or even nod. She just stepped back inside and shut the door.

“Mrs. Tilson, she’s grateful to you for helping out,” Daddy said when we got back in the truck. “She may never say that though. It’s a hard time for her and she’ll likely not want to ponder anything about these days.”

“Anyway,” Daddy said as he cranked the engine, “you done good.”

I
remember Badeye Carter. I remember his clear eye, the patch, the serpent tattooed on his shoulder, the long, black fingernails. I remember his black ’49 Ford pickup, the rusty cowbell dangling from the sideview mirror, the metal soft drink chest in the back filled with shaved ice, the three gallon jars of flavoring—cherry, lemon, and licorice, the Hav-a-Tampa cigar box he kept his money in. I remember how he always came that summer at bullbat time, those last moments of daylight when the streetlight in our neighborhood came on and the bats began to swoop, preying on moths attracted to the glow.

That summer was the longest of my life. Time seemed to sleep that summer. Sometimes a single afternoon seemed a week. June was an eternity. It must have seemed just as endless for my mother, for this was the summer when my obsession with snakes reached its zenith, and our house seemed more a serpentarian than a home. And then there was Badeye, to my mother just as slippery, and as dangerous.

I was eight years old. Every evening when I heard the clanging of the cowbell, I ran to the edge of the street, clutching the nickel I had begged from my father earlier that day. I never asked my mother. To her Badeye was an intruder, a bringer of tooth decay, bad eating habits, and other things.

Every other mother in Cliffside felt the same way, would refuse to acknowledge Badeye’s hat-tipping “how you doing, ma’ams” as he stopped his truck in front of their houses. They would either stare right at him with a look colder than anything he ever put in his paper cones, as my mother did, or, like our next door neighbor Betty Splawn, turn her back to him and walk into the house.

Their reasons for disliking Badeye went beyond his selling snowcones to their children. They knew, as everyone in Cliffside knew, that while Badeye was new to the snowcone business, he had been the town’s bootlegger for over a decade. Being hard-shell Southern Baptists, these women held him responsible for endangering their husbands’ eternal souls with his moonshine brought up from Scotland County.

There was also the matter of his right eye, which had been blinded ten years earlier when Badeye’s wife stabbed him with an ice pick as he slept. Badeye had not pursued charges, and the ex–Mrs. Carter had not explained her motivation before heading to Alabama to live with a sister, leaving the women of Cliffside to wonder what he must have done to deserve such an awakening.

Cliffside’s fathers viewed Badeye more sympathetically. They tended to believe his snowcones would cause no lasting harm to their children, sometimes even eating one themselves. As for the bootlegging, some of these men were Badeye’s customers, but even those who did not drink, such as my father, felt Badeye was a necessary evil in a town where the nearest legal alcohol was fifteen miles away. These men also realized that each of them had probably done something during their years that warranted an icepick in the eye. Badeye’s right eye had died for all their sins.

So it was our fathers we went to, waiting until our mothers were washing the supper dishes or otherwise occupied. Our fathers would fish out nickels from the pants pockets, trying not to jingle the change too loudly, listening, like us, for the sound of our mothers’ approaching footsteps.

Badeye always stopped between our house and the Splawns’. Donnie Splawn, who was my age, his younger brother, Robbie, and I would gather around the tailgate of Badeye’s truck, our bare feet burning on the still-hot pavement. Sometimes we would be joined by another child, one who had gotten his nickel only after Badeye had passed by his house, forced to chase the truck through the darkening streets, finally catching up with him in front of our houses. It was worth it—that long, breathless run we had all made at some time when our mothers had not washed the dishes right away or when we had been playing and did not hear the cowbell until too late—because Badeye’s snowcones tasted better than anything we’d ever sunk our teeth into.

Donnie and I were partial to cherry, while Robbie liked lemon best. Donnie and Robbie tended to suck the syrup out of their snowcones, while I let the syrup in mine pool in the bottom of the paper cone, a last, condensed gulp so flavorful that it brought tears to my eyes.

Our mothers tried to fight back. They first used time-honored scare tactics, handed down from mother to daughter for generations. My mother’s version of the “trip to the dentist with snowcone-rotted teeth” horror story was vividly rendered, but while it did cause me to brush my teeth more frequently for a while, it did not slow my snowcone consumption. The story’s only lasting impact on me was a lifelong fear of dentists.

When my mother realized this conventional story had failed, she assumed the cause was overexposure, that stories, like antibiotics, tended to become less effective on children the more they were used, so she came up with a new story, one unlike any heard in the collective memory of Cliffside’s children. The story concerned an eight-year old boy in the adjoining county who had contracted a rare disease carried specifically by flies that lit on snowcones. The affliction reduced the boy’s backbone to jelly in a matter of days. He now spent all of his time in a wheelchair, looking mournfully out of his bedroom window at all the non-snowcone-eating children who played happily in the park across the street from his house. The setting of the story in Rutherford County was a stroke of genius on my mother’s part, for it helped create a feeling of “if it could happen there, it could happen here” while at the same time being far enough away from Cliffside so as not to be easily discredited. The park across the street was also a nice touch. But even at eight I realized the story was too vivid, the details too fully realized (my mother even knew the victim’s middle name) to be anything other than fiction.

My mother, along with other mothers, realized another strategy was needed, so in an informal meeting after Sunday School in late June, Hazel Wasson, Dr. Wasson’s wife, was appointed to find out if the law could accomplish what the horror stories had failed to do. Mrs. Wasson spent the following Monday morning in the county courthouse in Shelby. To her amazement as well as everyone else’s, Badeye had all the necessary licenses to sell his snowcones. Mrs. Wasson’s next stop, this time accompanied by Clytemnestra Ely, was to call on the country sheriff, who appeased the women by promising to conduct an illegal-liquor search on Badeye’s premises the following afternoon, and, according to my mother, about thirty minutes after calling to let Badeye know they were coming. The sheriff and two of his deputies conducted their raid and claimed to have found nothing.

“I don’t know why we even bothered to try,” I heard my mother tell Betty Splawn the following morning, “what with Cleveland County politicians being his most loyal customers.”

In the first week of July my mother spearheaded a last, concerted effort against Badeye. She found a recipe for freezing Kool-Aid in ice-cube trays. The cubes were then broken up in a blender or placed inside a plastic bag and crushed with a hammer. According to the final sentence of the recipe, which my mother chanted again and again, trying to convince not only me but herself as well, the result was “an inexpensive taste treat every bit as good as the commercial snowcone all children love.” As the Kool-Aid hardened in the freezer, my mother called other mothers. By late afternoon every child in Cliffside had been served a dixie cup filled with my mother’s recipe, but while we condescendingly ate these feeble imitations, they only served to whet our appetite for the real thing. My mother threw away the recipe and dumped the remaining trays of Kool-Aid cubes into the kitchen sink.