Sweet Tea and Jesus Shoes Read online

  On that she was wrong. Stories of any kind were good for me, any time of the day or night. I hungered for them, thrived on them, relished every syllable with big-eyed anticipation. There is an atavistic connection between children and storytelling that has been handed down from the cave. And in my family, it has always been a way of life.

  Grandma Hilda, though, has never been known as a raconteur. Her stories tend to be pointless, long-winded, rambling, outrageous and just plain disappointing. If it’s a joke, she forgets the punch line. If it’s a parable, she leaves out the axiom. If it’s historical, she often gets the main characters wrong. It’s common for her to spend five or ten minutes building the background for what she assures us will be a great story, then interrupt herself with “Ya’ll know Jess Williams, don’t you, Sarah Williams’ boy?”

  No, Grandma, we say, we don’t know him. But that doesn’t matter, you go ahead.

  “But I could’ve sworn you knew him.”

  We assure her we do not, but want to hear the story anyway.

  “No,” she sighs, disappointed. “It won’t mean anything if you don’t know him.”

  Whereupon, likely as not, she’ll launch into another tale just as probable to remain forever unfinished. The story-telling gene, I learned early on, was not dominant on Grandma Hilda’s side of the family.

  That is not to say that many an entertaining tale has not been told about her. For example, she’s the one who, while chatting on the phone one morning with her sister, Montene, suddenly smelled the odor of burning food.

  “Montene,” she exclaimed, worried. “Have you got something on the stove?”

  Montene, on the other end of the line fifteen miles away, allowed that she did not.

  “Well, I smell something burning. Are you sure you’re not cooking beans?”

  Montene replied irritably, “Well, I’m sitting right here in the kitchen, and I guess I’d know if I had something on the stove. It must be on your end.”

  As you can see, it was eccentricity, more than anything else, that ran in Grandma Hilda’s family.

  She was known for interrupting conversations in the middle of a sentence to relate a long and involved piece of gossip about someone no one in the room knew; for making inappropriate comments about other people’s weight, hairstyle, clothing and, yes, odor; for asking questions and walking out of the room before hearing the answer. She was never the most popular guest at family gatherings.

  The first time Grandma Hilda met my daughter’s fiancé, she looked him up and down and declared mildly, “Why, he looks just like that fellow on that television show. Killed three women, didn’t he? Raped them too. Lord, child, how did you ever meet such a man?”

  It took us the rest of the evening to persuade her that my future son-in-law had not last been seen on America’s Most Wanted, and I still was not entirely sure she believed that Jill was not marrying a serial killer. As for Jill’s husband, we knew he was marriage material when he learned to take Grandma Hilda in stride.

  Though she was an embarrassment and an annoyance, though friends and family members had developed an attitude of pained resignation when it came to Grandma Hilda, it also has to be said that she was among the most generous people I have ever known. My brother and I will always remember her as the bearer of three-foot tall stuffed Easter bunnies and giant, chocolate-filled baskets wrapped in purple and yellow cellophane, of electric train sets and talking dolls at Christmas time, of birthday presents that included portable televisions and tape recorders.

  Grandma Hilda gave me my first grown-up piece of jewelry, a diamond chip-studded dinner ring that was far too extravagant for a girl of twelve, but which I treasure to this day. From the time she was born, my daughter was showered with toys, clothing and lavish and oftentimes age-inappropriate gifts of all kinds—a ten speed bike before she was five, roller skates when she was twenty-two—and for a wedding gift, Grandma Hilda presented the bridal couple with a car. That the car was twenty-five years old and leaked oil like a sieve was of little consequence; as always, with Grandma Hilda, it was the thought that counted.

  She wasn’t a rich woman; she lived in the same farm house in which my mother had grown up, on a modest insurance policy my grandfather had left and her retirement from thirty years at the shirt factory. But she liked to give presents. And although her gifts grew in eccentricity as she did (one Christmas, for example, I received a day planner from the previous year—with the appointments already filled in), and although we knew the chances were high that whatever we gave her for her birthday would be returned to us, beautifully wrapped and presented as new, for Christmas, she still, on occasion, would surprise us. The Christmas of 1995 was just such a surprise.

  This was Jill’s first Christmas as a new bride, and she had agreed to spend it with her husband’s family in Michigan. I imagine the fact that it was Grandma Hilda’s turn to host the holiday dinner played a significant part in Jill’s decision.

  Braced for disaster, for dinner at Grandma Hilda’s could result in anything from the firing of the preacher (Easter, 1982), to fist fights (summer, 1985), to food poisoning (Thanksgiving, 1990), my brother, my mother and I dressed ourselves up, armed ourselves with festively wrapped gifts, and presented ourselves at Grandma Hilda’s red-foil-covered door at precisely twelve noon.

  It was one of the most pleasant Christmases I can recall. The table was set with vintage linens and the silver polished to within an inch of its life. A platter of sliced turkey and ham was accompanied by homemade cranberry relish, a variety of green and yellow vegetables, and yeast rolls that had been rising since six a.m. When she put her mind to it and read the labels, my Grandma Hilda could out-cook Julia Child.

  A fire was lit in the seldom-used parlor with its moth-eaten burgundy velvet curtains and mantelpiece supported by white-lacquered Corinthian columns. In one corner stood a small Christmas tree that was decorated with tinsel and old fashioned red and green glass balls. We took our coffee and cake—an exquisite coconut so light it practically melted on the fork—into the parlor to exchange gifts.

  From Grandma Hilda my mother received a blender, as I recall, a very nice model with a food processor attachment that she had been wanting. My brother and I opened identical-sized packages, each one containing a beautifully stitched and brightly patterned cotton quilt. Another package just like ours awaited delivery to Jill.

  “Now I want y’all to take good care of those,” admonished Grandma Hilda somberly. “I worked all year putting them together. Had to take a class to learn how to do it. My eyes are getting so bad I knew this would probably be the last chance I got to do fine work, and I wanted to leave you children something to remember me by.”

  My brother, my mother and I exchanged astonished glances. To the best of our knowledge, Grandma Hilda—although she had many other laudable skills—had never picked up a needle in her life. And yet, within a year she had taken a quilting class and had designed and put together not one but three truly beautiful quilts.

  We smoothed the folds of the fabric reverently and carefully rearranged the tissue around our treasures. We assured her that our gifts were beyond anything we could have ever expected and would become cherished family heirlooms for generations.

  Pleased, she settled back in her fireside wing chair, crossed plump ankles beneath the hem of her silk print skirt, and folded her hands in her lap in best finishing-school style. It was clear the best was yet to come.

  “Now,” she announced, “do you want to hear my Christmas story?”

  This time the glances we exchanged were slightly uneasy. But the day had been exceptionally pleasant so far, and we were game for anything. “Sure,” volunteered my brother, trying to sound enthusiastic.

  “Can’t wait,” I agreed.

  My mother looked at her watch doubtfully. “We need to get on the road before too much longer.”

  Grandma Hilda cleared her throat and began. “This happened way back in 1933,” she said, “when your mama was j
ust a baby. Now this was during the depression and times were hard. We didn’t know if we’d have Christmas dinner on the table, much less money for presents. I took in laundry to try to make a little extra for Christmas, and your granddaddy, God rest him, was working overtime down at the lumber mill.

  “It was Christmas Eve, and I got up before dawn to make your granddaddy’s breakfast and send him off to work. He told me he was only going to work a half day, then stop in town before the stores closed to bring home a few little things for Laura Lee’s first Christmas.

  “All we had back then was a wood stove to cook on and keep warm by, and I used to keep the cradle right there by the stove while I worked, ironing and cooking. Long about the middle of the morning I went out to get some more wood but the wood box was empty. Your granddaddy had been working so hard he’d forgotten to fill it. So I went out to the shed and got the ax, and took it down to the woodpile to split some wood for the rest of the day. It was cold, too, and looking like it was going to commence to snow. You know, it was a lot colder back then than it is now. We used to have snow quite a bit.”

  I confess at this point I let my mind wander, anticipating another one of Grandma Hilda’s long digressions. But, as though sensing her audience’s fading attention, she returned to the point almost immediately.

  “While I was out there, cutting wood, I heard a car coming up the driveway and when I looked it was the sheriff in his big old Pontiac. Now I’d been doing some ironing for his wife, who’d been feeling poorly all winter, and I figured that was what he’d come by about. I told him I’d bring the ironing over a little later, and he said he didn’t want me to bother, that they’d come by and get it after Christmas. Said there was an escaped convict on the loose, and I was to be sure and keep my doors locked until your granddaddy got home. This fellow was a murderer, he said, chopped up a whole family up in Jackson County with an ax last year. I told him not to worry, that it being Christmas Eve your granddaddy would be home early. But I’d be careful just the same.

  “Well, he’d no sooner gone back down the driveway than I heard Laura Lee crying, so I just stuck the ax in the tree stump, gathered me up an armload of wood, and hurried back to the house. By the time I got her fed and changed it was starting to snow, and it was about time for your granddaddy to come home. It was starting to come on dark, so I went around the house lighting lanterns. When I got to the parlor here, I happened to look out that window over yonder...”

  We all instinctively turned our heads toward the window she indicated.

  “And Lord, if I didn’t see a man staring back at me!”

  She said it with such drama that I actually caught my breath, half-expecting to see a face appear in the window at which I was staring.

  “He was a mean-looking thing, too, with a beard and wild tangled hair, and standing there with snow on his clothes in his shirt sleeves. And then I saw him start to move across the porch, you know, over to the front door, and it wasn’t until then that I remembered what the sheriff had said. I ran to the front door and locked it not two seconds before he started rattling the door handle.

  “Then I remembered the baby sleeping back in the kitchen by the fire—with the back door unlocked. I ran through the house, threw the bolt on the back door and snatched up my little girl, and I blew out the lantern and hunched up against the wall, scared to death.”

  We were riveted. My brother made sounds of amazement and disbelief, and even my mother was wide-eyed. I urged, “What happened?”

  I have never seen a woman so skillfully hold an audience in her hand as did my Grandma Hilda on that occasion. “Well,” she continued, with an obvious relish of every word, “the longest time passed, and I figured whoever it was had just gone on. You know it was the Depression and we weren’t that far from the railroad. Used to get a lot of hobos and bums coming to the back door. I started to feel kind of silly, and bad that I’d locked the door like that on Christmas Eve.”

  A product of our own times, we all exclaimed that she had done exactly the right thing, for who knew what might have happened if she hadn’t locked the door?

  Grandma Hilda nodded. “It was getting on late, though, and I was starting to worry about your granddaddy. The roads were slippery and that old truck of ours didn’t work half the time, and what if there was a killer out there? We didn’t have a phone, and even if we did I wouldn’t know who to call. In another hour or so it would be dark, and if your granddaddy was in a ditch somewhere he’d freeze to death before morning.

  “We had an old mule, and a surrey that we’d drive to church sometimes when the weather was fair. I knew I was going to have to hitch up that mule and go off looking for my husband myself, or at least ride down the road to the sheriff’s house, and take him away from his wife on Christmas Eve to go out hunting for him. So I went out to the barn, with the snow coming down so hard I couldn’t hardly keep it out of my eyes, and left the baby sleeping by the stove in the house.”

  Oh, we knew something bad was coming. Obviously the baby—my mother—had survived the ordeal, whatever it had been, and so had my grandmother. But we were tense and breathless just the same. Like spectators at a silent movie who had thrown ripe fruit at the villain on the screen, we wanted to shout, “Don’t go in the barn! Don’t leave the baby alone!”

  Grandma Hilda went on, “I got about half way across the yard when I saw him again—that man who’d been at the window. He was slipping around the porch toward the back. I guess he’d been hiding in the barn all afternoon, and when I came out, he took his chance to get in the house. But I’d left baby Laura Lee in there, all alone.

  “Then I remembered how I’d stuck the ax in the stump that afternoon when I finished cutting wood. I ran across the yard toward the wood pile, but the ax was gone! That man had it, and he was in the house with my baby!”

  “Good heavens,” I exclaimed, when I couldn’t stand the dramatic pause any longer. “What in the world did you do?”

  Grandma Hilda swept the room with a thoughtful gaze, assessing the mood. It must have been satisfactory, because she continued, “I snuck into the house, that’s what. I crept around the back porch and I pushed open the kitchen door, and I could hear him moving around in there, with the floorboards creaking and all. But Laura Lee was still sleeping in her cradle by the stove, so I snatched her up and I ran out into the snow.

  “I hadn’t even put on a coat when I went out, and all I had to keep the snow off the baby was my apron. You know our skirts were real long then, and I kept tripping over mine. I ran down the driveway and down to the road, and it felt like nearly a mile in the snow and the dark. And who should I meet on the road but the sheriff and his deputy? Seems like they’d tracked that old convict to my house and thought I was in there with him, killed or hostage. They were coming to rescue me!”

  “Did they catch him?” my brother wanted to know.

  “Oh, they caught him, all right. Right here in the house. Shot him in the shoulder and dragged him back off to state prison.”

  “What about Daddy?” my mother wanted to know. “Where was he?”

  “Just like I thought, off in a ditch. But a neighbor had seen the tire tracks and pulled him out, and he was already on his way home. He’d gotten a bonus from the lumber yard, and he brought home a country ham, and a china doll for you and a quilted bathrobe for me. We had the best Christmas ever.”

  An awed and appreciative silence fell at the conclusion of her tale. We all three looked at each other, and I pronounced the collective opinion. “That,” I said, “was the best story I’ve ever heard.”

  We bombarded her with questions. How had he escaped? Who was he? Did he really have the ax? Wasn’t she scared to death? Why had we never heard this story before?

  “Because,” she answered, so pleased with herself she was practically beaming, “I was saving it. This is your Christmas present.”

  We all agreed that, as presents go, she had outdone herself.

  When Jill got home from Michi
gan two days later, I couldn’t wait to tell her what she’d missed. A peaceful, non-toxic dinner, hand-made Christmas gifts, and the most riveting after-dinner Christmas story I had ever heard—one that was not only a thrilling and heretofore unknown episode in our family history, but one that was actually told coherently from beginning to end. And told by Grandma Hilda. Excitedly, I began to repeat the tale.

  I got to the part where Grandma Hilda went to the barn and saw the man sneaking around the back when Jill interrupted me.

  “And then she looked over at where she’d left the ax, and it was gone.”

  I stared at her.

  “And then,” continued Jill, “she sneaked back into the house and grabbed up the baby and ran out into the snow and met the sheriff on the road, right?”

  I frowned, disappointed. “How did you know? When did she tell you this story?”

  Jill burst into laughter. “I don’t believe it! Mama, she didn’t tell it to me! It was the movie of the week last Sunday!”

  #

  That was our last Christmas with Grandma Hilda. She passed away quietly in her sleep the following July at the age of eighty-six. The next autumn as I was airing out the winter linens I came across the box with the heirloom quilt in it, still carefully wrapped in tissue to preserve it for future generations. Impulsively, I took it out and spread it on my bed. As I did, the corner flipped down and a white tag was plainly visible on the underside. It said: Made in Japan.

  I sat down on the bed, and I laughed. And then I cried.

  I cried for giant Easter rabbits and extravagant birthday cards, for funny stories about an eccentric lady who always did things her way, and who was,without a doubt, one of a kind. I remembered her last, best gift, and my laughter was a tribute to the woman who had, in the end, outdone us all; she told a story and made our eyes grow big with wonder; she presented us with quilts and made us marvel at their beauty; she made us happy, and she pleased herself.

  As always with Grandma Hilda, it was the thought that counted.