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  KEEPER OF THE STICK

  By Virginia Ellis

  Grown-ups never understand anything for themselves, and it’s tiresome for children to be forever explaining things to them.

  —Antoine de St. Exupery

  My daddy was a trucker, and he mostly hauled cattle. That means that four-legged critters are involved in most of the memories from my childhood. Believe me, if you’ve ever slipped and fallen in a warm, newly-dropped cow patty, the image stays with you for life.

  One of my first cow memories comes from when I was around four and half years old. I know my age because of the events that took place. That day, like many others, my dad had a load of cattle to move. No cattle, no money. It was a concept even a four-year-old could understand.

  Unfortunately, when he arrived with his truck, the cattle weren’t in a pen. They were loose in a fifty-acre pasture and so far away that you could barely see them in the distance. My daddy and the farmer who owned the cows spent all day on foot trying to herd the cattle into the loading pen. The man had shaken his head and explained that these particular cattle hadn’t seen a person in several years so they were a little spooky.

  So not only were the cattle not where they were supposed to be, they were “wild” cattle. In more recent times it’s been said that you can’t “tune a fish.” Well, I’m sorry to report to all you animal lovers out there, in my experience you can’t do much with a cow either—except chase ‘em.

  And that’s what my daddy did, until almost dark. As a last resort, and I know this to be true because my momma was around eight and a half months into the manufacture of my little sister, my daddy came home to get her, my older sister, and me to help load the cows. No cows, no money.

  All we needed, he explained, was a few more unfamiliar bodies in the way to keep the cows from splitting up and heading for the back of the pasture. So not long after that, I found myself standing in the fading afternoon light near Daddy’s eighteen-wheeler with a stick in my hand. My job, because I was the smallest, was to stand beyond the gate of the pen and keep the cows from running right past it. Daddy explained that these cows were scared of humans and that if I waved that stick, they’d turn the other way.

  All I had to do was stand there.

  It sounded reasonable to me, although I didn’t like the idea of being the only one left behind when the rest went out in the pasture to herd the cattle. They were gone a long time. I spent what felt like hours practicing with my stick and staring off into the growing twilight until finally I saw them coming. I could see my dad first, he was the tallest, then my mom walking and waving a towel, then I saw the cows. My heart started pounding. I never even looked for my older sister.

  My eyes were locked on what were undoubtedly the biggest cows I’d ever seen. And they didn’t look too happy about going anywhere with my daddy.

  Now that I’m older I can say I was probably facing twenty full-grown cattle with a few calves. In my four-year-old memory, however, there were at least a hundred of them racing out of the darkness, and they were wild-eyed.

  I could hear my daddy give a shrill whistle every once in a while and a few of the cows would jump forward. I walked out, away from the safety of the truck, and held up my stick. My brain knew what I had to do and kept repeating my daddy’s words: Just stand there.

  But it was like my feet had eyes. They could see those cattle, and they didn’t want to be the only spindly thing between wild cattle and escape. I’d never felt so small in my short life, and my cowardly feet took two steps closer to the truck.

  The nearer the cows got, the more agitated they became. If they hadn’t seen humans in awhile, they certainly hadn’t seen an eighteen-wheeler or a four-year-old with a stick. What if they didn’t know enough to be afraid of me? I took another two steps closer to the truck and waved the stick.

  That’s when things went south.

  The cattle seemed to sense that this might be their last trip in life and, instead of going into the pen, they bolted. I heard my daddy yell for me to chase them back.

  But that’s when the problem with my feet became acute. After one frozen, horrified gaze at the “thundering herd,” I dropped the stick and ran for the truck, pulling myself onto the step-up as the cattle went by.

  I was alive, but totally humiliated. Everybody was standing there tired and frustrated, looking at me, and I felt like I’d failed the only mission I’d been given in life. If I remember, my daddy asked what happened. I wanted to say that someone taller should have been in charge of the stick. But instead, I confessed that I’d been too scared, and my sister called me a scaredy cat. Then my mom just gave me a hug and said, “It’s okay.”

  The farmer, I guess with some remorse about my daddy chasing his crazy cows all day, said he figured we’d done all we could do. He’d find someone to come in the morning with horses to herd the cows into the pen. Then he did something amazing. He opened his wallet and gave my dad ten dollars to buy us some dinner since we’d missed it fooling with his cows.

  Not only did we have dinner, which I remember as being the most wonderful ham sandwich I’d ever eaten, (we didn’t eat in restaurants much) but we also went to the drive-in. I don’t recall what the movie was. Near the end of it, however, my momma started feeling bad and we had to go home. When I woke up the next morning, my grandma was at the house and she said we had a new baby sister.

  Now a four-year-old’s mind can ramble in some odd directions. I used to wonder if those cows had scared my little sister right out of my momma’s belly like they’d scared me up onto Daddy’s truck, and I watched to see if that fright might have a lasting affect on her. But she grew up normal, didn’t become a cow-hater or a vegetarian. I’ve never seen her actu ally interact with a cow—most of her adventures were with horses—so I guess we all made it through the cow chase unscathed.

  As for my daddy, he hauled cattle for a few more years and gave me a few more tales to tell before he switched to gasoline. You don’t have to herd gasoline, unless it catches on fire. But, that’s another story...

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  Author’s note: After writing this story, I sent the manuscript to my mother thinking she would get a kick out of it. I called her a few days later and asked how she’d liked it. Of course, she said it was wonderful and that she couldn’t believe I had remembered so much at such a young age.

  As I was congratulating myself on a job well-done, she continued talking. “There’s just one thing,” she said.

  I thought maybe I’d missed some small detail since she’d already congratulated me on doing a fine job, so I wasn’t nervous.

  “Uh—” She seemed reluctant to speak.

  “Well, what did I forget?” I asked.

  “We got the cows,” she answered. “That’s why the farmer gave us money for dinner. And as far as I remember, you didn’t run,” my mother said. “You might have moved, but you didn’t run. Everything else is just as it happened.”

  Now herein lies the lesson, not only for writers, but for children everywhere. All I can figure is, at four and a half I wanted to run so bad that in my memory, I had. In my memory I was the goat who had failed the test when in real life I had stood there, albeit moving slightly, and did my job.

  I am making a promise to myself right now, and forever more, to remember being the best I could be in any situation.

  ‘Cause sometimes, I was.

  FINGERPRINTS

  By Donna Ball

  [Tradition] cannot be inherited, and if you want it

  you must obtain it by great labour.

  —T.S. Eliot

  What most people don’t understand about the Southern family is how deeply our roots are planted in the subsoil of the past. Nourished by ritual and fortified by necessity, our strength lies in the blood of all the generations, who have gone before us. Scratch any Southern family and you’ll find a story of a young boy who fought a wild cat with a pocket knife, a mother who hid her children in a well to protect them from marauders, a husba
nd who crossed a mountain barefoot to bring nourishment to his starving family. These are not heroes; they are not legends. They are simply men and women who did what had to be done. Like the faded daguerreotypes that hang from the walls of weather-beaten home places across the South, they are our heritage.

  Opening weekend of bird season had been a tradition in my husband’s family for as long as anyone could remember. All the boys would gather, driving in from wherever in the state they happened to be on Friday night after work, back to the old home place. There would be a big pot of chicken and dumplings on the back burner of the stove, ready to be ladled up as the children and grandchildren came in, with fried fruit pies for dessert. There was milk in a fat blue ceramic pitcher for the children, and black coffee for the adults. The women would feed the children and catch up on the gossip while the men sat around a coal-burning stove, telling tall tales and oiling down their hunting boots with melted lard to protect them from the cold dew and wet bogs of the morning’s hunt. The aromas of gun oil and hot coffee, simmering chicken and hard-working men combined into a thick sensory stew that, even now, can take me back in an instant to a time and a place that will never come again.

  Miss Jewel and Mr. Bill—who were never called anything else by anyone except their own children—produced four living boys, of whom my husband was the oldest. All the boys were raised on the bounty of the land, fishing with cane poles in lazy summer ponds, tramping through frosty fields in search of deer or quail in the winter, but not ashamed to bring home a squirrel or rabbit for the stew pot when that was all they could find. What they killed, they ate. What they raised in the fields, they prepared or preserved.

  Miss Jewel still collected eggs from her own chickens every morning, and twice a day brought in milk warm from the cow. Mr. Bill held a hog-killing once a year, and salted and smoked his own meat. Once, as a very new bride, I inquired why in the world they would want to go to so much trouble when the supermarket three miles down the road could sell eggs, meat and milk for far less than it cost my in-laws to shelter and feed the animals that produced the same. My naivete was met with first a blank look, then with a tolerant, “Because that’s the way it’s done, sugar. ”

  That’s the way it’s done.

  Their sons had grown rather far away from their roots over the years, going off to the suburbs to work in factories or start their own businesses or, in the case of Little Earl (so named after Mr. Bill’s brother, who had died a hero in WWII)to teach high school. They came home for Christmas and Thanksgivings and birthdays, and on weekends when they could. But once a year they came home to their past, took up their shotguns and donned their caps and hunting vests, and did things the way they had always been done.

  No one saw any reason that things should be different the year Mr. Bill had his stroke.

  Not that there hadn’t been some discussion. The stroke had left the family patriarch weak on his left side and occasionally forgetful, a shrunken memory of his former robust self who moved like an old man and whose blue eyes were sometimes, terrifyingly, confused. It was painful to watch; heart wrenching to think about. Here was a man we thought would never die. But plainly he was more mortal than any of us wanted to admit.

  There were hasty telephone calls between the sisters-in-law, worried debate between the brothers, and, finally, a direct confrontation with Miss Jewel herself. Surely she wasn’t going to let Mr. Bill go hunting this year. Was he strong enough? What did the doctor say? Wouldn’t it be best to just skip the whole thing until he was stronger?

  But that stoic woman, with pain in her eyes and a grim set to her mouth, only replied that it wasn’t her place to tell Mr. Bill what he could or couldn’t do, and Mr. Bill was determined to go hunting on opening weekend, just the way he always had. She would expect to see us all on Friday night.

  The way she said it let us know that the subject had been raised in heated debate between her husband and herself on more than one occasion. Of course she didn’t want him to go. And of course he didn’t want things to change. In the end I think it wasn’t so much Mr. Bill’s stubborness that won out, as it was Miss Jewel’s compassion—and perhaps the compassion of all of us. I guess we all knew that if we waited for Mr. Bill to get stronger, there would never be another Opening Weekend hunt. And so the tradition would continue this year as it had every other one—for him. For all of us.

  Little Earl had married a city girl six months previously, and this would be her first weekend with her husband’s family. It was obvious from the moment Cathy walked in the door, wearing a pale blue wool coat and matching pillbox hat, clutching an envelope bag in died-to-match blue and smiling a smile that looked as though it might crack her cheeks at any moment, that Miss Jewel and Mr. Bill weren’t the only ones who had had words about the weekend. I felt sorry for her up until the moment she swept a distressed glance from the stew pot on the cook stove to the men who were dipping old rags into the soup can of melted lard on the coal stove, wrinkled her nose and inquired, “What is that smell?”

  Behind her, carrying the three pieces of monogrammed luggage that Cathy’s parents had given them for a wedding gift, Little Earl smiled wanly and apologetically, and we all returned looks of sympathy.

  We bedded down early– children sharing featherbeds and mounds of quilts with their parents in the unheated upstairs rooms where the temperatures hovered around freezing on cold November mornings—and were up long before first light. Miss Jewel started stirring at four o’clock, shuffling downstairs to mix up yeast biscuits in a big blue bowl and set it to rise on the back of the stove, opening the creaky pantry door and slicing country ham from the shoulder that hung there, heating an iron skillet, filling the percolator with water. I snuggled deeper into the downy bed, letting the familiar sounds paint comforting memory pictures for me, while my husband stretched and yawned and muttered about how no bird was worth getting up this early for, just like he did every year. And then we were both silent, listening and not wanting to listen to the not so pleasant sounds that were coming from Cathy and Little Earl’s room across the hall.

  Words like “stupid” and “barbaric” shot sharply through the tempered oak boards that separated the rooms. “You hate hunting!” Cathy cried. “You told me so yourself!”

  “I do not hate it. Lower your voice.”

  My husband and I looked at each other in the dark. Everyone knew Little Earl was not the best hunter in the family. The fact that he went on these trips out of a sense of duty rather than genuine enjoyment of the sport was no secret to anyone—except perhaps Mr. Bill. Would this be the year he backed out of the expedition? Would he let his father down?

  “And you’re taking that sick old man with you, making him carry a gun! What kind of son are you? What if something happens out there? Are all you all crazy?”

  “Nothing’s going to happen.” Little Earl’s voice sounded tired, as though he’d had the argument many times before.

  “And what about me?” She was tearful now. “You’re just going to leave me here all alone, worrying myself to death about whether you ever come back...”

  “Cathy, I’m coming back.”

  “Well maybe you shouldn’t! Maybe if you care more about—about killing things with a gun than you do about me, well maybe you should just stay out there in the woods with your brothers and your gun!”

  “Cathy, honey...”

  She burst into sobs, and I was embarrassed on behalf of all womankind.

  It was an uncomfortable group that trooped down to breakfast at 5:30 that morning, all of us rubbing our hands and putting on our happy faces, keeping our voices low so as not to wake the children and trying, by turn, not to look at either Cathy and Little Earl or Miss Jewel and Mr. Bill. Wordlessly, Miss Jewel poured black cups of coffee and served up big platters of country fried ham and eggs, buttery grits and soft hot biscuits with hand-pressed butter and four kinds of jam. Mr. Bill’s shaking hand scattered sugar all over the checked vinyl tablecloth and we all pretended not t
o notice. Cathy kept her head low and pushed her food around on her plate with her fork, and we pretended not to notice.

  The men bolted down their meal and drained the dregs of the coffee. They pushed ammunition into the loop holders on their vests, they lowered the ear flaps on their caps, they shouldered their shotguns. They kissed their wives. Little Earl’s kiss, I noticed, was stiff and reserved, and Cathy clung to his sleeve for a moment, looking into his eyes, before abruptly turning away. Mr. Bill pinched Miss Jewel’s cheek, like he always did, and told her to keep a pot of coffee on the stove. He liked it hot and strong, he told her, like his women. We all laughed at that, like we always did, everyone except Miss Jewel. But the laughter was strained, and faded as we watched him shuffle down the steps, holding on tight to the rail while his sons hovered anxiously around him.

  We stood at the screen door and watched them walk down the dirt drive away from the house, the bird dogs barking and bouncing excitedly along beside them. Our menfolk, going off to conquer the world on our behalf, just as they had done since time immemorial. Strong and young, old and weak, as different as five men could be but united by brotherhood, they were for that moment as close to a single unit as it was possible to be.

  It was foggy out, and barely light, and our noble hunters were swallowed up by the gloom after a dozen or so steps. Still, we stood there in the cold and the damp, watching. Then Miss Jewel said flatly, “Dang fool. Even if he could see the bird, he couldn’t lift the gun to shoot it.”

  She closed the door firmly, and we turned back into the kitchen to begin our chores.

  It soon became apparent that Cathy was about as useful in a kitchen as a rubber corkscrew. After she had broken two of Miss Jewel’s coffee cups, put the butter dish on the back of the stove instead of in the refrigerator—where it promptly dissolved into a puddle of cream—and fed the cat out of a Haviland saucer, we sent her out with the children to gather pecans.