Sweet Tea and Jesus Shoes Page 8

  Ten months later he bought out the remaining property, which was virtually useless without road frontage, for one hundred dollars per.

  Aunt Millie, having held up the family tradition for excellent land deals, moved to Florida and is living today on Social Security.

  Lucifer lived to be thirteen years old, and was buried at last on the hill east of my mother’s house, overlooking the erstwhile peony bushes. My brother commissioned a granite marker for the grave.

  Here lies Lucifer, it reads.

  A man’s dog.

  COOKIE THE ONE-EYED HORSE

  By Virginia Ellis

  Lady Godiva put everything she had on a horse.

  —W.C. Fields

  When I was seven, I had three best friends: Mary Jo Taylor, a boy named Jesse and Cookie, a one-eyed horse.

  Cookie, a little more than two years old and not a plug, was of no use to my friend’s father, a horse dealer, because of her obvious disability. So, Mr. Taylor had given her to Mary Jo.

  We’d been told Cookie lost her eye when some mean boy had shot her with a BB gun. She looked perfectly normal except for the smooth flat place where her right eyeball used to be. Mary Jo and I didn’t care that she wasn’t perfect, we had a horse for a friend and since she loved cookies, that’s what my friend named her.

  I don’t believe Cookie knew she was a horse, however. I think, perhaps because she’d suffered a trauma in her youth, she got confused. Cookie thought she was a dog. If we didn’t tie her up, she’d follow us wherever we went: in the paddock, all over the yard, even up the steps to the house once, before Mary Jo’s mother opened the screen door and chased her off. She knew we were inside eating cheese sandwiches for lunch and thought she must surely be invited.

  Cookie had an overall kind disposition, didn’t bite or kick. She’d let us ride her double and barebacked, running like the wind through the pasture till one of us fell off. The only time she ever hurt me was when I was unlucky enough to fall underneath her at a full canter. Her back foot yanked out a whole handful of my hair and put a good-sized knot on my head. It was the only time in my life I saw little circling stars like the cartoon characters when I came to.

  Mary Jo and I didn’t tell anybody about my spill because we didn’t want them to take Cookie away from us. Later in life, when I had to have a CAT scan for a physical, I found out that Cookie’s memory still resides in my grown-up self. One side of my skull is thicker—exactly where she stepped on my head.

  Now I guess that means I can claim I wasn’t always so hard-headed. I don’t bother to do so, however, because I doubt anyone who knows me would buy it.

  When you live out in the farm country of Florida, you don’t have a wide choice of kids to play with. You’re fairly restricted to family and close neighbors, which is why a variety of animals became our friends and in some ways, our guardians. When you’re on a horse in the same pasture with a Brahma bull the size of a Volkswagon on stilts, for example, and your horse suddenly tenses up and heads for the barn like its tail is on fire, your job is to hold on with all your fingers and toes because the horse is trying to save your life...either that or it heard sweet feed being poured from a coffee can into the trough.

  But, as I mentioned, I didn’t have many human playmates. Mary Jo lived on the next farm, and Jesse lived even further away. His family and most of the rest of the world existed on the other side of a canal too wide for me to imagine crossing on my own. It was a great occasion when Jesse’s mother brought him over for a visit.

  The three of us, Jesse, Mary Jo and I used to disappear regularly into the secret places that only kids know. Rabbit trails in the high weeds, the tangled roots of the big Australian pines lining the canal across the road, the old barn with half a roof near the big grapefruit tree in the back. That was our playground.

  On one particular visit, Mary Jo and I took Jesse to meet Cookie. Although very impressed, he said he didn’t think he would enjoy riding anything that big, and no, he didn’t want to feed the horse a vanilla wafer. Since he was my friend I didn’t want to call him a chicken, so we said goodbye to Cookie before any abject bravery was required on his part, and we walked back over to my house to see what critters we could find in the old deserted barn. I was a little concerned that Jesse might run back to his momma if we came across a snake but decided it couldn’t be helped. We’d just stay away from the old tin and wood pile and hope for the best.

  Jesse took one look at the barn and said, “I’m not climbing up there.”

  Mary Jo and I looked at each other with the same expression we might have years later if a guest sat down to our carefully prepared Thanksgiving dinner and announced, “I don’t eat dead bird.”

  “What do you want to do then?” we asked, almost simultaneously.

  He just shrugged.

  Suddenly we had nothing to do—a very unusual state of affairs for us. I moved over to the bales of hay that were stacked against the dry side of the barn and sat down. Soon Mary Jo and Jesse followed, except they had to move a bale over to make another place to sit. So we sat. And we sat.

  Then, with the sudden inspiration of country kids, someone said, “Let’s build a fort,” and we were off. Soon we had dragged out the center bales of the square stack and built a room inside. We had to climb in over the top but once inside, the five-foot outer walls completely hid us.

  After all that work we had to sit down and rest awhile in our nest. It was so quiet and cool down there in the shade that we discussed having a picnic. None of us wanted to go back to the house, however, since that might mean it would be time to leave if Jesse’s mother happened to be ready to go. If they couldn’t find us, they couldn’t make us come back.

  It only took us around fifteen minutes of resting and discussing to decide to play doctor.

  Now, I’m not blaming or accusing anyone—nor do I expect to get off the hook. I’ll just say that at the ripe old age of seven, having lived with only sisters, I was interested to see how the other half lived, so to speak. Mary Jo had a little brother, but he was just a baby—no use to us as a playmate or a co-conspirator.

  It took several choruses of, “You go first. No, you go first,” to make us decide to all drop our shorts at once. So, with sweaty hands and guilty consciences from what we were about to do, we dropped trou.

  This turned out to be something Jesse was very interested in. As we gawked at each other’s private parts, he seemed to be prouder of his than he should have been. He was just informing us how we were slighted because we didn’t get a pee-pee when the walls started to shake.

  You must have heard the expression, Putting the Fear of God into someone. Well, we were so panic-stricken we were competition for Lot’s wife. I looked toward the blue sky thinking we’d been caught by my grandmother’s hell-and-damnation God, or worse, by my grandmother herself who would stripe my backside until even the thought of baring it would be painful, and I was too transfixed to pull up my panties.

  The walls moved again, even more violently. As if we’d been ordered, all three of us yanked up our pants and turned to face our doom.

  That’s when Cookie looked over the top of our fort, and if a horse could smile, she was grinning from ear to ear.

  I have to say that I had the urge to smile as well—mostly from nervous relief at not being required, this time, to pay the price for my curiosity about boys. But the relief I felt about not facing symbolic death at the hands of our parents was overshadowed, just like we were overshadowed by Cookie. I realized that that silly dog/horse had climbed up the pile of hay bales, and the way they were shaking meant they were about to come down as suddenly as the house of straw so carefully constructed by the Three Little Pigs.

  It would do no good to order Cookie to get down. If anything, she would most likely try to jump in the center with us.

  “Climb out! Climb out!” this little piggy yelled as I headed for a side of bales that wasn’t teetering under Cookie’s full grown horse weight. We scampered out of ther
e like hysterical mice and then stood on the ground admiring Cookie’s tenacity. Even without an eye she’d followed us and found us without regard to her safety. Ours either.

  It took some thinking to get Cookie down from her perch. It’s a heck of a lot easier to get a horse to go forward than it is to shift them in reverse, especially a horse who only has a single-eyed view of the world. But Cookie trusted us. Both Mary Jo and I got back up on the bales to show Cookie the way down. By the time we’d done that, Jesse said he thought he wanted to go home.

  Jesse never came back to visit me, but I didn’t miss him much. Cookie was around for many more years and proved a better friend. I can still remember her playful nudges and the smell of her warm horse breath, spiced by vanilla wafers.

  I hope wherever she is now, and I assume that to be horse heaven, she can see as far as the horizon. And I’d like to think she remembers two young girls who loved her.

  FROM WHENCE WE COME

  By Debra Dixon

  The past is never where you think you left it.

  —-Katherine Anne Porter

  Southerners are pedigreed. We’re catalogued and classified like anthropological treasures in Bubba Tut’s tomb. And we’ve no one to blame but ourselves. Something about being Southern creates an emptiness inside the soul that can only be filled by “our people.”

  While any genealogist worth her salt can slap together a passable family tree, words on paper aren’t enough to impress us. We don’t care who your great-great-great-great grandfather was or how many times he met the queen. What we want to know is whether or not you have the coat he was married in. Or the first pair of shoes he bought for his children. Or the three teacups and five saucers your great Aunt Precious didn’t break over Uncle Dickie’s head when he came home too drunk to know he smelled like adultery.

  Our love affair with the past begins early. My sister and I never needed Aesop’s fables or the Brothers Grimm. In the South, if you need a bedtime story—pick a relative. Need inspiration? Pick a relative. Need a moral? Pick a relative. (Don’t throw china when you’re angry. Don’t drink and drive women wild.)

  Every tiny detail of our physical being and personality can be traced to Aunt Box’s fascination with door-to-door salesmen or Nana Burk’s thick ankles. Keeping these people, their memories, vividly alive in our souls comes naturally to Southerners. Every family has a storyteller—the keeper of our identity, the collector of our frailties. My sister is ours, despite the fact that she possesses an oddly selective memory.

  Her fines at the library are so high that it’s usually cheaper to pretend the books are lost and buy them. But she can remember every secret the family has or ever hinted at having. She’s managed to scrounge an impressive collection of old family photographs that originally belonged to gullible kinfolk who didn’t realize the innocent-sounding question, “May I borrow this?” was actually code for “You may never see this again.”

  No irate cousin has yet taken her to court over custody of the photo album, but we live in fear the day will come. (Faded sepia photographs are a status symbol of the South.) Mama will rush to the courthouse, arriving early as always and prepared to defend her child to the death. Sis won’t be there. The summons will have been lost in the bowels of her beat-up Ford filing cabinet—important papers in the front seat, junk mail in the back.

  She’s got her own compass for navigating life, and it generally gets her where she wants to go. But then she’s fond of scenic routes and dead ends. With her it’s always the journey, not the destination, that’s important.

  Our parents’ first clue that their two girls were dramatically different should have been the home movies of Christmas. My sister would pull something from her stocking and dance around the room, completely absorbed by the joy of the moment. (Mama would finally tell her that tissue paper wasn’t a toy, and Sis would dive back into the stocking for another discovery.) The contents of my stocking were lined up neatly along the couch cushion.

  When we dressed our new Barbies for the fashion parade, my poor Barbie was dressed in a sensible brown business suit. Her Barbie tripped the light fantastic in a sparkling magenta party dress just dripping with spangles.

  Now that you know Sis a bit better, you can appreciate our skepticism when she decided to find the past—Daddy’s past. The whole unsettling issue of Daddy and his people had been worrying her for twenty years, right from the moment she’d discovered he was adopted—half-adopted actually.

  We’d lived in blissful ignorance of Daddy’s past until our teenage years—until the government declined to issue Sis her Social Security card. Apparently there existed a teensy discrepancy with the names on a birth certificate. Daddy very calmly explained that the man we’d thought of as our grandfather, the man who died when we were quite young, wasn’t a blood relative. No, he wasn’t interested in finding his biological father. No, he wasn’t interested in discussing details. Case closed.

  And that, Daddy expected, was the end of that.

  For a smart man, a homicide detective—a man known to analyze minute bits of information and apprehend dumbfounded criminals, he made one major miscalculation. He thought he was dealing with business-suit Barbie. Nope. Party-dress Barbie was on the case. Somewhere, there existed another grandfather. Maybe uncles and aunts and cousins. Oh, my!

  He’d just handed the family storyteller a blank page—a blank page that nagged her and reminded her for twenty years that she wasn’t doing her job. Every couple of years she’d ask another question. Get another answer. Quietly, she began compiling a meager cache of information.

  By the time she confessed to Daddy that she had a need to find his people (and steal their photographs), she knew these things:

  Daddy’s people came from East Tennessee.

  Daddy’s daddy had a name—Byrd Daugherty.

  Byrd had been a coal miner who’d lost part of an index finger in a mine accident.

  The family had lived in Chicago for a time.

  When Daddy was two, his mother left his father and moved back to the South.

  Daddy had never been contacted by his father, not at Christmas, not on birthdays.

  I’ve got to tell you...the lack of solid leads was enough to daunt business-suit Barbie. For party-dress Barbie it seemed an impossible task.

  Sis had looked for any number of things during her thirtysomething years and never found any of them. Well, technically...she never finished looking for them. Living in the “moment,” as Sis does, is fraught with distractions. Entire game plans had been abandoned by her in the blink of an eye for butterflies, garage sales, and men who were completely wrong for the family. (In the South, it must be understood; you don’t marry the woman, you marry the family.)

  Given her track record, we never expected this newest quest to amount to much, but—being Southern—we understood her need to try.

  Weeks turned into months turned into years. She charmed complete strangers into tearing out or copying sections of their telephone directories so she could send letters in and around Chicago to anyone possessing the same last name as our grandfather. Or anything sounding remotely similar to Daugherty. Genealogy experts gave her pointers and even shared some of their research. The Internet as we know it didn’t exist in the early Nineties. The television program Unsolved Mysteries wasn’t on the tube every night.

  Each tiny breakthrough seemed to lead to another dead end. Most anyone else would have given this up as a lost cause, but Sis’s quirky compass was finally coming in handy. She’d been in training for dead ends all her life. Somewhere out there were uncles and aunts and cousins. And she was determined to find them.

  One night an amateur genealogist called and said she’d found our people. We learned that Daugherty is a fairly common name in the East Tennessee mountains, but if you go back far enough they’re all related. (You have to go back to the 1860’s. Two Daugherty brothers couldn’t agree on whether to wear blue or gray during the “great unpleasantness with the North.” Temper
s flared. As a result the clan split, and to this day each brother’s descendants live on different sides of the mountain and don’t speak. Apparently, pigheadedness is hereditary.)

  After a pregnant pause, our helpful genealogist strongly suggested we not try and visit “our people” since they tend to answer their doors armed with automatic weapons and intensely distrust strangers. On one occasion she’d been fired upon and promptly lost interest in that branch of her family tree, thus ending her research.

  What she had amassed, she offered to forward and Sis gladly accepted. The care package included more warnings about bullets, research notes, family trees, names, directions to Daugherty cemeteries, and what is now known in family lore as The Map. (Any map with a building marked “the snake handling church” deserves legendary status.) Despite the dire warnings—accompanied by the unwelcome news that the man we were looking for had died—Sis planned a trip. There was a cemetery to visit. A headstone to touch. A widow to talk with.

  Sis needed closure to the longest journey of her life. She needed to put a face to those people. Our storyteller had a need to touch history.

  Mama, ever protective of her children, didn’t mind her touching history, but she didn’t want her touching snakes and catching bullets. Two bodyguards were assigned—Mama’s brother, who has a Masters in Forestry from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, and our stepfather, who was an Eagle Scout. I figured if Sis got lost in the wilderness, needed to build a lean-to and identify edible bark...she was all set. I was less clear on how these gentlemen were going to stop buckshot or any other projectile.