Sweet Tea and Jesus Shoes Page 9

  My money was on Sis’ best-friend, who tagged along for the ride. She had three kids. I figured she could handle a few liquored-up rowdies with nothing more than “the look.”

  Their first stop was a mountain cemetery carved out of wilderness. Our grandfather’s sharply cut granite headstone seemed out of place with the chipped and worn stones of graves two hundred years old. He’d only died a few years earlier. That stung. Sis had found him but would never have the answers to her questions.

  Did he have the same huge hands that Daddy had?

  Did he love the water and dams the way Daddy did?

  Did he read those stupid encyclopedias just for fun?

  Could he see the fib in your eyes before the lie left your lips—

  the way Daddy could?

  And a million more.

  No stranger to deadends, Sis simply re-routed. She found a phone booth and called the number included with her notes. The phone was answered by a middle-aged masculine voice. There were sounds of a family dinner in the background. Giggles and voices and clattering dishes.

  Perfect timing. If you’re going to drop a bomb, Sunday Dinner is the preference of most Southerners. So, Sis dove right into her spiel. “Excuse me, you don’t know me but I may be your father’s granddaughter.”

  The conversation was quick and bizarre. Yes, his mother was the Daugherty widow in question. Absolutely no to the question of his father having been married before.

  “Are you sure? Parents don’t always tell us everything.”

  “Look...I said, no...no.” But his voice wavered uncertainly.

  “Okay, okay just one more question. My grandfather was missing part of an index finger from a mine acci—”

  “No! Not him!” You’d have thought the man won the lottery from his enthusiasm. “Dad had all his fingers! It’s not him.”

  Praise the Lord and pass the potatoes. Only in the South could the phrase “he had all his fingers” be a son’s proud summation of his father’s life.

  Sis had a ten-fingered corpse and another deadend. She also had an uncle with a pocketful of quarters and an area phone book still tethered to the phone booth. No one actually expected to find our Byrd on the other end of the phone. Except maybe...Sis.

  This time an older woman answered. Wouldn’t call the Byrd of the household to the phone. Said it was too difficult for him to hear on the telephone even with hearing aids. She’d been married to the man for forty years and if Sis had some questions she’d better ask them of her or stop wasting her time.

  Yes, he’d been married before.

  Yes, he’d lived in Chicago.

  And, yes, he was missing part of a finger.

  “Then I’m his granddaughter.”

  “Well then, he’ll want to talk to you. Byrd! Byrd, get the phone and hurry up. It’s your granddaughter.”

  It was The Moment.

  We’ve all heard about it. We talk about it. But very few of us are there to see it—the moment a grown man is brought to his knees. That’s the only way Sis has ever been able to describe the first time she talked to Granddad. The first time she hugged him.

  His hands are huge. As big as Daddy’s. The first thing he did was put her in the car and drive her down to see the dam. He sold encyclopedias as a younger man and even read them for entertainment. Genetics are a scary thing.

  But not to Southerners. We live and breathe genetics. We are who we were and are damned proud of it. We need to know that what came before will go on.

  Imagine losing something very precious. Imagine your wife disappearing and taking the only child you’ll ever have. Finally, when you’re seventy, you stop kidding yourself. You stop looking. You put away the birth certificate and the letters and the file folders.

  Then one ordinary day, when you’re eighty-three, a granddaughter you’ve never met knocks on your door.

  Imagine what it’s like to want to spend one Christmas with your son before you die.

  Imagine how proud I am of my sister, my family’s keeper.

  BIGDADDY’S OUTHOUSE

  By Sandra Chastain

  Man has his will—but woman has her way.

  —Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

  My grandparents, with whom I lived for most of my life, never nagged—at least not each other. They found other, more subtle means of making their feelings known. My grandmother was a hard-working saint. My grandfather—who I always called Bigdaddy—was close behind, at least in the sainthood department. Hard-working was another thing. To be fair, he recognized his deficiencies and took on a part time job in order to hire Slim, the local handyman, to do the chores “he didn’t have time to do.”

  Unfortunately, Slim didn’t do plumbing. Therefore, indoor plumbing didn’t come to our house until I was in junior high. That never bothered my granddaddy. He’d used an outhouse all his life and continued to do so, even after the facility took a dangerous tilt to the left. Though the little weathered building was hidden from view of the neighbors by a stand of prickly plums and wormy peach trees, my grandmother wanted it gone from her chicken yard before the next gathering of the Woman’s Missionary Society, which was scheduled to meet for the first time in years at our house. She had her egg money and three months to accomplish her goal, both of which might have been enough if she hadn’t committed the unpardonable sin of ordering the supplies from Mr. Weed down at the hardware store without my granddaddy’s knowledge. Once that toilet and lavatory were delivered, my granddaddy went into slow motion about removing the outhouse.

  My grandmother dealt with his brand of passive resistance in her own unique way. She never said a word, but every day when she went to the chicken yard to feed the chickens, she “rested” her back against the leaning side of the outhouse. Later in the day, while hoeing her little garden, she’d transfer a shovel of “good rich dirt” from the other side of the tilting building to the area where she intended to plant new strawberries. The little building with the half-moon on the door tilted more and more precariously until finally it became apparent that, unless Granddaddy was willing to face the southern exposure in a way he wouldn’t want to, the outhouse had to be replaced.

  Thus, Slim was commissioned to demolish the old outhouse, build and deliver a new one. “To be painted white, like the house,” Bigdaddy told my grandmother proudly, as if that would make everything all right.

  It wouldn’t. My grandmother’s humiliation would be complete.

  “If any of the ladies don’t ‘go’ before they leave home,” said Bigdaddy, “they’ll have a new facility, much better than the one those missionaries have that you women are supporting in China.”

  My grandmother didn’t argue. She just started thinking.

  Now Slim was amenable to most anything Bigdaddy asked him to do, but he considered outhouses to be beneath his dignity and conveniently ignored Bigdaddy’s request. I’ve decided that Slim and Bigdaddy had a similar relationship to the one existing between my grandparents—selective hearing.

  After several reminders from my grandmother, Bigdaddy encountered Slim downtown with his wife and children and announced that it was time Slim got on with tearing down the old and delivering the new. “And if you don’t want to get your feet nasty,” he added, having no truck with putting on airs, “bring those younguns of yours to help.”

  Now Slim might eventually have gotten around to doing the job, but having it suggested that he bring his children to help with the dirty work was the only incentive he needed to get the job over with. Bigdaddy should have taken note of the gleam in Slim’s eyes as he agreed.

  And so it was that a week later, about the time my grandmother’s Missionary Society members gathered for their monthly meeting, Slim arrived and went to work dismantling the outhouse, loudly delivering it to the woodpile, plank by plank—except for the door which he leaned against the broken lumber in such a way that the blooms of the peachtree showed through the cut out of the quarter moon.

  Ignoring the din of demolition, the pres
ident of the Missionary Society, Eleanor Deriso, opened the meeting with a prayer. The minutes of the last meeting were read and the treasurer’s report given. The members bemoaned the meager amount they’d collected for their Chinese World Missions Fund and decided to have a bake sale for which my grandmother promised to contribute several of her famous strawberry pies. Finally, after a vote was taken to send Miss Sophie (who was laid up with her back) a get-well card, the clatter of demolition from the outside slowed to a stop, and the program began.

  Afterward, as the ladies gathered on the screened-in side porch for strawberries and whipped cream on pound cake, Slim came driving up with the new outhouse, shining white to match the house, and complete once more with the cut-out of a quarter moon on the door. But the most remarkable thing about the new facility was the bay window on the side.

  “Why, Livy,” one member exclaimed, “I didn’t know you were building a new...” her voice faltered for a moment before she was struck with inspiration and finished, “new tool shed.”

  “Neither did Lee,” Grandmother said sweetly. “And it’s a hot house, not a tool shed. At least it’s going to be.”

  “Of course,” another member added. “The bay window is such a nice touch. That gave it away immediately.”

  My grandmother gave a serene smile and nodded. “Slim is such a craftsman. He only needed a picture to understand what I wanted. I found one in Lee’s Farm Journal. Lee’s going to be...surprised, at what a nice job he did.”

  To give them credit, not one of the ladies mentioned the quarter moon cutout in the door, a sure give away that the structure had started out to be an outhouse. But they had to have suspected that their quiet, demure Olivia was up to something. Not one verbalized the fact that my granddaddy had probably commissioned Slim to build and install the last outhouse ever to be constructed within the city limits of Wadley, Georgia...and certainly the first with a bay window.

  My grandmother never mentioned it either.

  As usual, Slim had done his own unique job on the construction of the facility—and in the process, exercised his own brand of passive aggression. It wasn’t his fault that the board he selected for the seat was full of splinters and soaked with a sweet and sticky fluid that smelled suspiciously like sorghum syrup. Slim always did the job; he just had his own way of settling his debts.

  A few days later, Bigdaddy came back from town with a can of hornet spray and a window screen. “Can’t believe that fool thought I needed a window,” he grumbled, then gathered up his hammer and nails and retired to his new facility where he installed the first window screen in an outhouse in the county. The new screen in no way contained the puff of insecticide, nor the bees escaping what they had thought was an easier source of honey than the peach blossoms. Grandmother just smiled and said that “sometimes a man has to take his lumps before he sees the light.”

  Some good things came out of the venture, however. Slim installed the plumbing in the house and finally, without mentioning the change of venue, Bigdaddy took the door off his outhouse, installed a new ‘shelf’ and moved the little building out of the chicken yard. My Grandmother promptly turned the area where the outhouse once had rested into a strawberry patch. The peaches and plums drew honeybees like never before. The crop of fruit for the next few years was spectacular.

  Grandmother never told the ladies why her hot house started out with a quarter moon on the door or how she grew such magnificent fruit. In fact, the proceeds from the sale of Livy’s fruit pies made our little church the shining star in the World Missions program. My grandmother waged her own private campaign to feed the poor, starving children in China.

  Because of Bigdaddy’s outhouse, we never had to “clean” our plates and we got our indoor plumbing, too.

  FLYING ON FRIED WINGS

  By Deborah Smith

  Southerners are, of course, a mythological people...Lost by choice in dreaming of high days gone and big houses burned, now we cannot even wish to escape.

  —Jonathan Daniels

  Southerners of all backgrounds share a love for sports, at least for certain sports, such as football and baseball, both of which will allow a person of any social persuasion the opportunity to drink beer and holler outdoors. Basketball, however, is primarily a big-city attraction, meant to be played indoors without picnics spread on the grass or giant moths swarming under the stadium lights. Plus there is very little spitting in basketball, either by the fans or players.

  This alone is enough to make basketball suspicious to rural southerners, who value the freedom to expectorate in public. Nor do rural folk care much for golf or tennis. The former is an expensive waste of good hunting territory, and the latter requires that even manly men wear snug white shorts. A good ol’ boy could get himself laughed at that way.

  On the other hand, big-city southerners find it hard to appreciate traditionally rural sports, such as stock-car racing, bass tournaments, and professional wrestling, all of which require a certain suspension of self-centered dignity to understand or trust. Any sport that involves oil, bait, or bodybuilders wearing sequined capes is a little too intimate for sophisticated city folk, who don’t even want to know the names of their next-door neighbors.

  Fans of stock-car racing have an unwritten dress code. Men wear jeans, tractor caps, big belt buckles, and some piece of clothing that advertises either Jack Daniels, Johnny Cash, or auto parts. Women wear jeans and tank tops with ads matching their menfolks’. The stock-car-mama effect is only complete if the gals keep their hair long, perm it into tight waves, and top it with poofed-up bangs that won’t move in a stiff wind. Big-city southern women cannot even imagine poofed-up bangs. They have stylists named Raoul and Bruce who would faint at the very thought.

  Bass tournaments are bewildering, at best. For citified sports lovers, and also, in fact, for the majority of southerners—who only care that the catfish filets are fully fried before the ice cream is finished churning—bass tournaments are interesting solely for the cheap thrills of watching big-bellied men wobble around in precarious little boats. In fact, watching men fish isn’t a sport—there’s nothing to watch. For all but true fishing fans, bass tournaments are as exciting as waiting for glue to harden.

  Pro wrestling is not about serious competition between serious athletes. Any longtime fan knows that the whole thing’s scripted, but a real southern fan doesn’t care, because wrestling is, after all, male soap opera. Women have Susan Lucci; men have Hulk Hogan. The thrill is in the sheer histrionics of the action: the drama, the plot twists, the heroes and villains, the damsels in distress, the evil seductresses, and the noble sidekicks. Add body slams and striped tights to Days of Our Lives, and wrestling fans would feel right at home.

  Despite all the diversity of southern sports life, however, there are a few sports that haven’t caught on with either the uptown or the downhome folks. Soccer is one, no matter what the cable sports channel brags about its popularity or how many polls claim that “soccer moms” are running the country. Not in the South, they’re not. Grown men kicking a ball around the ground while wearing baggy shorts is just too Socialist for southerners’ tastes: we need our sports to be outright dirty and dangerous, completely silly, or supremely white-glove genteel. Soccer just doesn’t fit the bill in any category.

  Hockey has potential because players get to beat each other up and grin without their front teeth, but you’re never going to build a groundswell of support for a sport no sun-baked southern child can grow up playing—unless hell freezes over and the local Dairy Queen sets up community rinks in its walk-in freezer.

  And then there is the steeplechase. It’s not really a sport, it’s a social event that includes horses, and except for ritzy patches of Dixiedom where pseudo-southern-royalty gallop their hunter-jumpers across the countryside in pursuit of foxes, most of us give a slow, collective, Say what? when anyone asks if we’d like to watch it. There is something vaguely embarrassing about watching little jockeys race expensive thoroughbreds ar
ound a grassy course while leaping a few fake logs. The feeling is akin to averting one’s eyes when a chubby old uncle breaks into a clogging routine during a barbecue picnic.

  Even so, every spring the well-to-do and/or culturally snooty trek to huge pastures outside the southern cities to attend a steeplechase. It’s like the opera. You have to say you’ve been to one, at least once.

  Entertaining corporate visitors was part of my job as a regional manager for a chain of garden nurseries, so I had been to the steeplechase several times before the year I took my Uncle Hoyt and Aunt Wesma. I knew what to expect, and they didn’t, but they insisted on doing things their way. They had been doing things their way for as long as anyone in my family could remember. The universe usually adjusted to suit them.

  Uncle Hoyt was big, raw-boned, grinning, green-eyed, and full of mischief, a mountain man born-and-raised, like all my uncles. And like them, he had finished high school then refused even one more minute of higher education, opting instead for an independent life of more than a dozen self-employed occupations. Several of those jobs had made him rich, the best one being a heavy equipment sales-and-leasing company he started with my Uncle Benton, who lost an arm in a bobcat accident (the machine, not the animal) and swore he’d recoup his flesh in money.

  So Uncle Hoyt had several million dollars parked squarely in savings and investment accounts, though he’d never let you know it. His little joke was letting strangers think he was just another graying, fattening ol’ mountain feller. In fact neither he nor Aunt Wesma stood much on ceremony, though if you carefully studied the pea-sized diamond rings she wore on her tanned and callused hands you knew you weren’t looking at cubic zirconia.

  She and Uncle Hoyt shopped for most of their clothes at their local discount store, and had furnished their seven-thousand-square-foot mountain log home with plain family heirlooms and a hodgepodge of rustic cedar pieces made by my Uncle JoMo (Joseph Moses,) who owned a furniture-crafting business. Oddly enough, their plain-logic code of living easily encompassed sending my cousin Mima, their only daughter, to gourmet cooking school at a luxury resort in Thailand. The trip was her graduation present when she finished law school.