Having grown up in the south I full well understand Sampiro’s now trademark “but that’s another story.” True southern tales are full of asides of other stories which are themselves full of asides of other stories which themselves are full of asides, well, y’all get the picture. Every good southern story has many, many, many side stories to go along with it. It has to do with all that heat, humidity and Evan Williams.
[snip]she did manage to survive every car we had- during her marriage to our poodle she survived a… that’s another story[/snip]
[snip]his ending is an unsolved mystery that involves B.B. and I wondea r to this day what happened, but that’s another story[/snip]
Well, not a lot to tell, other than it involves two sad love stories.
We had a Dachapoo named Fritz (poodle father/dachshund mother) who was spookily brilliant. I’m really not one of these people who says “Oh man, this dog is people smart!” every time one of my dogs learns to drag its but across the floor for a Twinkie (I’ll tell you flatly that my current dog, Ollie, love him though I do, is dumber than a monkey wrench- he’s gotten lost in a towel), but Fritz was the next level up from dog. He understood more words than any dog I’ve ever known, he somehow knew what present was his under the Christmas tree each year (wouldn’t bother any others but would unwrap his), once greeted us in the driveway on his birthday, jumped into the car, plundered through the shopping bags (which he never did) until he found his present (a ball of course) and then played with it the rest of the day- no idea how he knew that.
We should have neutered him as it would have made things easier. He went nuts whenever a bitch was in heat but none more so than B.B., the St. Bernard, with whom he was in love from the first time he met her. Even when she wasn’t in heat he was nuts about her. And the dog could strategize: one time he was barking at me (he loved women, men not so much) and baring his teeth and being a royal pain in the ass because evidently he thought I had designs on B.B. until (I was a kid then- wouldn’t do this today of course) I got mad at him, picked up a fallen branch and started to spank him with it. Pissed him off royally. Fritz assessed the situation, ran around me from behind, grabbed the branch from my hands, ran with it as fast as he could, dropped it several yards away, then ran back and started barking at me again. I had to admire that.
Luckily they never had puppies because they would have been messed up little dogs; there are things that a half-dachshund/half-poodle just can’t do with a St. Bernard. (We used to walk by him when he was paying court and sing “He’s got… High Hopes, he’s got, High Hopes…”, which he knew was about him and not nice and he’d growl when we so much as hummed it.) B.B. on the other hand was dumb as a bag of hair, but Fritz didn’t care.
Fritz was about six years old or so, and we’d had B.B. for about two years (and one litter of pups) when one night they disappeared. We went out to feed the pack and they were nowhere to be found. We called them, even drove through the pasture and spent the weekend walking through the woods, the whole Blair Witch thing, they were nowhere to be found. (Attitude and all, Fritz was beloved- B.B. was a court favorite too, but not as much as Fritz.) A week later we basically gave them up as dead. This was in spring.
Late that summer, just before school started back, my brother came home from college one night and we heard him screaming from the front yard, ecstatic, “She’s back! She’s back!” We ran outside to see what was up and there was B.B., Karen Carpenter skinny, mangy, covered with ticks and fleas and burrs, but otherwise seemingly healthy and obviously glad to be home. She’d been gone for three months. We were ecstatic, especially at hopes that Fritz was back too. Again we drove through the pasture, again we walked through the woods calling his name, again we posted pictures and reward notices at all the country stores, nada. Fritz was never seen again. (For years we’d stop when we saw dogs by dumpsters by a store 20 miles away if at a distance it looked like him, but it never was, though a couple did come home (the ones lucky enough to be spotted by my sister when she was alone).
How a dog as stupid as B.B. managed to find her way home from wherever they’d gotten lost (or been taken to) yet a dog as brilliant (though small) as Fritz didn’t, I don’t know. I know he probably didn’t, of course, but I’ve always hoped that he wound up with a loving family who appreciated him.
One side story: one of the times my sister got absolutely ecstatic was when she saw a dog on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere that she just knew was Fritz, and with reason: the dog looked just like him. Unfortunately, the dog was a Fritz-ie (Fritzie was what we would call her). She looked so much like him that everybody’s hearts leaped when we first saw her, only to be dashed. My sister’s then boyfriend/now husband was in pre-vet school at the time (dropped out after a semester or two) and told us not to get attached when he examined her as he could tell that she had a stomach tumor. Not even having seen her I’m pretty sure you can correct that diagnosis: she had about eight little tumors that ran around our back porch for the next few weeks- she was evidently about two weeks pregnant when Kathy found her. (Fritzie was a sweet little dog and very-grateful-to-have-a-home but it just wasn’t the same.
One of her pups was Hoppy, so called because she was one of the most hyper dogs you’d ever want to meet. Her father was apparently a birddog as she looked way more like that than she did her mother (who she didn’t look like at all). About the same time that Hoppy was born, Sophie was born of an assignation between B.B. and a stray Labrador (Sam). Sophie was a beautiful dog who looked like a Newfoundland (a big black and white St. Bernard, basically, though smaller than either parent.)
Hoppy fell in love with Sophie during her first heat. She fought off all the would be male suitors and would, ahem, take their place. By the time of a second heat, Sophie had returned the love and the two would fight off suitors for either of them together. Sapphic Sophie and Hoppy Homo pair-bonded like no two dogs I’ve ever seen, so much so that it was pointless to have them spayed (which, I regret to say, we rarely did with our animals- we never had much cash and we were ALWAYS getting new dogs). Even my mother had a soft spot for them (she had less of one for my same sex bonding) and that’s why we kept them- she hated to see them separated. They were a couple who were totally unembarrassed about they physical side of their affection (which shocked the hell out of some Mormon missionaries who called one night and, as leaving, saw them making the beast with 16 Teats on the front porch.
That story has a sad ending. They were together for about six years when Sophie was killed by a car (the leading cause of death for dogs up there- it was amazing she survived that long since she inherited her mother’s intelligence) and Hoppy just gave up the ghost. We were stunned when we learned Hoppy was pregnant, and she died giving birth (as did the pups).
Still, at least they had the equivalent of 30 good years together. I’d probably settle for 30 years of hot sex on a porch with someone I loved even if it meant being hit by a truck at the end of it, and I’m sure I’m not alone in that.
I like to think we invented the hyperlink, we just did it conversationally.
Of course there’s the other old joke
Q: How does every great Southern story begin?
A: [looks over shoulders, then starts talking]
**Sampiro, ** if you ever decide to visit Albany, GA again and want to bring your mother along - I promise to mother-sit for you. I have truly enjoyed reading these tales. I hate to admit it, but I can relate to a lot of them!
PS- I’ve also seen same-sex bonds formed between cats and cows, just not with the intensity of Hoppy/Sophie (who would sleep, when neither was in heat, cuddled around each other). Growing up on a farm where there was always mating going on between some species, and having parents who were old-school and embarassed of sex talk, and attending school before Sex Education was the rule, I had some marvelously “wrong ideas” about sex.
Speaking of strategizing dogs, another great one was Susie (who makes me have to call myself a liar- she died of old age as well, and was in fact probably the oldest dog to do so). She had belonged to my maternal grandparents, was a terrier mut, and like every terrier I’ve ever had was a total attention whore. (She was also spayed, thank goodness, as she couldn’t have weighed more than 15 pounds.)
Susie hated B.B. with a passion, in large part out of jealousy I think. She’d attack her every chance she got because she knew that, worst case scenario, if the St. Bernard (who outweighed her by 100 pounds, or almost 10 times her own body weight) turned on her and got a choke hold on her, people would come from all directions to pull her off, but more likely Susie would win because she learned an ingeniously evil tactic of coming up from behind and grabbing BB either by the ear or the eyelid. Either way, the more BB tried to shake her off the more it hurt and people would run from all directions. Sweet little Susie (otherwise, I mean)- it’s really probably a character flaw that I have more dead dogs who make me misty eyed in memorium than I do dead relatives.
And the most painful mating story: we had a Siberian Husky named Ashley given to us by a cousin who found out it’s not a good idea to keep a natural howler in the city. Ashley was a sweet and gorgeous dog, but a total whore (also afraid of the dark, but that’s… well, anyway). She wanted to get it from the boy dogs as much as they wanted it from her. We’d pen her up (Bo’s old pen), she’d dig her way out; we’d chain her, she’d somehow wriggle out of it; “Love ya, mean it folks… but I want some ass!”
So one night I heard a disturbance on the patio and opened the back door to find Ashley with Seargant, a pit bull who belonged to our nearest non-relative neighbor (about a mile away). I thought that the song for their love was “It’s Only Just Begun” and that there was time to separate them, so I grabbed a .22 caliber pistol we kept next to the door (don’t ask) and fired it into the air thinking it would scare Seargant enough to make him release and run. Turns out their lovesong was actually “We Have a Connection”, and the pistol shots didn’t phase Seargant in the slightest.
Unfortunately for him, they scared the shit out of Ashley, who turned around and ran howling as fast as she could down the hillside. When she did so, Seargant was totally turned around but still irremovably connected to her. To this day when I think of shock and pain or want to feel guilty for something I’ve done, I remember that poor pit bull staring up at me with eyes that said “Ohhhhhh… fuck…!” as he realized he was about to get drug down a hillside, fast, by a howling Huskey using his tallywhacker as a leash.
Nine weeks later: half pit-bulls, half Huskies, all with one blue and one brown eye. (Ashley made me feel guiltier than any dog I ever owned another tim…
Okay, I’ll tell it: we had a goat, Jezebel, the one who thought she was a dog (she even barked) who gave birth prematurely to two baby goats. She had no milk and the things were already sickly and starving. We were so pitifully broke at the time, but we nevertheless called the vet (we had just gotten a vet in the area who made housecalls- I’ll use his real name- Dr. Greg Bryson, because he was just a fantastic human being) and paid him with a postdated check to give her a shot to start her milk and to try and do something for the babies. One of them died anyway, Bel was a terrible mother who wouldn’t nurse the remaining one unless she was forcibly held down, and there wasn’t much hope.
The next morning I saw Ashley with something in her mouth that looked like roadkill and went to take it from her (roadkill is dangerous to dogs for obvious reasons). It was the second baby goat and it was dead. I was furious- I thought she’d killed it and I screamed at her (she was senstive to begin with) and I slapped her and yelled at her some more. She was devastated and I was in a rage and left before I hit her again. I went back out a few minutes later with a shovel to bury the baby goat. Ashley was trying to nurse it. Talk about feeling “smaller than a termite…”
(I’m glad to say Ashley had a happy ending- we gave her to a friend who was moving to a farm on the midwest where we felt she’d be a lot happier and a lot cooler.)
And two bizarre stories about cattle reproductive processes and Uncle Willie:
-
My father used to buy the semen from champion bulls to improve his stock and have an old “horse doctor” (term for somebody who doesn’t have formal education in veterinary medicine but knows quite a bit about it) we called Uncle Willie (no relation- in fact he was black- in the rural south “Uncle” was, believe it or not, a respectful title for an older black man) artificially inseminate the cow. I watched one of these procedures. A few days later it was show and tell in first grade and I volunteered “Our cow Betty is gonna have a baby!”
The teacher asked “How do you know that?” “Cause I saw Uncle Willie stick his arm up her ass T-H-I-S far!” The teacher didn’t appreciate it. -
Another time we had a cow who was having major difficulty giving birth. I watched this one too. Uncle Willie was sent for and quickly realized the calf was breech so he reached his hand in to turn the calf. This turned out to be the most expensive calf birth we ever had because when his arm was in and he was maneuvering the calf, we heard a sickening crunch.
A word about bovine female reproductive organs for those who aren’t familiar: they’re quite a bit bigger than human female reproductive organs. This wouldn’t happen so much to an obstetrician, but to Uncle Willie it actually wasn’t even the first time it had happened: the cow had a contraction while he was trying to right her calf and the contraction broke Uncle Willie’s arm. (Maybe there’s a performance artist in Bangkok who could do that, but I don’t know of any American women who can match it.)
I sort of agree, but I think Cafe Society might be better. I could see this thread as the course material for a college-level literature class.
I hope you’re proud of yourself, btw, Sampiro. You made a forty-nine year old straight guy cry with that ghost story of yours.
I work with Sampiro. I wish those of you who only know him from here could hear him tell these stories when he does the voices and acts the parts. He’s ten times funnier in person than as a writer. And you should hear him sing!
Wow. Sampiro Renaissance Man of the SDMB, by appointment.
These tales are a lot better than most of the stuff in my local library, a tiny library, admittedly, but all the same … 
You go on away from here woman! Get your own dang message board 20 billion web pages in the world and you trollin’ my waters…
It’s very true. I remember, after having known him only a short time, mistakenly identifying him with the theists of a group of mutual friends (I didn’t really know better, and in the South, one is generally better off assuming that any given acquaintance is religious. To do otherwise is to risk proselytization, a fate far worse than death…or at least worse than, say, a bad ice cream headache.) His reaction was carefully controlled and quite angry, and he quickly corrected my mistaken impression.
Since then, we’ve battled anti-evolutionists, Creationists, and other creepy characters side by side and at some length in the trenches of the Blogosphere (where the fighting is hardest and the rewards never worthwhile.)
So yes, Sampiro is a skeptic.
I wasn’t angry really, just wanted to correct the impression.
[snip]some of the Ancient Ones said it wasn’t raped, but that’s another story[/snip]
There’s a long story here, but the abstract is that some of the really old members of the family (all of whom were born 40-50 years after it happened) claimed that they heard from some aunt or uncle or ex-slave when they were children (who was either old enough to remember it or knew people who did) that the girl was having a consentual affair with the slave but claimed rape when she became pregnant. Of course I’ve heard 40 different variants of how the slave was tortured to death and to where he was buried.
[snip]Kitty was 92 and lasted for three weeks, but that’s another story…herself with abso-fucking-lutely amazing clarity-of-thought and swiftness-of-action when it happened, but that’s another story[/snip]
No real story here, other than the medical staff was amazed at how hard she fought an impossible to win battle. The day she caught on fire her sister (I can only assume with an adrenoline boost) brought a bucket of wellwater from the back of the house to throw on her, helped her roll until the flames were out, then went outside and stood in the middle of a busy highway waving her hands. As luck would have it the first person along had a CB radio and within minutes there was a sheriff there and the ambulance came as soon as it possibly could have. We were all impressed that a 92 year old acted that quickly and that rationally in such a horrifying situation, especially considering that they had literally been together longer than any married couple on Earth.
I used to love to eavesdrop on them as a kid to see just what people who have shared a bed and a home and memories for more than 90 years talk about when they’re alone. It was always “My legs need warshing… I warshed 'em Saturday… looks like might rain today… where did that Jericho cat go?” or something equally deep. Of course if it didn’t happen in Weokahatchee they didn’t know or much care about it- ask them about World War I and you might get “The Ferguson boy went off to it and came back with a French woman… that was the year the corn dried up”. I was asking them about the Rural Electrification Project once, which came to their part of the state in the 1930s- “What was it like to look out at that pasture and for the first time in the history of the world you could see lights out there and you could sit on your front porch and have enough light to read by?” and they thought about a moment and one of them volunteered “You could tell a diff’rence.”
One of my favorite Kitty and Carrie memories was of when their old gas stove finally died and we had to get them a new one. My brother and I moved the old stove out of the way and I looked down to find the gas (hose or whatever you call it) and screamed. A long dead and clearly not too happy about it mummified cat was looking up at me (having died and semi decayed under an oven that I had eaten hundreds of sweet potato pies and biscuits from). The twins came in, looked at it, and said “So that’s where Smokey got to… we thought he’d ran away.” Another time Carrie was burying another dead cat outside when a small plane started circling above (probably a law enforcement plane looking for pot plants, which is the single major cash crop in that part of the state) which frustrated her because she thought they were spying on her. She held the dead stiff cat on the shovel as high as she could and yelled out “I"m buryin’ a cat! That’s all I’m doin’! Now go away!” He did.
Welcome to the SDMB, Grace. You’ll find that Sampiro is one of our shining stars – but only one of many. I think you’ll have a good time here.
Sampiro, I have been following this and other threads/posts by you, and wonder if, as so many others have wondered, are we kin? My great-great-great grandfather on my paternal side is Southern, although if I remember family history correctly, we hail from South Carolina. To say that the family stories drip Southern Gothic would be an understatement. I am getting a start on working on a family tree before all the old folks are gone. I drive folks crazy, as all of my stories have many “…but that’s another story” tags wandering throughout the main tale I am currently spinning.
Your stories bring to me a cozy, dysfuntional yet oh-so-colorful memory of what “my people” are about. I went North to find some roots, I might have been better off going South.
Please let these gems pour forth in an abundance. If they remain merely (!) message board legend, well, that is not a bad thing. That they may turn into rough drafts of a publishable work is a definite possibility. You have a gift, don’t hide it under a bushel basket. We who have these tales to tell, and have a gift of storytelling, owe it to the people who haven’t a clue about not just Southern Culture, but the incredible dysfunction some of us not only endure, but also rise above.
I’ll buy your book, hun, and give them as Christmas gifts!
::chomping at the bit for some more tales::
A quickie to answer a question: The last time my sister visited at the house she was standing in my mother’s bathroom (a large well lit number with a huge clawfoot tub and and a mirror that ran the width of the room) and she kept thinking she could see somebody standing behind her in the mirror, but whenever she’d look at the mirror or turn around nobody was there. She decided it was a trick of light and reflection. When she felt a hand cup her shoulder and turned around and nobody was there she screamed, ran out of the bathroom still undressed and found me and mother and babbled out what had happened while we barely looked up from the television and said “Yeah, it happens.” It didn’t happen to her again as she never returned. (Since she never lived there after my father died and the house began to fall apart and Carrie’s urine became it’s fragrance of choice, etc., she has major nostalgia for the place that my mother and I noticeably lack.)
I do miss being able to shoot guns out the window and keep calves in the house, though. That’s something that most apartment owners just aren’t even nice about.
If you’re taking requests, may I hear more about your pyromaniacal aunt? Please?
It was my Grandmother, actually. Here’s one story of her (not the best and not one that deals with her pyromania so much).
This is a true story and, if anything, my grandmother’s hygiene and her character have been whitewashed.
Roguing Ruby’s Revelries Revealed
“I don’t care what she says. That whole family was always a pack of villains. She’s lying now. Only thing I sent her was a sympathy card telling her I was sorry that sorry mama of hers finally died.”
Grandmother’s house would have made Fred Sanford whip out the Lysol. Built on the cheap of green timber thirty years before, it could have been a museum for filth and odd angles. Two rooms were inaccessible entirely due to the floor to ceiling stacks of magazines and newspapers, boxes of God knows what, gallon cans of ketchup and other souvenirs of a loveless but highly acquisitive life. There wasn’t a square foot of floor anywhere that didn’t feel like walking on kitty litter if stood on with bare feet, the windows looked like a cataract exhibit, the mornings dishes had been left by the rusty sink for the cats to lick clean, the front bench-seat of a DeSoto provided the only sitting area due to the piles of clothes and papers and bags you didn’t dare look in on the seven sofas crammed against each other in the living room and the shag-carpeting depiction of The Last Supper had seen better days. In the wildly overgrown yard water boiled in wash-pots lit by tires while more tires filled the porch to keep them dry for burning season. Sister Lucy wasn’t in the room but was represented by her odor.
“She says you sent something else… a list of items stolen from your house.”
“I never did any such a damned thing!”
“Muh, I’ve got the card and letter right here!”
My father pulled a crumpled card and its enclosure from his suit pocket and showed it to her. Grandmother, caught red handed in a lie, looked at it a while debating her next sentence. Just because my father had produced the note, in her unmistakable demented childlike handwriting, that she had just denied ever having written, it didn’t mean the battle was lost and it certainly didn’t mean she was wrong in sending it.
“Where’d you get that?”
“Here’s a hint, Muh… it’s a letter that you mailed to Carol Ed Hawks. I didn’t get it from you. Who would that imply I got it from?”
“That damned Hank Sherman over at the post office! I wrote him a letter to get him that job and he’s turned it against me. I hope he knows that tampering with mail is a federal offense and he’s going to jail for it!”
“It wasn’t Hank Sherman. It wasn’t the mail carrier on either end. It wasn’t you. It was… you can do this Muh…”
“Carol Ed Hawks. She always was one sorry white woman, sharing my mail. That’s probably a federal offense too. Her whole family’s a pack of thieving dogs. You know that her nephew got sent to Draper for stealing a car back…”
“I don’t give a damn what her nephew did!. I want to know why you said you never sent this letter!”
“I’m eighty-two years old, goddam it! I’ve got two college degrees! I was a teacher for forty-six years. I’ve owned property since I was sixteen. I have accounts in five banks. Do you have any idea how damned many letters and notes and papers I’ve written over the years? How the hell am I supposed to remember every single one of them? Guess next you’ll want an inventory of the hairs that have fallen off my head over the years. I’m an old woman, not a machine!”
“An old woman who just told the State Treasurer’s secretary that her ninety year old dead mother was a thief!”
“That was only part of it. The rest was a sympathy card.”
“Well technically no, it wasn’t. It was a Christmas card.”
He held it out. It was, indeed, a Christmas Card, one that I hoped had become folded in half in his coat pocket, though the fact it was a standard sized Christmas card yet had been mailed in a standard sized letter-envelope (addressed in Grandmother’s handwriting) seemed to negate that hope.
Oh Come Let Us Adore Him!
had been scratched out and replaced with
Sorry your Mama died
both with the same black felt tip pen. The tails of the two ys penetrated the halo of one of the angels on top of the stable. Inside, the signature of original sender had been scratched out and replaced with
MRS. SYBIL MOREHOUSE SAMPIRO Rt. 1 Weokahatchee Note Enclosed
though in one concession to decorum
Remember the Reason for the Season!
a message oddly appropriate for a mother’s funeral in mid-spring, had been left unmolested.
“What in the hell is your point! The only money I have is that little bit of a pension from my daddy’s estate. And my Social Security. And my teacher’s retirement and the Alabama Power and Shell Oil dividends and what I get for looking after Lucy. I’m supposed to waste what little I have buying expensive stationary that says ‘I’m sorry that thieving bitch who didn’t wash you out when she had the chance finally fell over and went to hell’ when I got perfectly good cards that have prettier pictures of Jesus Christ on ‘em than you could buy from a rack at Winn Dixie? What the hell sense would that make?”
To Be Continued
Preview is my friend… preview is my friend preview is my precious…
Good storytellin’s good storytellin’ wherever you’re from!
Isn’t it great growing up in the country? My siblings and my forte was rescuing wild animals. City kids never get to hear their mothers yell “You get that antelope outside right now I just waxed that floor.”, or had parents who’s philosophy was injuries are just God’s way of telling kids “Stop that!”
Miss Ruby lived on one acre of land surrounded on all sides by my family’s farm. It had been acquired from my great-grandfather by eminent domain in the 1890s to build a one room schoolhouse that was still there the last time I drove by. This was the school where Kitty & Carrie learned to read and write and where a generation later my grandmother took her first teaching job (ca. 1924). She boarded with my by then widowed and eternally cash strapped great-grandmother and the twins and met the family’s youngest son, a cotton farmer and sometime bootlegger who threw one of the most enigmatic acts in the family history became my grandfather.
Nobody ever knew why he married her. He was an attractive man, she was on her best day an ugly woman. He was an outgoing good ol’ boy who could barely “draw his name”, she was a venom dripping bookworm who never missed a chance to mention how much wealthier and socially adept her largely institutionalized family was than this. He liked a clean house (lived in a two room place he built himself on the family property and hired a full time cleaning woman), she was walking collection of health code violations. Evidently she was also adept at charms and potions in those days because for reasons never understood by anybody the two eloped in 1926. My father was born exactly one year to the month later. Always sentimental, Grandmother used to tell my father “Garland wanted me to get you yanked out, but I told him No! The Lord sent us a child to look after us in our old age.”
When my father was a few months old my Grandmother left him with her mother-in-law and the twins to accept a job in Tennessee. (He wasn’t yet weaned, but a black wet-nurse [a daughter of Crow, in fact] and an aunt who gave birth the same week he was born filled the mammalian void.) His father continued to live in his two room house (an easy walk) and saw the boy at meals. He didn’t think much of him as my father grew up as pampered as the child of a very poor family could be- the twins chopped cotton and sold eggs for two years to save enough money to buy him a bicycle and did similar service to get him a radio, and he’d inherited his mother’s family’s love of books rather than his father’s families more practical interests. His father saw him as effete and no doubt as the living reminder of a very bad idea. He didn’t live with his wife again until just after the completion of the bigger green timber home on the site of the two room place, when she returned to live with him as husband and wife. He died six weeks after she moved back in. (Their son was grown and a newlywed by then.)
Meanwhile the one room schoolhouse had closed when a new much larger CCC project consolidated school had been built a few miles away. My grandfather sought the return of the acre (even though it was impossible to do anything with- too much granite to farm and on too high a bluff to keep cattle) and was furious when instead it was sold at public auction (just before World War 2) to Miss Ruby’s husband. He tacked on a kitchen and a backroom and there, with his wife and the Downs Syndrome daughter (their other kids were grown), set up housekeeping in a place whose porch looked directly down at my grandparents’ house.
By 1981 my grandfather and Miss Ruby’s husband were both long dead. Miss Ruby (the babysitter who used to take me to funerals, gave me catalpa worms to play with and drove about 1.1 mph for each year of her very long life long after losing one eye to a fishhook, had a long decline physically and mentally before having to be placed in a nursing home by her scattered children and grandchildren, and there she died, her vacant house (any evidence of ever having been painted long gone) still staring down at my Grandmother’s.
By 1981 Grandmother’s outfit at any given time usually consisted of at least three items of her grandchildren’s cast-off clothing (“cast-off” here meaning “items clearly intended to be disposed of”, such as those tossed in the trash pile in the woods or those folded neatly and placed in bedroom drawers while the family was not at home and grandmother found an unlocked door), an apron, two army surplus items, a hatchet and other tools (but always a hatchet) held by a man’s belt and some form of homemade uniting item. If you’d like to picture her I’ll give you one ensemble I particularly remember- my skinny brother’s faded jeans, my sister’s adolescent era red hooded sweat shirt, my faded ragged STAR WARS T-shirt on top, a CPO jacket over the lot, a pair of [literally] army boots and a cape made of a dried croker sack clasped with a bent nail, a utilitarian item she could take off to drag tools or dried cow shit should the need or inclination present itself. Jet black heavy eyeglasses rims, white mildewed hair in a sort of “demented old white woman Afro” and skin with crevices that could conceal a switchblade complete the number. (Again, 8 of her father’s 10 kids spent time in mental hospitals, but Grandmother was one of the sane ones- she was also one of two women in the state of Alabama enrolled in a doctoral program in the sciences during the Depression.)
“Read the note you sent her, Muh.”
Grandmother complied, perusing the note and removing a carpenter’s pencil from one of her twenty-three pockets to make some additions.
“Out loud.”
She cleared her throat and began reading with a completely unapologetic and even oddly noble lecturing tone. “Ahem…. ‘My Dear Carol Ed… Accept as genuine for yourself and your siblings my condolences upon the recent demise of your mother, my neighbor of thirty-nine years, Mrs. Ruby Vee Carter Booker. The cessation of the life force of the person whose body once harbored you is among life’s harder trials. My own mother, Seraph Olivia Holbrook Morehouse, has been dead these forty two years and eight months, having passed from this Earth on the seventh day of September, 1938, of injuries sustained from a not fully loaded timber truck driven by a colored man I believe to have been intoxicated with illegally acquired alcohol, and it is a loss that I still lament on a semi regular basis.’ I’m commiserating with her. I don’t see your problem.”
“Read on, Muh!”
“ ‘We must bear the loss of our loved ones to the hallowed acreage of the undiscovered country beyond with Stoic grace, for once removed from the dominion of the living we must but accept their new estate, as it is beyond our power to change or even to understand.’ I thought some philosophical musing might sustain her in bereavement.”
“Read on, Muh…”
“We have more control, however, upon the loss of our tangible assets, including household wares and mechanical implements necessary for the maintenance of a productive farm. Examples of such items may be found among the nomenclature of items that your mother, Mrs. Ruby Vee Carter Booker, deceased, did willfully and unlawfully remove from my property beginning, I would approximate, in the latter half of 1943, and continuing until her removal to South Haven Nursing Home in December of 1978. These items include but are almost certainly not limited to the following…”
TBC