Today, a large Walmart and attendant development sits in the
floodplain, awaiting its turn.
That day, I could see home. It was a large country grocery
store, on high ground at a slight curve in the highway. Our house was attached
to it. You simply walked through a door at the back of the store into our
kitchen.
I drove past the homes of childhood friends, O.D. Walker and
Jim Fletcher. I saw what we had one thought was a mountain cliff designed for
play and exploration. Now it looked to be just a slight erosion remnant, left
by the bayou over thousands of years. Youth magnifies, and life, unfortunately
for us all, diminishes.
Slowing, I pulled in beside the store. Cars came and went
there all day long, so there wasn’t any reason why anyone would suspect an
unusual visitor. But in that strange way that mothers know things, the door to
the store opened and she walked out.
Mable Josephine Harris von Tungeln was slight woman, maybe
five-foot three. She had been laid aside to die, premature and unfit, after she
was born while the doctor treated her mother with, Vick’s Salve of course. He
had a bit left over and saved Mabel as well, this from our family historian. Her
father had died when she was three, and the only thing she remembered about him
was the scene of her oldest brother’s climbing a post and ringing a bell that
signified meals or an emergency.
Her mother had raised the two sisters still at home in the
most abject poverty one can imagine. A playmate had pushed young Mabel down in
the schoolyard when she was in grade school and her classmates had discovered
that her “drawers” had been sewn by a hapless mother out of castoff curtains
from a local church. She never could forget that, and I’ll always remember how
she would break down whenever she heard Dolly Parton sing “My Coat of ManyColors.”
Somehow, she had survived to adulthood. There, if you looked
at her you would see frail figure in a simple cotton dress and horn-rimmed
glasses, seeming to be weak and helpless in the face of a cruel and challenging world.
Cross her, and you would excite hot bands of steel and find a
tigress who didn’t fear a person in the world, even my father. She hated nobody
that I remember, but had no use for drunkards (anyone who might or had taken
one drink in their lives), fast-talking salesmen, and “religious fanatics.” She
liked Elvis and would sneak fifty-cents from the cash register each time a new
single came out. She knew professional wrestling was fake, but thought I Love Lucy was real.
We had had two talks in our life about intimacy between people.
The first was after a neighborhood 18-year-old had been discovered having an
affair with a 52-year-old woman. He had then feigned a suicide attempt to garner
sympathy. Mother’s explanation: “I’ve always heard that an old woman can just drive
a young man crazy.”
The second was when I had tried to explain how I was in
love, I imagined, with someone long forgotten. “Let me tell you something,” she
had explained “When I married your daddy, I wasn’t in love, as you say, with
him at all. I married him because I knew the von Tungeln men worked, and if I
married him, I never would have to go hungry again. Then, after we had
sharecropped, butchered hogs to get money to buy this store, and then ran it
together, I woke up one morning and realized I worshiped the ground he walked
on, and still do. That is what love means for poor people.”
And that’s the woman who now stood on the porch of our
family store with her hands on her hips, looking at me.
 |
| Don't let that innocent smile fool you. |
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