Fiction Friday: First installment of a piece inspired by a story my late father-in-law Julius Cole used to tell around the supper table.

THE SECOND COMING 

by Jimmie von Tungeln       

 Now the reason that I got involved in this in the first place was because of my second cousin Clifton who was two years older than me. And the reason I don't mind talking about it when there are so many people who for all those years didn't mention it hardly at all and if they did they almost always said it didn't happen the way someone heard it did and even then usually lied and said they weren't there, is because I don't owe anyone in Hog Eye Bend, Arkansas one blessed thing. The only one I would have protected anyway was Clifton who got killed in the Second World War though they wouldn't take him at first because he couldn't pass the IQ test.

            Mama would say later that it turned out Clifton was just smart enough to get himself killed but that's not the way I looked at it. I sort of idolized him, him being older and everything, and I felt he had a good mind. It took a good mind to stand out in those days. And Clifton stood out as far as it concerned me.

            “Fun is where you find it,” – Clifton used to say, and I agreed. “Fun is just about better’n  anything’” he  would add. “It keeps us from bein’ mules or such.”  I mean, does that sound like the philosophy of a person who couldn't have passed an IQ test if he had wanted to? Really wanted to?

            Anyway, fun was what we were looking for and it was fun that brought us to where we ended up, which brought us to have a front row seat at the most exciting thing to ever happen in or about our little settlement, and which revealed so many things about so many people. You could say that it was part of the folklore of the Arkansas delta, even if it was recorded by two boys scarcely old enough to realize what was happening, much less old enough to attach much meaning to it.

            I was ten at the time, and Clifton was twelve, he being twenty-one when they hit Pearl Harbor and not living long past that. It was in August when the crops were laid by, that being another reason why so many people got involved. Had it had happened any other time of the year, most people would have been in bed and would never had even known about it.

            "I got it all figured out," Clifton announced one day, no warning, just out of the wild-blue. Just like that.

            "What?"

            "You know anything about girls?"

            "What?"

            "You know!"

            "Oh yeah," I lied.

            "Ever see one nekkid?"

            "Oh my God!  Who?"

            "You won't believe it."

            "Who?"

            "Geehaw."

            "Gehaw?"

            "Geehaw."

            "Why would anyone want to see that?"

            "Cause she's a girl, stupid!"

            "Oh."

            Until that moment, I had never thought of Gehaw as a girl, or as anything else for that matter.  I didn't even know her name except that her last name was Ratliff and she was one of the Ratliff's from south of Pine Bluff — the means ones —- the ones that Papa said married one another. I hadn't even heard her talk except to her Daddy's mules which she drove from sunup until sundown every day and all she said to them was "Gee" and "Haw." Of course that's where she got that name.  She was about eighteen, I suppose, real tall and real skinny as I remember.

            "You kiddin'?" I asked.

            "I got it all figured out."

            "What?"

            "How'd you like to watch her take a bath tonight?"

            I tell you I was stunned by the prospect of an escapade of such magnitude. Clifton sensed it. I could tell by the way he looked at me.

            "Take a bath?"

            "That's right!"

            "How do you know she does?"

            "Hell, everybody takes a bath."

            "I mean how do you know she will tonight?"

            "She does every Saturday night, right before dark. Fish Johnson told me and Chester's Gracie told him.

            Now I wouldn't bank a whole lot on what Fish Johnson said but Chester's Gracie was about as reliable a person as you found in Hog Eye Bend. She shared that common first name with a bunch of other girls about her same age as a result of the Lady Evangelist Gracie Throughgood who had held a week long meeting in Kingsland about twenty years earlier. She must have made quite an impression on the local people, for almost any girl born the next three years was named Gracie. Since they were mostly related, there was considerable confusion until they started getting married at which time they took their husband's first name as an identifier. We had, in addition to Chester's Gracie: Newt's Gracie, Jesse's Gracie, Neddo's Gracie, and Ed's Gracie just on our road alone. And my Grandmother, who was given the name half a century before this all happened, was called “Papa's Gracie” the last few decades of her life.

            Anyway, I never thought at the time about how Chester's Gracie might have come by this information because I was considerably troubled by Clifton's plan. I knew from past adventures that he tended to underestimate both the degree of difficulty as well as the time required for execution. "First you got to get started and then you jest play 'er as she goes," was his tactical battle plan for most undertakings. And his plans tended to get larger and more complicated as we got older.

This one presented a pretty good step up, even for Clifton.

            "You mean we just slip up and watch her?" I asked. 

            "As easy as that," he said and he got that blank look on his face like he did when he was thinking. He hadn’t said so yet but I knew we were off on an adventure.

            Now this discussion took place on Saturday about noon and we were supposed to embark about an hour before dark. Normally, this would have been simple since Clifton and I stayed with Uncle T.J. and Aunt Hallie, his grandparents, most of the summer. But, as I said, the crops had been laid by and Papa used this time of year to make whiskey and that was a problem. 

            The making of the whiskey wasn't the problem as much as the testing of it, a job which Papa trusted to no one else and which often rendered him unpredictable by Saturday night. Once he made a particularly bad batch and became convinced that the "White Russians" were coming after us, whoever they were. That night we all huddled in a corner while he sat in a chair in the living room with a deer rifle across his knee, waiting for the attack.

            "I'll shoot the goddam monkeys," he kept saying all night while Mama kept up a steady line of prayer. It turned out later that he didn’t even have bullets in the gun. That would have been lucky for any intruders, I suppose.

            That was when I began staying with Clifton whenever I could. You never knew when whiskey and imagination might collaborate to create a new enemy for Papa. That might, of course, keep me at home and I sure didn't want that to happen tonight.

Thinking back on it, I don't think it was so much to get to see Geehaw take a bath as it was for the honor of being asked to by a man much older and wiser man than I. That has moved more men than me to stranger adventures, I’d be willing to bet.

            "What happens afterwards?"  I assumed a logical continuity.

            "Nothin’”. We may tell Fish but we may not. He talks too much."

            "What happens if we get caught?"

            Clifton looked at me as serious as death and drew an imaginary knife across his throat.  "Old man Ratliff would kill us I reckon."  Then he looked at me suspiciously. "You in this with me?"

            "Sure," I said and in the saying of it I felt the metallic taste of the knife blade. I had always taken it for granted that, if I were to be killed, it would during some great brave act, like protecting my family for instance... say from an onslaught of White Russians. Only my respect for Clifton could have forced me to face such a sacrifice as the price of watching Gehaw Ratliff take a bath.

            But I was game and this adventure was as good as underway,

(To be continued)