THE SECOND COMING

Part One

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 was to 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 I was concerned.

                “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.

                My fears were realized. Papa had tied one on by the time I came home, but luckily for me he had sailed right past belligerence and was nearing a state of bewilderment as Mama tore into him. I could hear them when I reached the front yard.

"You low down sorry outfit."

Silence

“You ain't fit to live!"

                Finally a response: "Shut up for Christ's sake," Papa was struggling to keep his balance. He kept reaching for the garden fence and every time he did he grabbed a handful of blackberry vines.

                “Damn it to godalmighty hell,” he yelled.

                "Blasphemer!" Mamma shouted.

                "Yes, goddammit!" Papa countered, "Now get out of here and leave me alone." I had walked up and noticed the green cast to his skin. "I don't feel good," he said weakly. He tried to look past Mamma to me.

                "No wonder," Mama shouted right into his face.  "You been swillin' rotgut whiskey all day and now git ready for the Lord's turn." Then she looked around at me. "Bobby you get over here and help me pray."

                "I was going over to Uncle T. J's," I said.

                "You get your hind-end over here and pray." Mama said. Then she dropped to one knee.

                "All of you leave me alone - just get away!" Papa shouted. Then his jaw went slack. "I'm gonna be sick," he announced, not to any particular person. He just announced it like it was of some importance to the world at large.

                "You get out of my sight then," Mama said although she needn't have bothered, for Papa had already lurched around the corner of the house. Then she turned to me. "I hope you're satisfied."

                "Me?"

                "You should look after him. You know how sorry he is."

                Papa was making awful noises. Sort of like the gurgling sound that a hog makes when it's stuck, I thought, only much louder and with a lot more thrashing around. I didn't want to draw attention from him so I played it contrite. "I ain't done nothin'."

                "Hush," Mamma said, to my relief. She was listening for Papa, who wasn't making any noise at all now. I looked at her and I could see real concern in her face.

                "You think he passed out?" I asked.

                "You shut your little smart mouth!" Mamma said. I had forgotten that criticizing Papa was a privilege that she reserved for herself.  "He may have died for all you know.  A man that works all day and all week for you and who don't ask nothin, who ain't never done nothin' but smell the backside of a mule all his life and ain't got a nickel to his name for it because he spends it to keep you fed and who you ain't never once offered to help, even once when his back was bent over and breakin', not once, just always off with Clifton doin' God knows what."

                She could have gone on like this for hour or so if she had wanted to. I've seen her. But Papa had walked up so quietly that we hadn't noticed. He stood by the back door and he looked worse than before.

                "I think maybe you had better pray after all," he said softly, his eyes meeting Mamma's.

                "Halleluiah!" she said and forgot all about me.

                It was settled then, I was cleared for action. I changed shirts; that's the only thing I could thing of that might add dignity to the affair.  It was true that the shirt I changed to was exactly like the one I discarded, and that my dress was the same overalls and blue shirt that every young boy in the county wore, but I felt that the impending activities required some sort of special attention, no matter how modest.

                I stopped by a window before I left to make sure that Mamma and Papa were going to be occupied for awhile, and, sure enough, they were going at it in earnest.  Mamma had Papa on his knees with his head in both hands and tears were streaming down her face, which was, of course, raised toward the Savior.

                "Lord, look at this poor drunk sinner." she began.

                "Wait!" Papa cried. "Wait just a goddam minute!"

                "A blasphemer and a drunkard," Mamma expanded.

                "Wait," Papa said again and he tried to rise but Mamma had him in salvation's grip. He simply rolled over on his back.

                "You be still, "Mamma said, and she raised her face once more toward heaven. "Lord, this drunk sinner needs forgiven. I wouldn’t do it if it was me, but you’re a better person, I think."

                This time Papa prevailed. "Don't tell Him I're drunk, dammit, tell Him I're sick!"

                "I can't lie to the Lord," Mamma said, and she raised Papa's head up until his eyes met hers. "I won't lie to the Lord, even for you."

                "Just tell him I're sick, then, that part's the truth. Just don't mention the drunk part."

                "I can't Homer, not even for you."

                "Oh please just this once. Who’ll know?"

                I listened to them go on like this for a few minutes and I guess you could say that Papa finally got his way, for as I left for Clifton's house I could hear Mamma's voice drifting out over the cotton fields. It was sort of musical, like some misty plea for mankind itself.  "Help this poor sick sinner, Lord.  He ain't worth a ten cent bucket of lard, but could you help him please?  He ain't much, but he's sick and he's all we got."

                I skedaddled before Papa got his strength back.