Memories

I know I do this every year, but it's one of my favorite memories of being far away from anyone who loves you. I think it fits today very well.

THE QUIET WOMAN

A True Story of the Vietnam Era

By Jimmie von Tungeln

            If the old woman hadn’t come on after the stripper, things might have started a little smoother. After all, who would want to follow a tall, dark Eurasian woman who took off nearly everything she had on in front of a thousand horny service men? And I do mean all she had on, except for a tiny strip of gauze across her bosom and a triangular patch covering her “Forbidden Garden.” Tony Grant would claim the next day, “I swear I could almost see nipples from where I was sitting.” The USO waltzed out some weird acts back in those days, some deliberately designed, it seemed, to drive men crazy. The generals allowed it and then wondered why men were so hard to control out in the jungle.

            Anyway, the stripper was through and she wasn’t coming back out. It would have been dangerous, too much heat and too much beer. This was an enlisted men’s club in the I-Corp and not a gentleman’s joint in Manhattan. The next act better damn sure be a good one though. Feelings were running high. A half-decent rock and roll band would have been nice, anyone who could do a passable version of the Vietnam Vets’ National Anthem: “We’ve Got To Get Out of This Place.”

            But no. Out walks this tiny woman of indeterminate age, at least fifty, in a long sequined black dress that fell from her tiny shoulders almost to the floor. Her hair was clipped short and showed some signs of gray. Cheap-looking ear rings hung nearly to her shoulders. Her makeup looked as if it had been applied by a first-week beauty school student. Christ almighty!

Tiny and aged as she was, though, she showed spunk. She walked up to the mike like she was at Carnegie Hall and waited for her piano player to get seated. The place was quiet for a moment, from sheer disbelief I suspect.

            Then the rumbling started and you could here someone yelling for the stripper to come back out. I heard a grunt scream, “Get that old bag out of here.”

            The shouts of disapproval were so loud that only those in the first couple of rows could hear her when she said, “I know I can’t compete with that last act. I only know a few old songs, some Irish and some not. Maybe you’ll enjoy one or two of them.”

            With that, the piano hit a strong, commanding chord, and from that frail tiny body soared a sound so linear and pure that one could imagine it piercing the back wall of the club and flying straight into the jungle and beyond.”

“Over in Killarney
Many years ago,
My Mother sang a song to me
In tones so sweet and low.”

The sounds emerging from that ancient (to us at least, young fools that we were) face were so strange and haunting that those nearest the stage hushed immediately and this allowed the full force of her voice to carry further.

“Just a simple little ditty,
In her good old Irish way,
And l'd give the world if she could sing
That song to me this day.”

A wave of silence undulated across the room as the voice filled it with an assurance formed, no doubt, by many years of knocking about places with forgettable names and long-forgotten faces.

"Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral, Too-ra-loo-ra-li,
Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral, hush now, don't you cry!
Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral, Too-ra-loo-ra-li,
Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral, that's an Irish lullaby."

            By this time her voice was challenged only by the soft movement of hands moving cans of beer and heads turning to watch. She finished the song and, in perfect timing, the piano player led her into “My Wild Irish Rose.” A few in the crowd began to move with the music. Some even hummed along with the song. She finished it and looked at the crowd and smiled. It was sort of an impish smile if you can imagine. Then she dropped a shoulder, thrust a bony hip toward us and pointed a blue-veined foot directly at those in the front row.

“I hate to see, that evening sun go down.”

            The piano player supported her with a sweeping blues chord and she was off. Somehow she didn’t seem as old as she had when she started. The crowd just watched in disbelieving approval. She finished this number and than stopped and looked us over as if to say, “What do you think now, boys?”

Now these weren’t college boys or Irish rovers. Twenty-four hours earlier some of them had been killing Viet Cong, unsuspecting villagers, or water buffaloes, anything that got in their way. But their minds sure weren’t on killing now. The applause started in the front and moved over us like a rolling artillery barrage. The building shook like it might fall at any moment. She just kept singing.

            Who can remember what all she performed that night? It seemed over before it started. Each time she finished a song, the room erupted and hundreds of beer cans pounded on tables. As she came out for her third encore, she thanked us and we knew we would never hear her sing again. Those USO shows moved around quickly and we were only there for “365 and a wake-up.”

            “I’ll leave you with this, for that special one back home,” she said and looked at the floor as if it had some secret message written on it. Raising her head, she looked at each one of us and smiled.

            “I’ll be seeing you,” she sang.

            “In all those old familiar places.”

            You didn’t dare look around at a goddam soul for you knew you were about to start bawling and then they would too. We couldn’t cry, though. Hell, we were supposed to be killers. And tomorrow we might be. Not tonight, though. Tonight we were just a bunch of homesick boys enjoying a moment of peace in a world that seemed to have forgotten about us.

“In that small cafe …that park across the way…”

Life does have its moments, and I’ve never forgotten that one.

I love to kid my big sister. She’s a jewel, and we’ve become good friends in our golden years. She was, by far, the smartest one in our family. She once got a A+ on her report card because her teacher, a football coach and Navy Cross recipient, (not an easy man to please) said it was the highest grade he could give her.

This is a cute story and it goes way back to when girls took a class in “Home Economics,” not by choice if I remember correctly.

Anyway, she came home one day with this assignment to cook something or other. I don’t remember what, only that it involved hot water. Accordingly, she put a pan of water on the range, intending to return shortly. Something happened, maybe her friend Bobette Piper called. Anyway, our Sainted Mother found the pot later, the water having all evaporated, the pan dry.

It gave SM a great deal of pleasure for years to point out that she had raised a daughter that couldn’t even boil water.

Hey, I love kidding my sister. She’s actually a good cook now. She can make a tortilla soup that would make Rudy Giuliani tell the truth. She gave me a great recipe for chili. I had lots of fun with it, especially after I realized that it required almost all of the ingredients needed for a Bloody Mary. She also taught me how to make mashed potatoes like SM used to make, a secret that should be recorded ere the “instant” brigands take over the culinary world. My Sis is really one of the world’s great treasures.

Of course, there are no stories she could tell about “Perfect Child.”

It's harder than it looks.
You should see me try it.

Dancing and Death

It's Fiction Friday. This week I ventured into Lower Arkansas for the funeral of a cousin. Motoring through the woodland of LA brought back a torrent of memories, one that had formed this story a few years ago. It is an embellished version of one my Sainted Mother told me once.

The Charleston

By Jimmie von Tungeln

  

The younger girl held the matchbox steady as the older bored through one side and out the other an inch or so from the front. Using a rusted ice pick, she carefully pierced the cardboard without caving in the side. Her eyes narrowed from the concentration and her tongue curled against her upper lip. Together, they repeated the process at the rear and the girl held it up for inspection. “Now for the axles,” she said.

The younger picked up two slender twigs whittled to a near cylindrical shape and handed them to her sister. She stuck the twigs from side to side through the box. “Wheels,” she said. The other reached into her dress pocket and handed her four large buttons retrieved from a discarded coat. Taking them, she held them to the sky for inspection. There were four holes in each button, pre-cut for accepting thread. In the center, the girls had bored a single, larger hole. Through this hole, she pushed one of the buttons, then the rest, onto the sticks protruding from the sides of the box.

“Won’t be long, now,” the girl said. As she positioned each wheel, she stuck straight pins adjacent to the sides of the buttons to hold them in place. Finished, she held the completed apparatus up for inspection and then rolled it along the ground. The younger girl watched in admiration.

“Works good Essie,” she said. “Works real good.”

“We got us a wagon, Mabel,” the other said. She rolled the toy along the ground twice more and then held it up. “Now we’ll work on the axle.”

“Let’s check on the team,” Mabel said.

“Let’s,” said Essie as she rose from her squatting position. She placed the toy wagon against a great oak tree rising from the front yard. She took the younger girl’s hand and they ran to a place under the porch of the house. There they had built a small lean-to a foot-square in the shade.

A woman in her mid-fifties sat on the porch in an aged rocking chair watching the girls and moving in slow rhythm as she fanned herself with a fan that proudly announced its source as The Buie Funeral Home, Rison, Arkansas. The house was a modest structure of maybe 20-feet in width. Like many others of its type, it had three rooms, one behind the other with a back door leading to a well in the back yard for drawing water. Other than the rocking chair, the only embellishments visible on the front porch were a piece of broken mirror hanging from a string and a calendar by the door outlining the year 1920.

The woman stopped her rocking and fanning long enough to bend toward where the girls were crouched. “I’m a’tellin’ you girls them baby rats ain’t gonna live the day out so you moughts well bury them now.”

Neither girl replied. The had removed a piece of filthy blanket covering a small nest of hay and twigs that furnished the bed for four recently born rats. The tiny pink things were curled into tight balls and quivered as the air hit them.

“How long afore they’s big enough to pull the wagon?” asked Mabel.

“Couple of weeks, I reckon.”

“Hot damn.”

“I heard that,” the woman yelled from the porch. “Now y’all quit tormentin’ them babies or I’m gonna whup somebody’s ass.”

Essie giggled and covered the babies. “When we get the axles and tongue finished, we’ll start on the harnesses.”

“You still got them shoe laces?”

“All we’ll need.”

The girls withdrew from under the porch and stretched in the morning sun. Both were thin. Essie was six inches taller than the younger girl with jet-black hair that contrasted with the auburn hair of her sister. Both had bobbed coiffures, apparently fashioned at home. They each wore thin, simple dresses that draped over their bodies like clothes hanging from a line. They were barefooted.

“Mama, you said Uncle Frank used to make wagons out of match boxes and hook them up to rats. Why you fussin’ at us?” Essie said.

“Them rats was growed. He didn’t use no baby rats.”

“Ours gonna be growed in a couple of weeks if you give us some milk to feed them.”

The woman rocked back. “Now you girls shut up and come on around here. We got some washin’ to do.”

“Aw Mama. Can’t we play awhile?” Mabel said.

“You can play when I tell you to,” she said, but the girls didn’t hear. Their attention had centered on a distant sound, one unusual but familiar. They both walked to the edge of the cleared area that served as a front yard.

“Hear that?” Essie said nudging Mabel. “It’s car, and it’s headed this way.”

Mabel didn’t answer. She turned to look at her mother for confirmation. The woman had heard the sound as well. She raised a hand to her mouth and Mabel could see concern on her face. “Mama, somebody’s …,” she began but the woman motioned for her to be quiet.

“You girls come up here,” she said.

The girls obeyed and stood by their mother as the automobile came closer. They heard a rattling sound that seemed to echo from the large oaks that ringed the house. Had it not been for the fact that only one road led by their home, Mabel thought that it would have been hard to tell from which direction the sound came. It just came, that was all, growing louder until they could hear, among the sounds of the engine, the squeaking of the car’s body as it labored along the ruts and crevasse making up the dirt road.

“Reckon who it is, Mama?” Essie said.

“Hush now, you girls be quiet.”

Then there was a flash as sunlight bounced off glass and the girls could see snatches of a dark form moving through the woods like an animal on the prowl. The two moved closer to their mother.

The form then burst from the darkness of the woods and a complete automobile emerged. A faded black shape marked with large rings of rust and dents bounced into view and headed straight for the house.

Instinctively, the mother shooed her daughters behind her, ready to absorb the first shock if the shape didn’t stop before it reached them.

It swerved, though, just as it reached the edge of the front yard and came to a sudden stop parallel to the front porch. The front end dipped twice as if bowing in deference and then the entire apparatus was still.

Essie peered from behind her mother. “Look, Mama, it’s Carl and Fred.” She laughed at the thought of their being frightened. “It’s just Carl and Fred. They done got themselves a car.”

Sure enough, the driver was the woman’s oldest son Fred and behind him sat her next oldest, Carl. Those in the porch couldn’t see them well, but to the right of each of the men sat others who appeared to be female.

“How you, Mama?” Fred yelled.

The woman didn’t answer. She looked at the car and its occupants as if they had dropped into her yard from another world.

“We come by to see you,” the man said. “How you like my car?”

The woman looked the car over from end to end. “What you boys up to?” she said.

“I done told you, Mama,” Fred said. “We come by to see you.”

“Why ain’t you boys workin’?”

The man in the rear spoke to the other who replied and then turned to face his mother again. “We off today.”

“Who’s that in the car with you?” she said as if noticing them for the first time.

“They’s some friends Mama.” He turned to the passengers and said, “You girls git out and meet our mama.”

He turned to his mother again and opened the door of the car. “They comin’ around to meet you, Mama.”

With that, those in the car emerged one by one, straightening their clothes and slapping away the dust that had covered them. As the women came around the car, the girls stepped from behind their mother and stared.

“Would you look at that?” Mabel said.

“You girls hush,” their mother said.

The women did present a spectacle for two young girls in the backwoods. Both wore similar dresses that hung straight from their shoulders and ended midways between their hips and knees and were joined by a row of fringe that ended six inches above the knee. The girls watched entranced as the fringe jiggled as the women walked toward the front porch, each on the arms of one of the men.

Fred and his companion stopped halfway across the yard. Carl took an extra step as he and his girl bumped the other two from behind. Recovering, they all stood at attention as if on review before those on the porch.

“Mama,” Fred began.

“Where’d you git that car?” His mother interrupted him and glared.

“Hit’s mine,” Fred said. “I bought it last week. Now Mama,” he began.
            “Where’d you git the money?” she said.

“I hauled some hogs for old man Atkins,” he said. “Now Mama …”

“Hit must have been one big load of hogs.”

“Mama, this here is Adele,” Fred said, proud of his persistence. “And back ‘air is Bobbie June. They’s friends of ours.”

“Why ain’t y’all haulin’ some more hogs if’n it’s yore day off? Can’t you use some extra money? I know we could.”

“Now Mama,” Carl said from behind Fred. “That’s what we need to talk to you about.”

“Shut up, Carl,” Fred said. “Mama, can we come in and talk to you a minute?”

The woman deliberated, still ignoring the two other women. Finally, she turned to the door, “Come on in, then. You girls stay out here.” She didn’t specify which girls so the two younger ones remained on the porch staring at the two women. They heard a door slam in the back of the house and Mabel knew they had gone all the way to the kitchen to talk. It must be serious.

“What’s your name, sweetie?” the one named Adele said to Essie.

“Esther Mae,” she replied.

“That’s a right pretty name,” Adele said. “And what’s yours?” she said, turning to Mabel.

Mabel didn’t speak. She just turned toward Essie who nodded. “Mabel,” she said, finally.

“Well I’ll swan. Ain’t you the cutest two girls in Cleveland County?”

Before they could respond, loud voices roared from behind the closed door. The girls could only make out a word or two but they could tell it had something to do with liquor. Before they could hear more, the woman named Bobbie June spoke in a loud voice.

“Hey girls, come down here and let us show you something.”

They looked at one another. Again, Essie nodded and the two descended from the porch, one behind the other.

When they reached the two women, the one named Adele placed her hand on Mabel’s shoulder. She started to speak but sounds of loud voices from the back of the house attracted their attention. Mabel only caught the phrase “comin’ in here drunk” in the mixed confusion.

Suddenly Adele spoke. “I bet you girls don’t know how to do the Charleston, do you?”

Essie and Mabel both looked at her. “The what?” Essie said.

“The Charleston,” Adele said. “It’s the latest dance. You do know how to dance don’t you?”

“No ma’am,” said Essie. “We ain’t allowed to.”

“Not allowed to?” said Bobbie June, moving to draw their attention away from the house. “Why, you should, and I bet we can teach you in a sec.”

“You bet,” said Adele. “We been all the way to Dallas, Texas to learn it. You know where Dallas is?”

“No ma’am,” said Essie.

“Well, it’s a long way from Cleveland County, I’ll tell you that. Come here and look.”

She led the girls a few steps farther from the house and then turned to Bobbie June. “Let’s teach these girls a thing or two,” she said.

Bobbie June began to clap her hands in rhythm and, much to the delight of the girls, sang in a husky voice.

“Five foot two…

Eyes of blue..

But oh, what those five feet could do…”

They giggled when Adele began to move forward and backward in pace with singing, placing one foot in front of the other and then in back of it with arms swinging in perfect rhythm.

“Turned up nose…

Turned down hose…

Never had no other beaus…”

“Now come on, you do it do,” said Adele, grabbing Essie’s arm.

When Essie drew away, Adele said, “Don’t be afraid. It’s easy. Give it a try.”

She continued to dance and motioned for the other two to join her.

“See, just put one foot here, one foot there.”

Bobby June was joining her now, continuing to sing.

“Now if you run into…”

Suddenly Adele cried. “Look at that child.”

Three of them turned to watch Mabel who was now beginning to move in perfect imitation of Adele. She stumbled once, missed a beat, but soon was bouncing on her feet in complete harmony with the music.

“Look at that bearcat go. Kick them gams, you darb you,” said Adele. She stopped herself and joined Adele in singing and clapping as Mabel began to move in frenzied ecstasy. He eyes grew wide and her face contorted from concentration. Essie looked at her in amazement.

“But could she love…

Could she woo…

Could she, could she, could she coo?”

Bobbie June stopped singing then. Mabel continued do pour every bit of energy into dancing though there was no more music. The two women had turned toward the house when Carl came quick-stepping through front door toward the steps. As Mabel raged forwards and backwards, sounds of broken glass flew from the house and Fred came running out, dodging blows from a broom wielded by his mother. He crashed into Carl, who was halfway down the steps and the two went flying together into the two women standing in the yard.

It was only then that Mabel stopped dancing.

“And take them whores with you,” her mother shouted.

She needn’t have worried. The two women were already in car by then and before anyone else could move, Fred had joined them. Carl was already in front of the car violently spinning a starting crank. The engine stared immediately and he ran to the back door, crank in hand, and dove in as the car began to move. In a moment, they were gone.

Mabel and Essie didn’t move. They had seen storms before and knew that the best defense was no defense at all. Essie simply looked a Mabel in amazement. Without changing expression, Mabel winked at her.

“You girls start gettin’ ready,” their mother said. “We got to go pick up Mizz Reed’s washin’.”

The girls walked back to the house holding hands. Without speaking to one another, they walked to the spot under the porch where they had left the baby rats. Essie squatted and removed the cover. She watched the babies for a minute or so, it seemed to Mabel. She poked them with a finger.

“Mama, I think our babies died,” she said.

“I done told you they would. Now you girls git rid of them and git ready to go.” She turned and, broom in hand, went back into the house.

“Bring me our wagon,” Essie said.

Mabel turned without a word and went to the base of the tree where the matchbox wagon lay. She picked it up and returned with it to where Essie still squatted quietly. She handed the box to her sister.

“We ain’t got time to bury them now,” Essie said. She folded the rag that covered the tiny creatures and placed it in the box as a liner. Then she picked up the tiny objects one by one and placed them in a row upon the cloth. She rose slowly and showed the box to Mabel who simply nodded.

Holding the box in front of her, Essie started walking to a copse of trees just beyond the edge of the front yard, in the direction from which the car had appeared. That now seemed like years ago to Mabel. As they moved from the clearing, the trees made shadows cross their forms and then they were in the cool darkness out of sight from the house.

Essie began to sing as they walked, and after a few more steps, Mabel began to sway with the music. Now Essie did the same, still holding the matchbox coffin before her as they walked farther into the cool, dark woods.

“Five foot two…

Eyes of blue…”

She tried once to teach
me to "Charleston."
She failed.

Precious Memories ...

It’s been the Year of Funerals, it has. Headed for another today, a cousin, Rodgers Harris the son of my Sainted Mother’s brother Ed Harris. Uncle Ed was an awfully good man whose first wife, Ethel, died young. I don’t remember her too well. He had two others, wives that is. Outlived them both.

I do remember staying with Uncle Ed and Aunt Ethel one day on their farm in Cleveland County. I was maybe four or five. She took me walking down to their pond, where Rodgers, his brother Kenneth, and a bunch of other teen-aged boys were swimming.

That wasn’t odd. What was odd was than not a one of them wore a stitch of clothes. They were enjoying themselves so much that they completely ignored Aunt Ethel, and she them. I just gawked, not for the last time in my life.

I knew Rodgers afterwards from visits and funerals. He and his wife Eloise would show for gatherings or stop at our store. I never heard a bad word about either. They were just a couple who married and had kids and grew old between visits and funerals. You never thought of them as a couple as much as a single entity named RodgersandEoise.  Lower Arkansas (LA) is full of such folks.

Here’s an odd story about his parents. It involves the mother of our clan, Grandmother Vicie Coats Harris, the mother of eight. Her husband, Sainted Mother’s father, died when SM was three, the baby of the family. The only thing she remembered about him was when the oldest son, Holland Harris shimmied up a pole to ring a bell letting the community know something bad had happened.

It left Grandma Harris with two young girls still at home, alone and destitute, relying on friends, relatives, and pennies picked up from washing clothes for sustenance. When the local church acquired new curtains, she begged them for the old and made underclothes for my mother from them. It might even make an arch-conservative moist up to have heard how the children laughed when she fell at school and revealed her shame. Poor wasn’t the word for it. There were no safety nets then, a libertarian’s paradise.

Back to Uncle Ed and Aunt Ethel. They had married and were eking a living from the harsh land. She was the daughter of a widower, Fletcher Rodgers, the father of, if I remember right, 13 children, a number of them still living at home at the time. This must have spawned an idea on someone’s part, for soon, Ed and Ethel were delivering messages between widower and widow.

One can guess the result. We had cousins and step-cousins all over LA as we grew up. Rodgers and Eloise, as a couple, represented both. Someone told the story once of how a relative carried Sainted Mother and her sister Essie from the wedding to their new home in an automobile, maybe their first ride in one, ever. The person telling it recalled how Mother was grinning at folks from the car window as if she new that the days of hunger were over.

I’ll go down into the Fatherland today to say goodbye to Rodgers. I’ll pass near to the cemetery where Grandpa Harris lies, near to the grave of his father, George W. Harris of the First Indiana Cavalry, U.S.A and the father of his wife, William Coats, 26^th Arkansas Infantry, C.S.A.

Yep, it’s always been a mixed-up sort of family. The woods down in LA have always been full of them. Most were fine American citizens like Rodgers Harris, a veteran of the United States Air Force. You know, you first lose your grandparents. Then you lose your parents. Then there are the aunts and uncles. But when the cousins start to go, you begin to think seriously about this mortality thing.

So long George Rodgers Harris.
I wish I had known you better.

My Redacted Life: Chapter Twelve (Cont._2)

Goodness gracious but 1971 was an exciting year. I had survived the challenges of entering a profession totally unprepared. I learned many of the basics that year and filed away some lessons not taught as formal curriculum in any university. To say that I had learned much that year was like saying a bear cub learns a lot his first year on earth.

And I hadn’t had to carry a weapon, other than a devious and calculating mind, one always “locked and loaded” on full-automatic. Even so, I had learned that, just as in my former line of work, it always proved advantageous to keep your head below the sandbags. I had sharpened the useful skill of not telling someone everything I knew on first meeting them. I retained a lesson learned in Boot Camp that, as someone said, “All thoughts do not need to be spoken.”

I had learned that a little paranoia can be a good friend if one listens and that, as the Apostle said, “The quality of mercy is not strained.” Conversely, one should always pay attention to the person with “scrambled-eggs” on the hat. I was beginning to be less certain each day that my four years in the military had been a total waste. Learning to live by one’s wits is a marvelous skill, no matter what profession one follows. Nothing teaches that better than the military and nothing rewards it more than life among the sharks and shoals of business.

I hadn’t found love in 1971, but I had found comfort on more than one occasion. I hadn’t found success, but I had avoided failure. I had found that age and an acquired sense of treachery were the allies of the ambitious. In short, I was no longer afraid.

As the holiday system settled in on our collective consciousness, I looked forward to being able to participate. In downtown Little Rock, there were still enough shops and mainline stores existing to create a pleasant and comforting atmosphere. Stores began staying open later and as I left work in the dark each day, the sharp and happy staccato greetings of shoppers filled the air beneath the bright holiday lights. Everyone seemed so pleasant to one another. Were such times here to stay? Time would tell.

Christmas Day came on a Saturday that year. I had a major deadline due for some project or other, so I put in half-a-day Friday morning. Then I left, walked into the MM Cohn store at Fifth and Main to buy a last-minute present, and drove to the old hometown for the weekend. It was the second straight Christmas I had spent with my family after missing four in a row. It was the first ever, at nearly 30 years of age, that I had money to buy presents for each of my family.

Life was good. That first year had gone well and 1972 was going to be even better. Wasn’t it?

Oh, hell yes.

The end of "Ripple Days?"

My Redacted Life: Chapter One (Cont. 7)

It was Day Two of my civilian life, November 13, 1970 if I remember right, and I was home. My mother and I had met on the steps of our country store and shared our greetings. We weren’t an overly demonstrative family, but she made it clear that she was glad to see me finished with military life.

As she put it in her eloquent and feminine way, “I was always so goddam afraid they would send you back over yonder.”

We went inside where my father sat on his stool behind the store’s counter. It was his throne, and none entered his domain without recognizing his rule. He nodded my way and said, “Make it home all right?”

That’s the German equivalent of a scream of joy.

You remember a lot of things about your father as you grow old. Strange things. I think back often to how it must have been growing up in the deep woods of Arkansas in a tortured home life that would end in a separation and bitter estrangement.

His father had been hired out as a youth to a farmer in the German colony of Golconda, Illinois. Part of the money he had earned went to the education of brother who became a highly respected PhD, at the University of Iowa, teaching and studying about rural sociology.

Granddaddy got to keep some of the money, and later narrowed the choices of how spend it to purchasing a small flour mill in St. Paul, Minnesota, or buying a sizable chunk of timberland in the wilds of Arkansas.

On such decisions ride the gods who dispense the vicissitudes of life, laughing all way.

Of all the stories Daddy told me, the one that stands out involved a band of gypsies who stopped at their isolated homeplace wanting to swap a jug of milk for a wagon bow. “For your babies,” they said.

“Got no babies,” my grandmother said, threatening them with a broom and chasing them away.

They left, according to my father’s telling of the story, walking and singing,

“Up the road,

Down the road.

Here we go.

Got no baby.

Got no wagon bow.”

Don’t know if it’s true or not, but it’s a hell of a good story. Anyway, that’s the man who met me. He didn’t ask much about my service career. He never wanted me to join, but realized I had no choice. Having been called “A dirty Hun,” as a child during World War One, he didn’t consider military service any of his business, or mine.

He was a hard-headed, but mischievous man. He suffered the bitter prejudices of his day, but never refused a genuine plea for help from anyone in need, no matter the color of their skin. He was never cruel and never cheated a customer. He forgave many a credit bill for a family headed for Detroit and a better life. They would often offer him their plot of family land in payment.

He always refused. “What would I do with it?” Anyway, a lot of families who owned land went broke during the Depression.

He was a product of his time and place. He thought Franklin D. Roosevelt deserved a place as an addition the Holy Trinity. A “Blue-Dog Democrat,” his whole life, I am afraid that he could never have accepted an African-American as president. I suspect he would have changed political parties because of it, as so many of our people have.

That day, though, we didn’t discuss such things. He was most interested in the route I had taken home and how much traffic I had encountered. He had simple interests in a brain that whirled like a Cray computer. An eight-grade dropout, he could work algebra problems in his head without knowing algebra. He could envision and build a house, barn, or conveyor-device to load firewood without benefit of paper or pen. He could add long columns of figures, even those written in his tortured writing, without a single mistake.

He read the newspaper each day and was fond of comic books. He liked most white people okay, and all “colored” people it seemed, as long as they kept their place. He wasn’t fond of preachers or loafers. He could grow anything and butcher an entire hog with less effort than it takes me to mow a lawn.

He always kept a cow and a calf in a barn behind the house. It gave him pleasure, and it also provided an opportunity to enjoy a shot of Old Yellowstone after a long day in the store. More than one, though, and he faced the wrath of the tiny terrorists to whom he was married. Our mother was much the source of his strength and whatever success he enjoyed. He was a lucky man in marriage, a bit of good fortune I was later to enjoy myself.

Oh, I wish he had enjoyed an education. He might have helped with a cure for cancer. I regret that he suffered from the prejudices of his generation, but I’m glad that it didn’t make him mean as it has so many others. I wish at times that he hadn’t been so set in his ways, but then I think of others who got rich doing the same thing he did for a living and couldn’t have done it without pushing the boundaries of decency.

Is short, they gave him to us as we found him and that’s all I can write about. We could have done worse.

That day, we sat and talked for a long time about traveling, about traffic, about crops, and about fishing. If the weather held out he said, “We might just give it a try on Sunday.” I said I would like that.

Pre-Fishing Days

My Redacted Life: Chapter One (Cont. 6)

 It had only been two days since I left the Navy, and now I was home, almost, that is. I left the urban area of my hometown and descended into the Bayou Bartholomew wetlands, crossing the bayou itself. In 1958, four feet of water had covered the road ahead, the entire area suffering a major flood.

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.

My Redacted Life: Chapter One (Cont. 5)

It was only the second day of my civilian life but it felt like a year had passed. In a few moments, I would be home. Home. Robert Frost once said, "Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in." I knew my return wouldn’t be that cynical. It was the only place on earth where they wanted to take me in, at least from love.

 

Fight our country's
 enemies, and this
is your thanks.

I've mentioned that the Navy had offered to take me back in and give me home if I only promised to serve on river boats in Vietnam. See, to the right,  how the country allowed people to treat men who did that. I’m glad I passed on a grand patriotic adventure such as that.

Back to Day Two, I drove by fields, recently harvested, where men still made good livings tilling the soil. Large, but not grand homes, appeared where plantation mansions had stood years before. The farms gave way to scattered housing, then subdivisions, and then commercial enterprises. I seem to remember that a massive outdoor movie screen still stood on the outskirts of town. Roberts Brothers Tire Store came into view, then an all-night service station where we had delivered milk when I was an eleven-year-old.

Herbie’s Barbecue, where they used to bring beer to your car, was still there. I learned later that the bathroom was still as filthy it as it had been when I left. They say Herbie left it that way to discourage people from spending too much time within. A story, not verified, by me at least, held that a young man had left his empty beer can on the long, once white, urinal, his last beer before leaving for Vietnam, only to find it still in the same spot on his return. I don’t know. You hear a lot of things in your home town.

My crowd’s main teenage hangout, “The Wagon Wheel” had closed years ago. I drove on.

I reached Main Street and saw our town’s landmark: a billboard with a little girl on a swing that actually moved, “Little Miss Sunbeam.” I don’t remember how long it had been there, at the end of Main. I just couldn’t remember when it wasn’t. She was still swinging that day, and smiling right at me. Appropriate.

All the sights were familiar now. My heart was warm. I was no longer a stranger in a strange land. In a few moments I would be home. I drove down a divided and landscaped street with grand homes on either side. Then I made the final turn toward where my future waited.

I had no way of knowing at the time, but at a college 60 miles away, a beautiful young girl of 20 was finishing classes for the day and was sashaying across campus on the way to meet her boyfriend at the Student Union. Her flowing red hair and grandly formed legs no doubt drew a great deal of attention that day. Jimmie Buffett would later describe her type as “A smart woman in a real short skirt.”

Paths cross in this world. They choose strange routes and take their time. Sometimes, they carry anchors with them. I sometimes wonder if the gods don’t stand at the intersections and laugh.

Tomorrow: meeting Mother.

In my hometown, you know you have
arrived when she smiles your way.

Growing Up Southern: April 1, 2018

If I could do it all over again, I would sure ask my grandmother more questions. I learned a lot from her, but wish I had learned more.

I learned a bit about her father, who joined the Confederate Army, and told her about his greatest fear. “It was walking back home,” she said, “he told me there were roving bands of bad men, they called ‘gray-legs’ who would kill and rob soldiers trying to get back to their families.”

She taught me some useful things her brothers had taught her. “The best grapevines for smoking weren’t too hollow or too thick. You wanted one that would draw good, but not too fast.”

She taught me about the dangers involved in going swimming in some man’s stock pond with Rupert, Ronnie, and Larry Austin. “I’ll whip your ass if you do that again,” she explained.

She taught me about the intricacies of politics in LA (lower Arkansas) back in Civil War times. When I asked her if It wasn’t odd that her daddy was in the Confederate Army and her future husband’s daddy was in the Union Army, she looked at me as if I had asked her why hens gave eggs and cows gave milk. “Why no,” she said, Daddy was a Democrat and Mr. Harris was a Republican.

Not all she taught was proper. When the butcher at my aunt’s grocery store talked to her in familiar terms, she was irate. She later explained, “He talked to me just like he was a white man.” Life in LA didn’t create perfection, and we are all, I suppose, prisoners of our times.

She taught me about decision-making. She used to read to me, employing her third-grade education. As I grew older, I realized she was misusing about every third word. You would never have guessed it, for she never stumbled, hesitated, or exhibited any lack of comprehension. I guess she passed the trait on. My mother later, in teaching me about the grocery business said, “If you don’t know the price of something, make the best guess you can. If you look confident and lie, they will believe you. If you go and look it up, they won’t.” We can see that developed into an art form, these days.

She taught me about other aspects of eloquence in speech. When I was about three, I once began playing with the earphone of a party-line telephone. While stopping me, she heard the sounds of a woman’s voice yelling bad things at me, “Mama-Rodgers” grabbed the phone, moved to the speaker, and let loose a stream of threats and obscenities that would have earned her the Navy Cross.

I used to have a large photo of her father hanging in my living room. Last year I found a distant cousin of that name and gave to him. The old man looked stern and held a Bible. His obituary said that he was a part-time preacher and never took part in neighborhood brawls.

I’d give anything if my grandmother had told me what that meant.

And she loved
that pretty hat.

Sunrise With Schubert: March 25, 2018

Yesterday, I went to my hometown of Pine Bluff to see a cousin whom I hadn't seen in maybe 65 years. He is a von Tungeln, from my father's side. His name is Donald and we had a nice talk.

My father's side of the family was never as close as my mother's. Though my father's parents never divorced, they had two estrangements, the last growing more bitter over the years. They are buried side by side because my parents had extra plots and there was no other place to bury them. It is a dark-comedy type of amusement among my relatives that the two lie so (apparently) lovingly together.

I've neglected this side of the family over the years and now, much too late, am re-establishing contact. That makes me feel good.

It is a noble family, as the name suggests. My father's line migrated from Bremen, through Ireland in the late 1800s. This line settled around Golconda, Illinois. Another line settled in Kansas, migrating to Oklahoma and Texas. I have "cousins" in Oklahoma that I've become close to via FB and personal visits.

I also have "cousins" in the Bremen area, include Dierk and Rolf with whom I maintain contact. I still hope to visit them some day.

After witnessing two world wars with Germany, my father didn't make a big production of our heritage. Too bad. Maybe had I encouraged him, he would have. Having been taunted as a "dirty Hun" as a child during World War One, his reticence is understandable.

Personally, I am beginning to work on more understanding of the family. Dierk  provided us with a family tree that goes back to the 1600s, so much work remains.

Unlike many socially deranged Southerners, I try to let the story of the two wars with Germany rest in the annals of the past, for study instead of revenge. My job is to understand history, not to rewrite it. I do find it sehr interessant that the WWII veterans I've known who spent time in Germany after the war ended, without exception, came to like the German people much more than they did either the French or English. That's just the ones I knew personally of course. I'm sure it wasn't universal but it is odd.

I simply cannot forbear mentioning, again as my personal opinion, that today's America is beginning to make me understand 1930s Germany more and more. I hope we come to our senses soon. The kids I saw on TV yesterday may be our best hope.

As I say, my father didn't talk much about the family after two wars and two tragic estrangements, he chose to live the present. He did mention one piece of family history that he wished he owned: his grandfather's wooden shoes. I've often wondered whatever happened to them.

Granddaddy John von Tungeln

Growing Up Southern: February 22, 2018

Once, in a fit of anger, I made an obscene gesture to my sister in public. I had just entered my teens and she was nearly grown, seventeen or so—by Southern standards rapidly reaching “Old Maid” status. In all likelihood, she may have deserved my disrespectful action. She did know how to “pull my chain,” so to speak.

So up went the finger to the delight of my buddies. Not one to suffer affront easily, she reported the incident to our Sainted Mother.

Fearing for my life, I stayed outdoors that evening until darkness and hunger combined in a most insidious way and forced me to answer the call to supper. We ate in dread-fueled silence. Nearing completion of the meal, she asked me to remain after the others left.

She wanted to talk to me.

There it was, either a beating or reform school, or both. Reform school rose in preference as they had a swimming pool, they weren't too choosy about who they let on the football team, and Benny Colclasure was already there. He owed me money. I surmised that would entail some degree of protection against the bigger boys.

There was no protection from the wrath of Sainted Mother. Even my father feared her, in a manner much as I imagined that the Dark One feared the Holy Trinity.

As I mentally computed the most likely sentence for an affront to one’s sister, the others left the table. There was no doubt in my mind that my sister bore a smirk, but I wouldn't look her way. I simply braced for the onslaught.

Instead, Sainted Mother raised an empty hand and stroked her chin. Ah. A short sermon and pack your clothes. Not too bad. I might even make a “B” in math in prison school. There hadn’t been a ciphering whiz sent there from our school since the legendary Willie Lee Bohanon got sent up years before. He was a sergeant on the police force by this time.

“What?” she asked after thinking on the matter at hand for a moment like a lawyer questioning a witness, “would you do if someone called your sister a bad name in front of a bunch of other boys?”

Here’s where my superior intellect came into play. On the one hand, I knew what I would do—laugh my ass off. On the other, I knew the appropriate answer. “I would teach whoever said it some manners,” I said with an air of resolution that both surprised and intrigued me.

“I know you would,” Sainted Mother said, "I know you would, son." That made me feel like a pile of horse manure. My mind swung immediately to a diametrically opposite point of consideration that made me imagine how, Red Ryder-like, I would lay waste not only to the miscreant, but to his buddies as well. A mamma can exert that kind of change of perspective in a Southern boy.

She let it sink in for a moment and then said, “So you think your sister deserves respect?”

By now I did, for sure.

“Other boys should treat her like the lady she is?

Hell yes! I nodded.

“Then how could you expect them to show respect for her if you don’t?”

The feeling I now bore was worse than anything reform school had to offer.

I’ve thought about that lesson quite a bit, lately. I’d like to tell the story to our current politicians. After all, American citizens, even if they might be as opposed to your way of life as my sister was to mine, deserve respect. If we don’t give it, how will we expect other nations to?

Thank goodness for Sainted mothers. Perhaps we could bottle their wisdom and give it to the less fortunate.

Odd thing is ... my sister and I
are best friend now. You just never know.

Evening Thoughts: October 12, 2017

Wish ya’ll could have watched the Lady Hazel (aka “The Last Fan at Woodstock”) and me tonight. La Jefa flew to Houston for a much-deserved night off and we were at the farm with no adult supervision. You know what that means. I grabbed an electric guitar and cranked up an amp loud. There was nobody to stop us. I practiced my finger-picking and we played “Name That Hymn" for all the dogs and cats. Jeez, but we had fun.

Hazel’s had a rough week memory-wise, but tonight, full alert-mode returned. She only missed naming two hymns. They were ones I did a particularly awful job on. She even sang along on most. She remembered a few I was rusty on and I have marching orders to get to work on them. Here's one she particularly seems fond of. It's called Send the Light, a good-old-goodun' that I had fogotten about. I won't make that mistake again.

Periodically she reminisced on some of the music this old house had heard over the last 87 years, how her folks used to move the living room furniture to one side on Saturday nights and invite friends over to dance. She told me how someone took a wagon to Carlisle when she was a young child and returned with the organ that had belonged to her mother's family. It is still in our possession and soon to be installed in a new place of honor. She seemed pleased that we still have it.

I have some info on how they are using music as therapy for victims of dementia. I think there may be some truth to it. It sure worked tonight.

Eventually, my fingers got sore, she got sleepy, the animals got bored, and we just about ran out of tunes. What was I to do after two hours of hymns, a stiff back, and a set of blackened finger tips? Obviously, I settled for a Jameson and three cubes with memories of a night I’ll never forget.

Still game for whatever.

Growing Up Southern: September 1, 2017

I have this older sister who is a lot smarter than I. In fact, she’s scary smart. She once received an A+ on a report card in high school and was a two-year inductee into the National Honor Society. I had to follow her and try to measure up. Didn’t always work.

She started out, in her working career, in the basement of an office building in our home town, punching those old IBM cards. She retired from the same outfit, but in an office way up in a high-rise building in Little Rock, running a major department. We’ve become pretty good friends as we have grown older. We don't talk politics and we avoid discussing a few ancient incidents, but we enjoy one another's company, and each comes when the other needs help. All is good.

I’ve even forgiven her for, with the aid of a cousin, dressing me in girl’s clothing when I was about six, and taking a photograph of me. I’m eternally hopeful that she has forgiven me for some of my transgressions aimed specifically toward her. She hasn’t mentioned them lately at any rate.

In addition to being smart and successful, she is a survivor. She’s lost immediate family members in tragic circumstances and still suffers from the effects of a fall off a horse years ago. But, she still gets up and goes after it, life that is, every single day. She lives quietly now, surrounded by grandchildren, content and peaceful. We call her “The General,” for she is quite the commanding officer of our family. She takes it all in stride … I think.

I started thinking about her this morning when I noticed it is the month in which her birthday falls. She wouldn’t want me to mention her age, so I won’t. Let’s just say she is a handsome senior citizen, and I'm always proud to be seen with her.

When we were young, I always felt my parents were partial to her since she was the firstborn, and because Mother and Daddy were still poor sharecroppers then. Poverty seems to form bonds in the South. When we got older, we were both certain that our parents were partial to our younger brother because he was “the baby.”

As for me, the middle child, I always felt my parents would have traded me to a band of gypsies on any given day for a good pickup truck and another baby girl.

I guess all families are like that. The important thing is that ours was stable, and that accounts for a lot in this world. The gypsies never showed, and we kids all reached maturity without major problems. Our parents were hard-working, honest, and well-respected. They maintained high expectations for us, and we knew it. My sister met them, and that’s an inspiration for me.

A few extra pounds ago

Growing Up Southern August 17, 2017

I remember his picture hanging in my grandmother’s house, actually her second husband’s house. Her first had died when Mother was three.

I didn’t think much about ancestors as a kid. How many do? When her husband died, my father built a house for “Mama Rogers.” She brought the photograph with her and lived next door to us until she died.

Nobody wanted the old photograph. They put in behind the sugar barrel in our grocery store, and it stayed there for 15 years ago. Nobody wanted it.

Then I got married to a woman who appreciated such things. We took the picture and still have it.

Great Grandpa is leaving the house today. It’s time. I’ve had him for nearly 40 years. I even became interested and researched his life as best I could.

His name was William Coats, Reverend William Coats, they called him in his obituary. He was born 28 May 1829 in Tennessee somewhere. He traveled from Shelby with his father Sanders Coats to what was then Bradley, now Cleveland County. He married Anna Elizabeth (Ryburn) on 27 May 1855. He died 18 September 1897 and is buried in Friendship Cemetery. He served the CSA in Co D., 26th Arkansas Infantry.

That unit marched around a lot. From Cleveland County, Arkansas the boys somehow got to Northwest, Arkansas and were held in reserve at the Battle of Prairie Grove. They saw action at a skirmish near Greenwood, at Devil’s Backbone. Then they came back and took part, as I understand it, at Jenkin’s Ferry.

His daughter married a man whose father served in a Union Cavalry regiment. When I asked my grandmother once if that wasn’t odd, she said, “Why no, Papa was a Democrat and Mr. Harris was a Republican.” I guess that explained it all. She also told me how Great-grandpa Coats had told her that the most danger he encountered was getting home after the war. Roving bands he called “graylegs” preyed on men traveling. Returning home after the war was hard. Some things never change.

He died suddenly of a heart attack. His obituary stated that he always wanted to be a preacher but couldn’t afford to because of the pressures of supporting a family. He had married, as noted earlier, Elizabeth Ryburn, now a well-respected name in the county.

His obit said further that he was well-respected in the community and “never took part in a neighborhood brawl.” Don’t ask. I sometime wonder if that was a sort of coded message referring to the KKK. As Hemingway said, “It’s pretty to think so.”

I finally contacted a distant cousin who still bears the Coats name. He seemed delighted to have the photograph and has sons to pass it on to. I’ll hand Great Grandpa Coats over to him today. I think he’ll like his new home.