Tales From The South

 

My Short Life of Crime

By Jimmie von Tungeln

 My father decided, the year I turned fifteen, that a summer job would provide just the catalyst through which to redirect me from a life of idle languor to one of resolute achievement. He was, he assured me, there to help. Little did he know that his efforts would nearly veer me into a life of crime.

It happened this way. Daddy procured for me a job at a “filling station” in downtown Pine Bluff, Arkansas. It was during the late 1950s and life was slow and predictable, particularly in the summer months. The station employed two full-time attendants plus me and a college student, the son of a multi-millionaire cotton farmer, a father who also saw work as curative. The college kid arrived at work each morning in a brand new Corvette Stingray that probably cost more than the annual salary of one of the regular workers. My sister dropped me off on her way to work at a bank in the family car, an old purple Pontiac my classmates dubbed “The Purple People-eater.” Life can be sorrowful for a high school kid with a color-blind father.

Social disparity aside, we were a happy crew. When we weren’t serving customers, we washed cars, the college kid and I. When there were no cars to wash, we greased vehicles that were hoisted on racks like kings on their thrones. When there were no cars to grease, we learned things that would, the older guys assured us, stand us in good stead in later life—like shooting craps, doing card tricks, and learning how to spot girls who lived “on the spicy side of life.” What, one might ask, could go wrong?

It had to do with the FBI.

Two Special Agents, both bachelors (I think maybe all the agents were then) roomed in a boarding house two blocks from the station. It was our privilege to maintain their vehicle, a powerful Ford, in peak condition from which to fight crime, ferret out the Communists lurking in Pine Bluff, and keep the region safe.

The agents left that car in one of our vehicle bays at night and that is where the trouble started.

During the day, the car sat on the street, ready for action in the event of a Communist uprising or a chase after known criminals. It came to pass that it was my lot one hot summer afternoon to move the vehicle from the daytime spot to the vehicle bay. Like a good scout, I drove the car into the bay, left the key in the ignition as I had been taught to do and, having been told not to forget to close the bay door, followed that instruction. Then I was careful to lock the bay from the inside.

By exhibiting such a high level of professionalism, I could already visualize being accepted as a Special Agent myself, with all the glory that such a life promised. Certainly I would achieve a grander post than a sleepy Southern town, maybe New York. Just wait.

What no one had told me was that, due to a lack of criminal activity and the sleepy nature of our city, the station owner had agreed that the vehicle bay door wouldn’t be locked at night, just closed. This presupposed that nobody would be stupid enough to prowl around where an FBI vehicle was parked.

Wouldn’t you know it? That night, the only bank robbery that I remember occurring during my entire time of growing up occurred. It was in a little farming town with a branch bank some thirty or so miles away.

I knew nothing about this until I slammed the door on “Old Purple” next morning, ending some argument with my sister, and walked into the station.

Somber can’t describe it. All three of my comrades were leaning against a counter looking at me as if I were carrying a violin case and a copy of Das Kapital. I nodded but not a single one of them nodded back. They just stared. Finally the one we called Boss spoke.

“Where were you last night?”

“Me? At home.”

“Can anyone prove that?”

I knitted my brow. What business was that of his? “Sure, the family. Why?”

“What time did they go to bed?”

He knew what time my parents went to bed. “With the chickens,” as they say down South.

“Your sister there?”

“No, she was on a date.”

“Hmm,” he said. “You better get your story straight.”

“My story?”

“Your story.”

“What,” I said, “on earth are you talking about?”

“Somebody robbed the bank at Sherrill last night, just as they were closing.”

“Really?”

“Really. Guess what else happened?”

“What?”

“Somebody locked the FBI car in the bay here and the FBI guys had to walk all the way back home and get the key or they might have gotten over there in time to catch the robbers.”

The weight of the world began to lower on me like one of our fully loaded vehicle hoists. I said nothing.

“Don’t leave,” Boss said.

“What do you mean, don’t leave?”

“The agents want to take you in for questioning when they get back.”

“Questioning? Why?”

He looked at me as if I had just asked where sunlight originated. “Because you are the one who locked the FBI car in the bay.”

I couldn’t speak. I tried but my vocal chords just made a little squeaking sound like a screen door being opened on a hot summer day.

“They are pretty sure,” Boss said, “that you were in on it.”

Robinson Crusoe, on first reaching shore, could not have felt more abandoned and alone than I did at that moment.

“Don’t worry,” the college kid said. “We won’t get to listen to them.”

I finally found my voice. “Listen to them what?” I said, a half tone below “High-C.”

“Interrogate you,” he said in a grave voice honed by years of hazing fraternity pledges. “They are going to take you to the Police Station. That way they can just go ahead and lock you up if they decide to.”

“Lock me up for what?”

Boss said, “Aiding in a bank job is a pretty serious offense.” He told me that he had assured the agents that all his employees knew not to lock the bay at night. Mine was clearly a renegade action. With that, they all found something to do that didn’t include me. I moseyed around, bumping into things, until I finally found a quiet place to sit and await my doom.

Maybe prison wasn’t so bad, I thought. Maybe I could learn to sing there. Elvis did in some movie. Or maybe I could escape. As the minutes evaporated, so did my options, until only dark despair remained. Then I heard the sound.

It was the dark rumble of the FBI car’s powerful engine. The car came into view, lumbered alongside a gas pump, and stopped. It didn’t occur to me to attend it until I looked around and saw nobody else in sight. I was alone. The agent driving honked and it evoked the sound of a large creaking door closing on my life. I wandered out.

The driver rolled down the window and smiled. “Hey sport,” he said. “We drove this old gal a piece today so fill her up.”

“Fill her up?”

“Fill her up, and check the oil.”

“Yes sir,” I said. “Anything else?” I would get this thing over with, once and for all.

“Windshield’s dusty,” he said. “Oh…” Here it came. I froze. “They forgot to tell you but you don’t lock that bay door at night. Saves us some time and trouble.” With that, he turned to the other agent and began to compare notes. I moved to the gas pump.

As the pump hummed to life, my life hummed afresh. I even whistled. Then I saw three heads peer from the back of the station, laughing like they might never have another chance. I squeezed the pump handle like it was the hand of a lover, took in the smell of gasoline as if were the scent of roses, smiled at the three guys, and nodded. That was a good one, all right.

 

A SHORT STORY

 

MEMORIES OF A COUNTRY CHURCH

By Jimmie von Tungeln

Mama used to say us girls picked on Eula Faye or else egged her on, but I can tell you that she gave about as good as she got. Like the time we stole her Bible verse. We all had a good laugh out of it at the time but we didn’t get ahead of her. No sir. Not at all.

Now there are those who wouldn’t think this little episode was important. They have never lived out at the end of the world where everybody you knew was either direct-kin or step-kin, or sometimes both. It didn’t take much to create a story that would last forever. Particularly if you were as poor as we were.

After Daddy died, Mama raised us as best she could. While she didn’t hold out much for preaching, or churches in general, I think it had something to do with the hardness of her life, she did send us off to church when we got to aggravating her.

Ever third Sunday Brother Elmer Tisdale would ride out from Caldron with his old mare pulling his wagon and hold services in Pleasant Grove Church. I guess this must have been about 1930. I couldn’t have been over twelve or thirteen, I reckon since I was married and gone by the time I was sixteen.

The church was nothing but a little frame building set off from a cemetery that went way back almost to the civil war. My granddaddy had been a charter member but he had died young so Mama could barely remember him. The church building rested under the shade of three enormous oak trees. We kids called them “The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,” but not around any grown-ups for they had no sense of humor whatsoever about religion.

We would gather up around nine-thirty in the morning and have an hour of Sunday School before the services began. Mama made us leave early to get there to serve the complete sentence. Naturally she didn’t trust us as far as she could spit and I can still see her on the porch as we took off, threatening to cut a switch and wear us out if we didn’t get there in time.

The older ones were gone by then and it was just Sister and Jim and me had to go. Mama made us because she said it wouldn’t do us any harm and might do us some good. She was welcome to her opinion. We had our own, but we went just like she told us to.

We dawdled around as much as we could. Jim would usually cut us off some grapevines to smoke on the way and we would make up all sorts of imaginary trips that we were really going on. None of them included a church house. Hog Eye Bend Creek would be the River Nile and a clump of oak trees would be a pyramid. We used clouds for the Alps and the road we were on was the main street through Paris. For a bunch of country kids, we weren’t bad at making things up.

Anyway, Hattie Ruth Turner taught school up at Armistead so they had her teach Sunday School to the girls on preaching day. There were about seven or eight of us. Eula Faye was distant kin and her daddy had a pension from World War One. They also owned a grocery store out on the state highway, so they was about the richest family in the community. She was a round-faced thing with freckles ever place they had a spot to be in. Her mamma kept her hair done up in curls to tight I bet you could have played music on them. She kind of had this little bounce when she walked and we would giggle that someday she might just bounce off like a rubber ball. She would hear us and say that rich women in the city walked like that. We liked her okay, I reckon. We didn’t mistreat her. It was just that she would sometimes create the opportunity for a laugh or just create one on her own.

All the girls had to have a Bible verse memorized to recite first thing in Sunday School. This was supposed to help us into Heaven in some way, but it wasn’t real clear to us how and we didn’t care much for it. It might have been due to the lack of scriptural resources available to a bunch of little country kids. Some of those girls were from families that couldn’t even afford a Bible. We had one but our step-daddy wouldn’t hardly let us touch it. So we were in a constant of agitation about it. It sure wasn’t our favorite part of this whole salvation thing.

Miss Hattie, since she was a regular school teacher too, had to remember what side her bread was buttered on so she would always let Eula Faye go first. We would start to snicker even before she stood up. We met in the back of the church house and the boys in front. Eula Faye would make sure the boys were watching her and then when the room got real quiet, she would brush a hand across her hair and say it just like some movie actress.

“Jesus wept, John 11:35”

She got away with it ever Sunday.

Then we would have to stand up and quote some regular verse. And you weren’t allowed to repeat someone else’s choice. It got to where it played on our nerves.

Well this one Sunday, we fixed it up so Sister held Eula Faye up outside the door on some pretense and she hadn’t come in when we started. So Eloise Covington jumped up and asked if she could go first. What could Miss Hattie say?

Eloise was in on it, see? She stumbled around until she saw Eula Faye come in then Eloise shouted out loud enough for the whole church to hear: “Jesus wept, John 11:35”

You could just about see the color drain out of Eula Faye’s face when she took her seat. We swallowed our giggles until our stomachs started to swell, expecting to see Eula Faye have a nervous breakdown. But she didn’t miss a beat when Miss Hattie called on her. She stood up and took a deep breath. The boys knew something was up and had all stopped talking and were watching like a bunch of hounds at hog dressing time. She nodded to them as if they were her audience and then gave us her best “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet” look. Then she announced to the world, as if she might be telling the Red Sea to part.

“Moses crept, John 3:15.”

She said it real loud and then just set back and smiled the same as if she had just recited some long-winded psalm. We all broke up laughing until Miss Hattie stared it out of us. The boys didn’t know a Bible verse from a horse-collar so they mostly just stared with their mouths all open. Then it was all over and we re-commenced our recitation period. Miss Hattie never let on like anything unusual happened at all.

That was the day we knew it wasn’t going to be easy to get something by Eula Faye. But Sister and I laughed all the way home over it anyway. Jim just smoked a grapevine and looked puzzled over the whole thing.

YOUTH

 Sometimes I miss the America we are discarding.

Next door to our country grocery in south Arkansas was the shop of a man (long deceased) who did body work on cars. Each day, he would wander in when the delivery man for a local bakery and selected others showed up. They would gather around on nail kegs in the back of the store and solve the world's problems. The gatherings were genial, and what one might expect from a disparate group of southern rednecks.

Some were veterans of WWII. All were survivors of a devastating tornado in 1947 that killed 32 people in the community. All, to a man, were yellow-dog FDR Democrats.

Sometimes during deer season, they would all bring ingredients and cook a "Mulligan's Stew" on the old wood-burning stove. A FB friend is the daughter of the man mentioned above. She was a young girl, quite pretty as I remember, at the time. She says they used to tell her that the stew wasn't complete unless it contained an old sock.

What I remember, since our kitchen connected with the store, was when my mother would notice that the conversation had suddenly gotten very low. She would lay an iron aside, look at me and say, "They're telling jokes in there now, ain't they?"

I don't think things like that go on at the local Walmart.

EPIPHANY OF THE DAY

 THE SOUTH

Novels and films set in the American South, take lower Arkansas (LA) for example, love to picture southern neighborhoods as containing one eccentric but colorful character. It adds color and commands attention to the dull parts. Those who have lived in such places know better but take it in stride.

It’s better to laugh with than acknowledge being laughed at.

If I, though, were to be able to write a novel about such places, I’d try to include at least one person partially based on reality.

Take “Turnrow Thompson” for example. I’d say of him that he was known for his concentration. His acquired middle name honored, as Jimmie Buffet said of a character, his ability to "stick right to the task." It made him popular with football coaches, young women, sergeants, and bosses.

Folks claimed that the attention to duty was inherited, even resulting in the name Turnrow carried through life. Rumor had it that his mama was so dedicated to helping produce a bale of picked cotton a day that she had delivered him on a turnrow, deposited him under a cotton trailer and had gone right back to picking. No one had ever gotten her to verify the rumor. She would just answer inquiries with, “He never was no troublesome baby.”

A child with a reputation like that never found himself destined for greatness.

EPIPHANY OF THE DAY

 CIVIL WAR

Was rereading parts of the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant last evening concerning the Battle of Missionary Ridge. In the midst of describing preparations for this great American victory, Grant suddenly stops and delivers this reflection:

"There was no time during the rebellion when I did not think, and often say, that the South was more to be benefited by its defeat than the North. The latter had the people, the institutions, and the territory to make a great and prosperous nation. The former was burdened with an institution abhorrent to all civilized people not brought up under it, and one which degraded labor, kept it in ignorance, and enervated the governing class.

With the outside world at war with this institution, they could not have extended their territory. The labor of the country was not skilled, nor allowed to become so. The whites could not toil without becoming degraded, and those who did were denominated "poor white trash." The system of labor would have soon exhausted the soil and left the people poor. The non-slaveholders would have left the country, and the small slaveholder must have sold out to his more fortunate neighbor. Soon the slaves would have outnumbered the masters, and, not being in sympathy with them, would have risen in their might and exterminated them. The war was expensive to the South as well as to the North, both in blood and treasure, but it was worth all it cost. The enemy was surprised"

What an interesting concept. He would go on from there to defeat Robert E. Lee and help restore our country. It is gratifying to note that his reputation has enjoyed a major refurbishing in recent years. I recommend, for those wanted to know him better, the reading of the memoirs, considered one of the best personal reflections of war ever penned.

MEMORIES

 VACATION BIBLE SCOOL

No Vacation for a Pirate

By Jimmie von Tungeln

             The following happened in different times. Not ancient times, just different times. Most mothers were home all day then. Most fathers were away working. Children followed their own instincts and must have been particularly annoying. Mothers missed no opportunity to be shed of them for a few hours, or even all day. As I was to learn, it was also a time set aside for my religious instruction, specifically for a consolidation of my vague images of Hell, in form of a particularly nasty institution known as—one can still almost hear thunder and the neighing of horses at the mere mention of the word—Vacation Bible School.

            Perhaps the ill-timing of it all fueled my extreme reaction. They seem always to plan these things in summertime and this was a particularly bad bit of scheduling. It seemed to be set out purposely to interfere with the duties of a group of ten-year-olds who had no other mission than protecting both the physical and reputational well-being of their community. We had, over the last few months, coalesced into the sort of group about which folk songs were written during the Dark Ages. We were heroic. We were virtuous. We were protective of our lands and people. In short, we had responsibilities, and they didn’t include religion.

            A group of invaders from north of Bayou Bartholomew, for example, was in the process of building a raft with which to ravage the settlements to the south. This was the established territory of our little band of privateers. Who would stand between the invading hordes and our men and women folk if we were to be called away? There were forts to be built, traps to be laid, and counter-offensive craft to be built.

            The alternative spelled utter disaster. Ben Shannon explained it to us as we gathered around a hastily built campfire near the bayou’s edge. He was not our leader, per se, just older and more educated. “They’ll come rapping and pillaging our women,” he said. “At tar’s pure histry.”

            We shuddered at the thought as our blood ran hot and fired our anger like an open circuit suddenly lighting a darkened room. Rapping and pillaging indeed! (As adults, when we absorbed the difference between rapping and raping, many of us would come to think we would prefer the latter, but that’s a story for another day.)

            Pirates were only a part of our problem. At the same time, a group of rustlers from the Union Community had begun to range perilously close to our hideout on Ferdinand Thompson’s land. We had to settle affairs with them once and for all and it wasn’t going to be a sight that innocent folks should witness.

            On top of that, a group of semi-professional baseball players from the Hog-eye Bend area was threatening to descend upon the field on the edge of Ridgway’s dairy land and issue a challenge to any locals brave, or dumb, enough to meet it. We weren’t the type of fellows to back away from anyone, even from a team that reportedly fielded a player who could re-wrap a baseball with electrical tape so tight that it hit almost like a new one. We’d knock his fancy ball right back in his face.

            In the midst of all this, the two Hester boys, O.G. Stanford, Bobby Joe Benson, his brother Robert, and I all heard the sentence pronounced.

            “Unity Baptist Church is having a two-week Vacation Bible School and I have signed you and your sister up,” my mother said. She said it so softly and matter-of-factly that she might have only been stating we were having leftovers for supper. It failed to even register in a mind that was filled with sword-fights, running gun battles and strikeouts.

            “That’s nice,” I heard myself say, not realizing the doom to which I had just sentenced myself.

            I forgot it all until the next Sunday evening. I had lived through another Sabbath and was preparing to assume my duties as the gang’s quartermaster the next day. In my kit, I had packed a penny-box of matches and a book of cigarette papers filched from my father’s grocery store. Eddie Holland had been swiping pinches of Bull Durham from his daddy for weeks now and we had the goods to provide a swell smoke for the entire gang. I also packed away a five-cent package of firecrackers left over from Christmas and a picture of a Marilyn Monroe in a bathing suit that I had torn from a Parade Magazine. I had my Uncle Jack’s survival knife from the Korean War and a magnifying glass that was useful for starting fires, and also for frying ants. It was going to be a good Monday.

            Then I heard my mother yell from the living room, “Jimmie get in there and lay out some clothes for Bible School in the morning. Misses Cochran’s coming at 8:30 and you better not make her wait.”

            My blood froze. Bible School? Was she kidding? I answered back immediately in my best pirate voice. “Huh?”

            “You heard me.”

            “Did you say something?”

            “Now don’t even think about opening that little smart mouth of yours to me. You get ready.”

            “Aw momma.” Did she want to be rapped and pillaged?

            “Don’t you ‘aw momma’ me. I gave them a love offerin’ and you’re goin’.”

            “But Sonny Averitt has a new snake and he said we could come over and look at it in the …”

            “Don’t make me have to come in there.”

            So, the gang of prisoners dutifully reported outside the church next morning. There were five of us—Bobby Joe had rubbed some mustard in his eyes and convinced his mama that he might have the “chicken pops.” True pirates are born to embrace suffering.

            Anyway, we lined up as if we were awaiting the boat to Devil’s Island outside the church door. They let all the girls in first, including my sister who was older than the rest of us and ended up being a sort of guard for the duration, in addition to her normal job of reporting my every movement and utterance to the authorities at home. There were about 10 of us boys in the group, and not a happy face among them.

            Finally, our teacher, a Misses Krebbs, appeared at the door and bade us enter the foyer. Once that far inside, she stopped us and, as we huddled in a tight bunch near the coat racks and tables piled with offering plates, taught us the daily prayer we were to utter before we entered the church each morning.

I am a sinner, let me pray,

God has given me this day.

At every step, I’ll stop and say,

He will guide me all the way. Amen

            I think she made it up herself because she seemed mighty pleased with it. After a dozen or so tries, we got to where we could say it together and she allowed us in the church.

            Miss Krebbs was a stout little woman with reddish hair pulled into a bun. She had obviously been through this before, for the first thing she did after she sat all the boys down in the back of the room—the girls were already up front singing songs—was to single out the baddest looking boy in the room. He was a big boy, older than the rest of us, named Terry Clayton and was from the east side of town where they raised the tough ones. We learned later that he was in Vacation Bible School as an alternative to reform school, so he was prepared to endure a good deal of unpleasantness. It started immediately. Miss Krebbs brought him to the front of our little group. He turned and faced us with magnificent defiance, and we all envied his “look.” She then presented him as the type that would reap great benefits from the coming experience. She patted his back. He turned a crimson red, and those of us who were experienced in the ways of the truly fearsome saw dead bodies and raw bloody veins swirling in his head.

            Next, she looked at him and asked, “What do you expect to get from coming to vacation bible school,” she asked.

            Well, she might have just as well asked him what he thought of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Here was a boy who had never planned even a half-step beyond his immediate existence in his life. He turned even redder and finally looked at the floor.

            Miss Krebbs made him suffer for what seemed like minutes before she sat him down, broken and humiliated. Then she asked, “Who in here loves Jesus?”

            Every hand shot into the air.

            I won’t go into great detail about the ordeal that followed. As the remnants of our little band proceeded, without us, to build a raft capable of transporting the band all the way across the bayou to intercept the interlopers, we were cutting out pictures of the prophets to paste on large poster boards. The only part of our day that offered any chance of relief for our tortured mind was singing. It didn’t take long before we discovered that we could change the words of songs ever so slightly without drawing the attention of Misses Krebbs or one of the other guards. Of course my sister was a little more worldly-wise than the adults so we had to be extra careful. She knew the easy ones such as Gladly, the Cross-eyed Bear. We did manage, though, to slip by her such gems as Flour in the Mud.

            But our pleasures were few, all in all. Once, we had to study the Book of Job, which consisted pretty much of a story about how God and the Devil took bets on how this poor guy named Job would act if they played tricks on him. I guess they thought it pretty funny. Actually, we had done the same thing a few times with our gang’s favorite jester, Buddy Austin. We would, for example, twist him up in a bag swing and let it twirl him around a bunch of times and then take bets on how far he could walk before he fell. It was a kid’s game, at best, but I still think we showed more decency than the other two I mentioned.

            The study of poor Job did provide one bit of drama. Toward the end, when the unfortunate man had endured almost more than humanly possible, Misses Krebbs stopped the discussion and asked who could provide an explanation for it all. Well, old Terry Clayton just sat there for a few minutes. We were ten days or so into the sentence by then, and I suppose the imagined peace and manly freedom of reform school were beckoning him like the Sirens of Phorcus.

            He all of a sudden blurted out, it was the first time he had spoken since his opening day humiliation, “I guess it means that when you have nothing to lose, it’s better to be the shooter than the dice.”

            It was the last I saw of him until a number of years later when he stopped me for speeding. He was five years in the police force by then and let me go, a favor from one victim to another.

            On another occasion, they brought in this carpenter who was going to show us how to work with wood. We thought this was going to be really neat until we found that the project would consist of building crosses and not anything useful.

            I immediately got crossways with our instructor because he didn’t like my choice of wood. I was, and still am, partial to the darker woods like walnut. He claimed we should use lighter wood to symbolize the purity of Christ. Jesus!

            After a few days of sawing and bending a number of nails, our crosses began to take a number of shapes, few of them recognizable as the stated intent. On top of it all, the man refused to answer any questions of a practical nature, such as tips on building rafts or stockades for a hideout.

            As the end of our cross-building approached, O.G. Stanford finally asked Misses Krebbs what the finished products would be used for. She didn’t hesitate a second. “You are building them to be donated to the poor nigra churches in town.”

            We just looked at one another. Hadn’t these people suffered enough already?

            The absolute most idiotic thing about the experience was that Misses Krebbs never even learned my name. She knew my sister’s name, and she knew our relationship. But for some reason, she insisted on calling me Jimmie Valentine, for the pure sadistic pleasure of it I suppose. I still have, among my clippings about the Tet Offensive, my photos of a storm at sea, and the results of a tornado which I survived, a small folded certificate stating that Jimmie Valentine had, indeed, survived (it actually says “graduated from”) Unity Baptist Church Vacation Bible School.

            Ten week days passed like turtles doing the shuffle and the worst ten years of my life neared its end. In this case with “Boo-Hoo Day.” That’s the day they wrap it up with a children’s sermon from the church’s preacher and, traditionally, all the girls get “saved,” some of them for the fourth or fifth time, boo-hooing louder each time. All the boys declined the honor except for Johnny Staples and that is a complete story in itself. Let’s just mention he later went to California to become an actor and salvation probably held him in good stead.

            For the rest, we returned to our gang to learn that, in our absence, the remnant members had discovered that rafts made from green pine trees don’t float well enough to support the weight of a pirate gang. To make matters worse, Ferdinand had discovered our cowboy hideout on his land, torn it up, and reported the discovery to my father to whom he handed over the bottle containing a half-inch of bourbon that someone, we denied any knowledge, had been carefully collecting from throwaways for months. Of course the baseball game had to be forfeited and our team was forever known and “The No-shows.”

             A pretty sad experience? Yes, in many ways. The gang never reorganized. The next summer my father secured me a job working on a milk truck and a succession of summer, then part-time, and finally full-time employments followed until one day I awoke to be staring at the face of a grown man in the mirror. Sadly, it was not the face of a pirate. It was a face, however, honed to some degree from raging along the banks of Bayou Bartholomew, once, with a ragtag gang of fierce warriors, protecting an imaginary group of innocent women from the prospect of rapping and pillaging. So I am glad of my youth, even with that summer’s terrifying experience. Outdoor freedoms such as we enjoyed back then seem to have disappeared along with pirate gangs and second-hand baseballs.

Were there lessons learned? There was one, After enduring Misses Krebbs, and vacation bible school, there was never any doubt in our minds about the true horrors of Hell. That has always provided a little touch of religion in the night.

Worthy Labors

Random thoughts on a lazy Labor Day:

Unlike the other adults of the 327 million Americans, I have no “bright-line” solution to the mass shootings that plague the United States at present. I am, though, struck by the coincidence of these latest rampages and my reading of Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide by Tony Horwitz.

Horwitz follows the travels of Fredrick Law Olmsted who, before coming America’s most renown landscape architect, was a journalist who made a couple of trips through the pre-Civil War South and transmitted his observations for publication in the fledging New York Times.

May I surprise the reader by saying that Horwitz’s book amazes in two ways. The first is in the difference between the American South of the 1850s and the American South of today. The second raison d'étonnement is the similarity between the American South of the 1850s and the American South of today.

What concerns me most today is Horwitz’s impression of modern Texas. Let’s just say he isn’t kind in many ways. The most apparent observation is the hard-headed belief among so many Texans that paradise lies in a rather unique world. That world stays free from any moral strictures other than selected (very carefully selected) passages from the Bible, especially selected parts written by Bronze-Age nomads. If, only: everyone wore guns, the earth needed no protection from us, the “least of those among us” deserved no help from us, greed borne aloft by self-reliance was the only worthwhile catalyst worthy of rule-making, and the only governmental needs were local and national armed forces necessary to see that no one took our well-deserved wealth from us, the world would be pleasant. Yes, it would be pleasant indeed.

In other words, as James Madison posited, "If men were angels, no government would be necessary."

Or, as Texans and most other Southerners seem to believe, “If we each carried a Glock strapped around our fat asses, there would be no gun deaths in America.”

Of course, the old South thrived, as Olmsted observed, on the use of slave labor as the primary foundation for that self-reliance. What must unnerve thinking people is the number of modern Americans, many with vast amounts of wealth and power such as the late David Koch, who still support slave, or near-slave labor for individual enrichment.

That brings me to another thought on this day on which we honor the simple and highly-lauded act of honest labor. And, I won’t forbear noting that the time to contemplate these thoughts is not provided today by self-reliant capitalists. It is provided by the blood of organized laborers.

Now, a couple of New Testament parables have always bothered me. The first is that of The Prodigal Son. I’ll attend it in a moment. The biggie, though, is the sad story of paying the laborers. You remember the story, as told in The Gospel of Matthew 20:1-16. As summarized by Matthew L. Skinner, Professor of New Testament, Luther Seminary, Saint Paul, Minnesota:

“The story goes like this: Early in the morning, a landowner (who seems to represent God in this parable) hires people to work in his vineyard for the standard daily wage. He hires additional people at 9 a.m., noon, 3 p.m. and again at 5 p.m., telling each of these groups that he will give them “whatever is right.” When the hot workday ends, he first pays the folks who labored only a single hour the standard daily wage, the same amount he pledged to those who worked nearly sunup to sundown. When the members of that full-day crew get to the front of the line, they receive the same amount, exactly what they were promised.”

Now ain’t that something? Try that with the crew at the donut shop. But, as Professor Skinner points out, the Galilean’s parables “ …often include absurd behavior to deliver their message.”

But what in tarnation is the message?

Allow me dive off the high board. I think, see, based on a fairly close study of the Scriptures, that some parables weren’t designed by the authors to teach precise moral lessons. Rather, they were written to ward off disquietude among the early Christian cult members.

In my view. The Galilean is voiced to assure early converts that any "laborer" who accepts the invitation to the work in the vineyard, i.e. the Kingdom of Heaven, no matter how late in the day, will receive an equal reward with those who have been faithful the longest. Case closed.

Of course, the parable of the prodigal son not only confused me, as the oldest son in our family. It really pissed me off, for reasons obvious to anyone who knew my family. "Work? We don’t need no stinkin’ work. Go have fun, they’ll take you back."

Then one day I realized that the parable wasn’t about children at all. It was about apostates. Should the early church groups re-admit those who had strayed from the righteous path but who wished to “return to the fold” and escape the horrors of a greedy and self-reliant secular world? Muslims can kill them. Christians must take them back into the fold.

I think the Amish practice of Rumspringa is somewhat mythically viewed as a time for adolescents to experiment with sex, drugs, and other worldly pleasures. At any rate, a period of absence from religious constraint may simply represent a socio-religious rite of passage. It makes more sense than coddling wastrels.

That’s all my head-spinning for today. I think I’ll go listen to some Bach, and offer thanks for having been a member of a family with a long tradition of being workers that needed not be ashamed of their labors.

A whip or a good Glock will keep her
from taking what is rightfully mine.

Friday Fiction

Here's one that started me off on writing a book.

JURY DUTY

By Jimmie von Tungeln

            “How do you like jury duty so far?” the man next to Clyde Olsen asked. They had been cleared for the next case and were waiting in the Jury Room—a narrow space stuffy and thick with cigarette smoke. A ceiling fan swirled the smoke around in the heat, and Clyde could hear the sound of chairs scraping and people talking in the courtroom. It was still early in the morning but nearing time for the trial to begin.

            “Oh I like it fine,” he said. “I don’t get out much—gives me a chance to get away from work and do something useful.”

            “Tell you the truth,” the other man said. “I’d rather be fishing.”

            They both laughed. Clyde eyed the man. He was trim and well-dressed. His suit was cheap but new and the man was clean-shaven and short-haired. Clyde saw the Service Pin in the man’s lapel. “You been in the service?” he asked.

            “Seventy-ninth Infantry. Landed at Normandy on D-day plus four. With it all the way to
Germany.” He paused. “How about you?”

            Clyde smiled and looked away. “Had two kids, one of them just a baby, so I was exempted until the last few months. They finally called me in January and I was set to be taken but then Germany surrendered. This your first jury duty?”

“First time. Hope it’s the last,” the other said.

“Oh, I’ve been here before,” Clyde said. “During the war they were short of men to choose from so I got called pretty often. Armistead, Arkansas ain’t a big town, you know. Myself? I kinda enjoy it. Mostly bootleggers and wife beaters so far.”

“This your first murder case?”

“Yep, and I understand it’s an open and shut affair.”

“Open and shut. That’s what I hear.”

Just then, the bailiff walked through the door and announced that it was time for the trial and asked if anyone had any questions.

“Will they feed us dinner?” asked a thin young man with a large Adam’s apple.

“We may be through before noon even gets here,” the bailiff laughed and said.

“Shucks,” I’m already hungry,” the man said to a ripple of laughter from the group.

The jury filed out and Clyde found himself looking down the row of attorneys’ tables. At the farthest one sat a man in a wrinkled suit and next to him another who couldn’t have been more than twenty-five years old, wearing khaki pants and a white shirt and looking for all the world as if he might bolt for the door at any moment—the defendant.

The crowd was small, basically divided into two groups of five or so each. Clyde noticed a couple of children but movement drew his attention back to the defendant. He had turned in his seat and was looking into the crowd, his neck pulsing from the effort. The man in the suit nudged him and nodded toward the front as the Judge entered the room. The crowd rose and remained standing until the Judge sat and the bailiff announced that court was in session. After those in the room had seated themselves, it became quiet except for the clicking of ceiling fans. The judge nodded and the trial began.

As had been predicted, it appeared to be a simple affair—a case of a tragic set of circumstances and a youthful and horrible lapse of judgment. There was first a bar, where a young married man should never have been in the first place. Then there was an argument over something so silly and meaningless as to almost make the jury laugh. There were threats and, later—after feelings should have cooled—there was violence on a man who was walking home alone.  Through the morning, there was enough evidence and testimony to convince any juror that the defendant had caused the death of an innocent man.

The only balancing weight would be the sincerity of the youthful defendant when it came time for him to testify. Though he swore his innocence, he had no way of proving it. The jury watched without emotion as the prosecutor destroyed, one by one, his protests.

Then it was noon and the Jury was escorted to a local diner to be fed. They were instructed not to talk about the case until they returned but there were few who didn’t whisper about the scope of the tragedy.

Clyde sat next to the man with whom he had talked earlier. Clyde expressed his opinion that a man would stay out of trouble as long as he minded his own business.

“There ain’t a thing outside a man’s family that ought to concern him,” Clyde said, then added, “Unless it’s something like this that somebody has to do.”

“I’ll tell you one thing,” the other man said. “I don’t much care for being on a jury.”

Clyde seemed surprised. He lit a cigarette and said. “Why, we are making sure justice is served. Don’t you think it’s our duty?”

“I reckon. I’ve just had enough of duty to last me awhile.” The man rose and headed outside to take the air.

Clyde turned to the man seated on his other side. “Ain’t he the one, though?”

After lunch the man in the wrinkled suit questioned two people that had been in the bar when the argument started. He seemed to be building up a case that the defendant had been goaded beyond some human breaking point. Then he produced a short parade of witnesses who swore to the goodness and honesty of the defendant.

After that, each lawyer gave a speech, both of which the jurors seemed to find boring and it was over.

Back in the jury room, the heat was intense and none of the jurors seemed energetic about discussing what they had just heard. Most of the conversation centered on the tragic waste and the role of circumstances in a person’s life. On the first vote they, one and all, found the man guilty of murder. It was second-degree murder, but still murder, and the jurors were solemn as they waited for their decision to be delivered to the Judge.

Clyde didn’t look at the defendant when he was seated again in the jury box. He and the other jurors stared at the judge without moving. It was now late in the afternoon and time for them to go home, having done their duty in the only way possible.

Shortly, the ceremony was over. The jury foreman announced the verdict. The defendant declined to speak, simply lowering his head and waiting for the announcement. The judge handed it down and two bailiffs appeared from nowhere to handcuff the prisoner. The judged thanked the jurors and dismissed them.

Clyde had begun to stand when it happened.

It was just a sound but one like he had never heard. Vicious and unreal, it pushed him back into his chair. He almost threw his hands to his ears but this wouldn’t have stopped it. Nothing would have. He turned toward the back of the room, jerking his head like the first movement of an animal in danger.

From the crowd a woman was screaming. High and piercing, it was first just a sound of anguish torn from an unimaginable depth of feeling like someone had punched a hole in a pressurized tank. Then it formed along “Nooooooooo…” A quick breath and then again, “No, no, please God no.” The sounds tore past Clyde like winds in a storm.

They were from a woman dressed in a shabby, floral-patterned dress. She was thin, and wore a pair of glasses that dominated her face. She kept screaming and tried to move toward the prisoner but she was being held by the group of people who had sat with her during the trial.

“Oh God… don’t let them take him,” she screamed again, trying to break loose from those who were holding her. They held her, though, and her screaming turned to wet sobs as arms closed around her.

            The arms didn’t stop a boy of about five years of age.  He tore from the group and, vaulting a low partition, raced to where the prisoner stood and wrapped his arms around one leg.

            “Daddy, daddy,” he yelled. The sound echoed from ceiling to wall and seemed to be strengthened and spun by the ceiling fans. “Please don’t take my daddy. Please, please!”

            He sobbed into the khakis of the prisoner who stared at him with surprise. The entire courtroom stopped. Even the judge had turned to see what was happening.

            One of the bailiffs who had been holding the prisoner’s arm let go and said to him, “Don’t move.” He moved around the man and began pulling the boy loose.

            “Oh daddy, don’t, don’t, daddy don’t,” the boy said. The bailiff wrenched him free from the man’s legs and dragged him backwards, the little arms flailing in circles like the blades of a windmill, as if he might generate enough wind to unite him with his father.

            “Daddy, daddy,” he sobbed. His entire head had turned red and tears flowed through the redness and then were slung away as he shook his head from side to side to emphasis the “No, no” he voiced. His cries joined those of the woman to form a sound that flooded the room.  “Don’t take our daddy,” the woman yelled, but the strength was going from her. There was a rough sound as the bailiff and another man, each holding an arm, dragged the young boy backwards along the hardwood floor with the heels of a ragged pair of brogans scraping the floor.

            Through it all, the prisoner had not moved, nor had the judge or the jurors. They all watched the scene as if it were occurring in some strange theatrical performance. They kept watching as the woman and boy were led from the room, their faces still turned toward the prisoner and still entreating someone—the judge, the jury, the bailiffs, maybe God himself. It was a general and non-directed plea for mercy.

            Then the courtroom was quiet again. Still no one moved for what seemed like minutes. Then the bailiffs began leading the prisoner toward the side door. Just when the jurors thought the spectacle might be over, the young man broke the silence with a series of hoarse and guttural sobs that sounded as if they were erupting from the bowels of the earth itself. It was as if the shaking of his body might cause the entire building to fall.

            “Come on now,” a bailiff said. “Don’t let these folks see you like this.” The man tried to nod but the sobs conquered him. They led him from the room in that state.

            Now the jurors stirred, as if they belonged to one great organism, and filed from their seats. As they moved toward the door, Clyde’s companion turned to him.

            “Maybe I’ll see you again some day… at another trial.”

            Clyde’s eyes seemed to be trying to focus. His face was pale and slack, like a balloon from which the air had been released. His mouth moved several times before sound emerged.

            “Never,” he said. “Not me, never again. No… not ever.”

Started me on a book.

What They Talk About Down South

A post by an old friend made me think of a Southern tradition. You may smile if you’ve ever had a relative who told a story this way:

“There was this time Bob Ashcraft and me went deer hunting. You know Bob. He was one of the Ashcrafts from down around Kedron, not that that bunch over on Hogeye Ben Road where old man Ledbetter lived before he dropped dead. Just out in his cow barn and dropped dead. They say it was a heart attack. Dr. Reid told me about it one day when he had stopped by the store for some milk. I sold Borden’s milk and the Doc liked it. I used to sell milk from the Okay Dairy but switched to Borden’s when the Chidister boy started delivering it. You know the Chidister boy, the one whose daddy got killed at Pearl Harbor. Lots of folks don’t remember where they were when they heard about Pearl Harbor, but I can tell you just where I was. I was digging fence post holes for Mr. Finkbiner for fifty cents a day. He was the one who had the bad teeth and whistled when he talked. I normally don’t care for whistling but he was funny. His wife would get onto him about it. She was from Texas, so that kinda explains it. She was fatter than Suzi Bell Austin if you remember her…”

Author's Note: I had me such a relative. He was married to my Sainted Mother. You know. She was one of the Harris girls from down at Pleasant Ridge. They were also kin to the Coats family, the ones that came from Bradley County, down past Pansy. I went to school at Fayetteville with this girl from Pansy. She was almost a pretty as my wife, who’s from over around Lonoke. Her daddy was in the 79^th Infantry Division and they fought all the way across Europe, with Patton’s Third Army for a while. Lots of folks didn’t like Patton …

Anyway, it's funny to hear them talk. My wife likes it..

I'm fixna give you about
a minute to shut the hell up.

My Redacted Life: Chapter Twelve

As the summer of 1971 passed into fall, I was traveling a lot. The company was serving as planners on contract with a number of cities. These were vibrant communities having yet to encounter the trials that were to face them in the near future. I was soaking in experience like a dry sponge.

I began to notice some minor change in the makeup of planning commissions. When I had first began attending commission meetings, the commissioners, were, without exception, middle-aged men of Caucasian background, overly represented by real estate and insurance professionals. These overlapped, as many real estate brokers in communities sold insurance as well. Sometimes they also owned banks. Power stayed close to the center in most communities.

As time passed, though, I noticed a slight change in the makeup of many planning commissions. An African-American face would appear from nowhere. It would belong to a local professional in the Black community. A local dentist proved a common choice. Whatever the background, the choice would be a safe one for the power structure. There would be no independent thinking.

In fact, there wasn’t much independent thinking evident among most planning commissions. Each boasted a “bell cow,” usually the local developer or his representative. When a vote was called, no head would turn toward the appointed leader, but the votes would signal a pre-arranged agreement.

Conflict would occur on occasion because of a local power struggle. If the community was large enough, there could be competing factions, usually from competing banks, sometimes competing real estate companies. Often, a faction represented both. It could provide entertainment unless it turned tragic, as one did when the patriarch of the losing faction went to his office one evening and took his own life.

Not all of the lessons I was learning came from textbooks.

It wasn’t that the power brokers were evil. They were just protective of their privileges. Once they had taken care of those, they would, in the fashion of the 1970s South, take care of the communities. They established water and sewer systems that served all citizens. They cleaned up environmental dangers. They built fire stations. They built parks, segregated parks, but parks. They built, or sought funding for the building of, new traffic arteries. They sought sources of new jobs.

It seemed that, deep in their hearts, they believed that a harbor served humanity best when its tides lifted all ships. The fact that the tides lifted some ships higher than others simply represented the proper and given order of things. As long as most citizens benefitted a bit, it was okay for a few to benefit a lot. The banquet table was spread for all, but the rich and powerful dined first. For the common masses, as the heroine of a popular novel would later comment, “Enough is as good as feast.”

Then there were the locally owned newspapers, usually independent in their thinking. They did a good job of protecting the powerful from any of their baser instincts.

I watched our cities grow and I watched myself grow as 1971 moved toward a close. The year, overall, had been good to me. Even adversity had, by not destroying me, made me stronger. As it drew to a close, one might have observed me and said, “He was almost always happy, I think.”

Yep.

Southern Musings: March 12, 2018

One of the most revered religious voices in the history of our planet advised us not to judge others. We do, though. We can’t help it.

Nowadays, we not only rush to judge others, we elect people to public office if they are better and meaner at it than we. Odd, isn’t it?

Not really, it seems to depend on point of view. I recall a conversation I had with a dear close friend once who lived in a city where I served for years as its urban planning consultant. There was a prominent citizen there who was the meanest bastard I’ve dealt with in my entire professional career. A weak heart, combined I'm sure with his malicious personality, allowed me to outlast him.

As with many small towns, he was a banker, real estate broker, insurance company owner, and local kingpin. He was as rich as he was mean.

And oh, was he mean. He made the character of Mr. Potter in It’s a Wonderful Life look like Mr. Rogers of TV fame.

He once used his position of chair of the city's sewer board to kill a huge development deal for his city because a rival broker had the listing on the land where the development was to go.

He called a mortgage on a man with a wife and two kids because the man spoke, at a planning commission meeting, against a horribly devastating project in the man’s neighborhood, but from which our Mr. Mean stood to gain.

He sold homes “on contract”to poor (meaning “African-American”) families who couldn’t get mortgaged loans.  This meant they made monthly payments but gained no equity unless they paid the loan in full. He was known for kicking families out on the street for missing a single payment after years of faithful compliance. People would point out properties to me that he had “sold” to dozens of families over the years. He was a jewel among men. Every five years or so the Chamber of Commerce named him "Citizen of the Year." Everyone called him "Mr."

I’m proud to say that he hated me and the feeling was "muchal.”

He would refer to me during planning commission meetings as “that dumb young man who comes down to our fine city to tell us how to run things.”

His “fine city” has the same, within a dozen people or so, population now as it did in the 1970 census. Men like him are largely to blame.

Once, I mentioned him to my friend and she said something interesting. “I don’t know much about his business life,” she said. “I just know him as the nice next-door neighbor to my mother who mows her yard for her sometimes, and brings her fresh tomatoes from his garden each summer.”

That, my friends, is small town urban life in the South in a nutshell.

Growing Up Southern: March 9. 2018

It was going to be a good day for Jim Fletcher and me. We were going to be real cowboys at last. I would be Gene Larue. He hadn’t decided on a name yet. But we were ready.

We had a hideout in a forested area a mile or so from where we lived, the perfect spot. It was a cedar tree that had grown so large that its drooping limbs formed a tent-like structure that was protected from all but the strongest rain. Over time, we had hacked out a small opening, undetectable by a stranger. It was our little “Hole In The Wall.”

From nearby dumping spot, we had collect odds and ends for crude furniture and storage containers for secret hordes, like a “naughty” magazine that I had found under an entry-porch at school and sneaked home. We weren’t sure if cowboys looked at such things, but we were certain of other habits.

They smoked “roll your owns,” so we had save our pennies and Jim at purchased a sack of Bull Durham at my daddy’s store, “for an uncle.”

Now we had the ultimate possession to make us real cowboys, a bottle with enough “Old Yellowstone” for two strong shots like the cowboys always enjoyed after coming to town. We had found a bottle in the dump with a smidgeon of the yellow liquid in it. Then I had gently pilfered small amounts from the stash my daddy stored in his barn. He kept a bottle there to ease his mind when he closed the store and fed his cows. My mother allowed it unless he got too jolly during his little “happy hour.”

The amount in our bottle had grown slowly over the months, but on this soft early-spring day, it was time to be real cowboys at last. The bottle with its inch and a half or so of inviting liquid was stored in a place of honor in our hideout, along with the Bull Durham, papers, and a rusted BB gun capable of dropping an “Indian” at a hundred yards.

We had explored along Bayou Bartholomew all morning, looking for “Aarheads” and, having found some nice specimens, carried them back to our spot on our stick horses named “Paint” and “Ranger.” We would use the artifacts to make real arrows later.

Jim had still not decided on a cowboy name. Try as we could, we couldn’t think of a single “colored cowboy” in all of movie history. He had about decided on “Whoozit” when we arrive home from the range on that fateful day.

We tied our horses outside and it was time for good shot of whiskey. We had some Garrett Snuff bottles for shot glasses and Jim watched as I carefully poured equal halves into two of them. We toasted our comrades, whom we had not included in this adventure because of the limited amount of product, and downed our drinks just like we had seen the cowboys do hundreds of times, or so we thought.

Oh, my god!

It was like someone had pointed blowtorches into our mouths and down our throats. We went into coughing spasms that seemed to shake the roots of our mighty cedar. Neither could speak.

When we could catch our breath, we both charged through the opening and out into what we thought might be a reviving atmosphere. Gagging gave way to a retching that gave way to a gasping that gave way to tears that gave way to eyes wide as the bottom of coke bottles.

Jim gained speech first. “That must not be the same kind they drink,” he said in a still raspy voice.

“Can’t be,” I said. “They enjoy it when they do it.”

“I ain’t takin’ no chances anyway,” he said.

“Me neither.”

He took a breath and made one of those decisions that can alter history. “I ain’t gonna be no goddam cowboy.”

“Me neither.” I took several deep breaths. “What you gonna be?”

“Maybe a baseball player.”

“A baseball player?”

“Yeah, they got colored baseball players now.”

That sounded reasonable. Jim had a revelation and said, “I got a cousin who’ll trade us a baseball for that magazine we got.”

“Yeah,” I said. “We can play in Daddy’s pasture. What else we gonna need?”

“Just some chewin’ tobacco, I reckon.”

“We can swap our smoking tobacco for some chewing tobacco,” I said. “It’s gotta taste better than whiskey.”

“Sure,” Jim said. “We’ll just be baseball players.”

The nice thing about stories about kids growing up in the South is that, no manner how good the story is, there’s always another one for another day.

Mammas, don't let your babies
grow up to be cowboys. Trust us.

Growing Up Southern: March 8, 2018

When Sainted Mother wanted to chide me gently about my appearance, she had a unique way of softening the act, one honed by a lifetime of rural restraint.

“You look,” she would say, “like somebody who was called for and couldn’t come, and when they got there they wasn’t needed.”

I’ve never heard anyone else use it. I don’t know if she had it copyrighted or not, maybe so. I tried it once early in my marriage. Only once.

As I say, I don’t use it myself. I’d love to know if anyone else (other than immediate family, Sis) has ever heard it used.

I do know, from hanging out mostly with English majors at Fayetteville, that folk music adapts, over time, to location. Thus, an English Ballad about a dying soldier (syphilis supposedly) became the ballad of a dying cowboy on The Streets of Laredo. Of course, he was kilt by a gunshot wound. Here in America, we die manly deaths from firearms—"womanly deaths,” I suppose they call them when young girls are the victims—or it’s just not proper.

Anyway, I know folk sayings also adapt to new locations. In L.A. (lower Arkansas) where Sainted Mother grew up, when someone really annoyed you, say a presidential candidate mocking a disabled person (although that would have never happened in her lifetime) the correct response was, “That man makes my ass crave applesauce.”

Move a generation forward and fifty miles north, the saying changes but the intent stays the same. Say a couple of rich idiots loved to kill elephants for fun and cut off their tails, folks in the Arkansas Delta might observe, “That makes my ass crave a dip of snuff.”

I kinda like that last one because of its inherent earthiness and the fact that there are so many opportunities to use it these days. I counted its use eight times in 30 minutes last evening by someone close to me watching the nightly news on television.

One other of Sainted Mother’s favorites, and one I’ve never heard used elsewhere, concerned what she must have viewed as unwarranted pride. When someone who should have been expressing a high degree of shame or repentance, say someone who constantly lied, not for humor or emphasis—both accepted purposes in the commons—but for spite, greed, or self-aggrandizement, she would observe and comment. Many times, this involved undue haughtiness in church. Or, a non-chastened soul might drive by our little grocery store without the customary, no, obligatory, wave, thus warranting censure.

“They was just a’sittin’ up there like Garrett on snuff,” she would say, “never even looked this way.” Pride knoweth no shame.

Maybe she just made that up. Southerners do. My late father-in-law, showed such class once, when a political candidate for office had been caught performing despicable acts prior to the election (I can’t give away too many details, but it involved female prisoners and unused jail cells). Not surprisingly (family trees are not bushy in these commons, but they are quite tall), he still received maybe a hundred votes.

Father-in-law called it an "educational election."

An educational election?

“Yes, it tells us just how many assholes there are in this county,” he said.

Some things never change. We’ve had a few of those elections lately, haven’t we?

The family store and home.
Neglect to wave at your own peril.