My Southern Journey (4 page)

TAKE YOUR MEDICINE, BOY

Southern Living
, Southern Journal: February 2015

T
he boy was trouble. You could see that as he pushed through the door, then came stomping past the booths in the Huddle House in his toddler-size cowboy boots. He was wearing a strawberry-jelly scowl, his shirt had ridden up his belly, and his hands, which I am sure were sticky, were touching everything. His tired mother noticed, too late, that he was on the lam, and caught up with him just about the time he made it to our booth. His round cheeks were red—it was clear he had a cold—and he sneezed and then coughed a good-bye as he was dragged away.

“Reminds me of you,” my brother Sam said over his ham-and-cheese omelet.

My mother nodded.

“You was bad to get colds,” she said, and watched as the boy went, protesting, up the aisle. She loves boys.

Well let’s hope, I thought to myself, they don’t treat his ailment the same way my people treated mine. If they do, the poor child will be as tight as Dick’s hatband by time for beddy-bye.

They called it, oddly, a “toddy.” Their homemade remedies for the cold, flu, and croup varied a little, depending on which grandparents were mixing the concoctions, but the active ingredient was always the same. It required, to start, a few tablespoons of corn whiskey, which some people—but nobody
I know who’d ever had any—called moonshine. Hooch was more like it. Busthead. Popskull. There wasn’t anything nice about it.

Into the glass the old women of the family squeezed a lemon, if they had one; lemons were dear in the foothills of the Appalachians in those days, for mill workers and pulpwooders and roofers. Then, they stirred in a tablespoon of golden honey.

If there was no honey, they took a hammer and broke off a big chunk of peppermint candy and let it melt in the glass. Sometimes, if the child coughed loud enough and their hearts broke and their fear rose, they would place the chunk of peppermint in the toe of a white sock and bash it with the hammer, or just swing it against a post on the porch. It melted quicker that way, beat to dust.

I remember once they gave this medicine to my brother Sam.

He said he did not remember it.

“I reckon so,” I said.

He does remember he went to sleep.

My mother recalls there was giggling.

I do remember the first time they gave it to me. I am not sure how old I was, but I was in school, so had to have been at least 6. The peppermint did not do the job, and the corn whiskey burned a hole from my lips to my lower intestine, but, oh, what a wonderful feeling it was when the fire went out. The world went soft. The world turned gold. I floated. I flew into the dark. Moonshine. I get it now.

I know they would not have hurt us for anything in the world. Nothing was more precious, to these people who worked so hard with their hands for so little, than their babies. They simply used what they had.

I am glad that little boy in the Huddle House lives in a more enlightened time, but maybe just a little sorry, too.

TIME FOR THE YEAR’S BEST NAP

Southern Living
, Southern Journal: November 2012

T
he turkey carcass is down to bones. The mashed potatoes are nothing more than a sad, hopeful, metallic scraping—some people just can’t accept that gone is gone. The pinto beans and ham are in Tupperware, divided 14 ways. The last biscuit is a memory. (Or so it seems. My mama always hides one or two away for my boy, Jake.) Over the last crumbs of dressing, old women say, “Don’t know what happened…it just wasn’t fit to eat.”

It is time for my people to gather in the living room and unburden themselves of all the fine gossip they have been holding onto since September, like money. I will be there, with them, sometimes with a half-eaten piece of chocolate cake balanced dangerously on one knee, but I will hear almost none of it.

I would rather be awake, to find out whose garden did well and whose didn’t, and whose foreign car isn’t running good—because you know they should have known better—and whose children have misbehaved. I would like to know what is happening to our kin across the state line—my Aunt Juanita calls them “the Georgia people,” like they are a new species—and who last killed a snake. They will say that the snakes seem to have stayed out longer this year, and no one will say it any more but we’re pretty sure it’s because those men walked on the moon. I want to hear it all, swirling around me, assuring me that no matter what happens in
this uncertain world the things that truly matter, things here, are all right.

But the same peace of mind that settles on me as that talk drifts around the room is the same peace and comfort that tugs me into the calm darkness. My mama will look at me from across the wood floor and say, quickly, “Let him sleep.” I know this because sometimes I am not quite out, and it is the last thing I hear.

It would be all right with me if it was the last thing I ever hear.

I will blame the chair. I bought it out of a catalog a quarter-century ago, what the catalog called a British club chair, but it just looks like a leather chair to me. It is firm and soft at the same time, and there is some kind of drug in it, I swear, that makes my chin droop and makes me begin to snore softly. The talk continues around me, and I would like to tell you what it is all about but of course I do not know. I just know I love the idea of it, of the stories being told with me and yet without me, at the same time. The old white dog sleeps, too, across the room. In human years she is…well, a miracle.

I am not a napper, and do not even sleep well at night. But here, in this chair on Thanksgiving Day, it is automatic, certain. Maybe I should steal the chair from my mama’s and take it to live with me all the time. Then, at least, I could hear all the news at home.

But I do not believe I will. They tell me sometimes I am out for only a few minutes, but that cannot be. I wake feeling restored, feeling alive and happy to be. It is almost enough to make a person believe in magic, because I know there are hours and hours worth of good things happening as I shut my eyes.

MY TIME MACHINE

Southern Living
, Southern Journal: April 2013

T
hey say we Southerners live in the past. That, they say, is our problem; the past is dead, Faulkner or no Faulkner.

I guess I could try to explain, to tell them that for us memory is not an inventory, not a catalog of events, but a time machine. It lifts us off the dull treadmill of grown-up responsibilities to a time of adventure and wonder. The past is not dead, and so the dead are never really gone. We resurrect them, daily, for one more story, one more buck dance or ball game, or one more cast into the cool water. I could try to explain this, but instead I think I’ll take a boat ride.

I recently suffered through two weeks of agony from a kidney stone, cursing the air around me. Prescription drugs finally dulled the pain, and I drifted. I could have gone anywhere in that pleasant fog, but found myself on a floating house in the middle of the vast, brown Coosa River near the Alabama-Georgia line, waiting as my Aunt Edna tied an orange life jacket around my chest. I was 7 or 8 years old, and if she did not hurry my girl cousins would catch every crappie on the Alabama side.

“I got to go,” I pleaded.

“What you got to do,” she said, “is stand still.”

It was a homemade boat. A great, towering box of a thing that Aunt Edna and Uncle Charlie and other kin built in the yard. They
worked their shifts at the army base in Anniston, and then worked another shift on this, drills whirring, welding rods arcing blue flame into the night. Back then, every man welded, every man could run a wire, and Aunt Edna could outwork most of them.

“What is it?” I asked, between pulls on a Nehi orange.

“It’s a houseboat, dummy,” said my cousin Linda, who was prone to say what she thought.

When it was finally done, the vessel had an enclosed main cabin with chairs, a table, and a gas stove. It had a second deck up high, where you could see the entire world, but I was deemed too mentally unsound to go up there once they dragged the boat off dry land. Once in the water, we discovered one structural flaw. It was so tall it was bad to hang up under bridges. I sometimes wondered if they asked me along just so it would ride a little lower in the water. But I have had less noble purposes in this life than ballast.

We fished all day and sometimes all night on the backwater, always for crappie. Aunt Edna would fry them in iron skillets and save the hot grease for the best hush puppies I have ever had, not a daub of plain meal but a hoecake-like disk redolent with green onion, white onion, and Cheddar cheese. Once, I came into the main cabin to see her standing over a skillet of frying quail. We ate it with biscuits and gravy, right in the middle of a river.

But the best of it was the ride. I would find a place in the sun and just watch the banks glide by. Now and then, Uncle Charlie would shout to the old men fishing from the banks.

“Got the time?”

“Alabamer time?” the old men would ask. “Or Georgie time?”

They have passed on, of course—Charlie, Edna, even Linda. The houseboat is in ruin.

But they are not gone.

Nobody is, on Alabama time.

ALL-NIGHT GOSPEL

Southern Living
, Southern Journal: March 2014