The Floatplane Notebooks (15 page)

“Tell about how she smelt,” said Mr. Copeland.

“No need to talk about that,” said Miss Esther.

“Well, it's a fact,” said Aunt Scrap. She spat a stream of tobacco juice—sort of over Uncle Hawk's shoulder.

“Watch it,” Uncle Hawk said, ducking. “Don't you spit on me.”

“You be quiet. You just want to tell about Ross and the red-eye. Oh, I forgot. The bitters—she'd make a concoction and drink it for medicine. Did you just say that?” she asked Meredith.

“Yes ma'am, I did.”

“What was in it?” asked Noralee.

“Seems like, oh, lion's tongue and cherry bark. I think that's right. But it's a fact about her smell. I slept with her more than once, and I guess we didn't pay it no mind, but I don't think she ever washed anything but her feet, and that dog Sailor slept on the foot of the bed, and Lord knows, chickens would come in there and roost on her bed, and lay eggs on it. That ain't no lie. It was a feather bed and the feathers, even when it was mashed down, was as thick as that.” She held her hands apart. “And bless her heart, that there baby, that
BORN DED
, was hers.”

Meredith and Mark will be leaving for military service in a week or two. It's unfortunate, but there is no denying the fact that the rest of the world is not as civilized as the United States, and democracy has its price. Sometimes a high price. Of course, this Vietnam thing might be over before they get there. I hope so.

Anyway, Saturday when we left the graveyard, we left the truck—loaded with all the tools—for Meredith and Rhonda so they could load in the lawn mower when they finished. Meredith wanted to stay and mow the lawn. Aunt Scrap won't let him do it when we're all down there because it makes too much noise to talk over. The women went somewhere, and Papa, Uncle Hawk, Mr. Braddock, Mark, and me walked to the shop so Uncle Hawk could see what Papa has done on the floatplane since last year.

I swear. Papa and the floatplane.

Uncle Hawk was thumbing through the notebooks. He got
to the very last entry which had such and such a date and then it said: “Dropped engine.”

“What's that, Albert?” says Uncle Hawk. “You just going to use one engine now?”

“No. Why?”

“It says here ‘dropped engine.'”

“Oh no. It dropped—
fell
—fell on the floor.”

“Fell on the floor?”

“Just a little bump.”

“Sure,” I said.

What happened was, he had two chain block-and-tackles, which I got wholesale through Strong Pull, hanging from two rafters in the ceiling, each one holding a motor, because Papa pulls the motors up, see, then sets them down and bolts them to different places on the fuselage looking for what he calls better balance. He uses two rafters so there's not too much weight on one, and then he moves the plane from one place to another while he's working on it. It's pretty light. And so one of the engines ended up hanging from a rafter out over a wing. All we could figure out later was that that rafter was weak from where a knot was in the wood—it was weak all along and we didn't know it.

I was out there in the shop, sharpening my knives, when I heard a little crack in the rafter. Papa took a step toward the plane, the rafter popped loud, the engine fell, hit on top of the wing, knocked that wing down, the other wing up, catching him right in the chin and knocking him back against the tool cabinet.

Mama thought maybe that was the end of the floatplane, but Papa started in ordering fresh aluminum tubing.

So, anyway, we're waiting for Meredith and Rhonda to bring the truck so we can hook up the trailer and haul the floatplane to the lake. Twice this summer, Papa's backed it in the water and buzzed it around. None of the flying controls are hooked up but the rudder, so it won't fly. He's started calling them “experimental runs,” and he'll write a three- or four-page notebook entry—about each one—which you can't even recognize as what happened.

“Can't you do this engine mount a little lighter?” says Uncle Hawk, rubbing his hand across it. “Get something aluminum that's just as strong as this iron piece through here?”

“I guess I could,” says Papa. “What I need is bigger engines. A little more power. I know where I can get lighter engines with about twenty more horsepower, and when I get them on and hook up the flying controls she's gonna lift right up. Fly like a eagle.”

Papa's still flying with Joe Ray Hoover in his Piper about two Saturdays a month, sometimes one, and keeping Joe Ray in hickory chips.

Anyway, we didn't pay much attention to Meredith and Rhonda not coming back from the graveyard until it was after dark. Nobody had seen either one of them so I drove down to the graveyard—and here's where we had the big event of the year. Meredith and Rhonda had left a note under some hedge clippers on top of Tyree's gravestone saying they'd gone to Dillon, South Carolina, to get married and would be back in two or three days.

It was such a big event it made Bliss cry.

And Papa wrote it down in one of the notebooks, with the part about the hedge clippers and Tyree's gravestone and all.

Walker was laid up in bed for four days with the death rattle in his chest. The grandchildren were brought in one at a time in the late afternoon to see him. The rattle could be heard through the wall. At night Caroline would heat water and wash him. She said that was all that was left to do that all else had failed. The doctor left a salve for Walker's chest and Vera brought bitters.

Two cousins John Boggs and Mantha Sutton had joined the others in the graveyard. When Walker died a new row was started with his grave and in a few days the biggest tombstone of them all was erected over it.

Years later, Caroline and her grandson Tyree died of typhoid fever.
Then Ross died of pneumonia, and on a blue moon he talked to John Boggs:

“…
and all my kids were all the time wanting to go down to see Vera because she had these here great big pockets on her apron that she kept candy in. She loved all the children, she did. She moved out of the house
—
about the time Helen and me started having children
—
into a little house me and Papa built for her down the hill.

“See, she'd put candy in them apron pockets and let the children stick their hands way down in there and find it.

“She got to be a little bit peculiar. From taking laudanum. She'd get her pension check and walk nine miles to Raleigh to get her laudanum, then come back and dance up a storm.

“Mama used to worry because she didn't seem to bathe all that much.

“She was something; didn't mind telling anybody to ‘kiss her ass', and she worried a lot about Zuba after he got strung up with the wisteria.”

“That's Zuba sitting down yonder, I think,” said Walker.

Ross turned and looked down toward the woods. “Well, my God it does look like him, don't it?”

“That was a bad time,” said Walker.

“Yes, it was.” Ross turned back from looking at Zuba.

“How's that?” asked Thomas Pittman.

“They hung Zuba” said Ross, “and we couldn't stop them. I tried. Zuba was a field hand, a nigger.

“You know, you know, Vera kept that dog and them chickens and I don't know what all right there in her house and them chickens would lay on her bed. I saw it.

“And she'd, she'd take that crazy girl from the McGuires and bring her home and let her sit and rock, and more than once I seen a chicken jump in that girl's lap and she'd stop rocking, whereas she wouldn't stop rocking for nothing else, and I went in the McGuires
when that girl died
—
Vera was down there
—
and it was the oddest thing: they had a sheet over her, pinned down to every corner of the bed. I don't know whether it was because of her rocking
—
she'd rock no matter where she was sitting
—/
mean, whether they was afraid she'd start rocking after she was dead, or if she did start, or if it had something to do with their religion. They was of a unusual sect.

“You know, that girl's papa told me about Zubds daughter and him. He told me on a wagon ride into town one time. I picked him up. It was right odd. The story was about when Zuba and his family was all still together. I remember that, when they lived back in there behind the Hughes' house
—
before the rest of them headed north and left Zuba. Her name was Zenobia and she had been long gone when this fellow told me about what happened. But I remembered how pretty she was, even though she was a nigger, always dressed in white, and helped her Mama clean our church. His name was Harper, first name
—
the one telling me. Well, Harper sort of fell in love, as it were, with Zenobia and they would meet down at Buzzard Rock, in that little cavelike space underneath. While he told me he didn't seem the least bit ashamed. She black as night and him white as cotton. He took a notion to buy her a bottle of perfume from Moses the Peddler
—
who I also remember; Moses brought things around in a big old wagon pulled by a little mule. It was almost Christmas and Harper was worried about if he was going to get to see her before Christmas. It was Green Woods perfume, he said, in a little bottle, and Moses had told Harper that his papa
—
Harper's papa
—
had just bought a bottle for Harper's mama for a Christmas present. Christmas came and Harper didn't get a chance to give the perfume to Zenobia, and Harper noticed his mama got only a frying pan and a mirror for Christmas, no perfume. Then when Harper met Zenobia in the little space under Buzzard Rock
right after Christmas he said she smelled to high heaven
—
like Green Woods perfume, and it come down on him like that rock had fell in, he said, so he started following his papa on his rounds to the rabbit gums and that's where he seen them together. Then he come to find out she was pregnant, and there he was. Didn't know who was the father, him or his papa, and then the last time he saw her, she was leaving for up north in a wagon, when the whole family left except Zuba. She stopped in the store when Harper was there and motioned for him to come out to the wagon, and she showed him something: that little baby. It was black as tar, Harper said. Then somebody told Harper's papa that they'd seen Harper and Zenobia down at Buzzard Rock together, and Harper's papa beat Harper within a inch of his life, and all the while he was getting beat, Harper was saying, ‘You done it, too. You done it, too.'

“He told me every word of that just like he'd been practicing telling it, and while he told it, a line of sweat broke out on his upper lip. And it was a real cool day, too.'

It's been unreal. It's been great. Pilot training was tough academically, but the flying was great. I got an OV-10 assignment out of pilot training—turboprop, tandem seat, fully acrobatic, over four hundred knots top speed, and I'm practically guaranteed a fighter after the year here in Thailand. I'm flying combat missions out of Nakom Phanom Air Base in northeastern Thailand. It's the real damn thing. Four-hour missions over the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos, looking for trucks or anything else that moves. If I find something, I call in the fighters. They come in above me, I put in a smoke rocket near the target and clear them in. They have to follow my directions. I'm a FAC—Forward Air Controller. Most of the time the target is the trail itself and half the time they miss it. But sometimes at dawn or dusk I catch trucks moving. We get our asses shot at too—looks like orange footballs coming up.

After pilot training—T-37's and T-38's—there were three
months at Travis in New Mexico—gunnery training in T-33's, old trainers really, but jets. Then three months at Ft. Walton Beach, where the honeys were thick. Travis was slow, but Ft. Walton? We had dates Thursday through Sunday nights every week. After about two weeks I met a schoolteacher, Terri Allison, and I can't say, I can't describe the times we had together. They were literally too good to be true. I'm writing her. But now there's Bangkok and it's like fifteen dollars a night at the Pardeese Hotel—for a woman. And they're all beautiful. If you get one that's ugly, you can send her back.

And I can't get over the OV-10. It's a great little aircraft. Powerful as hell, fully acrobatic, not all that complicated, a hell of a lot less complicated than the T-38.

I had about six weeks with an instructor once I got over here, on the combat missions and all that, and it was hairy. He'd be sitting behind me, and I'd forget and start flying straight and level instead of jinking and he would—and I wouldn't know this at the time—he would lift his feet up, and then slam them to the floor of the aircraft and holler through the intercom: “Goddamn, Oakley—they're shooting at us.” It was wild. And then there was that first day they really did shoot at us. I was with C. C. Wasserman and he yells, “Turn
into
them, turn
into
them.” He said later that if they think you see them, they'll stop shooting. Sure.