Blood: Slings

David and Goliath, Edgar Degas

20

And David put his hand in his bag,
and took thence a stone,
and slang it,
and smote the Philistine in his forehead,
the stone sunk into his forehead;
and he fell upon his face to the earth.

I Samuel 17:49

1950

My mornings in Arkansas were sometimes disturbed by a distant thumping sound. The sound carried with it a very faint shaking that caused the crystal goblets in the china cabinet to tinkle ever so softly, the way they sometimes did when a train came by under the bluff. If this happened when I was in the kitchen I could count on my grandmother’s maid Juanita to shake her head and say, “They’re gettin’ a place ready,” and then go on to say somebody’s name, “Must be for Miz Parks. Heard she passed yesterday.”

Looking back it seems odd that such a rocky place was chosen for a cemetery, but at the time I simply took it to be the way things were. It was normal to me to that a new grave was opened with sticks of dynamite.

The cemetery was up the hill from my grandparents’ house and the favorite playground of my cousin and me. My grandmother strongly disapproved. She was sure that a gravestone would fall over on us. Besides that, she thought playing in a cemetary just was not right. In fact, it seemed so wrong that she simply did not have the words for it and, of course, did not bother to explain her own fears. Her generation never thought that children were owed explanations. In her mind it was enough just to say so.

More than once when I arrived at the steps to the back door after playing in the graveyard I was met by a disapproving shake of Juanita’s head and a mumbled comment, “You in trouble, boy.”

Then, when I went into the kitchen where my grandmother was shelling peas or cutting up a chicken she would say, “You just go right back out there young man and cut yourself a switch from that forsythia bush. Your aunt called me and told me you and Rusty were playing in the cemetery again. I’ve told you not to do that.”

Forsythia is a sign of spring throughout the South. As March winds swirl and the days lengthen the bright yellow blossoms string themselves out along thin branches. The blossoms do not last very long and they are soon replaced by small green leaves. Neighbors of my grandmother considered the forsythia bush just beside the steps up to her back door a particularly fine specimen. I, however, have long held an acquired aversion to the species. It goes back to Arkansas.

My task at that moment was to find the pruning shears, usually in a peck-sized peach basket on the back porch, and select the instrument of my punishment. I then waited at the foot of the steps for my grandmother to finish her work and wash her hands and come out to deliver my switchin’.

I’d stand there squirming as that little woman, wiping her hands on her apron, came through the screen door and took the forsythia branch from me. She’d tell me to turn around and pull my pants down. As I obeyed, she stripped the leaves off the switch. I had to lean over the steps and was switched until I bawled very loudly and promised not to go to the cemetery. To myself I vowed to be sure that next time I wouldn’t be seen by one of the townspeople.

Forsythia is not my favorite plant. Although I do remember that fairly often the switching was followed by a bowl of peach cobbler and cream slipped to me by Juanita.

In spite of the threat of a switching, however, the cemetary was endlessly fascinating. The old stones had familiar names on them. They were the names of the people my grandmother knew at church.

More than that, one of the enduring legends of the area was that DeSoto’s expedition through southern America had marched through this part of Arkansas. The legend included the report of discovering a Spanish breastplate in a shallow grave site in that very cemetary, although no one knew just what happened to the breastplate. We guessed it was probably up at the University in Fayetteville. It seemed only natural to us that if there was another Spanish artifact or even a skeleton, it would be found in the cemetery. Where else would DeSoto have buried one of his men? So we were constantly on the lookout for old shards of metal or bone as we played our games of cowboys and indians or war, GIs and Japs, around the gravestones. All we ever found were irregular rocks and pieces of flint — although some of those could have been arrowheads — scattered by the dynamite. Aand dead flowers drifting in the breeze.

In one corner of the cemetery the gravestones were all the same. They were small, maybe just a foot or two tall. They were all gray stone, probably granite. They all marked the resting place of men. I understood enough arithmetic to figure out that, unlike the differences in birth and death dates on the stones in the rest of the cemetery, which were everything from two or three to fifty, sixty, even seventy and more, here the differences were very much alike, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen, most of them. They all had died at about the same time in the early 1860’s. Still, that wasn’t the best part of the cemetery to play in. Much better was under the huge old trees and around the stone angels and cherubim and urns.

My grandmother made me go to Sunday school when I was visiting. I went with my cousin. One morning was spent on the story of David and Goliath. We even had a small comic book illustrating David’s heroic deed. I spent all of the painfully boring church service that followed Sunday school studying the cartoons and trying to understand David’s sling. It didn’t look like the slingshot my grandfather made from a forked stick, rubber bands cut from inner tubes, and a patch of leather. The cartoons showed a boy with a small rock in one hand and a loop of string and leather in the other.

Rusty, my cousin, figured it out later. He found a drawing in a book about Indians. It showed two leather thongs with a leather pouch in the middle. We took rawhide shoelaces out of an old pair of hunting boots and then cut up a too-small baseball glove with scissors to make leather pouches. We tied two pieces of the shoestring to each pouch. Between the Bible, the comic book from Sunday school, and the drawing my cousin found, we figured out just how David slew Goliath.

We tied the end of one thong around the wrist of our throwing arms and held the other end in the same hand so that the leather pouch hung down right in the center. We put stones in the pouches, then whirled the slings around our heads. When we let go of the free end, the stone went whizzing away at a very high speed. The trick was learning when to let go. It was not like throwing a ball. It was all a matter of timing and sensing the direction the stone would fly, and it would fly very, very fast.

We worked on our new skill in the graveyard because that was where we could easily find ammunition for our biblical weapons, and the gravestones made wonderful targets and places to hide behind. At first the stones flew in all directions. They clattered off the markers or thunked into trees. Eventually we began to get the hang of it. So we moved on to our natural targets — each other.

My cousin struck first, hitting my forehead just above my left eye, splitting the eyebrow. Blood streamed down my face in a bright red flood. We ran, whimpering and afraid, to our grandmother’s house. Juanita took me in hand, stanched the bleeding with cold water and a damp dishtowel, and then cleaned the blood off my face. After a phone call, one of my grandfather’s truck drivers, a man named Kansas, came up from the packing shed and drove me and my grandmother to the doctor’s office. Six stitches were sewn into my eyebrow and a gloriously large bandage was wrapped around my head. My cousin was envious of the bandage.

Returning, my grandmother listened to the story about David and Goliath and sent us both to cut forsythia switches and made us promise yet again to stay out of the cemetery. Juanita’s solace was a batch of fried pies with apricot filling.

That evening on the front porch I told the story of the slings while my grandfather rocked and smoked a Pall Mall. He smiled and sent me to bed with a scratchy, tobacco-smelling kiss on my cheek.