Foxhole

1

We are talking now of summer evenings...in that time when I was so successfully disguised to myself as a child.

James Agee, A Death in the Family

1949

When I was a boy, only seven or eight years old, I had a hard time keeping up with my grandfather's long strides across the rows of recently planted corn. My grandfather was a very tall man who wore a suit, tie, wingtip shoes and a fedora hat even as he walked his fields. He was so tall he could keep an even pace by walking at a diagonal, each step going from row to row at just the right length. At that age my legs weren’t long enough to walk that way. To follow Papaw I had to walk along a row for a step or two and then hop across to the next.

This was Arkansas River bottomland on the north side of the river not far from Van Buren. One side of the field was bounded by a grass-covered levee. The other boundary of the 300 acre plot was a sinuous ox-bow lake, a dark and forbidding slough where I could hear strange birds shouting, see squirrels dancing through the trees and other, more mysterious, shapes moving in the shadows.

In the fields the sun was high and there was no shade. From time to time Papaw reached down to pick up a clump of the land. He crumbled it as he talked to his hired man, his field boss. He sniffed the dirt and rolled it into dust between his fingers. They talked of rain and seasons, of plans for turning the earth and harvesting the crops. 

I copied my grandfather’s gesture. I took a clump of dirt from the top of the row. It pulled off like the crust of a pie and was flat in my hand, tan on the top and dark brown underneath. Picking up the clump exposed darker soil and I saw a tiny, pale green spike of corn just peeking out. I imagined the seedling squinting at the sudden light because I’d pulled his cover off. Still holding the clod in my hand I crouched down and looked along the row. I saw an irregular shifting of the surface — other spikes were pushing the ground upwards. Down that low I smelled the damp coolness.

As Papaw had done, I crushed the slab of dirt in my hands and let the grains flow out between my fingers. Then, just like Papaw, I brushed my hands together. Unlike him, I then wiped them on the seat of my jeans.

That was the same summer I learned the world was round and that China was on the other side. Like many a child before me, and since, I was puzzled at how all those Chinese could walk around upside down. I decided to go through the earth to see them. I used Mamaw’s gardening spade. I chose a spot in the back of her garden and went down into the earth. I was going to go all the way to China.

I learned in that afternoon something about sculpting holes in the ground. It was grainy, well-packed soil. A few kicks on the edge of the spade drove it easily into the earth. The dirt lifted out and fell from the spade without protest. The shovelfuls, tossed on the side of the hole, made a mound that grew tall as I went down. I learned that starting with a small hole meant I could not get very deep before I couldn’t get the shovel out. To go deep I had to also go wide. Eventually I even had to move some of the dirt I’d already taken out of the ground. To go deep, the hole had to be at least as wide as my body and as long as the handle of the spade. 

My hands began to hurt. I spit on them and they felt better.

This was summertime in Van Buren, Arkansas. When I was waist deep I realized that it was cool down there. It was damp and dark. I took the spade and cleaned up the edges of my little earth-bound box. I sliced away the earlier marks of the spade until the sides were smooth and dark brown. I decided I wouldn’t go all the way to China. It was a nice place just where I was. When I crouched down all I saw was the earth around me and the sky above. It smelled cool and safe.

My grandfather called it a “foxhole,” a word I’d never heard before. I later learned that foxhole was an Army word. But my grandfather had been too young for World War One and too old for World War Two, so even if he had been willing, he had no personal stories of war to tell me. 

But he did tell me stories of a wandering man, a returning soldier, who tricked one-eyed giants and tied himself to a mast so he could listen to women sing seductive songs. My grandfather rode a palomino in the rodeo parade. He hunted quail in the Fall. He taught me how to shoot a shotgun.

At the time I still assumed a foxhole was a place where foxes lived. I had never seen a fox in the wild, but if Papaw said foxes dug holes like mine, then they must. I wondered how they did it without hands and shovels.

Note for new readers:

This is a re-posting of the first entry in this blog from November of 2011. I've learned a bit more about blogging since then. I'm about to do some cleaning up of earlier posts and images and thought that new readers (you lucky few) might like to start at the beginning. A weakness of blogs is that they flow from back to front and you can lose the narrative thread. If you'd like to view Dirt, Blood, and Grace in a linear fashion, then click here to go to the second post of the series, "Becoming an Infantryman."

13 March 2014/2 Dec 2017:

Or to see the entire Dirt, Blood, and Grace as a single file, I have a .pdf of the entire file (a bit of a work in progress) here. Please note the copyright protection on the file.

Grace: Crepe Myrtle

42

Gravedigger

His name is Otis Cox

and the graves he digs with a spade are acts of love.

The red clay holds like concrete

still he makes it give up a place

for rich caskets and poor

working with sweat and sand

in the springing tightness of his hair

saying that machine digging

don’t seem right if you know

the dead person.

His pauses are slow as the digging

a foot always on the shovel.

Shaking a sad and wet face

drying his sorrow with a dust orange white handkerchief

he delivers a eulogy.

Miz Ruth always gimme a dipper of water

Then among the quail calls and blackeyed susans

Otis Cox shapes with grunt and sweat and shovel

a perfect work

a mystical place

a last connection with the living hand.

James A. Autry, Nights Under a Tin Roof

1974

My grandmother didn’t stay in the house on the hill after the passing of my grandfather, but moved to a smaller place not far from her son’s, my uncle’s, house. Her new house had a deep, narrow lot that ran back to a railroad embankment and she put her garden in. For most of the next twenty years she raised her corn, peas, okra, tomatoes, limas, and pole beans. She had a peach tree that, if there wasn’t a late frost, produced fruit as sweet as any I ever tasted.

I usually spent part of my summers with her. I didn’t stay as long or as often as when I was younger, but enough to get to know the neighborhood and accumulate a stash of comic books in a closet and toys in the garage. When I got older I discovered among my grandfather’s books an edition of Homer, B.A. Botkin’s collection of American folklore, and Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom. I  was to wonder ever after how much of these I knew from my own reading and how much had simply seeped in sitting on porch swings on summer nights.

I was in school at the University of Arkansas up in Fayetteville when Kennedy was killed. With my new wife I drove down through the Boston Mountains and watched the funeral on my grandmother’s television. 

Siting with her that day in 1963 and remembering her age, I asked her if the event was anything like her memory of the McKinley assassination. She said that she’d just been a girl and she didn’t think it made much news at the time. She didn’t really remember it. They certainly didn’t hear about it quickly since they didn’t get a newspaper. And it was before radio. Maybe the news came out by train. What she did remember was the reaction to Roosevelt’s death. But she didn’t want to talk about that either.

The stately horses that pulled the caisson and the prancing black horse with reversed empty boots in the stirrups has stayed in my memory. Much of those days has stuck in my memory. King’s eloquence of the previous summer, the open-mouthed gasp of Oswald as Jack Ruby’s bullet tore through his gut, the rumors and realities of new substances spreading to the east from the west — LSD and peyote, freakish chord changes in guitar solos, the brave white civil rights activists suddenly encountering their own draft status and finding a new and different cause.

But I never had the occasion to ask my grandmother about those disorienting changes.

When my cousin called me to tell me my grandmother had died, I was at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. With my wife and daughter I traveled to Arkansas. My older brother, in the Air Force, came up from a base in Texas. My younger brother, just out of the Navy, came up from Florida. My parents came from Florida. My cousins, in Fort Smith and Van Buren, met us at the airport. 

The funeral was much smaller than the one I remembered for my grandfather. The circle did not complete itself until I stood at the grave. The rectangular hole in the ground must have been blasted and then shoveled out. My infantryman’s eye saw the shards of stone and the loose dirt hidden by a tarp. My older brother and I had decided to wear our uniforms and the sunlight flashed off badges and ribbons as we listened to a preacher, who obviously didn’t know our grandmother at all, read from the books of Job and John.

Crepe myrtle is an interesting plant. It will grow as either a bush or a tree, depending on how it is pruned when young. It is an exotic, originally found only in Asia. These days it is common throughout the South. It begins to bloom near Easter time in Florida, but waits almost until mid-July in Arkansas before its red or white blossoms break out. Later in the year, each year, it will shed a layer of bark and will look, for several weeks, a lot like the mottled camouflage of an infantryman’s field uniform. In my youth my grandmother’s street was lined with them.

Next to the grave was a crepe myrtle tree. Probably the same one the bee had been visiting when my grandfather was buried. Now it was considerably larger and spread irregular shadows over the grave and the mourners. It was past blossoming time and the bark was beginning to slough away in loose strips that hung from the trunk. 

It was not part of the ritual for us to watch the casket into the grave. Instead the words were said, a benediction was pronounced, and we all walked away back to our cars. The empty rectangular hole was behind us, up under the crepe myrtle, waiting for the casket to be lowered.

Grace: Funeral

38

“Well, well, grandfather, I hear you’re a hundred years old. Tell me, how has life seemed to you these hundred years?”
 He looked up with inflamed, lashless eyes.
“It’s like a glass of cold water, my child.”
“And are you still thirsty, grandfather?”
 He raised his hand high, as though to call down a curse. “Damn whoever isn’t,” he said.

Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Greco

1951

The First Baptist Church was a large, yellow-brick building not far from the center of town. It was filled with people. The men wore suits. The women were in somber dresses, dark hats, and gloves. The size of the crowd didn’t surprise me. I thought everyone knew my grandfather, and everyone did. The coffin was in front and just below the pulpit. We, the family, were slightly off to one side. Everyone in the family was there, including a lot of people I didn’t know. Aunts and an uncle, parents, brothers and first cousins I knew. However, my grandmother’s sister had six married children. The great uncle and aunt, second cousins and their spouses, and the whirlpool of their children were not even names to me, but they brought memories of a house in the country with high ceilings, a hammock on the porch, and guinea fowl running free in the yard.

I sat in the row with my brother and between my grandmother and my mother. Brother Anthony stood in the pulpit and preached salvation. He always preached salvation, at least every Sunday in the summer when I was visiting Arkansas. About the only thing Brother Anthony left out was the Invitation and that was probably only because the rededicated would have to walk around the flower-covered casket to get to the preacher. He did, at last, speak of my grandfather and I felt some of the tension, the angriness slip out of my grandmother. She never liked Brother Anthony. Still, she kept in place her purse-lipped expression I knew so well.

I passed the time looking at the flowers and watching the men in dark suits at the back who had seated all the people and handed out the printed folders that listed the hymns and the pallbearers and named the survivors. Survivors. I wondered what that meant. I was thrilled to see my name right there, in print.

The church was nice and cool. Even so all the older women in the congregation were slowly waving their funeral home fans. This was the only place in Van Buren I knew of that had air conditioning, except for the Bob Burns movie theater (for the twenty-five cents from my grandfather I could watch Lash LaRue, Superman, Zorro and Roy Rogers on Saturday afternoons from the front row of the balcony seats).

When it was over they all sang Amazing Grace without even having to open the hymnals. By this time I was looking forward to another ride in the long black Cadillac with the little seats, just my size, that folded down in back of the front seat where the man in the black suit sat and drove the car. But first we had to stand on the sidewalk and watch the men carry the coffin out to the hearse that looked just like the ambulance except that it was black and didn’t have a red light on top or sirens on the fenders.

When that was done we got into the Cadillac and rode in a great parade to the cemetery. Men walking on the street stopped and took their hats off as the parade passed. Cars coming the other way pulled off the road and waited for us to go by. My mother and grandmother sat across from me on the plush gray seats, holding each other’s gloved hands, their eyes barely visible behind the veils hanging down from their hats.

The sun was bright and hot at the cemetery and I wished I had a hat to wear. But the only hat I had was an old floppy straw cowboy hat that my mother wouldn’t let me wear with my suit, the suit that once was my brother’s and that had sleeves that were too long. All the adults sat down in folding chairs beside the coffin resting over the big, deep, dark and cool-looking hole in the ground. I read the names of Floyd and Ruth on granite stones nearby. Brother Anthony began to talk and pray again. I watched a bee hovering over the blossoms of a small crepe myrtle.

* * * * *

For days after the funeral it seemed the house was always full of people. I wasn’t really wanted in there, getting in the way of my grandmother and Juanita and the constant flow of well-dressed people carrying casseroles and sitting and talking — I’d have to be still or at least quiet. Instead, I spent my time down at the packing shed where my uncle was keeping the business going.

I didn’t mind, especially when the boxcars were being loaded and iced down. I loved all of that: the rumbling of the switch engine when it backed a car in; the metal on metal screech of the wheels braking on the rails; the slamming open of the doors; the clatter of the rollers as the boxes went down the conveyor from the shed to the car; the big men in thick leather gloves wielding ice tongs; the howling of the ice crushing machine when one of the child-sized blocks of ice was dropped in; the rushing sound at the end of the hose as the ice flew across the stacked boxes of produce. Best of all was the smell. It was strawberries or tomatoes or spinach or cantaloupes or watermelons or corn or beans and all, all smelled of green.

One time a packer caught me there, standing just inside the door of the boxcar being very still, sniffing the air like a pointer snuffling for quail. They were loading loose spinach leaves into containers in the car. The packer caught me up and carried me, laughing and shrieking, to the beginning of the packing line where the spinach from the fields was being washed and sorted. The packer tossed me into the bin with the dirty spinach and I rolled down through the chute, getting sprayed with water and tumbled about, and surrounded with the smell. The packer caught me at the end of the line.

“Can I go again?” I remember asking. “Please, please?”

Blood: Arkansas Evening

34

But a man’s life breath cannot come back again — no raiders in force, no trading brings it back,once it slips through a man’s clenched teeth.

Homer, The Iliad

1951

The red light pulsed up into the branches of the tree overhanging the driveway behind the house. A long, white, high-topped Cadillac with torpedo-shaped silver sirens on its fenders and the red light on its roof was there, its engine idling, the gate-like rear door open, light pouring out. It waited.

Voices out on the sleeping porch, but I could not go out there. I had to stay in my room with my brother. My grandmother had told us to go there and stay there in a firm voice. So I opened my window and looked down through the screen and watched the ambulance and wondered about the sound of my grandfather falling off the bed on the sleeping porch.

I had fallen out of bed myself before, but not this night, so I knew what the fall was like. I remembered how confusing it was to wake up on the floor. I knew how different the room looked from down there — the narrow oak planks, the throw rugs, the little clusters of dust under the bed, the smell of floor wax and time.

But this sound was not quite like anything I’d ever heard before. It was a grunting sound and a thud like a feed sack falling from the bed of a truck. I hadn’t been quite awake. I wasn’t quite sure what I’d heard. I thought I remembered something my grandmother had said. It sounded like, “Oh! Jim!” I had heard the sound of the phone dialing, that clickity, clickity, clickity of the dial twirling back. I remembered being walked half asleep from the sleeping porch to my room where I now sat on the window ledge and stared down at the revolving red light.

I listened to thumping and grunting and a clattering sound on the stairs. Then I saw the white-jacketed men walking through the pool of light above the kitchen door carrying the gurney. I saw my uncle’s Packard drive up just as they were pushing the gurney into the back of the ambulance. The red light bounced off the Packard’s windshield.

I watched my uncle talk to the men. One of them shook his head. My uncle came into the house as the ambulance drove away. I watched the flashing of its red light diminish as it went down the hill. I wished they would turn the great silver sirens on. I’d like to hear that. It would tell all the town that my grandfather was coming down the hill.

Blood: Medal

32

Thou shalt not kill.

Exodus 20:13

This commandment forbids murder, not the forms of killing authorized for Israel, e.g., war or capital punishment.

Note to Exodus 20:13

The New Oxford Annotated Bible

Thou shalt do no murder. Lord have mercy upon us. and incline our hearts to keep this law.

The Book of Common Prayer

There had to be something somewhere in all of them, in all of us, that loved it. Some dark, aggressive, masochistic side of us, racial perhaps, that makes us want to spray our blood in the air, throw our blood away, for some damned misbegotten ideal or other. Whether the ideal is morally right or wrong makes no difference so long as the desire to fight for it remains in us. Fanatics willing to die for ideals. It was territory, back when we were animals. Now that we have evolved into higher beings and learned to talk, territoriality has moved up a step higher with us, and become ideals. We like it. Cynical as it sounds, one is about led to believe that only the defeated and the dead really hate war. And of course, as we all know, they do not count.

James Jones, WWII

I still have a box that used to rest on the bureau in my grandparents’ bedroom. It has a leather-like covering that is now a deep mahogany color and has the logo of a tobacco company on it. In my grandparents’ time it had treasures in it — cufflinks, an Illinois pocket watch, a church collection envelope with petunia seeds in it, and a medal for service on the local draft board during World War II. The box sat on the top of the bureau alongside photographs of my grandparents’ four children, two young men and two young women. One of the women was the my mother and one of the men was the father of my cousins. The other two I never knew. The woman wore a high-necked dress and had dark eyes and hair done into a tight bun — Ruth, dead from TB sometime in the 30’s. The other was a man in uniform whose death will be forever a mystery since all who might know the truth are now also dead and at the time no one spoke of him — Floyd. He was only a photo and a name on a tombstone.

In the cedar-smelling closet there was no uniform for my grandfather to wear his medal on. I wondered, then, why the medal was in the box and what it meant.

Part of what it meant was connected to the courthouse square. No respectable county seat is without monuments on its courthouse square. They memorialize at least the Civil War, World War One (called the Great War on many of the monuments), World War Two, and other conflicts great and small. Crawford County, Arkansas is no different.

Most of those squares also have a bench or two where people can sit and feed pigeons and squirrels, which was what I often did with my grandfather and at least once, I seem to remember, with my Aunt Edyce, widow of the man in the uniform on the bureau. In my memory she was a woman who was oddly sexless, a woman who sat on the fringes of family gatherings.

Sometimes I ran my fingers across the raised letters on the bronze plaques or the letters carved into marble and granite, the names, the names. It did not occur to me to ask why these names? Why this specific name? Nor was I the only one who did not, does not ask.

I now know that in my grandfather’s time, in the 40’s, a roll was made of every male child in the county, not unlike the call for enumeration by Caesar Augustus commemorated each Christmas. All the sons of Crawford County were listed and classified. Their names were put forward to a selection committee that had been chosen from among the elders of the community. Eventually and at last all those selected went out of the county. For some of those men all that now remained was a name on a monument. They passed forever even from the memory of the community, as have the names of their elders who sat on the board and were given their medals at the end of their service.

Blood: Packing Corn

29

...the exceeding brightness of military glory — that attractive rainbow that rises in showers of blood...

Abraham Lincoln

1950

My grandfather was a produce broker. He bought and sold the crops of the nearby counties and shipped them by truck and rail car to the cities — Chicago, Memphis, Kansas City, Tulsa, St. Louis. He shipped beans and tomatoes, spinach and strawberries, peaches and watermelons, cantaloupe and carrots, sweet corn and cucumbers. Whatever was planted and grown nearby. Whatever could be sold.

The drivers pulled their trucks on the scales in front of my grandfather’s office, got their tickets, and then drove across the street and backed up to the loading dock of the packing shed. Then they waited to be loaded. The drivers were friendly to me. They dressed as cowboys in boots, jeans, straw hats, large belts with larger buckles, shirts that had snaps instead of buttons, and had red bandannas hanging out of their hip pockets or tied around their necks on a hot day. One was known as “Kansas” and wore his straw hat tilted to one side of his head. He told me that that was the way cowboys wore their hats in Kansas, where he was from, and I believed him.

Kansas could do rope tricks in the manner of Will Rogers. Waiting for his truck to be loaded he would take the hemp lariat out of the cab, spin it in lazy circles, and step in and out of the loop. He’d toss the loop over my head and it would drop down around my shoulders. He’d tug it tight and draw me to him and ruffle my hair as he took the loop from around me. “Gotta be quicker than that to get away from Kansas, boy,” he’d say. “If I ever got me the right horse I’d go on the rodeo circuit, ’cause I’m the best man with a rope I know. Just ain’t got the right horse.”

Kansas, and almost all the truck drivers, did not sit like ordinary men. They squatted down on the platform of the packing shed. They hunkered on the balls of their feet, the cuffs of their Levi’s drawn up toward the tops of their boots. It was a posture like a catcher behind home plate, and not too unlike that of Vietnamese villagers and Montagnard tribesmen, although those peoples squatted flat-footed. Later in my life I was to do both, squat behind home plate for wild throwing high school pitchers and facing Montagnards in the highlands and Vietnamese village elders in the Delta.

Lounging this way, sometimes leaning back against the side of the packing shed, they whittled on scraps of wood. They all carried a pocket knife of some sort. Some rolled cigarettes made from sacks of Bull Durham carried in a shirt pocket with the red tag hanging out or from a can of Prince Albert. A rare few smoked tailor-mades, possibly Home Runs, or, if he had made a recent run to New Orleans, Picayunes, the famously strong cigarette from that part of the country. Or Lucky Strikes.

Kansas was particularly proud of his ability to tightly roll a cigarette from the flakes of Bull Durham and gummed paper. He made a trough of the paper with the thumb and first two fingers of his left hand and shook the tobacco from the pouch held in his right hand. When he had measured out enough tobacco, he caught the tag of the sack in his teeth, tightened the string, and put the sack back in his pocket. He then tamped the tobacco down with a finger and brought the paper to his lips, licked it, and then smoothed out the cylinder.

“See that, boy, as good as any tailor-made you’ll ever see.”

It wasn’t, I knew, certainly not as perfectly formed as my grandfather’s Pall Malls, but I didn’t say so.

Some of the drivers would let me puff on one of their cigarettes.

“Don’t do him no harm. Long as he don’t inhale.”

“Stunt your growth, boy,” another would say.

My grandmother once smelled the smoke on me and it was the occasion for yet another visit to the forsythia bush behind the house.

Inside the packing shed a crew prepared loads for the trucks. Depending on what was being packed, a configuration of conveyor belts, bins, cutting devices, wrapping machines, piles of crates and baskets, and work lines was established. The machines were all driven by arrangements of belts and pulleys that whirred overhead and led, if carefully traced, back to an electric motor with a great on-off handle in a back corner of the shed.

One day they were packing corn. Trucks filled with loose ears picked that morning in the river bottomland waited to take their turns backing up to the loading dock. At the dock a conveyer belt ran into a truck and the loose corn was shoveled onto the belt. The corn flowed into the shed and along the packing line. At the packing line people stood on both sides of the belt and grabbed the corn as it streamed past them. Alongside the conveyor belt in front of the people working the line was a cutting machine. This was something like a row of enlarged mechanical cigar cutters. In front of each worker was a row of holes that every second or so opened up for a moment before a cutting blade flashed across. What a worker did was grab two ears of corn and thrust the ends of the corn into two open holes. In a moment the blades flashed and chopped off the ends of the ears. Then the worker rotated the two ears, flipping them like small batons, and put the other ends into the holes. The blades flashed again. After that, the worker tossed the ears onto another conveyor belt that delivered the trimmed ears to packers. The packers took the flow of trimmed ears of corn, now all nearly the same length, and put them into boxes. The filled boxes then went down a set of rollers to a waiting truck.

Back at the cutting area the ends of corn filled great bins that were emptied out during breaks between the unloading of trucks. These bins had a sweet summer smell to them. The silage in them often moved with the struggling of corn worms and the sides of the bins were speckled with the brown juices of worms that had been caught by the cutting machines.

The men and women who worked the line were local people. It wasn’t steady work. It ebbed and flowed with the season and the harvest. But some, because of their skills, or because they could reconfigure the lines based on what needed to be done, or because they were some sort of kin somewhere back in time, were always there in the summers. They were all acquainted. One of them was named Joe.

As I watched (they would not let me get anywhere near them while the machines were running) they chatted and joked and told stories on each other as the ears of corn flowed down the line in front of them. Perhaps it was a particularly funny story, or perhaps he’d tasted a bit more than he should of the whiskey that came down out of the nearby mountains the night before, or perhaps his steel-toed boot stepped on a stray piece of corn —  but instead of an ear of corn it was the tips of two of Joe’s fingers that went into the cutters.

The blood spurted across the line and one of the women screamed. Joe’s truncated hand still clutched the ear of corn as he stood back from the line. He shouted to shut the line down. Someone ran back and pulled the big handle and there was a sudden quiet in the room.

Kansas came striding in from the loading dock, whipping his red bandanna from out of his pocket. He wrapped it around Joe’s hand, ear of corn and all, and said, “Let’s get you to the hospital.”

He turned to me. “Go get your grandpa and tell him the line’s been shut down and that we need to take Joe to get his hand fixed.”

He said to one of the other line workers, “See if you can find them fingers and we’ll take ’em along. Don’t think it’ll do no good though.”

I ran across the street and interrupted my grandfather who was talking on the telephone. Papaw took his hat off its hook and went out the door. Kansas was walking Joe across the street, carrying someone else’s bloody bandanna with the fingertips in it. My grandfather started his Hudson and he and Joe and Kansas drove off, leaving me behind to wait.

I told the story to my grandmother at the dinner table that night. Her only comment was not to me, but to my grandfather. “You keep him away from the machinery, Jim. You know that’s a dangerous place.”

Blood: Serpent

27

The Copperhead According to Mother Ruth

Get him with a hoe
but don’t step on the head
He’ll bite you
even dead.
Look in brushpiles
circle them wide
he’s their color
and he’ll hide.
He’s God’s creature
but it’s also true
you must do unto him
before he does unto you.

James A. Autry, Nights Under a Tin Roof

1951

My grandmother was a small, tough lady. She was a Brinkley, a name that didn’t seem to mean anything in the town and wasn’t in the graveyard. I came to understand her people migrated from somewhere in the Carolinas after the war and settled farmland along the Arkansas River bottom. Her family claimed some kin to Stonewall Jackson, the soldier beloved of Lee who was killed by his own men.

She kept a garden behind the house on the hill and by the time I arrived for my summers it was well established. She grew a little bit of everything there. Bush beans and pole beans, sweet corn, okra, radishes, field peas, spinach, squash, cucumbers, a couple of watermelon vines, onions, lima beans, black pendulous eggplants, and others. She worked in the garden almost every day, wearing an old-fashioned bonnet to keep the sun from her skin and wielding a hoe she sharpened with a file.

That’s how I knew she was leaving the house to work in the garden. I’d hear the screen door screek and slam and then the rasp of the file across the edge of the hoe.

I helped some of the time, but the too long handle of the hoe was difficult for me and I could easily end up doing as much harm as good. She didn’t seem to want me to help. Perhaps it was her own personal time that she didn’t like to share as she bent over along the rows, chopping out the weeds, testing for ripeness.

The garden was a great place to find a beetle to torment; or to watch an ant lion in the bottom of its small pit waiting for an unwary ant to trip and slide down the slippery side of the trap; or to watch a spider craft a web from one leaf of a corn stalk to another. It was in the garden that I found the most beautiful creature of all basking in the sun at the end of a row of corn. It was just resting there with its slit eyes watching from within its wedge-shaped skull, its patterned skin a dusky orange and black, its tongue flickering out to taste the world.

“Git back!” Mamaw said, loudly, forcefully.

With her sharpened hoe she diced the copperhead as if it were a carrot on her chopping board. In just moments with a chop, chop, chop, the same motion she used for a recalcitrant patch of weeds, the snake was dismembered before me.

“You stay away from them. They’re pizen, you hear?”

What could I say, but “Yes, ma’am?”

But the twitching remnants of the serpent fascinated me. They kept on moving long afterwards. Juanita told me some folks believed that, if the moon was right, the pieces could join back together. That was why, when she heard about the killing, Juanita came out with a shovel and buried the pieces in different places around the garden.

Blood: Solitude

Jazz Green, Oak Tree, 2009

24

...and I only am escaped alone to tell thee. 

Job 1:15

1949

A magnificent oak tree stood in the back yard of my grandparent’s house. My grandmother did not think that I should be allowed to climb the tree, but my grandfather told her that boys would be boys.

The trick was to get up on the first branch, because it was seven or eight feet off the ground, maybe more. That wasn’t too hard since for a very long time chains had been wrapped around the limb to hold a swing. The chains had been there so long that the tree had grown around them like the scar tissue that now threaded its way through my eyebrow. I could stand on the seat of the swing and, with a little hop, get my arms around the limb. Then it was a simple matter to get a leg over and scramble around until I was sitting up in the air.

Seated there I could look directly into the kitchen and watch my grandmother and Juanita at work. I could go further. The next limb was about a third of the way around the trunk and only a little bit higher. My tennis shoes gripped the rough bark easily and the tree was rock-sturdy down this low. A few branches higher and I could look into the screen porch on the back side of the second floor. That was where we all slept on hot summer nights with the door open to the house and the attic fan pulling a breeze across us as we lay on top of clean sheets and lumpy old mattresses on enameled iron bedsteads. At that height I could sometimes hear the Electrolux vacuum cleaner whirring across the carpeted bedroom floors behind the porch, or the flushing of a toilet. I could see over the fence into the neighbor’s yard and the house vaguely like my grandparents’. Sometimes I stopped there and rested in the joint between the limb and the tree, but more often I went on higher, finding limbs within stepping distance or sometimes putting my arms and legs around the trunk and shinnying up using the insides of my arms and thighs to grip the bark.

The next good resting place was on the side away from the house. There, sitting on the limb I could feel a faint tremble when the wind blew and I could look out through the leaves and toward the bluffs along the river. There were caves in those bluffs, another place I and my cousin could go to play, and another place my grandmother disapproved of. Sometimes this was as far as I would go. Other times I kept on until I reached a point where I could look down on the roof of the house and out over it to the river far, far below.

Up that high the trunk swayed in a decent breeze and there was a fork and a hollow where I once discovered the broken eggs of a nesting bird. There I was up in the tree, part of it, swaying with it. It was as if the tree were holding me, cradling me, rocking me. When I was very still I could hear a bird chittering near me and once a squirrel came right up to the toe of my sneaker, his tail flipping up in the air, his black eyes snapping with curiosity, his incredible hands — they seemed to be more hands than paws — casually gripping the bark. The squirrel heard me breathe and was off in a chattering scamper from limb to limb and away. Up there I was alone, perfectly alone with the tree and the sky.

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.

Dirt: Shotgun

17

Achilles set out iron, dark grey trophies,
ten double-headed axes, ten with single heads.
He stepped the mast of a dark-prowed man-of-war
far down the beach and tethered a fluttering dove
atop the pole, its foot looped with a light cord,
then challenged men to shoot and hit that mark...

Homer, The Iliad

1950

The Hudson stopped at the gate to the pasture. Two adults were in the front seat, my grandfather driving, my uncle on the passenger side. Queenie and I shared the back seat. It was my job to get out of the car, without letting Queenie out, and open the gate. I held the gate open while the Hudson drove through, carefully closed it, and got back in the car. The guns were in the trunk, all in sheepskin-lined cases except for my little single-shot .410 — Papaw’s 16 gauge Remington automatic and Uncle Russell’s autoloading 12 gauge.

We followed the faint path up to a fence line where we stopped and we all got out for some preliminary practice. Russell opened the trunk so we could get to our shotguns and ammunition. Uncle Russell gave me some tin cans that I put on fence posts before I could take my shotgun out.

The .410 was a little big for me, but I’d been assured that I would grow into it. My grandfather reminded me of all that he’d shown me in the backyard of the house on the hill: carry the gun with the breech open; never point a gun at a person; keep a gun unloaded until just before you plan to shoot; always keep the safety on; keep an eye on the people you are hunting with.

Finally, after we were facing the fenceline, I with the open shotgun in my left hand, Papaw let me put a shell into the chamber and close the it. He made sure I put the hammer on half-cock and kept the barrel pointed toward the ground. When he said OK, I put the shotgun to my shoulder, resting my cheek on the polished walnut stock. At last, I was looking down the barrel knowing something was going to happen, not like all those backyard practice sessions. This time the hammer wouldn’t just make a snapping sound when it hit the firing pin. I reached up with my thumb and pulled the hammer all the way back. I sighted down the barrel and put the bead right on top of the can. Take a breath. Let a little out and hold the rest in. Steady on the target. Squeeze the trigger.

BANG!

Even though I’d been expecting it, the bang and the kick surprised me. The can didn’t move.

“Try it again, boy.”

I pushed the lever that opened the breech, broke the gun open, and pulled out the empty shell, smelling the sweet gunsmoke and noticing the little wisps that came out of the barrel. I put the warm shell into my left pocket, got a live shell from my right, and reloaded the gun.

“Squeeze the trigger, boy, don’t jerk it.”

I was ready for the bang and the kick this time, but I missed again.

“You just flinched a bit. Keep the stock firm against your shoulder. It won’t hurt you.”

I nodded and got another fresh shell and re-loaded the gun. This time I watched the bead on the can very carefully and saw it wavering around. I waited until it seemed to be swinging towards the can and then I pulled the trigger. This time the can popped up into the air and bounced on the ground on the other side of the fence.

I swung around with a big grin on my face. “I got it!” I said.

“Watch that gun!” both my grandfather and my uncle shouted at me.

“Pay attention to where you point that thing!” my grandfather said.

“Don’t ever point a gun at someone,” my uncle said.

I flushed with embarrassment as I pointed the barrel of the gun to the ground and turned back towards the fence. I never forgot that lesson. But I also never forgot the thrill of hitting that can.

I shot a few more cans off fence posts before my grandfather and uncle got their shotguns out. Then I put my .410 back in the car and started throwing cans for them. When one of them would shout, “Pull!” my job was to throw the can into the air. Not straight up, but away from them, kind of like a quail might fly from them after being flushed. Neither of them missed very often, even when I tried to trick them by throwing off at an angle, or throwing harder or softer.

After a while it was my turn and they talked to me about leading, about sensing how fast the bird was flying and getting a steady swing to the gun just in front of the bird and following through as I pulled the trigger. I didn’t hit very many cans. It was so hard to remember all the things I was supposed to do.

“That little .410’s got the tightest choke I’ve ever seen,” my uncle said. “Shoots like a rifle.”

“Pretty good for squirrels and rabbits,” my grandfather said. “We’ll see about quail.”

They let Queenie, who’d been whining and yipping all this time, out of the back seat. Queenie was my grandfather’s favorite pointer bitch. She was a little fat and a little old, but she had a wonderful nose and could quarter across the field at a steady lope, her nose swinging across the ground, her tail curved up into the air.

We crossed over into another field and began strolling behind her, spread loosely apart. My grandfather and uncle had their shotguns loaded with the safeties on. I had my .410 with the breech open and a shell in the chamber. It rested in the crook of my left elbow the way my grandfather had showed me.

Queenie worked her way up to a pile of brush near the center of the pasture and suddenly froze, quivering, nose pointed at the brush, tail straight behind her, left forepaw off the ground. My grandfather motioned with his hand. I quietly closed the shotgun and held it halfway up towards my shoulder, my thumb on the hammer, my finger outside the trigger guard.

Queenie was beginning to tremble. The .410 felt heavy in my hands.

“Hut! Hut! Hut!”

Queenie jumped forward in a bound. The covey of quail broke skyward in a rattling whoosh. The birds scattered forward, right, left. I brought the .410 the rest of the way up to my shoulder and cocked the hammer in the same motion. I looked down the barrel and tried to find one of the gray, fluttering shapes.

Bang! Boom! Boom! Boom!

I heard my own gun fire once and couldn’t count the times my grandfather’s and uncle’s fired. I saw bursts of feathers in the air and awkward shapes fluttering to the ground and more whirring shapes diving off into the distance and dropping into the tall grass. Queenie ran towards the fallen shapes.

I pulled the spent, warm shell out of the breech and loaded a new one while Queenie brought the birds back to us, carrying them gently in her mouth. The dead ones my grandfather put into the pouch on the back of his hunting jacket. One of the birds was still squirming, struggling to escape.

“This one must be yours,” my grandfather said as he took the bird from Queenie. “Good shooting.”

My grandfather put his shotgun in the crook of his left arm, freeing his left hand to hold the bird’s body. He pinched the bird’s head in the fingers of his right hand and, with a quick shake, snapped the head off. The quail quivered once, then died. He put the bird into the game pouch.

We walked down some of the single birds from that covey and found two more coveys that morning. I shot five or six more times, but was sure that I missed each time. My uncle and grandfather each got several more birds.

Back home we cleaned the birds and confirmed that, yes, it was my little .410 that had winged that crippled bird.

“See here,” Papaw said, showing me the dark pellet under the skin near the breast. “That’s a number 6 shot, all I could find for that .410 down at the hardware store. I was shooting 8’s and they’re a lot smaller. Make sure your grandma knows that was your bird so she cooks it just for you.” Which I did and she did and I ate it crunching the bones and feeling like a hero at the kitchen table, my hands still smelling of the solvent and gun oil I’d used cleaning my shotgun.

All my life I have been unable to recall all of the exact details of that moment, just how it all fit together, the thrumming rush of the birds into the air, the little .410 kicking into my shoulder, the fluttering of the bird to the ground. Later, after many more days in the field with many different shotguns, I reached the point where I could see it all — the beat of the wings against the blue sky, the quick rise into the air and the tailing off at the top of the curve, the bead of the shotgun just ahead of a bird, the trigger pull and shot, the crumpling of the wings and puff of feathers, and erratic fall to the ground. But that was the result of experience and practice.

Dirt: Place

Bridges: Van Buren to Fort Smith, Arkansas, ca 1912

12

     Take the even, take the odd,
     I would not sleep here if I could
     Except for the little green leaves in the wood
     And the wind on the water.

 Archibald MacLeish, J.B.

1949

On summer evenings after supper — fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, green beans, and corn bread cooked by a large dark woman named Juanita — my grandfather and I sat on the front porch of the house atop the bluff as the day cooled. My grandfather had his own rocker with a seat woven from split white oak. He smoked Pall Mall cigarettes and stubbed them out in an amber glass ashtray on a metal stand by his rocker. I sat in the porch swing that hung from chains attached to the roof. It creaked softly as I pushed off the floor and swung my legs. My grandmother rarely joined us. I think she preferred the brighter light of the parlor where she sewed, or the kitchen, where she continued with the day’s chores.

Under the bluff next to the river was a double track of the Union Pacific Railway. When the evening freight came through, my grandfather would take out his Illinois pocket watch. It was his habit to check the trains. If we were to walk out on the bluff we could see down to the east where the railroad crossed the river. But usually we stayed up on the porch.

The best view from the porch was to the south and west in the direction of Fort Smith and Oklahoma. From there we could watch a sunset. Sometimes we watched summer storms come up out of Oklahoma and sweep across the river bottoms below us. The storms were black boiling clouds that darkened the day and pulsed with lighting. Then we would go inside and watch the flashes through the windows and hear the wind shake the oak trees in the yard. The next day I would find the husks of cicadas scattered on the ground where they’d been blown from their attachment to the rippled bark.

Sometimes all we saw was a light graying of the sky and a light summer rain would come to wash across the air, caressing the roof of the porch, as gentle as a Bob Wills song coming from the huge Philco console radio inside the house.

Dirt: To and Fro

6

It is God who girds me about with strength
and makes my way secure.
He makes me sure-footed like a deer
and lets me stand firm on the heights.
He trains my hands for battle
and my arms for bending even a bow of bronze.

Psalm 18:32-34

1950

My grandparents’ house was on a bluff above the Arkansas River. This was before the river had dams and it was a wide, treacherous, sluggish stream flowing out of nearby Oklahoma. Levees tried to keep it from the fertile floodplains and it was hemmed in by the flinty outcroppings from the Boston Mountains to the north and the Ouachita Mountains to the south.

The front porch looked out over the river. Flagstones led from the porch out to the edge of the bluff. A winding series of steps went down the face of the bluff to the road below. On summer days I was sometimes allowed to walk to work with my grandfather; he in a suit and straw fedora hat, I in jeans and tennis shoes.

The steps were made of stone and concrete. Aged wrought iron railings on the downslope side were entangled with honeysuckle, Boston ivy, and grape vines. I often picked up a stick and rattled it along the rails to clatter my way down the hill, warning the rabbits that we were coming, listening for their dash into the thickets. Sometimes I counted the steps to the road below, the same road that ran from the back of my grandfather’s house and around the hill, the road he drove in his Hudson Hornet most days. When we reached the road we crossed the railroad tracks and walked the three blocks to his office at the Myers Commission Company.

At the end of the day, we walked back. By then the summer afternoon heat was full upon the streets of Van Buren. By the time we reached the railroad tracks my grandfather had taken off his coat and had once or twice wiped the leather sweatband of his hat with his handkerchief. Then we started up the steps. I hopped and skipped up them two at a time, pausing at each landing to wait for my grandfather who walked at a steadier pace. My grandfather’s approach was to lightly touch the iron railing at the bottom step and begin a slow, steady climb, placing his heavy wingtip shoes one after the other, one step at a time, carefully, patiently, inexorably making his way up the hill.

From time to time I was able to sneak up on a garter snake sunning itself or a toad lurking in a damp shadow. Or I might stop and pluck a honeysuckle blossom. I’d bite the end off and suck the green-sweet nectar.

Halfway up the bluff I was ready to sit for a moment, perhaps to pick at a broken piece of concrete or a loose stone. My grandfather came on slowly, steadily, breathing lightly, enjoying the walk up the hill. He watched me with a benign air, but never slowed his pace, shooing me forward when he caught up with me, watching me scamper and puff my breath out and wipe my face on the sleeve of my shirt. On a turning when we could see the river, Papaw looked out across the floodplain on the other side then glanced at the sky to check the weather. He might point something out to me — a new sandbar in the river or one of the rowboats used by the rough men who set trot lines for catfish and primeval alligator gar.

At the last turn, when there were only another 20 or so steps to go, I would be exhausted. Grandfather, never slacking his pace, always took my hand. 

“Just a bit further,” he’d say, “I’m an old man and you are just a boy.” 

I always found something new and fresh in myself as if energy flowed out of that huge hand that wrapped around mine. I would pick up my pace, skipping up the steps but never letting go, like a puppy on a leash dashing ahead, pulling back, but never letting go.

We always reached the crest together and as we crossed the flagstones leading to the front porch my grandfather let go of my hand to put his coat back on and wipe the sweatband of his hat for the last time. I’d dash across the yard and up the steps, crash through the screen door and shout out my announcement of our return, “Mamaw, we’re home!”