More Sweet Tea

by Deborah Smith

  Joe mixed the medication, a white creamy substance, and put it in a small non-descript jar.

  “Do you have a shaving kit or drawer that Agnes doesn’t go through?

  “Yeah, I got a case with some shaving cream and a secret jug of menthol Deep Heat that I use on my sore hips. She hadn’t found that, so I’ll put in there.”

  He left the store with his purchase in a White Knight’s Pharmacy bag and walked right by me without speaking.

  For three days, Clyde treated himself without much difficulty. The night before he planned to slip over to Summerton for his surgery, lightning took out the big oak tree at the side of the house and squashed his truck like a

  bug. He called Doc Pritchard’s office and filled me in.

  “Okay, Missy, now what’ll I do?” Uncle Clyde wheedled.

  “I got only one chair I can sit down on now, and I have to lean on my left cheek to do it. I’m not sleeping and you have no idea the pain I was in after I ate Agnes’ TexMex and cheese-grits casserole…Damn near, killed me. I tell you, I was peering down that long tunnel with a light at the end!”

  A lighted probe extended down a dark tunnel was what Doc Pritchard had recommended in the first place, so I suggested he just tell Aunt Agnes or call the proctologist and explain his transportation problems.

  Now before you get to thinking that I should’ve given him a ride, Uncle Clyde had already made it a personal policy not to ride anywhere with anyone else. He either drives, and drives his truck, or he doesn’t go. This has been his self-proclaimed traveling credo since all his children have been on the earth. To church? Aunt Agnes made two trips in the old Bonneville station wagon, dumping the wee ones in the nursery before returning home for the teens and tweens. Uncle Clyde drove, with great dignity and parked his truck right next to the preacher before waiting for Agnes at the door. I could’ve offered him my old VW,

  but I would’ve only incurred his wrath.

  The proctologist’s office gladly rescheduled Clyde’s appointment, but the earliest date was set for three weeks out.

  It was after midnight, five days after the storm, when Agnes roused me from sleep, crying helplessly into the phone.

  “I can’t help him,” she cried, “And he is on the floor, crying like a child! Be honest, Missy, is he dying and hasn’t told me?”

  I was wildly uncomfortable and very tired, so, I passed the buck, trying really hard not to break my oath to Uncle Clyde.

  “Look, Aunt Agnes, I know for a fact that Uncle Clyde’s not dying. Why don’t you call Doc Pritchard?”

  “I did! I did call the Doc! Their housekeeper said that he and Elmira have gone to the symphony and a romantic weekend in Raleigh and won’t be home ‘til Sunday.”

  “Okay. I know the Doc gave Clyde a prescription of cream for his, ‘er… ah, ailment. Find his medicine and let him use it. He knows what to do. It’s personal. That’s all I can say. Aunt Agnes, I promised.”

  There was a loquacious silence on the line and then

  she said, “I will not forget your unwillingness to help him, Missy. I can forgive, but I may never, ever forget.”

  I drove straight to their house. Agnes jerked open the door, stomped right through the house and stood next to Clyde who was writhing on the rug. I wavered, hanging back in the doorway to their bedroom.

  “Where’s your medicine, Bub? Sweetie?” she said with softness. “Let me help you. I’ve seen it all and after going through childbirth in the double digits, unless you’re getting ready to birth triplet bowling balls, there isn’t any pain I can’t help you through.”

  Uncle Clyde pointed to his shaving kit and said, “Hand me the little white jug. I got ‘roids, Agnes! Bad, wicked ‘roids. There are flaming torches stabbing me from my rear end to my inner stomach. I know if I could stand to get my pants down, you’d see the smoke from the fire! I’m dying here, I tell you, dying!”

  Agnes handed over the little white jar he indicated and I retreated from the room to give them some privacy. I went to the kitchen where I brewed some rosehips tea, stirring in a hefty dose of cooking sherry. Then, I returned to the door of the bedroom.

  “I need help,” Clyde called. “I gotta have some help!”

  I put down the mug of tea and opened the door. I carefully touched his brow and said, “Let her. Let Agnes nurse you now.”

  Aunt Agnes used the entire contents of the jar before Uncle Clyde began to really feel a deep, burning response to her ministrations. He began a sing-song, guttural moan.

  Agnes packed his bottom full of smelly white cream. She used every last dab of the self-heating menthol rub that Uncle Clyde had been sneaking to use to penetrate his achy arthritic joints.

  When the heat began to permeate the raw tortured membranes of Uncle Clyde’s heretofore unmentioned recesses, he plumbed new depths of pain.

  “Woman!” he bellowed, “Dear, Sweet Lord, take me to heaven now, ‘cause the fires of hell are burning up my rear!”

  I drove them to the Emergency Room so that I could explain to the physician on duty all that had transpired. Uncle Clyde was weeping unabashedly, his anguish beyond measure.

  He was in so much agony that he didn’t even notice that his attending physician was a beautiful young woman named

  Dr. Geraldine Powers. My uncle might have just died on the spot had this fact registered through the flames of hell in which, he was positive, now fully engulfed his nether regions.

  First, Dr. Powers knocked Clyde out with a shot for pain and carefully washed away the smelly cream of doom. Then she irrigated my Uncle’s angry orifice.

  Aunt Agnes excused herself to the hospital chapel. I followed her down the hall and sat on the back pew while she bargained with God.

  Aunt Agnes, talked plainly. She and God seemed to be good friends. She approached her prayers like a discussion with a confidante. Then, she made a deal.

  “Lord, You and I know that the credit and joy I have so willingly taken for healing the sheep in Your flock is a source of the greatest pride in my life. I will own the sin of this pride. If you will heal my Clyde, Lord, I will promise to give You all the healing glory. I will never, ever mess with the health of any of your other children with any chemical or natural manipulations that may lead someone to believe I know what in heck, pardon my French, I’m doin’ Father. Also, forgive me for pretending that

  pickles helped with the baby making process. They were all I had in the fridge that day and I just gave the Morris couple what I had. I appreciate Your omnipotent ability to make twins from peanut butter and old cucumbers. You are a mighty God, and I may have taken that for granted. I give you my word of honor . . . My healing days are done. Amen.”

  By the time we returned from the hospital chapel, the doctor was having a Eureka! moment of her own.

  “I haven’t seen anything like that since medical school,” she said, “when one of the women in our class accidentally put Colgate in her diaphragm instead of spermicidal jelly. She was blistered inside for days.”

  I may be a nurse, but this was information that I could have done without. I couldn’t think of a mental medical category to place it in.

  “The unusual thing is,” she said, “the heating attributes of this particular menthol rub appeared to have opened, and then chemically cauterized, the affected tissues. When he wakes up, he’ll be sore for a day or two, but his hemorrhoids should be gone. I would ask that he see a physician, straight away, should this problem return. And I further encourage you to never, ever suggest this healing process to another living soul on earth.”

  The doctor really pressed this last bit of information on Aunt Agnes. Then she finished writing in Uncle Clyde’s chart, leaving us to keep vigil by his bed until daybreak.

  When Uncle Clyde woke up, he stretched, before remembering the excruciating pain that had domina
ted his life for the last memorable days. That he was feeling better dawned across his face with a relieved grin, followed at once, by his familiar scowl.

  “Agnes? Can you ever forgive me? You healed me. If I had just come to you in the first place, you’d have fixed me right up, for sure,” Clyde said.

  I cleared my throat, letting him know there was audience present.

  My Uncle glowered at me. “What’er you a doin’ here?”

  “Clyde,” Agnes said, sweetly, “I called Missy because I knew she would have a modern perspective on my healing arts. She told me what your medicine looked like, not what it was for…don’t you remember? You told me yourself where I should put it.”

  WEEKS LATER, I was sitting on Aunt Agnes’ porch, visiting with my cousins and drinking long swallows of sweet, mint tea. Uncle Clyde pulled up in his new Chevy truck and climbed the front steps to perch on the edge of the porch.

  “I gotta come see the Doc, Missy,” Clyde said, massaging his knee, “Need something else for this tinge of arther-itis. I’ve used that whole jar of white stuff he gave me, and it ain’t worth a hoot!”

  Did he really think Hemorrhoid cream could work on arthritis?

  “Don’t look at me,” said Agnes, looking back at me. “Me and God have an understanding. You can explain the healing contents of that jar if you want to, Missy. I am now officially retired.”

  The Hope Quilt

  by

  Susan Goggins

  “Hope” is the thing with feathers—

  That perches in the soul—

  And sings the tunes without the words—

  And never stops—at—all

  —Emily Dickinson

  “LET ME help you, Grandma.” I reached past my grandmother’s arthritic fingers, my hands stretched above hers to retrieve the folded quilt on the top shelf of the plain cedar chifforobe. We had gone in opposite directions for so long—I growing taller, she shrinking with age. But it still surprised me as a teenager that I had become bigger and stronger than this woman who to me was always larger than life.

  I put the still-folded quilt onto the bed she’d shared with my grandfather for over fifty years. The bed in which she’d borne my father. In the simple farm house where her husband had been born as well. “The friendship quilt,” I said. “I remember you showing me this when I was a little girl.”

  I ran my hands over the seams holding the fragile-looking pieces together. I said, “You and some of your friends all pieced a bunch of quilt squares, then got together and quilted them so you all got a quilt like this.” I’d remembered reading about friendship quilts. The quilting bees were social events complete with refreshments and probably lots of gossip.

  “Is that what you thought?” Grandma asked. She laughed. “This ain’t exactly a friendship quilt. It’s what I call my hope quilt. You know what a hope chest is?”

  “Sure. That’s where a girl would sew and embroider her household linens and collect them in a cedar chest so that she would be ready to set up housekeeping with them when she eventually got married.” It was the seventies then, the years of women’s lib, and such old-fashioned ideas seemed positively pre-historic, but I’d never tell Grandma that.

  “That’s right,” Grandma said. “A girl worked on all those linens, acting on faith that she would eventually get married and be able to use them in her own home.”

  “Instead of ending up an old maid?”

  “Yep,” Grandma said.

  I smiled at what she’d left unsaid. I hadn’t been as attentive to learning the womanly arts of cooking and needlework as she had been. I think she despaired of the younger generation of females in general. My mother had taught me to embroider some and Grandma had taught me to tat a little, but the shuttle didn’t fly like it did in her hand. For me, lacework was a pretty awkward business, and I ended up pulling the wrong thread and tying my work up in knots as often as not. I could make picos and join them, but not much else.

  “I want you to have it,” Grandma said. “It brought me luck and maybe it will for you too.”

  Touched, I clasped it to my chest. “I’ll treasure it, Grandma.” I leaned forward to kiss her cheek, fragrant and dry with her favorite face powder. “So why do you call this the hope quilt?”

  “Do you remember how I said that a girl filling up a hope chest was an act of faith? Well, when I was a teenager, World War One was just ending in Europe and who knew if all the boys who had gone were gonna be coming back.”

  I put the quilt back on the bed and followed Grandma into the kitchen. It was a half-hour before supper. Time to make the biscuits. She opened a deep drawer next to the sink and took out her ever-present bowl of self-rising flour. She’d attempted to teach me to make biscuits as patiently as she’d tried to teach me to tat, so knowing all the steps I went to the refrigerator and fetched the two-pound package of Snow Cap lard. I’d heard part of this story before.

  “Wasn’t the Spanish flu epidemic killing a lot of soldiers who were waiting to be sent home from Europe?” I dipped out a couple of tablespoons of lard into the tiny iron skillet Grandma kept on top of the stove and turned on the burner.

  “I was worried plumb to death about your Grandpa,” she said, measuring out some milk in a tiny glass she used only for the purpose of biscuit making.

  “And I guess the other girls in the community were worried that what with the war and the flu, they might not be able to find husbands,” I said.

  Grandma poured the milk into the middle of the bowl of flour and paused a moment for it to sink in. Then she stuck her fingers into the goo and started swirling the stuff around in a circle, gathering up flour as the dough started gaining the proper consistency. “You bet they were. So was I. I hadn’t seen your grandpa in two years, and I didn’t know if he’d remember me or not.”

  “Shaw,” I said. “I expect he couldn’t forget you.” I laughed, scooped up some of the cold lard out of the box and smeared it onto the biscuit pan.

  “Well, I wasn’t so sure.” Grandma got the skillet by the handle with a pot holder, or “hot rag” as she called it, and carefully spooned some of the melted grease into the biscuit dough. The rest would be dribbled on top of the biscuits to bake them a perfect, golden brown. My mouth was about to water already. “I’ll admit I was worried about the competition,” she said. “I knew of at least two other girls in the community who had their eyes on him.”

  I watched her swirl some more flour, which was kind of hypnotic and relaxing. “So how did he come to pick you?” I asked.

  “That’s an interesting story, and it all started with that quilt. It was really your Grandpa’s, you know.”

  “Your hope quilt belonged to Grandpa?”

  “It started out that way.” That’s when Grandma, still swirling and swirling, took up the rest of the story.

  BEN’S MOTHER, Anna Grace, was making a quilt to give to him when he came home from the war. She asked all his aunts and girl cousins to make a square and sign it in India ink or embroidery, and of course, she made a square herself.

  When she asked me to make him a square, I was tickled to death. That was, until I heard that she asked Myrtle Dickens, one of them Douglasville Dickenses, to make him one too. And if that didn’t cap the stack, she also asked the new Methodist preacher’s girl, who just moved into the community, to make one. So I figured that was my competition, and I backed my ears for it. I had loved Ben since the first grade when he’d poured well water on my head from the gourd dipper and ran. And I couldn’t let another girl steal him away.

  “Myrtle was Anna Grace’s neighbor’s cousin’s, next-to-youngest girl. I knew her from the singing school, and let me tell you that girl couldn’t sing a lick. Not only that but she left the vanilla out of the banana pudding she made for the dinner on the ground. So she couldn’t sing and she couldn’t cook, and I cou
ldn’t imagine what Ben or Anna Grace saw in her. She wore nice dresses, though, with matching hair bows for her curly, dark hair, so at least somebody in the family could sew.

  “The preacher’s daughter’s name was Lizzie. She was a stout girl with rosy cheeks and sandy hair. I had met her in Sunday school and she struck me as proud. Her father had been assigned to our country church after serving in Atlanta, and I got the feeling Lizzie was a city girl through-and-through. Who knew if she could cook or sew or sing, and I didn’t know what Anna Grace saw in her either.

  Grandma’s hands never stopped moving. “Anna Grace invited the three of us to bring our squares to her house one Sunday after dinner—you know that’s lunch to folks nowadays—and get the quilting started. So when Sunday rolled around, we all showed up with our sewing baskets, and Anna Grace showed us into the parlor and gave us tea cakes.

  “I do believe these are the tastiest tea cakes I nearly ever ate, Mrs. Grogan.” Myrtle said.

  “Just the right amount of vanilla,” I said, looking sideways at Myrtle the flatterer, who narrowed her eyes at me.

  “We get Watkins double strength vanilla in Atlanta,” offered Lizzie. “It’s the best there is.”

  “Thank you,” Anna Grace said. I don’t know which one of us she was talking to. “Why don’t you show me your squares.”

  It’s hard to know what to put on a quilt for a man. I mean, you wouldn’t use a Dutch Doll or an applique’d flower. That would be too feminine. I thought about doing a log cabin block, but that was too simple to show off my sewing. I decided on a cottage applique. It looked nice and homey and might put him in the mind of settling down—with the girl who’d sewed it. Anna Grace put on her spectacles, looked right close at it, and told me it was good work.

  Then Myrtle got out her square. Lord, if it wasn’t a Sunbonnet Sue! “I made it out of the scraps of my best dresses,” she said. “To remind him of me.”