by Thom Jones
This guy I saw on the Donahue show said if you laugh all the time you can heal yourself from fatal diseases and that some guy healed himself by watching the Three Stooges and the Marx Brothers. Well, I guess I’ll just have to die, because I could never laugh over something so stupid as that. Really, Monk knew what he was doing and made the story funny to make us laugh like that—he was always a kidder. But after Barney died right after the dog and Mary Lou, Monk caved in. All that good stuff he learned at the AA about the higher power, which helped Monk quit drinking and smoking, the higher power Monk chose to call God—it all quit working. Monk was no dummy. He could see Tootie was just practicing the Hippocratic oath with no real feeling. Although she tried to cover it up, Tootie went into a depression, too. She didn’t feel right at home and she didn’t want to go back to Africa. She put up a front, but Monk could see through it. No matter what Tootie did for him or what Pug did for him, he just sort of dried up inside. Pug was with him when he died. Pug was with Barney when he died and with Mary Lou. Three in five years. Pug said Monk was rational right up to the end. He didn’t say nothing about Jesus taking him to heaven. What he said was, “Ain’t this a bitch?” After he said that, Pug said he rolled over and died. Maybe Pug saw it wrong. Maybe Monk closed his eyes and prayed for his own salvation, for the forgiveness of his sins. Late at night when I can’t sleep, I think of Monk up in heaven with Barney and Mary Lou and the whole family short of Pa, who died cursing God.
My doctor gave me an operation because my lower eyelids were growing up and going into my eye. The pain was horrible. Tootie did the operation over, to get all of the eyelid roots out, but they still sprout up and stick me in the eye and I have to tape my eye open, put drops in it, and take aspirin. Sometimes the pain is so bad I just have to lie on my bed and hold a picture of Jesus to my heart and pray for Him to come and take me, or pray for Him to save Tootie’s soul. She has done good things for the world, but only through the grace of Jesus are we saved. Our righteous acts are as filthy rags. Everybody knows that one.
Tootie quit the Catholic Church and used the money Mary Lou held back to start her own doctor practice. Dermatology. In the daytime she cures pimples on teenagers and at night she goes out with men and lives the fast life. Her looks are gone. She dresses wrong. She doesn’t know how to act right after all of those years in Africa. She comes on too independent. Maybe being around those lepers and those African drum dances put Satan in her life. Satan made her forget how Jesus sent an angel to save her from an elephant stampede and another time from getting shot by those rebels in Angola, or how He saved her from her snakebite. Satan is the prince of this world and his powers are strong. He prowls the earth like a hungry lion looking for souls to devour. He knows his days are short, and he’s trying to make hay and catch every sinner in his net of evil. I never thought he could get Tootie, though.
Or maybe Tootie’s troubles was because of Pa. Tootie was her daddy’s girl, and that can be too much of a good thing. I do believe that a Catholic can go to heaven, but not unless they accept the grace and salvation the Lord offers us. It’s so easy. It’s so simple. Tootie don’t think it’s rational, and it isn’t rational. Lions playing with lambs and eating straw sounds ridiculous, I guess, especially if you’ve been to Africa and seen how they do and have been bit by a nine-foot mamba snake…who am I to judge? It’s not rational; it’s what you call a paradox. You have to believe like a little child. Believe it because it’s impossible. There’s no need for holy water or praying to a lot of saints when you can talk to Jesus direct. When I think I can’t take it no more, I hold my picture of Jesus against my breast and pray for Tootie and my family and for all of the lost souls in the world. I say, “Jesus, I cry my bleeding heart out every day for you; come down to earth and forgive them all, for they know not what they do. Come down and give us a thousand years of peace like you said you would and throw Satan down in the pit where he can’t get at us no more.” When I do this the grown-up in me dies and I’m like a little child and can see the world fresh again. Born again. Sometimes I don’t really believe in no life after death, but I do believe that Jesus has saved me. Other times I believe it all—tigers eating straw, the water turned to wine, the Red Sea parting, the Tower of Babel, and a thousand years of peace on earth with our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
I am ninety-two years old and I had to get this in before I go.
New Stories
Night Train
JACK BUFFMEIR, AS far as I knew, being a little kid, didn’t seem to have a real job or any work history whatsoever. On occasion he made birdhouses, and if he couldn’t sell them to people, he just gave them away. They weren’t all that hot. Something a simpleton would knock together. In addition to this, Jack raised a few chickens and grew vegetables. My grandmother felt sorry for Jack and let him live in a shack on the back of her property. It was just a one-room affair with an outhouse behind it.
What interested me most about Jack was his black-and-white bull terrier, Oyster, a rarely seen breed of dog, then as now. I coveted the dog, but Oyster would rarely give me the time of day. As far as Oyster was concerned, his oddball master was the sun, moon, and stars. With a full-time religion like Jack, the dog did not have any time for little boys.
Jack could play the fiddle, and when he was in good humor, he liked to dress up in his white suit and play “Turkey in the Straw” at the back of my grandmother’s store. In the middle of the song he would set the fiddle on the pop case, pull out a soup spoon, and cavort around dancing as he clapped the spoon against his cheeks. He would pick up carving knives from the meat block and flash them around with the authority of a samurai warrior while clog dancing in his two-toned brown-and-white shoes. Meanwhile, Oyster would do back flips, roll over, and dance about on his hind legs with Jack. There was no television, and people found their entertainment in peculiar ways.
All you had to do to get a meal or a place to flop from my grandmother was to offer to pluck the “clinkers” from her coal furnace down in the store basement and haul them out back to the barnyard. A mental defective, hobo, or dangerous bum off the streets could come in and accomplish bed and board for this small chore. Boy Cleatus, a black of fifteen, used to do the job for a quarter. The clinkers were heavy sizable things, like fossilized starfish. How the little pellets of coal clumped together during incineration was something I never understood. Whenever Boy Cleatus got in trouble with the law and was sent to the reformatory in St. Charles, the clinkers were mine to haul for no quarter. Since the firepit was small, I often opened the furnace door and poked at these spiky formations. When the bulk of the fuel had burned, they became hollow, like fragile shells, and it was fun to mash them down before I threw more coal into the pit. The cold clinkers from the bottom of the ash pit I put in a laundry tub and carried out back. It paid to wear gloves when handling clinkers, although I seldom bothered; I mainly wanted to get the job over with as soon as possible, so I tolerated minor burns and ashen splinters. I learned to shovel coal and haul clinkers at an early age, but Jack Buffmeir, who lived scot-free in the shack, never dirtied his fingers in this fashion.
He was a thin, dapper fellow who preferred a suit and a vest to ordinary clothes. He neither drank nor smoked. I had heard that he had been gassed in the first war and had somehow gotten out of mortal combat early. My grandmother disputed this story and told me that Jack had been struck by lightning and never served in the Great War. When he wasn’t in his turkey-in-the-straw mood, Jack was a quiet, suspicious man preoccupied with his health. It was one extreme or the other with him, glaring, contrasting differences like the opposing colors of his two-tone shoes.
Buffmeir could swing into states of highest agitation, constantly pulling his watch from his vest pocket and flipping it open like a man who kept an urgent, variegating schedule. He was continually going to doctors. My grandmother was given to believe that his aches and pains were imaginary, but I wasn’t so sure. Because I was a kid, he seldom paid attention to me; I coul
d observe his unguarded visage, which was often that of a man in severe pain. His face took on a sour countenance and he would sometimes buy packets of fizzing stomach powders, which he mixed in a glass under my grandmother’s kitchen spout. Like Napoleon in a white suit with a straw boater, he would insert his hand under his jacket and press it against his side, stoically waiting for fast pharmaceutical relief. Oyster positioned himself close enough to Jack so that he could look up at his master and gauge his moods while he stood vigilantly braced to defend the old man against a 360-degree perimeter of incoming evils.
Jack demanded complete and unwavering loyalty from the animal, yet he hardly bothered to feed the dog, and never once did I see him deign to kneel down and pet the animal or even bother to say a kind word. This lack of gratitude toward Oyster did not surprise me.
One cold day I stood out in front of the store waiting for the Aurora Beacon-News to dump off their afternoon bundle of papers, when I spotted a stray feral cat. I wanted a pet more than anything in the world, and I went for the tortoise-colored female. I managed to pick her up as she worked my face over with her front paws slashing like razors. She was a bundle of compressed fury, but I managed to stumble up the stairs with her, bust in the door, and drop her on the floor. The cat dashed off for the basement, and after my grandmother treated my scratches with Mercurochrome, I took a bowl of milk to the basement. I looked all over for the cat to no avail; but a cat can hide, and the basement was a warehouse of stock.
There were cases of cereal, toilet paper, coffee, Campbell’s soup, Dinty Moore beef stew, sardines, potted meat, SOS scrubbing pads, and various and sundry goods. I ran about pell-mell looking for the animal, but it seemed to have vanished. Several days later I saw her purring in contentment on the white batting that insulated the coal furnace. The cat, which had given birth to six kittens my grandmother later drowned in the cistern, nonetheless found a home in the store as a mouser. Like Oyster, she spurned my attempts to befriend her.
Then a more hopeful time arrived. Jack Buffmeir saw an osteopath who convinced him to become a full-out vegetarian. The diet produced instant and miraculous benefits. Buffmeir left off wearing his dandy suits and plowed an additional two-acre garden behind the shack. He claimed he felt like a new man and would talk endlessly about the virtues of organic produce to anyone who would stand still and listen to it. Not only that, he put Oyster on a vegetarian regime and claimed that the luster and sheen on Oyster’s harsh black-and-white coat was a result of nutrients from the life-giving soil. The earth was rich and productive Illinois black topsoil and under the blazing sun and with an attentive watering schedule, Jack grew tomatoes, rhubarb, potatoes, corn, peas, carrots, and beans. Once these were in the ground he began tending to the trees on my grandmother’s property, trees he had planted earlier in life under my grandmother’s instruction. There were fruit trees and a couple of black walnuts, an arboretum of sorts, albeit long neglected.
Buffmeir believed in the healing properties of nuts, which were rich in proteins. He also stepped up his egg production, selling what he didn’t eat at my grandmother’s store. These were in the milk and butter cabinet with a small sign in front of them that read JACK BUFFMEIR’S MAGIC EGGS, FRESH DAILY. The eggs, which had brown shells, were fertilized by the fuckingest rooster on the south end of town. They cost a nickel more per dozen than regular eggs, and my grandmother was constantly besieged with questions about exactly what was so damn special about Jack Buffmeir’s eggs. Jack said that he fed his chickens a special vitamin-enriched diet. I heard claims that they were good for your hair and nails and could even cure baldness. Even though Jack had no woman he produced a convincing argument that the zinc in them improved flagging sex lives. I didn’t precisely know what a sex life was, but one day Jack grabbed me in a headlock and gave me a Dutch rub that really hurt, saying that if I wanted to grow big and slug home runs I should eat two of his eggs for breakfast every day. I was used to eating Dolly Madison chocolate doughnuts dunked in coffee for breakfast, but soon I had my grandmother frying egg sandwiches for my lunch.
The deleterious effects of cholesterol were unknown in those days, and eggs were fairly sensible nutrition. But Jack did not come into full glory until he broke from his osteopath’s guidebook and, all on his own, discovered nature’s true miracle food—the peach. He ate peaches morning, noon, and night. Illinois peaches were small, hard, and sour. Jack admitted as much, but ate them anyway. In an astounding burst of industry he planted hybrid peach trees and hybrid apple trees. He cultivated mulberry, pear, and sour-cherry trees. He revived the long-neglected grapevines that grew alongside my grandfather’s old Chevrolet garage, which, by then, my grandmother had rented out to a German machinist. Jack was constantly pruning trees, watering them, fertilizing them, and splicing hybrid branches on them like artificial limbs. But Jack refused to cut the grass; that job was left to Cousin Eustace, a head-injury victim.
There were a lot of birds when the fruit got ripe. Buffmeir killed flocks of crows and blackbirds with his shotgun (Oyster would finish off the wounded with a few quick snaps of the neck). Buffmeir would let me collect the bird bodies in a cardboard box, on the outside of which he would tally his kills before we tossed the dead birds into the trash burner. I was always being told that there were hungry people in the world, but I grew up in a store and all I ever saw was food. I had the good fortune to be born after the trees had matured. Jack had worked these trees back to vigor. For me, they were just there for easy picking. The only tree tree on the property was an oak that had gotten the jump on Jack—it was there in manifested maturity before he could do anything about it.
My grandmother liked flowers. I used to collect morning glories from the vines that grew up along the high fencing behind the garage. In the salad days, when my grandfather ran the prosperous Chevrolet dealership, he constructed a concrete tennis court behind the garage. There was a patch of grass back there that Cousin Eustace also cut, and from there I could collect wildflowers to add to the bouquets of morning glories I presented to my grandmother. Even if you got them into a glass of water, they were only good for a couple of hours. Having seen Jack Buffmeir raise vegetables, I planted nasturtiums and petunias, but just as the seedlings began to sprout, Eustace would hack them down with the push mower. My grandmother refused to intervene, since mowing the lawn seemed to be my cousin’s only reason for being. Cousin Eustace was a diabetic, only a few years older than myself, but as my mother had dropped him on his head as an infant, he was feebleminded in a more straightforward way than Jack Buffmeir. I’m fairly sure that any psychiatrist worth his salt would have diagnosed Jack as a paranoid schizophrenic with a propensity to manic depression. This was particularly evident when he started in on a food jag. His views shifted.
Pretty soon peaches were just okay, but the real healing miracles involved carrots and foods with violent colors like eggplant, green and red peppers, tomatoes, and watermelon. The peach, the mainstay of his diet, well, cut into one and what did you see but anemic yellow flesh. Jack started eating carrots like there was no tomorrow. He also went to the library and brought home an exotic book about yoga in which very thin, dark, little people twisted themselves into knots, their faces composed into visages of radiant inner peace.
There was a punching bag in the basement of the store. It was an inflatable speed bag that hung from the ceiling. One morning Jack set to work on the bag at five A. M., shortly after my grandmother opened up. I could hear the bag popping from my bed on the second floor. Since my father was a professional boxer, the sound of the bag filled me with the hope that he had sobered up and come to pay a visit. When I got my clothes on and rushed down to the basement, Jack Buffmeir was doing a headstand in the rag bin, a small closet where my grandmother tossed the gunnysacks the red and white potatoes from Idaho were shipped in. Jack’s face was redder than a fire hydrant. I said, “Where’s my dad?” But then I looked at Jack’s knuckles and saw that they were scuffed raw. Oyster must have mistaken my intentions
, for he rushed me and began ragging my pantlegs. Jack said, “Oyster, leave off!”