Tales from a Free-Range Childhood

by Donald Davis

  Before he let me look in the mirror, Herschel gave me the maintenance instructions: “You might want to get some of this Butch Wax and a metal comb. It will help your hair set up and stay in place. The problem is that your hair is just not as thick as Milas Chambers’ hair. You are going to have to let it grow as much as possible. We can always square it off at the bottom. I just know your mama is going to like it!”

  “How much do I owe you?” I knew that this was the question to ask, even though the rate list on the wall clearly stated all the prices.

  “You do not owe me a penny!” Herschel announced to the entire barbershop. “This gave me a chance to try out something I have wanted to try for years.” (I had no idea he had such a long history of knowing my mother.) “You just take good care of yourself.”

  I was soon out of the chair and ready to start my walk home.

  Almost every car and every person in Waynesville was someone I either actually knew or recognized as familiar. So all the way home, I was being met or passed, on foot or on wheels, by people with whom I could have talked or at least waved. On the entire half-hour walk, I was most careful to make no eye contact with any living person or moving vehicle. Something in my deep brain was telling me that no such meeting would be complimentary. It was a long walk.

  Mama had a lot of shopping to do at the grocery store, and perhaps she took advantage of the trip and made other stops as well. For whatever reason, I got home a good while before she did. I did not go into any room dominated by a mirror. No, by now, there was no need to look. I already knew I had made a big mistake and was totally done for.

  Suddenly, I knew what to do to redeem myself. I would cook supper for the entire family, and Mama would be so relieved she might not even notice the ducktail business. This would work.

  From the freezer in the garage, I got a package of ground beef. It was frozen, but if you put it in the frying pan with the stove turned on, I knew it would gradually thaw if I kept turning it over and over and scraping the thawed part off with a spatula. I got onions and canned tomatoes. All of this would make spaghetti sauce.

  A big pot of water went on to get hot for the noodles once the sauce had cooked and everyone was home and ready to eat. In the freezer, there was even a package of brown-and-serve rolls to finish off the menu.

  By the time Mama’s car came up the driveway, the sauce had bubbled and cooked until it was at least edible, and would be really good by the time we were actually ready to eat. The long box of spaghetti noodles was on the counter beside the ready, simmering water. The rolls were on a cookie sheet, already with butter spread on top before they went in to be browned. I knew I was safe.

  Then the door opened. Mama smelled the food. It seemed to raise her curiosity more than feed her happiness. Mothers are not predictable. She stepped into the kitchen and nearly screamed, as she could see only the back of my head as I stood over the stove. She thought a stranger was cooking at our house. I turned and smiled.

  She sounded like she started to pray: “Oh, dear Lord, what in the world has happened to you?”

  By the time I realized it was not a prayer, things were coming apart in a hurry. Mama stepped right past me, reached out, and turned off all the knobs on the stove. She picked up the pan of spaghetti sauce and put it, hot, into the refrigerator without even putting a lid on it.

  “Get in the car!” was the order. “Did Herschel Caldwell do this to you? Let’s go!”

  By the time our car pulled up in front of the Parkway Barbershop, it was already dark inside. We were now past closing time, and all the barbers had gone home for the night. Mama glanced at her watch to confirm the time, hit the gas, and we were off again. I could not imagine what was coming next and was not about to ask.

  All of a sudden, I figured out what was happening: we were headed for Herschel’s house!

  We got there. Mama did not even have to tell me to come with her as she got out of the car and marched up toward the house. We did not go toward the front door. No, we headed right around to the back, where you could see lights on in what had to be the kitchen. Then came the biggest surprise: Mama did not even knock on the door. No, she simply opened it, and we were in the kitchen.

  Herschel and his wife were already sitting down at their kitchen table for supper. They looked up at us. Herschel’s wife looked totally perplexed. Herschel himself had a little grin on his face that told me he already knew that, whatever happened, this moment alone was worth every bit of it.

  “Hello, Lucille. Would you all like to have supper with us?”

  Mama pulled me in front of her into the Caldwells’ direct line of vision. “Look at this mess, Herschel Caldwell. You have known me long enough to be smarter than this. You know very well that Lucille Davis would not have a child of hers going out in public looking like this. You have embarrassed the very life out of me. Now . . . fix it! ”

  Herschel’s wife didn’t move. She just watched with wide, wild eyes. Herschel himself smiled through the entire operation. He brought me over to the kitchen sink, ran the water until it tested properly warm, squirted a huge glob of dishwashing detergent on my head, and lathered it up. This was repeated three or four times, with lots of rinsing in between, until all of the greasy Butch Wax seemed to be gone.

  He then sat me down in a kitchen chair and disappeared for a moment. Soon, he was back with a boxed set of haircutting instruments. Mama watched as Herschel carefully combed, clipped, trimmed, combed, clipped, trimmed . . . until my hair was soon too short to part or comb anymore.

  “Now”—she was not quite finished with him—“give him his money back!”

  Mama did not know that Herschel had not charged me for the haircut. Neither of us said a word. No, Herschel simply reached into his pocket and counted out one dollar and sixty cents and put it in my hand.

  Now, it was his turn to talk. “I’m sorry about how this turned out, Lucille. I’ll tell you what. I cut his hair free the next time also.”

  With that, Mama was satisfied, and we were gone.

  She never went to the barbershop with me again. She did not need to go. No, from now on, she gave me money and I went by myself. Nor did Herschel ever again have to ask, “How do you want your hair cut today?” Both of us already knew the answer to that. From then on, I looked exactly the way my mama wanted me to look. It just wasn’t worth the fight.

  But every time I saw Herschel from that day to the end of his life, we each had a secret little smile for one another.

  Chapter 18

  BRACES

  Mama had beautiful teeth, and she was proud of them! They were perfectly straight and even, a uniform and beautiful pearly color, and in her entire life she never had one single cavity. It was a remarkable dental record for someone who grew up on a farm in the North Carolina mountains years before available dental and orthodontic care.

  Daddy also had beautiful teeth. He was also proud of his. He could take them out! My father did not share Mama’s dental DNA. His teeth apparently started rotting as soon as they came in. Born in 1901, he had, by the time he was a teenager, a mouth full of little stubs he described as looking like tree stumps after a forest fire.

  At age eighteen, Daddy somehow got to a dentist for the first time. The dentist took one look at his mouth and immediately set in to pull what was left of his tooth stumps. He was then fitted with full upper and lower plates that he wore for the rest of his life.

  Daddy was totally comfortable with his false teeth. In no time, they were more familiar and much more comfortable than when he had real ones. He never took them out except to clean them. He always slept with his teeth in, and almost no one ever saw him without them through the course of his life.

  The story was that even Mama did not know he had false teeth when she married him. She also did not know that he had a long habit of chewing tobacco.

  Shortly after they were married, they moved into the little house on Plott Creek Road. As soon as they got there, Helen, the milk cow, became a memb
er of the family. Daddy would come home from work at the bank, change his clothes, and go out to milk the cow.

  What Mama did not know was that as soon as he was out the door, he would take out his teeth and pop a fat chew of tobacco into his mouth. He gummed on the tobacco while he fed the chickens, milked the cow, and did various other chores to delay his return to the house. On his way back from the barn, he would spit out the tobacco and pop his teeth back into place.

  One day about six months after they were married, he went out to milk as usual. Something must have been on his mind that day. When he returned to the house, he had forgotten to take out the tobacco and to put in the teeth. Imagine Mama greeting him at the door. There stood the man she had married, the man she thought she knew, toothless and with brown tobacco oozings outlining his mouth. I am still surprised that she did not run away.

  When Joe and I were little, Daddy loved to use the teeth to play with us. He would take them out of his mouth and pretend that they were talking all on their own. We were fascinated by his teeth.

  Mama was not. In fact, she hoped that we got her dental genetics rather than his. One of her favorite sayings, every time one of us lost a baby tooth, was, “Oh, I hope you boys did not get your father’s teeth!”

  Joe and I were equally unlucky in the tooth department, but in two totally different ways.

  He got the soft, decaying version of Daddy’s teeth. Even his baby teeth decayed. The dentist cauterized the stubs with silver nitrate until he looked pitiful.

  My teeth were not that soft, but I had a different set of problems: every single new tooth that I got came in in its own individual direction, without any relationship at all to any of my other past or future teeth. The baby teeth didn’t matter, but by the time most of my permanent teeth were in, my mouth was a total mess. I had a hard time closing my lips over all of them.

  One day, Daddy was looking at me, and he remarked, “You look just like I did when I was your age. My teeth were just like that, before they all rotted and got pulled out.”

  Now, I knew another reason he had so much appreciation for his false teeth.

  With the advent of fluoride and toothpaste, and with very regular dental visits, my cavities were kept in check. But nothing immediate could be done about the crookedness. Over and over again, however, in eavesdropping on Mama’s conversations with Dr. Phil Medford, our dentist, I began to hear the same repeated word: “Braces . . . braces . . . braces.”

  As far as we knew, braces were a new invention. They were also very expensive. You did not routinely get braces because everyone else had them or because a sheet of paper would not slide between your front teeth. No, braces meant that there were discretionary funds somewhere in the family. So I knew that it was all just talk. I would never have braces.

  Things do not always go as you expect them. Daddy had a somewhat distant cousin named Jack Turbyfill. His cousin Jack was a dentist in Asheville who had become an orthodontist. Maybe they made some kind of deal through the family. I never did know the details. All that I know was that on the morning of my thirteenth birthday, I was greeted with a surprise announcement at the breakfast table: “Happy birthday! Guess what? You are going to get a wonderful birthday present.” Mama was the smiling announcer. “We have arranged for you to get braces for your birthday!”

  It was not in this lifetime what I wanted to hear. By now, I knew all I needed to know about braces. There were two kids in my classes at school who had braces, and I wanted nothing at all to do with what I saw them in the process of enduring.

  First, there was Jimmy Hogge. Jimmy Hogge was probably the most oral child I had ever known in my life. Back in kindergarten, he was always being reprimanded for having several fingers in his mouth at once. By the time we were in the second grade, he could play “The Flight of the Bumblebee” on his teeth. He simply could not keep his hands out of his mouth.

  It was a popular thing in that day for boys to have watch chains. None of us had pocket watches, but we had various things on our watch chains, from rabbit’s feet to pocketknives. (Yes, everyone had a pocketknife at school!)

  One day, Jimmy Hogge was playing with his watch chain in his mouth. He was biting the end of it and popping the little clasp open and shut with his fingernail. All of a sudden, we heard him gasp and go, “Uuuuh!” The little clasp on the end of the watch chain had slipped out of his finger grip and closed around the wire connecting the braces on his two front teeth. He was stuck!

  Mrs. Gussie Palmer, our teacher, sent him to call his mother and tell her what had happened. When he got back from the school telephone, he was crying. Not only did his mother refuse to come to school to get him, she vowed that she would not take him back to the orthodontist until his next appointment time came around. For the coming week, that boy came to school each day with a watch chain hanging out of his mouth.

  The other classmate with braces was Amelia Gibson. I am sure that when Dr. Turbyfill first looked into Amelia Gibson’s mouth, he silently thanked God that the mortgage payments would now surely be paid! She had the biggest and most numerous set of teeth any child had ever carried to Hazelwood School. After her first appointment, she told all of us that four of her teeth had to be pulled just to give the others a possible chance of being forced into straight lines.

  Since my birthday came on the first day of June, school was now out for the summer. It was not many days until I climbed into the car with Mama and we made the twenty-seven-mile drive to Asheville to meet Dr. Turbyfill. Daddy was not going. His contribution to the trip was to declare that the whole business I was about to go through was not just about straight teeth. He declared, “Just think of it as part of your total education.” I was not impressed.

  Dr. Jack Turbyfill was a short man with a kind and friendly voice. His office was on the second floor of the Flatiron Building in downtown Asheville, just across side streets from Ivey’s Department Store on one side and Woolworth’s on the other. Mama filled out all the papers and answered all the questions for me. Finally, it was time for me to go into the actual working part of the office.

  There was nothing at all to going to the orthodontist. There were no shots to numb pain, no screeching sound of drills, no burning smell of drilled teeth. All they did was take a set of x-rays (painless), then take impressions of my upper and lower teeth (painless but slightly annoying). Then the appointment was over. We were promised that Dr. Turbyfill would “make a plan of action” and that I would be under way with the next appointment.

  It was not two weeks later that we went back to Asheville. I actually looked forward to the trip. On the last trip, we had gone to eat lunch at the S&W Cafeteria after the appointment, and my hope was that we might again get to go to this favorite place. No matter what, there would be a side trip to Woolworth’s before the day was over.

  I was somewhat afraid that this second appointment would be very different from the first and that I would begin to discover that pain was involved with orthodontics. It was not so. Dr. Turbyfill worked on my mouth and put the bands on all of my lower teeth. Then he added wires to the bands and did a lot of tightening and twisting of the wires. It was actually quite entertaining. There were times when there were ends of long wires hanging out of my mouth before they were trimmed off. It was like putting new strings on a guitar in my mouth.

  When the appointment was finished, Mama suggested eating at the S&W Cafeteria, my favorite place. We headed there and splurged on deviled crab. Then we started for home.

  That night, I discovered why main-line dentists choose to specialize in orthodontics. Nothing that they do to you actually hurts in the office. It is about two or three hours later, when you are safely back at home with your family, that it begins to hurt.

  By the time we were back at home, my mouth was throbbing. Every one of my lower teeth was in a battle for life and death with the next one. The whole assembly was locked in battle. It was a feeling of tension on the edge of explosion.

  Mama asked a very me
aningless question: “What would you like for supper?”

  It was all I could do to answer, “Soup, and no kind that has anything in it that needs to be chewed.”

  In a few days, all the soreness was gone.

  At the next appointment, I got bands on my top teeth, and the entire project was under way. The pattern was a consistent one. We would go to Asheville for the appointment. Dr. Turbyfill would adjust all the wires and put on some new ones. My mouth would be sore for several days. Then it was waiting until the next appointment came. Soon, the summer was coming to an end and school was about to start. This was when Mama went into a panic.

  I still remember her report to Daddy at supper one night after my appointment that day with Dr. Turbyfill: “Oh, Joe, I don’t know what we are going to do. School is starting next week.” (At this time, Mama was teaching second grade at Hazelwood School, and her year was about to begin.) “Dr. Turbyfill’s appointment person says that she just cannot make every child’s appointment an hour after school is out. She says that it is normal for children to get to leave school to come in for their appointments. How are we going to do this? You have to work, and I will be at school. How are we going to manage?”

  Daddy answered almost a little too quickly. “Give me a day to think about it, and I am sure I can come up with a plan.” For the night, the conversation was over.

  The next night at the supper table, Daddy’s concocted plan rolled out. “I have been talking to some of the other parents whose children go to Dr. Turbyfill. Here’s the idea that I have: the Trailways bus leaves Waynesville at seven fifty-five in the morning, headed to Asheville. It’s a slow route—the one that goes over through Bethel, then Canton, then on to Candler and Enka and through West Asheville to Asheville. It is supposed to get to Asheville at five minutes after nine.

  “Here’s what we can do: you can put him on the bus at seven fifty-five on your way to school. Make his appointment for about nine-fifteen or nine-thirty. He’ll be out of there in no time. The bus coming back from Asheville leaves there at eleven o’clock. It gets back here at ten after twelve. I can meet him at the bus station at my lunchtime and take him to school from there. The appointment will be done, and he will only miss a half-day of school. How about that for a plan? And remember what I said when we started all of this? It will be a part of his education.”