Tales from a Free-Range Childhood

by Donald Davis

  Then, with a gleam in his eye, Daddy looked at me and began a litany of instruction: “When your mama gets home from the circle meeting at church, you let me do most of the talking. If you need to talk, you talk about homework and Sunday school and what your friends might be doing. If there is any talking to be done about cars, I will be the one to do it.”

  I was totally happy with that.

  Soon, Mama got home and automatically started cooking our supper. My little brother, Joe, came home from playing with Ronnie Leatherwood. Soon, we were all seated at the table, blessing and then eating Mama’s food. Daddy began eating just like it was a normal meal, and for a long time he didn’t say anything at all.

  Then he asked, “How was the circle meeting?”

  “Just like always,” Mama answered. “We spent almost all of the time hearing the finance report from last time and talking about whether it is a good idea to put cushions on the pews in church. I think it would be a good idea, but some of the older women think that all the men will sleep more if we make it more comfortable.”

  Daddy nodded like he was interested and taking it all in.

  After the meal was finished, I realized that nothing at all had been said about the car. Daddy was taking a big bite of coconut cream pie when he casually started the comment: “Oh, I almost forgot. Tomorrow is Monday. I have to go over to the west side of Asheville in the morning to appraise a house for a man who wants to get a mortgage at the bank. I really need to get it done and then be back at work by about eleven o’clock. So, Lucille, I better drive the Plymouth. You can drive the Pontiac and take the boys to school.”

  My own bite of pie was half swallowed just as he said, “You can drive the Pontiac,” to Mama. Now, it was totally hung in my throat and would not go either up or down. I thought I was going to choke to death. I let out a big cough.

  “Are you all right?” Daddy quickly asked.

  “I am fine. Something just went down the wrong way.” As I recovered, I pushed back my chair and left the table. “I think I’d better check on my homework and get to bed early,” I offered. “Tomorrow is a new week at school.”

  Mama smiled with approval.

  Later in bed, I could not get to sleep. All I could do was toss and turn and think about all the possibilities that had potential for the next day. It was a delicious wakefulness.

  The next morning, I got up on time and headed to the kitchen for breakfast. Daddy was already there and was reading the morning paper. Mama was alternately cooking and calling brother Joe to come to eat.

  I could hardly bring myself to choke down a bite. I was amazed, watching Daddy eat like it was the most normal thing in the world to do. He finished, took a last drink of coffee, and wiped his mouth. “I’d better get going if I’m going to get back.”

  With that, he picked up Mama’s keys to the Plymouth, headed out the door, got into that car, and was gone. The rest of us finished our breakfast.

  “Well, we better go. It takes a little longer in that old car. Get your stuff and meet me out at the car.” Mama hated driving the old Pontiac.

  I gathered my school books and made my way to the car very slowly. It seemed to me to be an unwise thing to sit in the front seat with Mama. I knew that if I moved slowly, my brother, Joe, would be delighted to grab the front seat.

  Mama was waiting in the car when I climbed into the seat directly behind her. That seemed to me to be the place where she was least likely to see my face. I never could keep a straight face when I had to give questions crooked answers. As she put the key into the ignition switch, I put my head down in my lap to try to disappear before what I knew was coming.

  Mama turned on the switch, then pushed the starter button on the dash of the Pontiac. The noise was horrible: Thunk, bunk, dunk-dunk-dunk! The starter tried desperately to turn over the dead engine.

  “What’s wrong with it? Why is it making that noise instead of starting?”

  I tried to offer a suggestion while ignoring her question: “I think you need to give it some more gas. It sometimes doesn’t like to start first thing in the morning.”

  She pumped the accelerator pedal a few times, then hit the starter button again. Dunk-dunk-dunk. It was giving out.

  “I think maybe you flooded it,” I offered.

  Mama was quick to give up on the old car. “Let’s get out of this thing and go over to the Leatherwoods’. Maybe Lawrence hasn’t gone to work yet, and he can give us a ride to school.”

  Since Mr. Leatherwood was the superintendent of schools, he was happy to give an even out-of-the-way ride to Mama, who was, after all, one of his schoolteachers. He was just as happy to take Joe and me by the high school on the way.

  We were on the way before the question came: “What’s wrong with your car, Lucille?”

  “It’s not my car. Joe took my car today to go over to West Asheville and back. I was supposed to drive that old Pontiac of his. It wouldn’t start.”

  I could see the questioning gleam in his eye as he remembered the Jeep loan and added that to what she said. “Wonder what’s wrong with it? It’s been running okay, hasn’t it?”

  “I drove it just yesterday, and it was fine,” I volunteered.

  It was Mama’s turn for a question to Mr. Leatherwood: “Maybe you could come over this afternoon and look at it before Joe gets home?”

  The plan was made. Mr. Leatherwood would pick the three of us up at the end of our various school days. Then he would take us home so he could have a diagnostic look at why the car wouldn’t start.

  I had a hard time paying any attention at all to any of my teachers that day. I knew that somehow Daddy had a big plan going in all of this, but I still hadn’t quite figured out exactly what it was.

  Afternoon came. We rode home just as we had gotten to school. Mama repeated the request: “Would you mind coming over and just looking at Joe’s car?” Mr. Leatherwood was happy to do so.

  I pulled the release and opened the long hood uncovering the straight-eight engine. Mr. Leatherwood took one look at the hole in the side of the block with the rod sticking partially out of it.

  “Good grief, Lucille! What in the world did you do to Joe’s car?”

  “I think I flooded it.” She remembered what I had told her.

  “Flooded it? I think you’ve drowned it. This car will never run again!” He closed the hood and quickly turned his back and went home.

  Mama took a few deep breaths, then walked calmly into the kitchen and began to cook supper. She took her time and fixed a very fine meal.

  After the trip to West Asheville made him late to work for the day, Daddy was a little bit late getting home. At last, he came.

  Instead of the usual kitchen table, Mama had set the nice china on the dining-room table for dinner. All of this drew no comment from any of us. We simply sat down to eat like this was the most normal thing in the entire world. I had a hard time eating. Daddy ate like he was starving.

  We finished all the main courses, and Mama brought out ice cream with chocolate syrup for us each to fix our own dessert. We were slurping away when Daddy finally spoke. “Well, Lucille, I had a nice day today. It was a quick trip over to West Asheville and back, thanks to your car. How did you get along with the Pontiac?”

  “Just fine!” Her answer was immediate. “We all got along just fine. But there is one thing I would like to know.”

  “What’s that?” Daddy was smiling.

  “With a brother who is in the car business—a brother who could bring you a better car just by your making one telephone call—why, why, why do you insist on continuing to drive that dangerous piece of junk you call a car that is sitting right out there in our driveway? And why do you dare have our boys driving around in that awful and unsafe thing when you could make one telephone call and have a new car tomorrow?”

  Daddy did not even attempt to answer the question. He simply got up from the table and walked over to the telephone. He called his brother Harry and spoke only four words to h
im: “She says it’s time.”

  By the next afternoon, we had a much newer and only slightly used Plymouth, and the Pontiac was forever gone to Betsy Schulhofer’s Junkyard. I also knew that if Daddy ever had any idea about using an “end run” on me, whatever it was, he would win.

  Chapter 20

  IRRATIONAL FEAR

  Since my father’s parents both died before I was born, I never knew the grandparents on this side of the family. No, whenever grandparents were mentioned, it meant only one thing to Joe and to me: Grandmother and Granddaddy Walker. Through all the years of my growing-up life, we continued to go to visit them all the time.

  Granddaddy Walker was a farmer, though by the time I really remember him what he mostly did was walk around looking at the farm. Grandmother continued to work nonstop, through heart attacks and bouts with cancer, until the end of her life.

  We went to see them at least once a week. Often, it was Sunday afternoon. Pretty often, it was anytime on Saturday. Sometimes, it was another time of the week, especially in the summer or during a holiday when school was out.

  One day, we were getting in the car to go for one of our visits. My little brother, Joe, looked up at Daddy and asked the question: “Why do we go to see Granddaddy and Grandmother so much? We go out there every time we turn around.”

  Daddy quickly answered, “It’s because they don’t have a telephone. We have to go see if they’re dead. Since they don’t have a telephone, they can’t call us and tell us if they are dead. They could just lie there dead for a week if we didn’t go check on them.”

  Three of us laughed. Mama did not think it was funny.

  From then on, every time we started out to see Grandmother and Granddaddy, my brother, Joe, would make the announcement: “Let’s go see if Grandmother is dead! Let’s go see if Granddaddy is dead!” Eventually, even Mama chuckled.

  I loved going to their house. The farm, which Mama remembered mostly as a place of childhood work, was fascinating to me. After turning off the paved county road, there was a rough dirt-and-rock road which ran the last mile to the house. There were creeks and woods and mountains to climb. Every time we went there, I would beg Mama, “Let’s go up on the mountain. Let’s go up to the big rock and build a fire and cook our supper. Let’s go up to the top and see where the sun goes at night. Let’s go up to the place where you spanked the cow with the pokeberries and turned it purple!”

  After enough begging, Mama would give in. “Okay. Let’s go. But wait a minute until I fix my stick.”

  She would then go out into the yard of Grandmother’s house and cut a piece of limb off a tree. The limb would be the right size for a walking stick, but it had to have a good fork in it. She would trim the forked end until she had a pronged point. That end went toward the ground as we walked. Mama was scared to death of snakes!

  We would walk along with her probing the trail from side to side like a blind person checking the way with a white cane. Suddenly, she would come to an abrupt halt and point the stick toward a nearby spot on the ground. “There was one right there. I don’t know what kind it was, but it was as big as my arm!”

  “When was that, Mama?” I would ask.

  “When I was about eight years old,” the answer came.

  A few steps later, she pointed again, this time at a large, flat rock. “There were two of them right there. One was a blacksnake and one was a rattler. The rattler grabbed the blacksnake by the tail, and then the blacksnake grabbed the rattler by the tail, and then . . . they proceeded to totally eat one another up!”

  “Did you see that?” I had to ask.

  “No,” she sheepishly answered. “But I heard all of them talk about it.”

  To listen to Mama’s commentary, there had been a snake on every square foot of that farm during her lifetime. No matter how many times we went there, I never, ever saw one single snake on my grandparents’ farm.

  As I got older, my love of the place did not go away. After all, Grandmother not only thought I was cute, she had a strong belief that sugar was a primary food group. When I went there, she would save the extra biscuit dough, roll it out very thin, put a layer of homemade applesauce on it, add more sugar and cinnamon, flip the dough over the applesauce and crimp it with a fork, and fry it in butter in the frying pan. Since the first side soaked up all the butter, she had to add more butter for the second side. Then, once they were done, we ate up the little fried pies with cold, fresh milk from her cow. She called the pies “Rooster Pies.” When I asked why, she said that they were shaped like the comb of a rooster. I didn’t care what she called them—I loved them.

  By the time I got to junior high school, I began to seriously try to figure out my mama. One day, I came home from school in the eighth grade and made a terrible mistake. As we ate supper, I said to Mama, “We read about you at school today.”

  “Really?” This gave her a little smile on her face. “How did you read about me at school?”

  “You are in one of our school books. It is as clear as day that it is you.”

  “Which book are you talking about? I don’t think I could be in a school book.” She was curious now.

  I could not stop. “It was our health book. We were reading the chapter called ‘Mental Health.’ You are in there. It’s about the snakes. You have what the book calls an ‘irrational fear’ of snakes. You are not normal!”

  I definitely should not have said that, especially the last part. Mama was onto me in a flash. “I will tell you about irrational fear, mister! Irrational fear is always something someone else has. If you are afraid of something, it makes more sense to you than anything in the world! And someday, something is going to happen to show you all about that!” She turned and walked out of the kitchen.

  Eventually, I turned sixteen. In North Carolina, when we turned sixteen years old, there was a particular ritual that had to be completed by every male. If you were a male (I don’t know about females), on the day when you turned sixteen, you presented yourself at the nearest office of the Division of Motor Vehicles. You waited patiently until your turn came, then you turned in your brain, and they gave you your driver’s license. (They kept your brain for a long time after that because, at age sixteen, you had little use for it anyway.)

  My birthday came on the first day of June. This meant that I got my new driver’s license at the beginning of the summer when I finished the tenth grade in high school. The whole summer was ahead of me as a new driver.

  The frustrating thing was that my parents did not believe in meaningless, indiscriminate, pointless, endless, destinationless driving around. So it was a very difficult thing to actually get to drive a family vehicle that summer. (The actual concept of a sixteen-year-old having a car of his own had not been invented.)

  However, as the summer rolled on, I learned a wonderful trick that always worked. All I had to do was get a sad look on my face, go up to my mama, and whine, “I miss my grandparents. Would it be okay for me to go to see Grandmother and Granddaddy?” My mother could not resist. Out came the keys and usually an offer for gas money.

  Since there was no telephone at Grandmother’s house, how did they know? How did they know when I got there? How did they know when I left? How did they know what myriad routes I discovered on the long way there and back?

  One day, still in June, I had secured the keys to Mama’s car and was out for a visit. I went early in the day so Grandmother would have ample opportunities to feed me. Her belief in sugar as a food group continued. There was a new round of Rooster Pies, this time with peach filling.

  After a while, Granddaddy came into the kitchen. He ate one of the little fried pies, then said to me, “Let’s go for a walk up around the barn. There are some little grafted trees I have up there. They are doing pretty well, but I still like to keep a good check on them.”

  We took off. The big barn was only a couple of hundred yards up the hill from the house. He and I walked up there and checked out the trees. He loved to graft fruit trees
so there were several varieties on a single tree. He checked out a few more things around the barn, then we started back down the dirt path to the house.

  About halfway back, we were almost startled when a little blacksnake darted from one side of the worn path across toward the other side. It stopped right in front of us as if it had just noticed us and was checking us out. Granddaddy reached down, and before the little snake knew what was happening, he picked it up.

  It was a young and small snake—a teenage snake, a little training snake. It was no larger than your finger and not much over a foot long, if that.

  “Look at this little fella,” Granddaddy mused. “I am going to put him in the corncrib. There, he can catch mice and grow up to be a good rat eater. He will be happy up there.”

  I broke in with a new idea. “May I have the snake?” I heard myself say almost before I thought about what I was saying.

  “What do you want with a blacksnake?” he wondered to me.

  “I want to take it to my mama!” was the quick answer.

  Granddaddy chuckled. “I will give you this snake under one condition: you do not ever tell her that I had anything at all to do with it!”

  I swore up and down that I was good at keeping secrets. Granddaddy then walked back up to the barn and got a towsack. He put the snake in the towsack and tied a length of grass string around the top. He handed the wiggling sack to me.

  The sack was soon placed in the trunk of my mama’s car. Soon, I was on the way home, working on my presentation plan in my mind all the way.

  Once back at home, I went in the house and left the little snake in the car. I needed to think for a little while to figure all of this out. Some time passed with no plan yet made, so I decided to go back out to the car and check on the snake. When I opened the trunk of the Plymouth, there was the sack. It was flat and empty, with the string wiggled off the end of it. The snake was gone!

  I searched the trunk of the car, behind the spare and all over from corner to corner. I crawled under the car and looked in the wheel wells and along behind the rocker panels. Next was the inside of the car, from under the seats to under the dashboard. Last was under the engine hood, looking everywhere, even to taking the top off the air cleaner. There was no snake. It was simply gone.