Dear Father, Dear Son

by Larry Elder

“Just didn’t.”

  Were girls going to be this brutal when I started dating?

  Eventually, the rejects would stop calling. I felt sorry for them. One prospect was a Marine. He showed up in his blue uniform and wore the shiniest black shoes I’d even seen. He brought flowers, gave us candy, and stood up when Mom walked into the room. Never saw him again.

  Doris’s closet was stacked with boxes and boxes of shoes. The piles were so high you could almost hide behind them. She wouldn’t be able see you—but you could see her.

  That gave me an idea.

  Doris always got dressed in the closet. I could hide in her closet, cover myself with the boxes and take a peek at her as she dressed.

  I buried myself in shoes and boxes, and waited for her to come out of the shower. In a few minutes, the door opened. I was scared to death, afraid to even breathe. I shut my eyes, held my breath, and tried not to even let my pores open. After what seemed like forever, she dressed, cut off the light, and left. I never “saw” her and never tried again.

  “What did you see? Tell me!” Kirk demanded.

  “No, I chickened out. Kept my eyes closed.”

  “That’s just sad. You’re never going to get anywhere in life. And I’m too big to try it,” he said.

  At last, one of Doris’s dates made the cut. Don was tall, well-built, and GQ handsome. Doris was crazy about him. All the girls on the street managed to be outside right about the time Don pulled up in his big, shiny white car without a speck of dust. He was kind to Kirk and Dennis and me, too. He took us swimming and to Dodger games. He spent time talking and laughing with us, a big contrast with Doris’s other dates who thought of us as impediments. Sometimes he wore tight shirts or pants that showed muscles upon muscles.

  “Honey, that is a man,” Doris said to a girlfriend.

  Mom despised him. Absolutely, positively, couldn’t stand the man.

  One time, I said something about Don being handsome.

  “You think so?” Mom said.

  “Of course he’s handsome. His face, his body, perfect teeth.”

  “Well, I don’t see it.”

  “You don’t see it?”

  “No.”

  “Mom, you just don’t like him. And when you don’t like somebody they could look like Sidney Poitier and you’ll think he’s ugly.”

  “Hu-u-um, maybe so. But there’s something about that man.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know, but there’s something I don’t like.”

  “Thought so.”

  “Don’t tell Doris,” she said. “It’s her life, but I’ll tell you right now something’s not right about that man. If I’m wrong, may I be struck by lightning.”

  “Oh, Mom.” I cupped my hands and clapped them, imitating the sound of thunder.

  “You just wait,” she said.

  One day, a few months later, Doris came home, rushed in, and dove onto the couch. She cried for hours. Don, she discovered, was not only married, but had two children. His wife found out about Doris and confronted her in the department store where Doris worked part-time. Doris was crushed and humiliated.

  Mom put her arms around Doris. They sat rocking for hours. Doris moved away about three years later, but she was never the same—no longer the joyful co-ed who bounded down from the plane that day.

  “So that’s what happened to Don,” Dad said. “He was just gone one day. And nobody told me what happened.”

  “Mom smelled a rat from the get-go.”

  “Like I said. She’s a pistol.”

  “More like an Uzi.”

  “What’s an Uzi?”

  “An Israeli combat submachine gun.”

  He almost spilled his coffee.

  “Better not have an affair if you want to live,” I said.

  “Don’t worry.”

  When Mom stopped working at the restaurant, she took a job as a clerk with the phone company. After a few years, Pacific Telephone considered her for a supervisor position, a huge deal and rare opportunity for a clerk with no four-year degree, in a facility with no black supervisors.

  She underwent a series of tests. And came home every night on the verge of pulling out.

  “I don’t think I can pass these tests,” she said. “I think I’m cracking up.”

  But she studied hard and passed.

  Then there were months of training. She again came home stressed and wondering whether she could make it.

  “I’m going in tomorrow and tell them I can’t do it,” she said more than once. “I want to go back to my old job.”

  But she hung in and made supervisor. They gave her an office and an assistant.

  “Your father found out how much money I was making,” she said, smiling, a few months later.

  They never discussed money. But Mom needed Dad to know that she made more money than he did.

  “How did he find out?”

  “I left my paycheck on the kitchen table when he was drinking his coffee, and I got up to use the bathroom and pretended that I forgot it.”

  “How do you know he looked at it?”

  “Well, I put the envelope right here.”

  She demonstrated how she carefully placed it between “these two marks.”

  “Then I went to the bathroom, and when I came back I could tell it had been moved because it wasn’t on the same marks.”

  She couldn’t have been happier.

  I didn’t tell Dad about the paycheck, the marks on the table, and Mom’s glee.

  When I went away to college, I found out that a lot of parents tried to stop their kids from going away to school. Some tried hard to get them to stay local.

  “It’s a good thing Mom wasn’t like that.” She looked forward to my seeing another part of the country. “She didn’t feel a thing when I left.”

  “Oh, yes she did.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Remember when she dropped you off at the airport?”

  “Yes.”

  “Came home and threw up all night.”

  “Really?”

  “I know. I was there to help her up. And I was depressed for days.”

  “Really?”

  “We’re not as tough as you think.”

  “You know, Mom ran off one of Kirk’s girlfriends.”

  “What?”

  Kirk was about seventeen, and was seeing a woman who was in her mid-twenties with a kid.

  “Mom was not happy.”

  “I don’t blame her,” Dad said.

  She was originally from San Jose and told Kirk she wanted to move back there with him as soon as they could get together the money to travel.

  “Mom sat her down and told her it was unfair to push this kind of responsibility on a seventeen-year-old still in high school. She offered to pay for her bus fare to San Jose, and give her a couple hundred dollars to get on her feet. But she was not to see or call Kirk ever again.”

  “What happened?”

  “She took the money, and Kirk never saw her again.”

  “Damn.”

  She didn’t do quite the same thing to me, but she made it clear when she didn’t think someone was suitable.

  “I brought a girl I met in law school out to L.A. during a semester break. Mom immediately disliked her.”

  “Why?”

  “Mom told me she talked too much.”

  The three of us were at home, standing in the hallway, when Mom saw a spider on the wall directly behind the girl.

  “Quick,” Mom said to her, “hand me your shoe.”

  Startled, she removed her shoe. Thwack! Mom smashed the spider with the shoe—and handed the shoe back to her.

  “With the spider on the bottom?”

  “She didn’t even wipe the shoe off.”

  “No.”

  “Yes.”

  Dad smiled. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Neither did the girl.”

  We both laughed.

  19

  WA
Y BACK HOME

  “What was it like,” Dad asked, “goin’ down to Huntsville, comin’ from a big city like this?”

  Every summer for three years, my brothers and I took a train to “the family farm” in a tiny town called Toney, right outside Huntsville, Alabama, where my mother, her sister, and brothers were raised. I was nine or ten the first time.

  Going from Los Angeles to Huntsville was like stepping into a prehistoric era. Grandma and Grandpa didn’t have indoor plumbing. The restroom was an outhouse a hundred yards from the house. At night, my grandparents set a bucket with vinegar near your bed.

  “That’s in case y’all got to pee in the middle of night,” said Grandpa.

  If you had a more serious emergency, you grabbed a roll of toilet paper, and groped your way in the darkness toward the outhouse by following the God-awful smell.

  My grandparents scolded us for using so much toilet paper to wipe ourselves. A roll might last them more than a month, and Grandma asked why it was necessary for us to be so “city clean.”

  “Ain’t nobody goin’ smell you down there, no way.”

  To bathe, they pumped water from the well in large buckets. The buckets were hung on a rod over the fireplace. The heated water was poured into a large bathing tub. Kirk went first and enjoyed fresh, fairly hot water. Then it was my turn to wash up in the now warmish, dirty water.

  “Hurry up, Larry,” Dennis said. “Grandma, he’s taking his time on purpose.”

  After I got out, Dennis balked, “Grandma, the water is nasty.”

  “Why don’t cha just stand outside, then, an’ shake the dirt off?” Grandma said. “Boy, git in that tub!”

  He complied. After this, we started bathing in the creek. The water was cold, but it looked cleaner.

  Grandpa was tall and strong. From the moment he woke up until he went to bed, he was never without a pipe. All day, he reached into his blue overalls, and carefully opened a packet of coiled tobacco. He broke off a piece and stuffed it in his pipe just as the last wad was burning out. He bent down next to the fireplace, grabbed a straw, stuck it in the fire and lit the pipe. He mashed down the red-hot tobacco with a finger that was blackened with ashes.

  He was a thing of beauty. I couldn’t take my eyes off of him.

  “Whatcha lookin’ at?” he said when he caught me staring.

  He hummed, always, no matter what he was doing. He hummed when he checked the chickens for eggs. He hummed when he fed the hogs. He hummed when he grabbed a stick and tried to kill a snake that Dennis saw in the front of the old three-bedroom farmhouse.

  He joked all the time, and they all started with, “Did ah ever tell you ‘bout the time…” That’s how he began the first joke he told me, just moments after I’d laid eyes on him for the first time.

  “Did ah ever tell you ’bout the man who said, ‘If I had some ham, I’d make me some ham and eggs—if I had the eggs.’”

  He told me that Mom was so difficult to make laugh that he would use her to test out the jokes he planned to tell at his Mason meetings.

  “If that girl laughed, then I knowed it was a good ’un.”

  Grandpa never cursed. When he dropped the bucket after he just milked the cows, he said, “Oh, foot!” When he checked the nest of a laying hen, and found that she had underperformed, he said, “Oh, foot.”

  “What did you say, Grandpa?” I finally had to ask.

  “Oh, foot!”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Oh, foot.”

  “How do you spell it?”

  “Spell what?”

  “Whatever it was you said.”

  “I ain’t spellin’. I’m speakin’.”

  He walked slowly, a kind of shuffle that had less to do with age and more about “not seein’ no point in rushin’ ’round all the time.”

  “I’ll git there when I git there,” he’d say.

  He drove their 1949 car with the gearshift on the steering column the same way he walked—slowly. Fifteen miles per hour, at the most. He and Grandma occasionally waved to people and gossiped about them as they drove.

  They passed a middle-aged man in a straw hat with a goofy, toothless smile. He was sitting on a tree stump and puffing a pipe.

  “Yonder go John Lesley.” Grandma waved. “Looks like he’s stayin’ with Freddie tonight.”

  “Been there all week,” Grandpa said.

  “That’s John Lesley?” I asked.

  “How’d you know him?” Grandma asked.

  I told her that when we did something Mom thought stupid, she’d say, “John Lesley knows better than that.”

  “I didn’t know he was a real person.”

  They explained that John Lesley had mental problems. Nobody knew for sure, but the rumor was that a horse had kicked him in the head.

  “Ain’t so,” Grandpa said.

  “That’s what pastor told me.”

  “Don’t make it true.”

  He never worked, had no home, and survived by people taking him in. After a while, he’d leave, and somebody else would put him up and feed him.

  “Does he do chores for the people who put him up?” I asked.

  “Never seen him do none,” she said.

  “Have you ever let him stay with you?”

  “Couple times,” Grandma said. “Nice fella. Ain’t got a lick of sense.”

  I turned to look back at him from the rear window. He was waving to another car.

  “So that’s John Lesley.” Wait’ll I tell Kirk and Dennis.

  When Grandpa drove those unpaved two-lane country roads, any car behind him would soon catch up. Drivers honked—not out of annoyance, but to say, “How do”—and passed him leaving a cloud of red clay. Grandpa lifted a finger off the steering wheel and nodded to them. “How do?” And hummed right through the dust.

  They grew cotton, watermelon, corn, and sugarcane. Dennis and I would take a butcher knife to the sugarcane field, hack a piece off a stalk and, with our teeth, strip off the bamboo-like skin which left a sweet white stick. We chewed the stick, swallowing the juice, and spitting out the pulp.

  Dennis and I chased the chickens and the guineas in the front yard, but they were way too fast and we never caught one. They ran, scared to death, the moment you got near them. One day I set a trap. On the dirt patch where the chickens walked around, I put a stick attached to a string propped up underneath one side of a cardboard box. A hen, with a line of four little fuzzy yellow chicks following behind, paraded by. When she walked underneath the box, I pulled the string. The hen avoided the box as it dropped down, but a little chick was trapped. I carefully lifted the box and grabbed the little feather-ball. The chick was twisting and chirping like mad. Mama hen pivoted and flew directly at my eyes. I dropped the chick. Mom retrieved her, and they scrambled away.

  “She almost poked your eye out!” Dennis said. “She was ready to die for her!”

  But it was a horse that almost killed me.

  Grandpa and I were bringing in his two big plow horses after a full day in the field.

  “You stand over yonder,” he said, motioning for me to stand off to the side while he removed the horses’ harnesses.

  To get a better view, I moved over and stood close behind one of the horses. When Grandpa removed the collar from the horse’s neck, the horse stood on his front legs and kicked his back legs in the air. The hooves came within an inch of my face.

  “Boy, what you doin’?!” Grandpa screamed. “I told you to stand yonder! That horse almos’ knocked you dead!”

  “I wanted to see what you were doing.”

  “Don’t you know enuff not to git behind a horse when you set it free? They kick so fast you cain’t git out of the way.”

  “Sorry, Grandpa, I didn’t know that.”

  “Oh, foot. John Lesley knows better ’n that.”

  Grandpa took stalks of sugarcane to a nearby farm. There was a large round wooden hub on the ground, and attached to the hub was a long pole parallel to the ground about fou
r feet high. The pole was tied to a mule that walked round and round the hub. Grandpa fed the sugar cane stalks into an opening in the hub, which slowly swallowed up cane and ground it. The juice flowed into a huge, steaming vat, its fire stoked from the gigantic woodpile stacked off to one side. Finally, there was a metal chute, a little narrower than the ramp on a kid’s slide in the park. Down the chute flowed a thick brown goo—molasses, or ’lasses as Grandpa called it.

  In the mornings, even before Grandma made breakfast, we’d pretend we had to go to the outhouse and head over to the huge watermelon patch. We’d select one that looked ripe, bust it open by dropping it, and dive face down into it. The chickens fought each other for the seeds we shot out. Grandma wondered why we didn’t eat more breakfast.

  “After ah done made biscuits an’ fat back? You boys better eat ’cuz ain’t goin’ be nothin’ ’til later.”

  Grandpa was also the country barber. He charged 25 cents a head, and after farming all day, he cut hair for hours. I think he loved having a stage to tell jokes more than he wanted the money.

  “He was a good barber, too, Dad. Better than you.”

  Dad laughed.

  Every day, all summer, whenever the mood struck us, we ran down to the sugarcane field or to the watermelon patch and chewed and ate until our jaws got tired. It didn’t seem legal.

  They grew berries and vegetables. They used the two plow horses in the summer to round up the grain that was stored to feed the livestock.

  From a window, I watched Grandpa, Grandma, and some men they hired load hay with pitchforks and stack the bales in the barn to feed the horses all year. It looked so fun, I asked Grandma if I could help.

  “You too liddle. You ain’t nothin’ be a tetch. It’s too hot. Cain’t handle it.”

  I begged her every day until she relented.

  “Now if it gits too much, you say somthin’ ya heah.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I’m gonna be watchin’ you.”

  “Yes, ma’am. But I’ll be fine.”

  The pitchfork looked a lot lighter from the front porch. So did the hay. After fifteen minutes, each scoop weighed five pounds more than the last one. I wilted in the heat, got dizzy, and passed out.

  “I ain’t gonna say I tried to tell ya’,” she said when I woke up. “Tain’t as easy as it looks.”