Willow Tree

By Larrywomack.com

1.

For me a twelve-year-old in the summer of 1951, time didn’t matter. My two younger brothers and I arose around seven, breakfasted on Wheat Chex, and usually went our separate ways to play with friends our ages.  Though my group was often consumed with sports of one kind or another, we occasionally played cowboys and Indians with the younger kids.  Neither especially good nor particularly interested in sports, I would sometimes disappear from the play and head to a majestic old weeping willow tree in a neighbor’s yard.

That tree must have been a million years old and was the tallest I’d seen.  Though its branches were too high for climbing, its myriad drooping willows provided a comforting dome of shade and a perfect hideaway for daydreaming and reflection.  It was my special place where I could lean back on the gargantuan trunk, sort through my recently accumulated knowledge, and dream of future exploits and accomplishments.

Minutes, hours, days, weeks, eons went by.  I had no concept of time – when I arrived or when I left. It didn’t matter. And I can still vividly recall many of those distant daydreams – some of which came to pass and some of which, thank God, didn’t.  The details of the surroundings and the calmness of the experience are also as alive today as then.  Closing my eyes, I hear my friends at play in the distance, smell the earth beneath me, feel the bark against my head, and taste the bitter juice from the willow branch between my teeth.

Time passed, though I didn’t understand that concept until three or four years later, when I began to emulate adults.  Then, time was just hands on a clock.  As a youth I thought the adults around me were all overly concerned with time.

Adults used phrases like wasting time, spending time, and killing time.  Until I became an adult, I never thought of time as a consumable.  More recently, I have come to regretted that. There is profundity in a twelve-year-olds concept of time – never want it to fly or stop.  With youth, there is limitless time for dreaming of the future and living in the present.  In those early years, the concept of past extends only as far back as yesterday.

The willow tree towered over the backyard of Miss Etha Green and her elderly father.  Etha was an old-maid schoolteacher.  Miss Etha was always dressed as if she were going to church, which she often was.  I considered her right pretty for an old maid and I liked the way she dressed.  Nobody else in the neighborhood looked as nice as she did all the time.

Miss Etha was friendly but she acted like a know-it-all.  Like I said, she was pretty – pretty enough to find a husband, but with her haughty attitude it was easy to see why no man would want to marry her.

I often saw Miss Etha when my mother took me to the library.  So at first I assumed her “flutiness” was probably about books and studious things.  That summer, however, I found that she was the way she was because of the way she knew Jesus.

The 12^th Avenue Church of Christ people said that if you didn’t go to their church you wouldn’t get into Heaven.  There was a lot of 12^th Avenue Church of Christ people in the neighborhood.  Etha Green was the youth director at that church and the neighborhood ringleader in spreading the Church of Christ opinion of Jesus and of going to Heaven.

When she’d see someone she didn’t know, kid or adult, the first thing out of her mouth was, Where do you go to church?  If you didn’t say you went to the Church of Christ, the next thing she’d do was ask you to go to church with her the next Sunday.

One time a bunch of us boys were playing football in the street in front of her house and she came out and asked, How many of you boys want to go to Sunday school with me next Sunday?  Most of the boys ran away so they wouldn’t have to answer.  Like a fool, I just stood there.  The only boys left were her nephew Kenny Green and me.

He asked, “You want to go?”

I said, “I guess so.”

My parents said I could go if I wanted to but they made a kind of frown at one another and then sort of giggled.

Kenny came by my house Sunday about 9:15 and we walked together to 12^th Avenue Church of Christ, which was just one block over from Cephas, my street.  The place looked more like a school than a church but it was air conditioned throughout.   She introduced me to the class and said that I usually went to the Methodist Church.  Though I knew many of the kids there, they looked at me like I was the new freak in the neighborhood.  It made me want to leave right then.

After a boring couple of hours of mostly Bible readings and prayers, Sunday school ended and I went into the big auditorium with Kenny.  It looked like the movie theater with the lights on.  He told me that the Church of Christ didn’t believe in musical instruments so there wasn’t an organ or piano.  He said they didn’t believe in crosses or stained glass windows either because those things weren’t mentioned in the Bible.  I suddenly realized that we were staying for church – something I hadn’t planned on.

After we all sat down, their preacher got up and said, “Let’s all turn to page 347 in the hymnal and sing Are You Washed in the Blood of The Lamb.”

I thought that was a pretty creepy song to sing in any church with or without an organ.

Church seemed to go on for days.  People stood up and said they’d sinned and promised not to do it again.  That was something I wasn’t used to in the Methodist Church.  There were prayers about this and that from what seemed like everyone there, and lots of bad singing of songs I’d never heard before or since.

As church let out, I thought, I’ll never complain about the Methodist Church again.  When Kenny and I passed Miss Etha’s house on the way home, I decided in my head that whatever it was that Etha Green thought she knew about Jesus and Heaven that I didn’t . . . was just fine with me.  Miss Etha continued to be friendly but neither she nor Kenny ever asked me to go the Sunday school with them again.  That too was just fine with me.

My parents asked, how it went?  I said that it was long and boring and that they all seemed a bit weird to me.  I also told them I was looking forward to going back to the Methodist Church next Sunday, and went out to play with my brothers in the backyard.

The next morning, Rodney Adair, Billy Roy Carrigan, and I decided to go up to the Buchanan Street Methodist Church to play Ping-Pong in the basement.  We sat on the rock wall in front of the church to wait for Brother Johnson, the preacher, to get there.  We waited about a half-hour.

Brother Johnson was a big man, with big scaly hands, a big voice, and a friendly smile, but when he wasn’t up front preaching he always seemed as if his mind was someplace else. I guessed he was thinking about God or Jesus or something in the Bible.

During the week he spent a lot of time in his office talking on the phone and to members who dropped by.  He told us boys we could play Ping-Pong downstairs in the cool concrete basement as long as we didn’t make too much noise.  I think he only had to run us out twice.

In every other sermon that summer he mentioned that he had witnessed 83 electric chair executions at the state penitentiary.  As I was shaking hands with him after church one Sunday, I asked him about the executions.

He said, “Good to see you, good to see you, How’s your mamma doing?”

I don’t know if he heard me and didn’t want to answer or if he just wasn’t paying attention.  You could never tell with Brother Johnson.

We had been playing Ping-Pong for about two hours when Brother Johnson came downstairs with a fellow he introduced as the warden of the penitentiary.  It scared the bejesus out of us.  Brother Johnson said he hoped that would be the last time we’d ever see the warden.  They laughed and went upstairs.  We left.  I don’t know where Billy Roy and Rodney went, but I headed for the willow tree.

Sitting there I thought about my grandfather, who was a policeman and who also had a shop in his basement where he made the keys for the state prison.  I thought maybe my grandfather knew the warden too.  Because my grandfather went to the Episcopal Church, I figured he didn’t know Brother Johnson even though my grandfather’s house was in walking distance of my neighborhood.  Thinking of the Episcopal Church, where I occasionally went, reminded me of the 12^th Avenue Church of Christ and Miss Etha.  I found it interesting that someone who seemed as smart as she went to such a stupid church.

I wondered if my grandfather had ever sent someone to prison.  Maybe sometime he had to take a prisoner out to the penitentiary and he ran into Brother Johnson going to an execution.  Or maybe he took some new keys to the warden and the warden introduced him to Brother Johnson who was out there to witness a guy getting fried for something my grandfather caught him doing.

If I had a choice of being a policeman, a criminal, a preacher, or a warden, I think I’d choose preacher.  If I could be a cowboy or an Indian, I’d choose cowboy.  I wondered if Miss Etha became a teacher because she was an old maid or if she became an old maid because she was a teacher.

My mind jumped to Tiny.  Tiny had a face like a woman but dressed like a man.  Though Tiny was about the size of a ten-year-old boy, he appeared to be a lot older.  It is always hard to tell the age of a freak, I thought.  Besides Tiny, we had several other freaks in this neighborhood – a deaf-and-dumb boy, a retard, and a queer.  But Tiny was my favorite, even though we never spoke a word to one another.

Sometimes Tiny would come into Bill’s Place, the diner (with air conditioning) where we boys hung out that summer.  It was across the side street from the Methodist Church where we played Ping-Pong.  Tiny would order a hamburger and a Coke and go to the far corner booth, eat it quickly, and leave.

The other place where I saw Tiny was the bus stop in front of the Methodist Church.  A big hackberry tree in the churchyard sheltered the butt-high concrete retaining wall where you could sit and wait for the bus. Tiny waited there every weekday morning for the 10 o’clock bus.

On the mornings I happened to pass by at that time, I could see Tiny walking fast up the street.  Tiny walked with a priss, arms folded in front; looking down; with head moving slightly from side to side.

I don’t know how I knew that Tiny was a hermaphrodite but like everyone else, I knew it.  Sometimes one of our buddies would say, You know Tiny’s a hermaphrodite.  And the rest of us would say that we already knew it.

A hermaphrodite has got a weenie, a girl hole, and a butt hole.  Born that way and only God knows why.  I always wanted to see what Tiny looked like down there.  I wondered if the girl hole was on top and the weenie was on the bottom or what.  The only girl hole I had ever seen was in a magazine at the barbershop.  It was a small picture and I could only see hair.  I had to imagine there was a hole there.

Tiny looked smart, as if he or she or it knew something that the rest of us didn’t, like Miss Etha.  I don’t mean about the location of parts or what he she or it could or couldn’t do with them.  I mean important stuff.  Though Tiny might have seemed a little embarrassed that everyone knew about the hermaphrodite thing, he always had an air of confidence.  Not something you’d expect from a freak.  There was something high class about Tiny.  Oops, I thought, I should never say that to anyone.  They might call me a freak too or maybe even a hermaphrodite.

“Larry!  Larry!  Come home.  I need you to go to the store.”  I could hear my mother call from two doors down.

 

2.

 Rodney, Billy Roy, and I had hooked up again and decided to go down to Bill’s Place for a Coke and to watch the older guys play the pinball machine.

There were two places in the neighborhood where you could buy a hamburger and a soda fountain Coke – Bill’s Place and the drugstore.  The drugstore didn’t have a pinball machine.  Bill’s Place did.  Anybody could play the pinball machine but you had to be sixteen before you could win any money.

Bill, a quiet and pleasant man, did everything in the diner.  He cooked, served, swept the floor, sold cigarettes, took your money, and whatever.  He was a one-man show. 

Bill was tall and thin.  I never saw him without a cigarette dangling out of his mouth.   He even talked with the cigarette in there.  Sometimes he’d make my friends and me go over to the corner of the place so he could tell the older guys a joke.

Bill’s Place was on a side street across from the Methodist Church and next door to a service station.  The mechanics who worked next door always came in for lunch, but I never saw anyone from the church in there except for us guys.

Someone hit the jackpot on the pinball machine. Bill got excited and jumped around like he always did.  It looked like an act to me.  I couldn’t understand why he’d get so excited from someone winning the money from his cash register.  I hoped when I got older it would make more sense.

When I got home, Ada Bing was there.  Ada Bing was a gossip.  She’d make the rounds of houses almost every day with the latest neighborhood news.  Mrs. Bing was drinking a glass of iced tea as my mother ironed in the kitchen.  I spoke, got a glass of water, and went back towards the front door.  They didn’t know it but I detoured through the bedroom and headed for the back porch where I could hear the gossip without being seen.

Ada Bing went to the 12^th Avenue Church of Christ but she’d just as soon tell something on one of them as on a Methodist or Baptist.  One time I heard her telling something about the Jew man who ran the Five & Dime, and him possibly doing it with a girl who worked in his store and making a baby.

Peeking through the cracked door, I noticed that Mrs. Bing was as white as a ghost.

The last thing I heard her say was, “Eva, turn up the radio!”

She and my mother stayed in the kitchen for more than an hour.  When she left she was still pale as a ghost. I went into the kitchen to see if I could learn something.  But by then my mother was on the phone talking to her sister.  I heard her say that Ada Bing and the preacher at the 12^th Avenue Church of Christ were going to have to get up in front of the members of the church the very next Sunday and admit that they had been sleeping together for months and ask for forgiveness of their sin.

They must have been doing it, I thought.  I also thought that the 12^th Avenue Church of Christ must have some rules about sin that I’d never heard of in the Methodist Church.  In the Methodist Church, we didn’t talk much about sin.   Maybe they talked about it in the adult Sunday school class but I doubted it.  Because when it was over most of the people coming out were laughing and having fun.

That night I told my mother that I was thinking about going to church with Kenny Green again the next Sunday. She said I couldn’t and looked at me like she thought I might know something. In bed, I lay awake wondering what it would be like to do it and trying to figure out just how old one needed it to be for it to work right.

The next morning, I awoke early and went to the bathroom to pee. I flushed the toilet and turned to leave when I saw through the bathroom window, out of the corner of my eye, something move on the Conyers’ back porch next door. Holy, moly, I thought! It’s Delores Conyers standing there in her underpants.  No top!

Delores was thirteen.  One year older than I.   Delores’ head was elongated like that of a horse. She was not unattractive, but she wasn’t a beauty either.  I could see her tits.  They were smaller than the ones I’d seen the barbershop magazines, but they were tits nonetheless. She also had a curvy butt.

Delores walked to the edge of the porch and looked out to see if anyone was around.  She didn’t see a soul.  Not once did she look towards my bathroom window.  I stepped into the tub to see better.

I had never seen real tits before, except on my mother.  That didn’t count.

They had little brown circles and nipples like mine, only bigger.  She reached up and rubbed them and at the same time she kind of twisted her butt around – sort of like dancing.  Delores raised her arms, turned two circles and went inside.

I went back to the bedroom to check the time – 6:45.  I got up every morning after that for eight days and stood in the bathtub for about a half-hour.  She never appeared again.

As I stood in tub each day, I tried to imagine what it would be like to do it with Delores but I couldn’t quite figure it out.

Later that day, I saw Delores and her brother standing in their front yard.  Delores, who for some reason never spoke directly to me, asked her brother to ask me if I wanted some cookies she had baked.  I’d answer sure.  She went in the house, brought the back cookies on a paper plate, and hand them to her brother to give to me.

“Thanks,” I said.

She thought I meant for the cookies.  I took the cookies up to the willow tree.

 

3.

Mr. Stein ran the Five & Dime.  It was the only store in the neighborhood that sold clothes, underwear, socks, sewing stuff, writing tablets and pencils, small gifts like little statues and candles, and toys.

Mr. Stein was fat.  He had a big red nose and he talked funny, like some of the people I saw in the movies and heard on the radio.  One time I heard Mr. Stein say that he was from New York.  I saw movies of New York on the newsreels that showed Times Square and the Empire State Building.  It looked like an interesting place.

Some of the kids thought he was mean.  I thought he was just different.

He used to say to us, “If you play with it, you buy it!”

Rodney, Billy Roy, and I were looking for something to do and Billy Roy suggested that we go up and make fun of Mr. Stein.  No one else had a better idea so we headed up Cephas Street to Buchanan.  We hid just outside the door to the left of the show window and on the count of three ran in hollering, Jew man Stein from the Five & Dime! and ran out the other door.

I didn’t know how that got started until one day I heard two men talking in the barbershop about how if it hadn’t been for the Jews all our boys wouldn’t have gotten killed in the War in Germany.  I guessed that’s why we all made fun of Mr. Stein even though he was from New York and not Germany.

The men agreed that all the Jews should be sent back to Europe where they caused all the trouble.   All along I thought the Germans caused the War and we went over there to rescue the Jews from the Germans.  After hearing that in the barbershop, I became a little afraid of Mr. Stein.

Billy Roy and Rodney made it out, but just as I was going through the door, a lady was coming in and I hit her straight on, falling to the floor.

Mr. Stein came over and said,  “Larry?  You OK?  I didn’t know he knew my name!”

I said, “Yes.”

He said, “You need to be more careful next time and you should apologize to Mrs. Bogle for running into her.”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Bogle.”

“You be more careful next time,” she said.

I limped out of the store and didn’t see Rodney or Billy Roy.  I cut through the alley behind Cephas and went to Miss Etha’s yard and the willow tree to determine my next move.

After what everyone had said about Mr. Stein, I was afraid that he might try to hurt me or call the police.  But he was awfully nice to me after my accident, I thought.  That was confusing.

Call the police. What if he called the police and my grandfather showed up?  Would I be in trouble then?  And what if Mr. Stein went down the street and told Brother Johnson about me coming in and making fun of him and then Brother Johnson made me get up in front of everyone at the Buchanan Street Methodist Church and confess my sin.  I wondered if being a hermaphrodite or a Jew is a sin.  I didn’t think I’d want to be either.

And what about Sunday?  I sure wanted to hear what Ada Bing and the preacher at the 12^th Avenue Church of Christ had to say.  And I had been looking forward to going to Buchanan Street Methodist on Sunday, but what if Mr. Stein said something to Brother Johnson.  I decided that Sunday should be a day of rest.  I was staying home . . . just in case.

“Larry, Where are you?”

It was my mother again.  I headed home.

After doing my chores, I wandered down to Bill’s Place to find Rodney and Billy Roy.  They weren’t there.  What about the drugstore? I thought.

Eddie, the soda jerk, made the best chocolate sodas in the world.  He used two scoops of vanilla ice cream and a big dipper of chocolate syrup.  Then he’d spray it with carbonated water to make it fizz, put a little whipped cream with a cherry on top, stick in a spoon and a straw, and it was the best!

Eddie worked for Dr. Jones, the druggist.  On Eddie’s day off Dr. Jones made the sodas.  They were never as good as Eddie’s.  We’d usually order a cherry smash and get a package of Eat-A-Snack peanut butter and crackers to munch along with it when Dr. Jones was behind the counter.

Eddie was skinny as a rail and smoked all the time. He had been in the War.  Some people said that was why he sometimes acted strange.  Mr. Hunt, the barber next door, said it was because Eddie fixed himself a little toddy three or four times a day.  You could usually tell when Eddie had one too many toddies because he’d start singing country music, which nobody but Eddie liked, and he’d also start insulting some of the customers.

Eddie would ignore us kids, flirt with all the ladies, and smart off to the men.  Dr. Jones would get mad at Eddie and send him home.  Several times Dr. Jones told us that Eddie wouldn’t be back.  But he’d show up the next week and start making those great chocolate sodas again.

Going into the drugstore, I saw Rodney and Billy Roy sitting on stools at the soda counter with my retarded cousin, Van Junior, and Dr. Jones was behind the counter.

“Where’s Eddie?” I asked.

“Eddie’s dead,” said Dr. Jones.  He got run over by a bus. Can I fix you a soda?”

“No thank you, Dr. Jones,” I said.  “I’ll have a cherry smash and a package of Eat-A-Snacks.”

“You boys excuse me, I’ve got to go fill Mrs. Bogle’s prescription.”

That made me nervous.

“So Eddie’s dead,” I said.

“Yep!” said Van Junior with a tear in his eye.  Billy Roy and Rodney just sat there.

Van Junior was the only retard in the neighborhood and his mother was my grandmother’s sister. His mother babied him, I was told.  She even shaved him every day and he was a grown man.  He hung out regularly at the drug store where everybody made fun of him.  But he didn’t seem to know.  He worked for the milkman delivering milk early every morning but I think I was the only one who knew that.   He told the others he was a highway patrolman and would show them this badge he had.

Van Junior also went to the Buchanan Street Methodist Church. Before Sunday school, he’d hang around with us young guys instead of talking with the adults.  Then when it started he’d go into the adult class.  I always thought that since he was a retard, he would probably get more out of going to Sunday school with us kids than going with them.  I mentioned it one time to a classmate and he said he didn’t think it was a good idea to have a freak in Sunday school.

Van Junior couldn’t drive a car, he couldn’t read, and he couldn’t tell time.  And everybody knew it.  They thought he didn’t do anything but hang out at the drugstore, tell tall tales, and on Saturday nights go downtown to the Grand Ole Opry.

“I’n doin’ to da’ Grand Ole Opry Saturday night and ater da’ show, Little Jimmy Dickens is doin’ to get me tum’ putty. “

It hadn’t been long since I thought Pussy was just the nickname of Richard Knox’s sister who was known to do it with a lot of different guys, according to Richard and others.  I now knew he meant get him a woman to do it with.

Van Junior said, “I was doin’ to take Eddie wit me tause he said he really likes putty.”

Billy Roy said he didn’t think Van Junior would know a pussy if it hit him right in the face.  We all laughed including Van Junior.  Then Van Junior said that it wasn’t his face that wanted pussy, it was his wee wee.  We all laughed again.  Then in a instant you could see the four of us think about Eddie.

“He dot run over by a car,” said Van Junior.

“Bus,” said Rodney.

Billy Roy, Rodney, and I paid our bills and left.  We walked all the way home without saying a word.

When I got home, my father said he had a treat for me.  He was going to take me to the Grand Ole Opry with him that night.  My father was a fireman, but the people who ran the Ryman Auditorium, where the Opry was, hired firemen on the weekends to take up tickets and guard the doors.  I had been a few times and it was fun.  I always left before my father did because he had to stay until it was over.  He’d put me on the bus that stopped on the corner of Cephas Street and Buchanan, seven houses from home. 

I wandered around backstage for a while and looked at all the Opry stars in their fancy cowboy clothes.  I thought, no cowboy in his right mind would dress like that.  After eating a bag of popcorn and drinking a Coke, I had had enough and told my father I was ready to catch the bus home.  He walked me to the bus stop and returned to the Opry.

A car stopped right in front of me and the driver said, “Hey, Larry!”

It was Earl Selly from the neighborhood.

“You want a ride home?  I’m headed that way.”

Earl Selly was a known queer.  I didn’t know what to do.  He was an adult asking me if I wanted a ride and he had a nice car. But he was a known queer.

I said, “Thank you, Mr. Selly, and got in.”

He said, “Aw, you can call me Earl.”

He asked me all the usual questions about age, school, and summer and I answered them as politely as I could, given the circumstances.  His house was on the corner of Cephas and Buchanan, just six houses up from mine.  When we got to his house he parked the car in front and I got out and told him thank you for the ride.

He said, “Any time, any time.”

Walking home, I thought about him being a queer and I wondered why he became one.  I walked by Miss Etha’s house where I could see the giant willow tree looming in the shadows of her backyard.  I really wanted to go there but the night wouldn’t let me.  When I got home my mother was on the phone and not aware of my earlier-than-usual arrival.  No one ever asked how I got home that night and I never told a soul.

 

4.

Mrs. Ballinger’s husband was killed in the War.  He was on an aircraft carrier in the South Pacific when a Kamikaze pilot crashed his plane on the deck of the carrier and blew Mrs. Ballinger’s husband into the water along with several other sailors.  While he was in the water, another Kamikaze pilot crashed on the carrier sending shrapnel into the water.  Some of it hit Mr. Ballinger in the head and killed him.  They never found his body.

Mrs. Ballinger was a big woman with big breasts who always wore dark dresses, nylon stockings, and high-heel shoes – like she was going somewhere.  But she mostly stayed home with her son Jimmy, a red-haired freckled-face boy about my age who was a smart aleck and not one of the guys.

When she did go somewhere, it was on the bus in the middle of the day.  She was friendlier to the adults in the neighborhood than to us kids.  I think she knew we didn’t like her son all that much.

When we’d give Jimmy a hard time, he’d say he was going to tell his mother who would tell our parents; then we’d be in trouble.  When that did occasionally happen, my mother would say, Now you be nice to Jimmy; his father was killed in the War.

Billy Roy, Rodney, and I were meeting some other guys for a baseball game down at the other end of Cephas Street – was a big field at Cephas and Clay Streets just right for baseball.  We passed the Ballinger house on the way to the field and needed one more kid for the game so we decided to ask Jimmy.

Mrs. Ballinger came to the door and said, “Yes, I’ll go get him, but I want you fellows to be nice to Jimmy.”

Jimmy joined us and we headed for the ball field. After the game we all stopped at Seats Grocery Store, also on the corner of Cephas and Clay Streets.

Seats Grocery Store wasn’t really a grocery store like the sign said.  It was a place where you could get a soft drink and a pack of crackers or an ice cream sandwich.  My favorite were the little miniature paraffin six packs of juice in cola-shaped bottles that you could chew after you bit the cap off the bottle and drank the juice.

Mr. Seats was the skinniest man I ever saw and looked like he only shaved once a week.  He had a big mole on the side of his nose with a lot of black hair growing out of it.

We guys went in there three or four times a week but I’ll bet Mr. Seats didn’t say more than twenty words to us all tolled.

We told him what we wanted, gave him the money – without a word – and walked over to the soft drink cooler to pick our drink.

Mr. and Mrs. Seats lived in the back of the store.  A curtain of beads hung between the store and their living room.  You could hear the baseball game on the radio through the beads and sometimes see Mrs. Seats moving around.

She was skinny too and wore a light blue dress that looked faded.  She didn’t say much either.  I wondered if they really cared whether we came in and bought something or not.

Just as we opened the drink box Mrs. Seats hollered, “Leonard, get in here . . . I think I’m dying.”

He ran in and we just stood there.

We heard him say, “I’m calling the doctor now!”

I peeked through the beads to see Mrs. Seats lying on the floor.  She smiled at me, closed her eyes, and went limp.

I turned to my friends and said, “Let’s get out of here!”

I ran out up the street towards my house with them following me.  About halfway up the block, I stopped.

“What did you see?” Jimmy Ballinger asked.

Out of breathe, I said, “I think I saw somebody die.”

Jimmy threw up on the spot and Billy Roy and Rodney ran like bandits!  I ended up in Miss Etha’s yard under the willow tree.

I had seen a lot of cowboys and Indians die but that was the first time I’d seen a dead person for real.  And she smiled at me right before she died. I suddenly realized that we were so scared that we forgot our drinks.  I guess we could go back later.  Mrs. Seats just crumpled to the floor and died.  I wondered if she was already in Heaven, or if it takes a while to get there.  I thought I’d ask Brother Johnson that one.

I wondered if Jimmy’s dad being killed in the War had anything to do with him being a smart aleck and a mamma’s boy.  I wondered if he threw up because of being around a dead lady or if the event reminded him of his daddy.  Was Jimmy’s daddy in Heaven?  I believed Jimmy and his mother went to the 12^th Avenue Church of Christ.  I was thinking, I’d like to go to heaven when I die.  From what they said in church, it seemed like a pretty nifty place.  Streets lined with gold, angels singing – I was sure that the angels didn’t sing that washed in the blood of the lamb song.

I didn’t stay under the tree as long as usual.  I walked slowly up the back alley towards home.  I hoped no one but my mother would be there.  I had a bunch of questions to ask her and I wanted to talk in private.

5.

 “Pussy ran away with a motorcycle guy last night,” said her brother Richard, stopping me on the sidewalk.

“Ran away for good?” I asked.

“Yep, that’s what she said.”

I had heard a lot about Pussy, but I don’t know how much was true or how much was made up.  Her younger brother Richard said that sometimes she’d do it with two or three guys a night.  One time he showed us a pair of panties that she’d worn the night before.  He said you could see stuff.  We all agreed but I didn’t see anything.

Pussy wore real short shorts. The only other place I’d seen shorts that short was on the lady on the flying trapeze at the circus.  Pussy liked to flirt with us younger boys and tease us about having little weenies.  Richard said she played with his one time but he couldn’t get her to do it again.  I wondered what that would be like.

Pussy’s real name was Jean, which is what we called her to her face.  I mentioned Pussy one time to an older brother of a friend.  That’s when I learned that the girl hole I saw in the magazine at the barbershop was called a pussy and that Pussy was just her nickname.

“It wasn’t just any old motorcycle guy either,” Richard said.  “It was one of those guys that ride motorcycles around in a metal cage at the circus.”

I could hardly wait to get down to Bill’s Place to tell the guys about Pussy!  Rodney and Billy Roy were there, watching Wayne the deaf-and-dumb guy play the pinball machine.

People said Wayne was deaf and dumb.  I got the deaf part but didn’t understand the dumb part. His name, Wayne, was about all he could say that you could understand, and he even said that funny like the corners of his mouth were sewn together.

Sometimes Wayne would try to sell you a little card with sign language on it. He’d mumble at you and wiggle his fingers.  Written on the card was I am deaf.  The sign language on this card can help you communicate with me.  The money used from your purchase of it will go towards my education at the school for the deaf.

I bought a card a couple of times from Wayne for a nickel, even though, if I could communicate with him, I probably had nothing I’d want to say to him.  I swear both times I saw him put my nickel in the pinball machine.

Sometimes some of the older guys would make a circle with the thumb and finger of their left hand and poke the middle finger of their right hand back and forth through the hole.

Wayne would say, “Ussy, ussy, ussy!”

They’d give him a nickel, laugh, and say, what a freak! But he didn’t hear them.

“Richard’s sister, Jean, ran off with the guy who rides the motorcycle around in the big steel ball at the circus!”

“Pussy?” said Billy Roy.

“What did you say?” asked Bill, cigarette dangling from his lips.

“That’s right, Richard just told me.”

“When did it happen?”

“Last night,” said Richard.

‘I Un! I Un! I Un!” uttered Wayne, as the bells and bangs of the pinball machine clattered throughout the diner.  “I Un! I Un!”

Bill went to the cash register to get Wayne’s winnings.

Handing him three dollars, Bill got real close to Wayne and mouthed slowly, “ Jean Knox ran away with a motorcycle guy last night.”

Wayne said, “Ussy, ussy, ussy!”

We all looked at one another.  How did Wayne know about that?  Who had told him about Pussy and how did they tell him.  After sharing the news with the guys, I headed to the barbershop.

Owen Hunt Barber Shop was on Buchanan Street next to the drugstore, down from the church.  Owen Hunt was a nice man with a moustache, dark hair with gray streaks in it, and he was always talking.  When I climbed in the chair, Mr. Hunt usually asked my age and then told me he remembered giving my first haircut when I was four years old. I think he had me mixed up with some other kid.

The barber chair sat in the middle of the floor of the shop.  About ten chairs that looked like the ones we had at our kitchen table lined one wall. A mirror ran the length of the shop behind the barber chair, and rows of bottles of smell-good stuff sat in front of the mirror.  On the two little tables in the shop were stacks of magazines of every kind.

Mr. Hunt had been in the War.  I think he was stationed somewhere like Florida and his job was cutting off the hair of all the new soldiers.  He didn’t like President Harry Truman but it seemed to me that every other man who came in the shop did.  So there was always a lot of arguing about Harry Truman.

One time I saw Mr. Hunt shake a razor in a customer’s face and say, “If you ever come back in here again I’ll cut your throat, you bastard.”

The man left in a hurry.  Mr. Hunt and the three other men in the shop laughed like someone had just told a joke.  It seemed weird to me but I laughed too.

The shop was crowded and as usual the men were going on about Harry Truman and I picked up a magazine called the Police Gazette to look at the pictures.  I hoped it was the one with the naked girl.

On the first few pages were advertisements for stuff you could take to make you feel better and for an exercise program to make you look like Charles Atlas, the World’s Strongest Man.

When I turned to the next page there they were – a bunch of little pictures in a row, like in a comic strip, of a woman taking off her clothes.  In the last picture she was completely naked and you could see a little patch of hair between her legs.  I quickly closed the magazine and tried to act like I hadn’t seen anything.

“Young man, you’re next,” startled me.

I got in the chair and Mr. Hunt asked, “A little off the top as usual?”

I said, “Yes sir.”

And he began buzzing away with the electric trimmer.  Mr. Hunt kept talking to the men about Harry Truman.  I sat there thinking about what I’d just seen in the magazine and hoping Mr. Hunt wouldn’t get mad and wave the razor again.

When he finished, I paid him and started out the door.

“Like that magazine, son?” one of the men asked.

“What magazine? “I replied.

I could hear them laughing as I rushed out the door; just like someone had told another joke.

Where is that tree when I need it, I thought, heading up Buchanan Street towards Cephas Street.  About that time Tiny came around the corner from a side street and we stood face to face.  Tiny was taller than I thought he or she was.  Up close, Tiny looked more like a man than a woman.

“Excuse me,” I said, like I had done something.

“Oh, that’s OK,” smiled Tiny. “I’m the one who wasn’t watching where she was going.  Have a nice day,” she said, turning down Buchanan towards the drugstore.

She said, I’m the one who wasn’t watching where she was going.  So she dresses like a man and calls herself a woman.

When I reached the tree, Miss Etha was working with her flowerpots on her back porch.

“It’s all right for you to sit under that tree with me out here; I won’t bother you”

“Thank you Miss Etha.  I was just cutting through to get to the alley,” I lied.

I walked down the graveled alley to another sitting place I had behind our coal barn.  I had some heavy thinking to do.  I wondered if Pussy knew how to swing on the flying trapeze, because if she did, they’d probably give her a job in the circus. She really did look hot in short shorts.  Where would she sleep tonight?  Did she take any other clothes with her? I wondered.

If I worked in a circus, I’d want to be the ringmaster. Welcome ladies and gentlemen to the Barnum and Bailey Circus, featuring Miss Pussy on the Flying Trapeze.  I guess Wayne could be in the freak show or maybe a clown.  But I think you need to hear the music to be a clown.  That Tiny could have a show all her or his own.  They’d put up one of those big signs like for the fat lady or the strongman.

Before I could move I was looking a horse right in the face.  I’d never been so close to a horse before.

“Didn’t mean to frighten you, young man.  I’m lookin’ to buy rags,” said the Negro.

He was a big black man, almost purple; who looked a little too big for the cart he drove and the draggy old horse that pulled it.  His deep black skin glistened in the sun.  He wore an old brown hat, overalls without a shirt, and had one bandana tied around his head and another tied around his left wrist.  This was the first Negro I’d ever seen up close, much less spoken to.

“I don’t have any rags right now but I can get you some tomorrow.”

“Won’t be here tomorrow, jis’ come on Thursdays.”

Not wanting him to leave, I asked, “Is that your horse?”

“Had him for fourteen years.”

“He looks pretty old.”

“Got to go now.”

I watched the old Negro, the horse, and the cart go up the ally towards Buchanan Street and wondered if Negro kids played cowboys and Indians. And if they did, which ones did they prefer to be . . . cowboys or Indians?

It was about time for my father to come home from the fire hall for dinner to I went in the house to wash up.

 

6.

Boots Williams was the most sophisticated man I’d ever talked to.  After church he always had a group of people standing around listening to his stories.  Everyone seemed to like him.  He was even friendly to me, inviting me into the circle of conversation like I was an adult.  He wore a straw fedora, a blue-and-white pinstriped seersucker suit, white shirt and tie, and the pointiest-toed black-and-white shoes I’d ever seen.  I thought I’d like to dress like Mr. Williams when I became an adult.

Mr. Williams didn’t live in the neighborhood.  Someone told me he lived in a big house on the river just a few miles north of the end of Buchanan Street, so I never saw him except on Sundays.  I always looked forward to seeing him.

Once I asked my mother what Mr. Williams did for a living.  She looked funny, paused, and then said she wasn’t really sure.

We were all standing there, outside the church, and I asked Mr. Williams what he did for living.  There was silence and a long pause.  Then he said, I am a businessman, said goodbye, and headed for his white Buick.

One of the older boys called me aside and whispered to me that Mr. Williams made fuck movies for a living.

“What?” I said.

Fuck movies.  Movies of people doing it.  But don’t tell anyone; it’s pretty much a secret.”

I wondered if Brother Johnson knew.

Making movies like that was hard for me to imagine.  Where did you show them?  Did people pay admission to get in?  What would the people at the 12^th Avenue Church of Christ think about that?

My family and I spent the rest of the day down at my grandfather’s having Sunday dinner with my uncles and aunts and their kids. All us kids went up to the park just a few doors away and played on the playground while the adults all talked about the old days.  I sort of wished I had stayed down with the adults because I liked to hear their stories.

We got home around suppertime and mother made me take a bath before we ate.  When my dad left for work at the firehall, my brothers and I walked up the street to the bus stop with him. As we started back home, we saw Billy Roy’s daddy drunk again.

Billy Roy’s dad was the son of a farmer who had come to Nashville and settled on Cephas Street, a few houses down from mine.  I never knew how Mr. Carrigan became a riverboat captain or how long he’d lived in the neighborhood because they lived there before us.  About the only thing I knew about him for sure was that he was a drunk.  Everyone said he was, except for his family.  I never heard them call him a drunk or say a bad word about him.  Nobody ever told me not to, but I never said he was a drunk in front of his boys.

Just about every Saturday that summer, the Carrigan boys and others of us in the neighborhood would walk about three miles to the State Theater to see a cowboy movie.  This particular Saturday, however, a pirate movie was on.  It was Errol Flynn in Two Years Before The Mast.  There was a scene in the movie where all of the pirates came to shore and went to a bar and got drunk on rum and started singing:  What do you do with a drunken sailor, What do you do with a drunken sailor, What do you do with a drunken sailor, early in the morning?

I looked over at Billy Roy to see if I could tell if he was thinking about his daddy.  I don’t think he was.

We didn’t see too much of Mr. Carrigan in the neighborhood.  He was either away on a voyage down the Cumberland River, at the Buchanan Street pool hall drinking, or asleep in the house.  The only times I ever saw him up close he was staggering down the sidewalk in front of my house, drunk as a sailor, in the middle of the day.

My brothers had run on home but I kind of hung back to see what Mr. Carrigan would do.  After seeing that movie, every time I saw him I’d sing that song in my head.  I decided to walk by him humming that song to see if he’d get mad, or grin, or something.  I think he heard me because he looked up.  But I don’t think he was familiar with the song.

It was just getting dark and I wasn’t quite ready to go in.  I was leaning on my father’s car parked in front of the house and thinking about Delores Conyers.

My mind shifted to Delores’ father.  He was different from the other fathers in the neighborhood.  For one thing, he worked in an office. The Conyers family was the only family that moved into the neighborhood after we moved there.

The Conyers rented the house from an elderly couple who had moved from it into a big house on the next street up, just across the alley.  Since my bedroom was next to the Conyers’ house and I could hear Mr. and Mrs. Conyers arguing a lot.  He also hollered at his kids more than most other parents in the neighborhood.  Sometimes, from the bathroom window, I could see him out on their back porch giving Delores or her brother a spanking

I was just rising off the car when I saw a flash and heard a loud bang come from the back porch of the Conyers’ house.

At first I thought it was a firecracker, then I heard a woman screaming, “I’ve been shot! I’ve been shot! Oh! I’ve been shot!”

I ran along the fence between our yards.  When I got to the back, I jumped up, grabbed onto the fence, and looked over into the Conyers’ yard.  I saw Mr. Conyers going into his house.  He didn’t see me.  I ran in and told my mother what I saw and she called my father at work.  He said to keep everyone inside and he’d call right back.  About fifteen minutes later, he called and said the police told him that someone had shot the lady who lived across the alley from Mr. Conyers and that she was dead.  He also told the police what I had seen and they told him they’d be by to see me shortly.  I got scared like I had done something.

We pulled the shades and kept peeking out the bathroom window towards the Conyers’ house.  When the police did arrive, they went straight to the Conyers’ house and knocked on the door. They stayed about twenty minutes, then left with Mr. Conyers following them in his car and never came to our house.

The next morning when my father came home from the fire hall, he told us that Mr. Conyers told the police that he was out in his backyard shooting at a rat.  Mr. Conyers told them that when he fired, the bullet must have bounced off the ground, ricocheted off the corrugated barn of another neighbor across the alley, and accidentally hit the lady who was standing on her back porch.  Some 50 yards away, my father added.

After a sleepless night and a brief breakfast, I headed up the street to find Rodney and Billy Roy to tell them what I had seen.  Rodney’s mother said he’d gone to town with his older brother.  Billy Roy’s house was on the other side of Mr. Conyers.  So I opted for the willow tree instead.

Did Mr. Conyers see me? I wondered.  If he did what would happen?  If he did, would he try to kill me too?  Oh, No! I thought about see his daughter on the back porch in her underwear.  I thought, if he happened to see me then, I’m a double-dead man.

She did have nice tits though; not big tits like Pussy.  Pussy had big tits; you could tell from the shirts she wore.  Richard said she had big nipples too. I’ll bet Mr. Williams knew Pussy.  She might have appeared in one of his movies.  Now that would be something to see.

The older guys at Bill’s Place talked about getting it all the time.  That’s what most of their jokes were about.  The way Wayne acted, I thought He must be getting it from somewhere too, and he’s deaf and dumb.  Why even my retarded relative knew more about that kind of thing than I did!

Wait! I said out loud.  Then thought, what am I doing thinking about stuff, like that when my life is in danger?

Hey! scared the bejesus out of me.  It was Billy Roy.

Ducking under the willow branches, he asked, “What happened up your way last night?”

“Mr. Conyers shot and killed the lady across the alley.  He said it was an accident.”

“Why don’t we go up and examine the crime scene?”  suggested Billy Roy.

“You’ve got to be crazy!” I responded.

“He ain’t there. I saw him drive off when I was on my way up here,” said Billy Roy, grabbing me by the arm.

“If he comes back and sees us he might kill me,” I said, rising from the ground.

“Aw! What would he want to kill you for?  Even if he killed that lady on purpose, he’d go to jail for sure if he killed a witness.  That would be admitting he did the other murder on purpose.”

Though Billy Roy was not known for his wisdom, what he said made sense.  So we headed down the alley toward the crime scene.  I imagined that I was Dick Tracy and that Roy was a patrolman.  We were on our way to solve a heinous crime.  Only this time it happened right next door to the police station where I, Dick Tracy, worked. I hummed some serious background music in my head.

 

7.

Kenny Green, Miss Etha’s nephew, and one of my brothers asked my mother if they could use our old push mower to make money cutting neighbor yards.  She reluctantly agree and I watched them head down the street to begin their money making idea.  I was jealous; wishing I had thought of it first.

On especially hot days like this, there was little to do and almost no one to do it with.  I was sitting on the curb in front of my house just thinking, when I saw the ice man’s horse and wagon stop up the street in front of Rodney Adair’s house.

I hustled my bare feet up the street and asked if I could get in the back of the wagon.  The overalled-old ice man nodded yes as he usually did.

The Adair’s were the only family on the street who still used an ice box instead of a refrigerator. In the summer the ice man came about once a week.  Rodney saw me get in the back of the wagon and ran out of his house to join me in the wagon.  The only drawback to riding in the wagon was sitting in the melting ice, but on a day like this it seemed like a plus.  There were always pieces of ice around to chew and suck on.

This ice man returned to the wagon and headed down the street hollering, Ice man! Ice man!  We stopped once to sell a block of ice to the people who live on the up-the-street side of my house and again a few doors down to Billy Roy Carrigan’s mother.

We were nearing the end of my street when we heard a blood curdling scream.  Rodney and I jumped out of the wagon and saw my brother and Kenny Green running towards us.  Kenny was holding his hand and screaming at the top of his voice.  My brother was close behind.

“I cut my finger off!” screamed Kenny.  “Look here!  He held out his left hand and in it was part of his finger from his right hand.”

I hollered for Rodney get a piece of ice off the wagon.  He darted towards the disappearing ice wagon.  As soon as Rodney returned, I helped Kenny put the piece of ice in the hand holding the finger.

“You run on up to Dr. Duff’s and I’ll go home and tell your mother what has happened.”

Kenny and my brother headed to the other end of the street where Dr. Duff’s office was located and I went over to his house to get his mother.  Later that day, I sat on the curb in front of my house thinking that could have been my finger, if I had thought of the lawn mowing idea first.

My mother came out of the house and told me that she’d just heard on the radio that the goat man was headed down Germantown Hill on 31A.  She estimated that he would be at Clay and Cephas Streets in about a half hour.

Without even thanking her, I jumped up and started searching for my friends.

“The goat man’s coming! The goat man’s coming!” I hollered up and down the street and my friends started to gather.

The goat man came through at the end of every summer.  I never knew exactly where he came from or where he was going.  He rode in an iron-wheeled wagon overloaded with pots, pans, car tags, lanterns, buckets, and bails of hay.  Goats pulled it.

There were five or six of us sitting on the curb across from the baseball field, listening for signs of his arrival.  We heard bells jingling in the distance and started running up the street towards the sound.

“There he is.  I see him!  I see him!”

We could also see a crowd of people running along side the wagon. He stopped about a block from us and we ran to join the crowd.

“If you have no definite place to go, and no specific time to be there, speed ceases to be an important factor,” he addressed the crowd through his long white beard.  “I’ve never had to beg, steal, or borrow to exist.  The Lord provides the perfect medicine – a mixture of sunshine and water, and provides the goats with plenty of vegetation.  They in turn provide plenty of milk.”

He poured goat milk from a big coffee can into a glass and downed it all.  The crowd applauded.  We stayed around for the rest of his show, which included a lot of reading from the Bible.  I bought a needle-threader from him for my mother and a postcard with his picture on it for me.  He said, Thank you for coming.  Please come back next year.

I took the needle-threader home to my mother and took the picture with me to the willow tree.

If you looked real close at the picture, the goat man didn’t seem as old as the beard made him appear.  Under the picture was Chess McCartney, Goat Man.

I wondered how I would look with a beard.  It seemed like a sad life to me – riding around the country on a goat wagon selling trinkets.  But Chess McCartney seemed to like it.

When he was a little boy did he want to be a goat man?  Did my grandfather want to be a police man?  Did Brother Johnson want to be a preacher?  Mr. Stein a shop owner?  Pussy, the wife of a circus motorcycle star?

Why was Van Junior retarded?  Tiny, a hermaphrodite?   When Mr. Conyers was a boy did he ever think he would kill somebody?  Did Etha Green always think she knew more about Jesus than everyone else?

Suddenly I felt a cool breeze blow through the willows and realized the summer of 1951was coming to and end and, somehow, I didn’t like it.