Running on Red Dog Road Read online

  On Easter Sunday morning Grandpa put on his new worsted wool suit and clamped elastic suspenders to his pants front and back. Garters, a strange contrivance of wide maroon elastic bands, were fitted above his calf and clipped to his socks to hold them up. A round watch attached to a gold chain draped across his chest and disappeared into the watch pocket in his vest. His shirt was starched, his shoes shined, his hat and his Bible in his hand.

  Grandpa was armed to fight the Devil.

  Holding himself still behind the walnut pulpit, Grandpa waited for his congregation to settle. He started quiet, but as voices from here and there in the pews began to encourage him with shouts of “Amen!” and “Praise God!” and “Thank you, Jesus!” his voice rose to a crescendo I likened to the voice of God. Oh, he could work up the congregation with fearsome warnings of the fire and brimstone awaiting those who didn’t repent. He was awful longwinded though, so I was glad when the cadence slowed and I knew he was winding down. Soon he’d call for everyone to stand and sing Hymn No. 164, “Blessed Assurance,” or maybe he’d announce Hymn No. 87, “Lord Lift Me Up to Higher Ground.”

  The Pentecostals weren’t too good at singing, but a few voices lifted true and clear over the drone and drag of the congregation, and I hear them still. “Precious Memories,” “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” and Grandma’s favorite, “His Eye is On the Sparrow.” “Rock of ages, cleft for me . . .”—I thought it said, “Rock of ages, Clev for me.” Clev was my grandpa’s name. So that was my favorite hymn.

  There was praying too.

  Grandpa would say, “Brother Riley Davis from over in Crab Orchard is here visiting his mother who’s doing real poorly, and he asks us to remember Mother Davis tonight and lift her all the way up to Heaven to be healed by the Lord God our Master Physician.

  “Brother Slade Williams, would you kindly take us to the Lord in prayer?”

  The good brother would fall to his knees right there in the pew or in the aisle and begin to pray. Soon all in the congregation were on their knees, and they joined right in, everyone praying out loud.

  The Pentecostals believed you got saved, then sanctified, then filled with the Holy Ghost, which meant some would receive the gift of speaking in tongues. The Bible talks about speaking in tongues a good bit, but to tell the truth, it made most people uncomfortable. It didn’t seem a bit strange to me. But then, I knew the ones who did it. They were Grandma and Grandpa, and they were normal as the applesauce pie my grandma made for Sunday dinner.

  “Clev, I do wish you’d mind the time when you’re up there preaching,” Grandma said. “The biggest part of us have our dinners in the oven and you going on until half past the noon hour means folks are going home to a meal that’s likely not fit to eat.”

  Grandpa shook his head. “I hear what you’re saying, Rindy, but there’s no way for me to tell precisely when a sermon is going to end. Just no way.”

  “Well, think of something. You can’t have all the womenfolk staying home because you don’t let out on time. And that’s exactly what they’re threatening. Sister Wood told me so. The men are affected too, you know, because it’s them that’s eating a dried-out roasting hen for Sunday dinner.”

  They had this disagreement most Sundays on the way home from church. But Grandpa said there was no two ways about it; he had to preach until there was no more preaching in him.

  Once we got home, Grandma hurried to put Easter dinner on the table while Grandpa stayed outside to see to it the animals were sheltered. The sky was gray, with snow still on the ground, not a lot, but enough that Grandpa hid the Easter eggs inside the house for me and Vonnie to hunt for after dinner. The day before, we’d spent all afternoon dying hard-boiled eggs with food coloring mixed with vinegar and boiling-hot water, first writing our initials on the eggshells with the wax of a used birthday candle. The dye didn’t color the wax, so our initials showed up plain as could be. We dipped the eggs in a cup of red or blue or yellow, then started mixing our own colors. Red with blue to make purple. Red and yellow for orange. Blue and yellow to make green. Finally, we dumped all the colors together and got a muddy shade of brown.

  We’d been eating chocolate bunnies and jelly beans and marshmallow biddies from our Easter baskets since we got up before dawn to go to sunrise service. Grandma warned we’d spoil our appetites, but Mother said for goodness’ sake, it was Easter. She took our picture on the porch. We are dressed in our Easter garb, everything brand new from the skin out. Grinning from beneath our Easter bonnets, we are holding the baskets, the fingers of our white cotton gloves stained from handling the eggs.

  Mother set the table in the dining room the way Aunt Lila always did, draping three lace tablecloths this way and that over a blue flowered cloth. Aunt Lila had first done that because our biggest lace cloth still wasn’t big enough if we had both leaves in the table. She got compliments, so she kept doing it. Now Mother had copied her. Mother used the best dishes—the white ones with blue windmills—and the silver-plated knives and forks she’d polished the day before with baking soda and vinegar.

  Soon the table was loaded with baked ham and fried chicken, candied sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes and cream gravy, stewed rhubarb, green peas and pearl onions, corn custard, pickled beets, and deviled eggs, the whites dyed blue and green and lavender—all served up on big platters and in sparkling cut-glass dishes passed down from generations before. Mother made yeast rolls and warm wilted lettuce salad from the season’s first tender leaves of Bibb lettuce and green onion shoots.

  She motioned me over. “Go get that blue vase you put in the sitting room.”

  I’d forgotten all about it.

  When I opened the door, a big bouquet of bright yellow flowers bloomed where there had been bare branches. I carried the vase to the dining room as careful as if the yellow flowers were real gold, placing it in the center of the table.

  Outside big wet snowflakes mixed with icy drizzle, but inside it felt like spring. There were lace-trimmed anklets on my white patent-leather feet, “Sunday” embroidered in pink on my yellow underpants, bread pudding with warm raisin sauce to be spooned over it, and Easter eggs waiting to be found.

  And Mother and I had forced the forsythia.

  6

  A Hobo’s Prayer

  The Pentecostal Home Missionary Society believed in helping your neighbor. My grandma believed everybody was our neighbor, and that included the hobos who hopped on and off trains that coughed and belched through our town, oily plumes of smoke and a mile of coal cars trailing between the black engine and the bright red caboose. Grandpa said he’d heard tell hobos had a way of marking houses known to serve up a good meal. Ours must have had a sign pointing right at it because every hobo traveling north in the spring and south in the fall found his way to our back door.

  No one was ever turned away.

  Wild-eyed and bushy-headed, the man leaning against our gate wore a rumpled Sunday suit that harkened back to better times, a white shirt that was nearly clean, and a tie so stained the original color was anybody’s guess. Grandma went to the edge of the garden and hollered Grandpa’s name. He hurried over and introduced himself, shaking the hobo’s hand. He always found some chore for the hobo to do, even if it didn’t make sense to me.

  This time, he led the hobo to a stack of kindling near the stump we used as a chopping block. I watched as he gestured toward the cellar door. The man nodded and began to fill the wheelbarrow with the wood, the very same load another hobo had carried from the cellar door to the chopping block just a week or so before.

  Grandpa always said a man that earned his own dinner could hold his head up.

  Before long Grandma appeared on the porch, carrying a steaming plate of leftover pork chops and sweet potatoes served with biscuits and a tin of hot creamed coffee.

  The hobo eyed the biscuits.

  But he wasn’t going to get fed quite yet.

  Grandma offered a basin of water with a thin slice o
f lye soap, which scoured all the dirt and part of the hide off, leaving the hobo’s hands pink as the pig snouts she’d made the soap from.

  The hobo looked at the biscuits again.

  But Grandpa said we should first bow our heads for a word of prayer.

  “Lord, we just thank you for the bounty of this food we are privileged to share and for your many blessings on this family. And Lord, we ask you to bless this humble traveler. Protect and guide him as he goes forth across this great land. Lead him through the unknown trials and tribulations he’s bound to face. But Lord, if it be Thy will, allow him the sweetness of some victories. In the precious name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.”

  All of us said, “Amen.”

  So the hobo said, “Amen,” too.

  “You sit down in the swing there and enjoy your meal,” Grandma said over her shoulder, disappearing into the house and leaving me and the hobo for Grandpa to deal with. Grandpa busied himself raking leaves and giving me rides in the wheelbarrow to keep me from being an aggravation. I watched the man pick up his fork and load it with sweet potatoes. He didn’t stop until the plate was clean.

  Grandma came back out holding a paper bag. “I put some extra in here for you to take with you. Make you a good supper later on.”

  Courtly as he thanked Grandma for the meal, the hobo nodded to Grandpa’s “God bless you” and headed off down the red dog road. He sang a ditty:

  don’t know where i’m going

  don’t know where i’ll be

  i’m at home in this fair land

  from sea to shining sea my friend

  from sea to shining sea.

  Grandpa watched him go. “For the most part they’re good men down on their luck,” he said. “Times is hard for lots of folks nowadays.”

  I wondered out loud if hobos ever got lonely.

  Grandpa thought on that before he answered. “For the most part, I’d reckon not,” he said. “Funny how some men are content not putting a foot across the county line while others have the need to roam. You know how geese have it in them to fly south for the winter? Some men are born with that same yearning. Like the geese, it’s in their blood.”

  Not long after, we had another hobo visit, this time at Sissy’s house. Late one morning we were sitting on her maroon mohair divan cutting clothes out of an old Sears, Roebuck catalog to dress our family of paper dolls. Her momma had put her daddy in charge of us while she went downtown to shop for shoes. Sissy’s momma was four feet ten inches tall and wore a size two and a half shoe, so she bought sample sizes when they went on sale. She looked even smaller next to Sissy’s daddy, who was close to six feet tall and blocked most of the light when he stood in a doorway.

  When someone knocked at the door, Sissy jumped up and ran to see who it was, the scantily clad paper dolls in her lap flapping wildly to the floor.

  I thought she had lost her mind.

  People rarely knocked on our doors. Those who did were people we knew, and they only gave a couple taps before opening the door and sticking their head in to holler was anybody home. If that didn’t work and they had a mind to, they came on in and made themselves at home until somebody showed up. Now, Sissy did not have the faintest notion who was outside that door, and we’d both been warned about a million times not to open the door to strangers. A bowlegged little man stood there, his beat-up hat pulled down over his ears. Shorter by a good head than Sissy’s momma and grimed from head to foot with coal soot, he grinned up at Sissy through gap teeth.

  “Young missy, is the master of the house available for a word?”

  “If you mean my daddy, he’s in the bathroom,” she answered.

  The hobo was right about that master-of-the-house part. Sissy’s daddy did rule the roost. Although he had a big wood paddle he called the Board of Education hanging on the wall, I’d never known him to use it. He didn’t have to. A glance was enough to keep us in line. Sissy tried real hard to please him. So did I.

  That’s why it was a complete shock to my system when Sissy opened that door.

  “Would you be so kind as to give a thirsty sojourner a cool glass of water?” the man asked.

  “I’ll go get you some,” Sissy replied, “but you’ll have to come in the house because my daddy won’t allow me to let the door stand open.”

  The little man followed her in and hoisted his sooty self onto the couch, taking off his hat and stuffing it in a pocket. I noticed his forearm was tattooed with “A Mother’s Love” and a tombstone with “R.I.P.” on it. He’d washed his hands somewhere, and water had run down to his elbows, leaving clean tracks in the dirt on his arms.

  Sissy’s daddy, probably hearing the commotion, came into the room holding an unfolded copy of the morning Post Herald in his hand. He stopped dead in his tracks when he saw a real live dwarf perched on his couch, his feet sticking straight out, surrounded by me and Sissy and a bevy of half-naked paper dolls. I expected him to have a conniption, but he didn’t.

  I gave him credit for staying calm.

  “The young lass was about to fetch me a cool drink,” the man said. “I hope the mister doesn’t mind.”

  Sissy’s daddy nodded and told her to get the man a glass of water and to fix him a sandwich.

  I couldn’t believe she was getting off so easy.

  The man talked between bites of the peanut butter sandwich.

  I knew it was peanut butter because that’s the only kind of sandwich Sissy ever made. If I had made a nickel bet on it, I would have won the money.

  The hobo man was, or so he said, with Barnum in his day. Oh, he’d seen and done it all, traveled far and wide. He’d run off and joined the circus when he was but a lad of twelve. It was a hard-bit life, but he’d got used to it. First thing they’d put him to doing was shoveling steaming piles of dung out of the cages of the lions and tigers and elephants that performed in center ring. The boss man soon realized a dwarf was as much of an attraction as the beasts he was tending, so they put him in as a clown. The life of a nomad was all he’d ever known. Now he rode the rails where he could still watch the countryside go by. He liked waking up every morning not knowing where he was. When he needed a couple dimes to rub together, he could always pick up some change juggling on street corners. Plenty of people would drop a coin or two in his hat. Why, they’d pay a dwarf such as himself just to let them gawk.

  When the hobo finished his sandwich, Sissy’s daddy, who had hardly said a word, walked him to the door. He stood there for a minute, watching as the man headed down the road.

  I’d been waiting for the hobo to show us some juggling, trying to picture how he’d manage it with such short arms, but he never did. I didn’t blame him. Sissy’s daddy didn’t appear to be in a juggling kind of mood.

  “You’d best run on home now,” he told me. “Sissy can’t play anymore today.”

  “Yes sir,” I said.

  I was somewhat relieved I didn’t have to make up my mind about staying or going, but I admit to being concerned about what was going to happen to Sissy without me there.

  The next day she told me she didn’t want to talk about it. Begging didn’t work, but once I promised she could keep my Sparkle Plenty doll all night, she gave in. I knew she would. She could not resist that Sparkle girl.

  Yes, she admitted, her daddy did give her a spanking.

  It was, to my knowledge, the only time he ever took that paddle off the wall.

  “Did it hurt bad?” I asked, not sure if I hoped she’d say yes or no.

  “Just stung for a minute. Three licks is all I got. One for opening the door, one for letting that little man come in the house, and another to make sure I’d never do it again.”

  “Did you cry?”

  “Of course I did!” Her look was withering.

  I didn’t know whether to offer admiration or sympathy, so I kept my mouth shut.

  Sometimes, when Vonnie was really pitching a hissy fit, Mother gave her a couple of swipes with a switch.
That is, if she could catch her. I’d never been switched or paddled, although I’d come close a time or two. It’s not that I never deserved a paddling, because I’m sure I did, but so far I’d wriggled out of it. Lots of my escapes were because I was the baby, with an older brother and sister who surely knew better and should have kept me out of trouble. Or so Grandma said. Nevertheless, I was trying to get a feel for how to act, just in case.

  Hobos came from the north in the fall when they headed for warmer weather, and in the spring they headed back north, often leaving gifts made from cigar boxes or popsicle sticks or matchsticks. Sometimes a hobo would offer to paint a picture of your house on a board or a piece of cardboard for a few coins. Some used real paints, but others kept a little tin of watercolors in their hobo sack, which was usually an old pillowcase or tablecloth tied onto a pole. A hobo painted a picture of my friend’s house that her mother liked so much she hung it up in their living room.

  Grandpa came in the house with the Raleigh Register tucked under his arm. We had two daily newspapers. The Post Herald was the Republican paper and the Raleigh Register was for the Democrats. Grandpa was a Republican and Grandma was a Democrat. Since she was the one who ordered the paper and dealt with the paperboy, the Raleigh Register was thrown in our yard every afternoon. Sissy’s family got the Post Herald early in the morning.

  “Anybody remember that singing hobo fellow we fed a while back?” Grandpa asked. “Appears he’s been by here and left us something. Found it wedged out there in the gate. Note says he’s sorry he didn’t catch us at home. He thanks us for the best meal he’s had since leaving his mother’s knee in Omaha. Rindy, you get credit for that,” Grandpa said, giving a nod to Grandma. “Looks like he left us a poem.”

  “Read it to me,” I said.

  “Way I figure, the one wants it read is the one to read it.” Grandpa handed the poem to me.