Running on Red Dog Road Read online

  a hobo’s prayer

  smokedusting

  wanderlusting

  rails click by below

  heard them once

  heard them twice

  calling me to go

  stew ain’t half bad

  company’s fair

  not a soul i know

  been here once

  could be twice

  time for me to go

  they’s kids somewhere

  call me dad

  names i hardly know

  seen them once

  or maybe twice

  still i’ve got to go

  down south the sun god

  shines like gold

  here it’s about to snow

  i been there once

  or was it twice

  oh Lord i loved it so

  when heaven turns the

  caged birds free

  i watch them from below

  just one more time

  or maybe twice

  sweet Jesus let me go

  “Amen,” Grandpa said.

  Grandpa said that hobo had been given a gift and that we are all given one and some are given many.

  “What’s my gift? I asked. “You think maybe I could make a rhyme?”

  “I wouldn’t rightly know,” Grandpa said, “but you won’t know either until you try it. And that’s something I do rightly know.”

  “What’s your gift then?” I asked.

  “Some folks seem to find their gift early on,” Grandpa said. “I haven’t thought much on it, but I reckon mine came to me late. After working the mines all them years, I got saved and sanctified and filled with the Holy Ghost and commenced preaching and starting up little churches here and there where folks didn’t have any. I like to think I did some good.”

  “Amen,” Grandma said from the porch.

  7

  The Spirit Is Willing

  We hadn’t had any more hobo visits, but my Uncle Ed, who’d arrived at our house earlier in the day, had stirred things up in his own way. Grandma found him balled up on the bedroom floor, spit dribbling from the corner of his mouth, arms hugging his knees. It looked like he was trying to keep his legs from shaking loose and flying off across the room. His teeth would have chattered if he’d had them in his mouth, but he’d put them in one of his shoes, for safekeeping, I guess. The other shoe was still on his foot.

  Grandpa went to fetch the doctor while Grandma tried to wrest the truth out of her brother. It didn’t take long. He’d decided, he said, to have himself a little toot of the rubbing alcohol we kept in the bathroom medicine cabinet.

  Grandma’s face turned pasty as biscuit dough.

  “Good Lord have mercy, Ed, you must have lost your mind. Why, that stuff will kill you deader than a doornail. I declare, sometimes you act like you don’t have the sense God gave a goose.”

  Uncle Ed commenced to nod his head to show he agreed with her about him and the goose. Grandma told him he better be praying that Grandpa came back with the doctor.

  Uncle Ed had an even better idea.

  “You say a prayer for me, Rindy. Tell Him I ain’t such a bad feller. He’s way better acquainted with you. He don’t hardly know me.”

  “Edward Moore Adkins, I’ve prayed for you every single day of your life, and I’m not likely to up and quit anytime soon,” she said.

  Uncle Ed was Grandma’s baby brother and the only one who visited us regularly because he only lived a few hours away. But he hadn’t come for a visit this time. Their brother Teel had taken sick, and Aunt Annie had written for Grandma to come to Flat Mountain to help her. Since Grandpa was staying behind to tend to the animals, Uncle Ed would drive us there. He often smelled of alcohol, which gave Grandma cause for extra praying, but we needed the ride. Grandpa said the best way to deal with Uncle Ed was to keep hopes high and expectations low. But when Uncle Ed arrived just before dinner, even Grandma’s highly trained senses didn’t see or smell any signs of liquor.

  That hadn’t lasted long.

  Between groans and grimaces, Uncle Ed tried to explain how he’d thought just a taste of the rubbing alcohol wouldn’t hurt him any.

  “That’s all I had, Rindy, and that’s the plain truth of it. I swear to God it is.”

  I watched for lightning to strike him dead, but God must have decided to let it go this time.

  Grandma decided not to.

  “Ed, mark my words, I will not tolerate you taking the Lord’s name in vain in this house. And I will not tolerate you acting a fool and drinking the rubbing alcohol either.” Her words were sharp, but ever so gently she smoothed his thinning hair back and folded a wet washrag over his forehead.

  “You know, I was just recollecting how you bossed me around when we were young’uns, Rindy, and here you are still doing it all these years later.” He somehow managed a feeble smile.

  If Uncle Ed’s car was off its feed, which meant he’d used up his gas ration, he’d ride the bus to our house. When Grandma spotted him making his way down our red dog road from the bus stop on Worley Road, she could pretty well judge how much he’d had to drink. If he was tipsy, he walked gingerly, as if he was trying to stay within the lines. But if he was soused, he reeled and tilted, flailing his arms like an out of control tightrope walker. On those occasions, Grandma would feed him and put him straight to bed to sleep it off.

  Next day I’d sit with him on the grass while he told stories about some French girl he’d had a fling with in Paris during our first big war overseas. Grandma, who didn’t know what he might say next, told him she’d heard quite enough, but he just threw his head back and laughed. She walked off, saying he wasn’t getting another minute of her attention until he behaved.

  He’d read the newspaper out loud, politics and sports and obituaries, finishing with the funny papers. Dick Tracy was our favorite. He’d hoot and holler and slap his leg at the antics of B.O. Plenty and Gravel Girty and their blonde-headed daughter, Sparkle Plenty. Uncle Ed said that Sparkle girl didn’t have a thing on me, no sirree, not a thing.

  He told me I was the spitting image of Lana Turner. He bet one day a Hollywood man would see me eating an ice cream cone in the drugstore downtown and make me into a big movie star like her. Uncle Ed said he’d come to see me, but I’d have to let him in for free. I cut a picture of Lana Turner out of the newspaper, holding it up to my sun-speckled face in the mirror.

  It was usually fun when Uncle Ed came, but this time I was scared. Grandma was doing what she could until the doctor got there. She hollered for me to bring the cream pitcher and a jar of milk from the refrigerator. After she emptied the milk into the half full pitcher of cream, she made Uncle Ed turn it up until he glugged the last of it down. He said he thought Grandma was right—he probably had killed himself, and as bad as his belly hurt he didn’t much care. Grandma said no need to make matters worse by adding foolish talking to foolish acting.

  “Trouble is, I’m not so sure Ed’s acting,” Grandpa said, coming in the door with the doctor behind him. “That foolish part sounds about right though.”

  Relief washed over Grandma’s face when she saw them. Doc Cunningham had been our family doctor forever. His one-room office near the post office in East Beckley was furnished with cracked leather, faded linoleum, and generations of secrets. Shelves around the walls held olive and cobalt and amber bottles of pills and potions he doled out or mixed up, depending on what ailed you.

  In the office Doc Cunningham carried a Persian cat draped around his neck like a boa, and white fur floated in the shaft of sunlight filtered through the dingy window. One day when Grandma took me there to pick up something or other, he told me the cat was called Pitty Sing after a cat in a play he’d once seen. It was called The Mikado if I ever wanted to look it up. I never forgot the name.

  The ancient smell of the office soaked into everything it touched, and as he moved around our bedroom, poking Uncle Ed, whiffs of leather and liniment mingled with the smell of tobacco from a yel
lowed Meerschaum pipe he kept in his jacket pocket.

  Doc Cunningham peered out of eyes skimmed over with age as he wiped wire-framed spectacles with a peach-colored hanky he’d borrowed from Grandma. He told Uncle Ed it looked as though his life had been spared for another day.

  “Thank God for that,” Uncle Ed said.

  “Wouldn’t hurt none,” Doc Cunningham replied, “but to my mind you should thank your sister for that hearty dinner she fed you.”

  Grandma had made pork chops with cabbage, scalloped potatoes, fried apples, and cornbread muffins, with blackberry cobbler to finish off the meal. Uncle Ed could never get enough of his sister’s cooking, so he ate extra helpings.

  “You’re mighty lucky,” Doc Cunningham continued, “mighty lucky indeed. But touch your lips to that poison again and you’ll not only be a damned fool, Ed Adkins, you’ll be a dead one, and I’ll come sign the papers over you to prove it.” His drawn-down eyebrows squirmed like aggravated woolly worms.

  Uncle Ed nodded that yes he was lucky and yes he was a damned fool. He announced he was giving up alcohol in all its evil forms. He had in mind to start preaching on the street corners downtown where some wayward soul might hear the Word and find eternal salvation. He’d give out those leaflets on the bus too, the ones that said, “ARE YOU SAVED?” or, “JESUS IS THE WAY.” Maybe he’d knock on doors and witness to people right there in their own front rooms.

  “I’m glad to hear it,” Grandma said. “I always am, but I hope you really mean it this time.”

  Uncle Ed always repented and got saved after he got drunk, but it never took. Soon he’d be backslid again.

  Grandpa said Uncle Ed had slid back and forth so many times he was bound to have wore the seat of his britches out. But God worked in mysterious ways, and you never knew when a man’s heart would be changed. He’d keep praying for him long as it took. Like the Scripture said in Matthew, “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.”

  Uncle Ed liked that verse and had Grandpa repeat it several times.

  “I’ve got a feeling that one’s gonna come back to bite me,” Grandpa said, a grin tugging at his mouth.

  Doc Cunningham had said “damned fool” right out loud in our house. Grandma didn’t hear him because she was in the kitchen getting money out of her butter-and-eggs jar, so he didn’t know about her no-blaspheming rule. While she was gone, Grandpa made Uncle Ed pay the two dollars for the doctor’s house call. Although Grandma didn’t look too happy about it, she took her two dollars back and put it in her apron pocket just the same.

  She walked the doctor out on the porch to ask would Uncle Ed be able to drive the car the next day. Doc Cunningham said no reason not to as long as he stayed out of the rubbing alcohol. Grandma was so relieved she sent the doctor home with a quart jar of the pickled eggs he was so fond of.

  “Well, that settles it then,” Grandma said. “We’ll leave before light in the morning.” Her eyes gave Uncle Ed a quick once-over. “You look just fine to me, a little green around the gills maybe, but fine. I don’t expect you’ll feel any worse driving than not. Might keep your mind off your misery.”

  Uncle Ed looked stricken, but he didn’t say a thing.

  Grandma had put the quietus on him.

  8

  Only the Essence Remained

  A little setback like Uncle Ed almost killing himself wasn’t about to stop Grandma. She gathered a stack of clean quilts and feed sacks in a box, filling another with a cured ham and a big slab of salt pork. She packed canned peaches, blackberry jam, and jars of green beans, corn, and tomatoes into the last box, stuffing old rags between the jars so they wouldn’t break. She filled two flour sacks with potatoes and apples and another half full of pinto beans. Grandma never went anyplace empty-handed.

  We always had plenty of everything to share with family and neighbors and hobos alike. Food was put up for the winter, with rows of jars four deep lining the fruit-house shelves. Hand-sewn quilts were stacked to burrow under on cold nights, and more were being made on the quilting frame crowded into the kitchen. Feed sacks turned up as pillowcases and dishtowels and aprons. Grandpa would take me with him to buy feed for the chickens so I could pick out the sacks I liked. When Grandma ran the sturdy flowered prints through her Singer treadle sewing machine, rose and yellow and lilac sundresses flowed out the other side.

  After I squeezed the last bit of Ipana from the tube, Grandma made do by using soda and a sprinkle of salt on my toothbrush, and if the bottle of Fitch’s shampoo ran out, she washed my hair with Ivory soap. “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without,” I often heard her say.

  But there was still a chicken in our pot.

  And homemade dumplings too.

  Grandma was taking me and Vonnie to Flat Mountain with her, leaving Grandpa to fend for himself and tend the animals. She finished up the packing, sending me to the fruit house for a quart of bread and butter pickles to fill an empty spot in one of the boxes. After checking on Uncle Ed, she started up to bed. Before long she came back down and headed toward the bathroom, reappearing with the bottle of rubbing alcohol safely tucked under her arm.

  “Safe’s a whole lot better than sorry,” she muttered, and started back up the stairs.

  Next morning Uncle Ed’s complexion had improved to a gassy yellow, so we started before daylight, stopping along the way to get pint bottles of milk for him and nickel packs of peanuts and bottles of Orange Crush and Grapette soda pop for us. The sign on the ESSO filling station said gas was thirteen cents a gallon. Grandma said she expected we could get it cheaper on down the road apiece, but Uncle Ed pulled in despite her, telling the man to fill ’er up, and yes, he most assuredly could check the oil while he was at it. Grandma knew some battles weren’t worth fighting, and since she was depending on Uncle Ed’s good graces to get us there, she didn’t let on she noticed.

  Vonnie and I played cow poker, each of us counting cows in fields along our side of the road. If you passed a cemetery on your side, you had to bury all your cows and start over. Bushes or other lumps could be mistaken for cows, so lots of arguing and a fair amount of cheating went on until we aggravated Grandma so much she put a stop to the game. She handed us the shoebox that held paper dolls and coloring books with pictures of open-mouthed children frozen in place as they frolicked around a Maypole. When we lost interest, we looked for Burma Shave ads, six wood signs stuck in the ground along the roadside, each with a line of a poem.

  This one had a word Grandma didn’t allow me to say. I liked it best:

  SHE WILL FLOOD

  YOUR FACE

  WITH KISSES

  BECAUSE YOU SMELL

  SO DARN DELICIOUS

  BURMA SHAVE

  We turned off the highway onto a dirt road that drew itself up the mountain in fits and starts, stopping for cattle gates that had to be opened and closed before going on. We rounded a curve, and the house appeared of a sudden, a grand place in a clearing of piney woods halfway up Flat Mountain. A massive stone chimney rose from the center of the house, which sat squat and square, a moat-like porch encircling the whole place. Homemade rockers were scattered all around, and I counted four oversized picnic tables with trestle benches, one on each side of the porch. At each corner, a swing hung kitty-cornered so you could look out on the sunrise or sunset depending on what you fancied at the time.

  Uncle Ed said he didn’t know why in tarnation a body would want so many tables and chairs.

  “Teel always did like a lot of company,” Grandma said.

  Inside the house, pine shelves lined the walls. Plates stood along the back of the lower shelf, with baskets and tins filled with kitchen needs in front. Below the bottom shelf, hooks held iron pots and skillets. All the rooms had shelves—the ones in the bedroom held a sewing basket full of wooden spools of thread, folded clothes, rows of books, a jar of buttons, and an assorted collection of empty mason jars. Hooks underneath held a double-barreled shotgun. Three print dresses and one of navy serge hung nex
t to a man’s black gabardine suit that had a curious long jacket.

  A celadon-green Hoosier cabinet sat against one wall. Another piece I admired was a walnut trunk that had flowers and birds carved all over. Uncle Teel made that trunk for her as a wedding present, Aunt Annie said, and she used it to store her fancywork. She tilted up the lid to show us. From the looks of it, Aunt Annie spent all her spare time doing fancywork. The trunk was almost full, and doilies and antimacassars decorated every chair and table. I wouldn’t have been surprised if Uncle Teel’s long johns had morning-glory vines embroidered around the back flap.

  The house had a place for everything and everything was in place, just the way Grandma liked, yet there was an unsettling smell of stale cooking odors and the fetid stench of an ever-present chamber pot. The air felt heavy, and what got to your lungs seemed all used up. Not a whiff of fresh air could enter because Aunt Annie had all the windows and doors shut up tight.

  Grandma took one look around, and told Aunt Annie not to worry herself another minute—she’d set things right in no time. She banished the chamber pot to a far corner of the porch, then opened up every window, letting sunlight flood in and the fresh breath of the mountain blow through. She put a pan of water and spices on the stove, and soon the aroma of cinnamon and cloves and vanilla wafted through the rooms, mingling with the piney scent of the woods.

  “Leave that pan on the stove, and I expect it would freshen up the house every time the fire’s lit,” Grandma said. She was at her best when she was telling other people what to do. Somehow they’d end up thinking it was their own idea and weren’t they just smart as a whip to have thought of it.

  After Aunt Annie washed Uncle Teel head to toe, she rubbed Jergen’s lotion over his bony frame and put him in a clean suit of long underwear. She and Grandma helped him into a chair on the sunny side of the porch, putting a pillow behind his head and tucking his favorite crazy quilt around him.

  A crazy quilt was made from leftover fabric scraps of different sizes and shapes and colors put together in a patchwork design. Grandma had one at home that her mother, Sarah Jane Adkins, had made—every piece embellished with embroidered flowers and initials and names of family members. Grandma said it looked like her mother had used up every stitch she knew and then made up a bunch more. She told me that quilt would be mine one day since I admired it.