Crossing the Georgia Line (Forewarning - Ch. 7)

Based on a True Story

Chapters

Forewarning................ Into the Soul of the South

1................. White Lightning

2............Doocy Dew

3..........Time in a Bottle

4...........Knowing 'Bout Doocy

5.........Storm-clouds Gathering

6.........Let Me Be There

7..........Fifty Summers from Now

Forewarning

Into the Soul of the South

The story you are about to read is true.

                  Except for one thing.

                  It is an account of events that, as told here, are far, far more understatement than hyperbole, although I have long been predisposed to a mite of hyperbole, or so they say. In this way, it is not completely true. Much of the truth, no doubt, has been lost in the annals of time. But not to worry, we have retrieved plenty of truth to make every reader and the writer stop to take a good hard look down into their own souls.

                  Because the account is based on true events, it is a memoir, and because it utilizes certain poetic licenses, as needed, it is novel; so, it is a memoir/novel, or novel/memoir.

A true memoir would cover many years of one’s life; but this one covers only one summer, the Summer of 1973, although there are flashbacks to earlier times and discussions of later.

Because it is novel, names are changed in most cases, mainly to protect the guilty, a category that includes almost everybody, except the two leading Southern ladies in the story, and Grandma, and maybe Preacher Harvey. Outside of those, the rest have guilt written all over their mortar-stained faces.

                  I could not in a hundred years remember all the amazing and stranger-than-fiction events that took place in the Summer of ’73. We say “Summer,” capitalized, because it takes on its own persona.

The story is set in the town of Roanoke, Alabama – at least between seven a.m. and four p.m. Evenings would find us headed south down that Roanoke Road and crossing that Georgia line back to LaGrange, the place where we learned almost everything that we knew about life, which wasn’t much, to the chagrin of English teacher Ms. Long and any other number of LaGrange High School teachers, and to Mama's dismay, too, I am sure, and probably everybody else I knew. But somewhere along the way, I suppose all of those teachers and family and friends would be glad to see that some things besides the Georgia red clay did rub off on us – mainly the influences from the Basketball (the same orange color as the clay, by the way), the Bible, and a few other Books. We can add Bricklaying to this list of “B’s,” too, although if you see that from Red's point of view you likely will feel that this brick wall never got too high off the ground.

On bricklaying: You and I will drive up that Roanoke Road every day this summer to visit that bricklaying job with Pee Wee, Red, and, especially a gentleman named Doocy, who was no gentleman at all. There may be a special guest, too, who pops up on that bricklaying job that sat high on a Rock Mills, Alabama hill, and the young lady will take her rightful place in the catalog of characters who would go on to decorate a summer as beautifully as you would decorate a cedar tree come Christmas-time.

The story will commute us from that fateful job on the hill back home across that state line, where we will have to face Mama’s sickness every day, and sometimes the record of events on this side of the Georgia side of the line will take us to some late-night basketball games down at the “Y,” serving, I am sure, as a God-given diversion.

                  A thousand chords will come together, chords that sometimes are harmonious, though not often, and sometimes dysphonic – but together, they make up a sheet of music that is the Summer of ’73.

                  As you know with songs, they embrace every mood and tone: some funny, some nostalgic, and, if you’re lucky, you’ll run across a good old-fashioned love song. If you turn the dial a little, you will land on a sad song, like the song of a bird in a willow.

                  The song of ’73 is all of these, rolled into one.

It was fifteen years after the summer had passed that I had the idea to write about it. We would publish it in a big red book, which still sits somewhere in a library of the University of Houston at Clear Lake as well as on my red-oak bookshelves in my “Presidential Library” in Red Oak, Texas.

I considered it then our great American novel, but its time was not yet. It would have to wait. As our LaGrange friend and good Christian lady Mrs. John Clinkscales told me once: “God has His time, we have ours.” So it is here.

                  When we penned the story in 1989, it was the first serious work of literature we had ever done, if you don’t count the hundreds of college essay papers we wrote. It was serious, too, in that it was cathartic, even though it is filled with plenty of humor, much of that supplied by the incomparable Doocy.

The red-book version had its merits, I am sure, but the story needed to age, and cure, and its writer needed more polish, perhaps. It is hard to tell. Even though it is the same story – truth never changes – it is told much differently. In many ways, it is told by a different person. You understand.

                  Almost thirty-five years would pass with that big red, three-hundred-forty-three-page book still sitting on the shelves of our library. Few had read it – a small number of friends, two college professors – and I often wondered if I should ever go back to write that story again. I always thought I would, but I never thought I would re-tell all from scratch, like when Grandma made those homemade biscuits each morning for years and years.  

You may wonder: Why now? Why after thirty-five years?

Perhaps the best answer to that is the calendar. One day, not long ago, the calendar turned to the year 2023.

Twenty-Twenty-three –the fifty-year anniversary of that summer.

I do not know, friends, how many times we will use those two words – that summer – but, even now, you can understand that it is not just a run-of-the-mill time. But I was not the only one who lived June through August of 1973. I have thought often of my 1974 high school classmates, thought of how they fared during that time, thought if their lives took such a sharp turn around the bend as ours, never to be the same. I’ve often pondered that the young Southerners with whom we walked those Granger halls never knew about our journey, for soon after the sun had set on the summer and a new school year had arisen, the silly young man who was barely shaving would take his leave – his body would cross that Georgia line headed the wrong way, but not his heart.

During the process of re-telling this tale, we met with many of them – seventy-four of them, ironically, plus their great spouses – at our own fifty-year reunion. This group comprises one of our favorite audiences, and we are glad that many of them will read and hear what they had no idea took place back then down that Roanoke Road and in the mill village of our own town. In a way, I know that our story is theirs, too.

I am glad that the crossing of so many rivers and the passing of time have only vaguely faded the memories. Our pen is still relatively sharp, so they say, and the mind is good and clear – though some of our friends might dispute it – but the memories are secure and as fresh as the morning dew. But, still, we could not afford to let another quarter of a century go by before telling the tale, again.

                  Here’s how the re-telling came to be:

By 2023, my only grandson had grown into a young man, almost twenty years old, taller than I by three inches, red-headed and smart. He and I still read novels together and go on long hikes; and during some of those earlier adventures he began to ask questions about our growing up. I do not remember the first time we began to discuss these matters, but I doubt I was three sentences into our life story before I introduced the year 1973.

That is where I almost always begin that life story.

I could have started in 1967, but 1967 would have to wait. He would hear about the year I sat in a sixth-grade classroom at Southwest Elementary, as will you. My longtime school friend named Pippen sat in the classroom with us shortly before Christmas in 1967. He would remember that day, and he would mention it almost every time we got together through the years. The recording of such events make the journey you and I are on much more of a memoir than a novel.

Two more important matters:

An agent from the 1990s who worked with us in the rewriting of the story suggested that we use the format of the movie “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” a story where Senator Ranson Stoddard, played by Jimmy Stewart comes home from Washington to attend the funeral of a renegade gunman, Tom Doniphan, played by John Wayne. On his return, a reporter compels Stewart to tell the story of why a distinguished senator came home to the western town of Shinbone for the funeral of a notorious gunman such as Doniphan. Stewart obliges the report in his unique Jimmy-Stewart style. I never forgot the literary agent’s suggestion, even though we would not rewrite the book for another thirty years.

It is more than a little irony that we would adopt that flashback style when we retold the story, but we would do it naturally as we went into Stewart-mode and related to our grandson how, among other things, we became so close to a renegade such as the webbed-handed Doocy. Things have a way of coming back around.

Then, this: After we wrote the story in 1989, I was admitted into a writing fellowship with twenty women at the university,  I was the ‘token male’ in the group. I remember many of the lady writers often referred to the newly-written work as my “Great American novel.” I never thought much about what the great American novel was for a long time, but then I looked into it and came to find out that, in short, it is one that captures the soul of America. I realized then that my fellow writing students were onto something. Perhaps you will find it true, that the pages ahead do capture the soul of America.

But it comes with a twist.

With our story being a Southern story, it goes deep into the South, with its setting in the red clay of Georgia and Alabama, with backdrops of tall pines, with the sounds of Chattahoochee’s waves splashing on the distant shore of your mind, with sweet tea taking its prominent place on every table, and with kindness running deep in every heart. That’s how deep into the South the story goes, except the kindness part may not apply fully on that rough and rugged job site up on that Alabama hilltop.

The story becomes more than an American story. It is a Southern one, as Southern as To Kill a Mockingbird and Cold Sassy Tree. It is -- to one writer, at least -- the Great Southern Novel.

As such, perhaps it will capture the soul of the South.

Thus we begin with the “forewarning.” This story may change you, it may grab your soul, whether you’re from the South or not, but especially if you are. You will need to proceed carefully.

Turn the page now, friends: You and I, as of now, are Crossing the Georgia Line, singing as we go ....

Georgia, Georgia, what peace I find.

Just an old sweet song puts Georgia,

On my mind …

                                                                                                                                                                  srb

1

White Lightning

                  For half a century we have traveled the road from the Longhorn state to lovely Georgia a couple times a year, a separation of almost eight hundred miles. Two spots were the most special, and two rivers. One was in Vicksburg, Mississippi and the crossing of the mighty Mississippi, at which time I would always turn back to our two children in the back seat and quote one, a Mr. Huckleberry Finn, and his “The river looked miles and miles across.” The children, of course, found that sudden burst of poetry delightful, as you can imagine.

                  The other key spot was further on down the road at the crossing of the churning Chattahoochee, the dividing line between Alabama's tide and the Peach State. No sooner would the rubber hit the bridge that I would switch from Twain to the blues sound of Mr. Ray Charles, throw my head back Charles-like, and sing with enthusiasm:

Geor-gia, Geor-gia, what peace I find ...

Oh, my, the kids in the backseat never seemed to be able to express their appreciation of their dad’s musical talents, so overwhelmed that they could take no more, and exclaimed, “Dad, please, please don’t sing …”

All from our blessed generation appreciate our children’s encouragement in such matters and oblige them by raising the volume a notch higher, then even adding some color commentating at the end with a gleeful, “Ah, sing it pretty Mr. Ray Charles.” I learned that from an old bricklaying friend from Kentucky named Hamlin with whom I worked many years later, after the events of this story. With every “Blue Eyes Cryin’ in the Rain” song or “Unclouded Day” that played on the radio as we laid brick down in sultry Houston, he’d exclaim, “Sing it pretty, Willie, sing it pretty,” and sometimes he’d even help Willie out himself.

So it was with our every crossing of the Chattahoochee, and the enthusiasm was greater than even the Mississippi, because now we were home, home to Grandma’s and the best homemade biscuits ever made, home to the place where the roots were laid deep and where the red clay that stained your knees, elbows, and britches growing up never washed off.

Georgia is an old sweet song, as we all know, and there are a hundred other songs besides Mr. Charles’ that put Georgia on our minds, too, and I imagine we will “sing them pretty” with you all along the road in this event-filled story of the Summer of 1973.

I had to take a deep breath early in this summer of 2023, fifty years afterwards. A question that I have been waiting to hear for half a century came to me, abruptly:

“Tell me the story of how you grew up, Popman, and leaving Georgia, and don’t leave out any details.”

That question came from my grandson, Cheyenne, who was accompanying us on this road trip. Don’t think it too surprising that he would make such a request, knowing that it would be a marathon story, for he and I had journeyed many miles together in his eighteen years– both on foot on dangerous hikes and in the reading of classic novels. He had gotten bits and pieces of what happened that summer of ’73 through it all, but there was much that had never been said.

Not to him, not to anyone.

That intrigued him, and it made him want to dig deeper, largely because of his keen interest in both family and psychology.

Cheyenne and I had a twelve-hour window in which to reminisce and try to make sense of that time. We had packed our bags the night before and set the alarm early, and our tires hit the road before the sun had poked its head out from under the covers. We headed toward it as quickly as we could, as if we were racing to the Louisiana line. We hit the highway and began settling in for the long journey a good hour before you could see the eastern sky slowly turning as rich an orange, fittingly, as the Georgia red-clay.

  I smiled at the request, even though I was a little surprised it came so early.

What Cheyenne wanted to know were the circumstances from long ago that had brought us from that red- clay-land to the black dirt of Texas in 1973. I pondered how best to start our story as we rolled down the highway, taking a sip of coffee to stall long enough to determine a beginning. I decided there was only one place.

“Well,” I said, with a smile, “it’s hard to know where to start, but I might as well begin with Doocy. That’ll get us to where we’re goin’ as fast as any.”

“I thought you might,” Cheyenne laughed, “I figured it was either going to be him or ‘you know who.’”

We both laughed at that, because we both knew who ‘you know who’ was. But we were at least going to have to cross over into Louisiana before we got to her.

Another sip of coffee, a moment to marvel at the burning orange-red eastern sky, a deep breath, and the story began.

                   When I first met Doocy, it was a little like two ships passing in the night, but, then, it wasn’t, too. It would be more like a ship encountering a rowboat on the dark seas and the big ship rolling right over the little boat, sending it sprawling as if it were a sailboat in the tub.

That was how meeting Doocy felt.

It was early on Monday morning – June 4, 1973 – that we met, just about the time the sun was rising, except it didn’t exactly rise that morning. Storm clouds had been gathering all during the night and had jarred me in bed a couple of times. Had the cloud been a church choir, they would have broken out in enthusiastic singing with a bass lead. But the only singing the clouds were doing that morning was an occasional roaring of the thunder, but that was plenty to make me jump out of my seat sitting in my ’65 red Chevy Nova waiting for the crew to arrive on the job.

I guess I should have seen the thunderous signs as foreboding, as a warning that this new job might be more turbulent than I had asked for, and I could’ve done the smart thing and climbed back into my Nova, sprinted with blistering speed down the long driveway to the highway that ran in front of the house, swung left onto the Roanoke Road at Cooley’s store, and never slowed down until we were across the Georgia line and back to our quiet house on Juniper Street. I said I probably should have done the smart thing, but, at sixteen, almost seventeen, I was not exactly in that business.

“Besides,” I added to Cheyenne, who was getting settled in for the long haul riding shotgun beside me, “if I had done that, I could not be tellin’ you the story of Doocy right now, and it is a story you need to hear, if for no other reason than as a warnin’ for you to keep lookin’ over your shoulder in case you might bump into this kind of fella in a dark alley sometime or t’other.”

                  I picked up with how Pee Wee had called me the night after we got home from church and told me that his brother-in-law Red had agreed to take me on with his bricklaying company. He gave me directions to the jobsite thirty miles over in Roanoke. The house actually was in the little town of Rock Mills – or community, I guess – and it served as kind of a cushion between Standing Rock and Roanoke, Alabama.

                  Pee Wee was my big brother Cliff’s best friend, Pee Wee and Cliff both being five years my senior, but those five years might as well have been twenty for the difference in toughness. Cliff worked for Red and Pee Wee for a couple of summers and was well-known as a strong worker. Doocy never called him “Cliff,” I would learn, but just called him Squatlow, because, as he would put it,

“Thet Squatlow would jus’ bend way down low an inch from t’dirt to push er load of brick.”

They had contests on who could push the most brick, and Squatlow and Doocy were always two of the best, Squatlow because he could get so low, and Doocy because -- well, he was Doocy, as you’ll learn.

                  The last school year, my junior year at LaGrange High School, I had been working in a shoe store in a shopping center that had a department store called Roses, a store that came along before anybody ever heard of WalMart. On one side of Roses was Winn Dixie, where I took my first job as soon as I turned sixteen, and on the other side my favorite pizza place, Pizza Villa, which was next door to the Pic-N-Pay shoe store.

                  “I was makin’ a buck-fifty at the shoe store,” I explained, “and Pee Wee said he was pretty sure Red would pay me two-fifty, which I jumped at, even before I knew for sure I was gettin’ the job.”

But I wanted a change anyway, not that I had any issue with the shoe store, because I worked with some nice folks there, especially Ms. Billie, a lady about Mama’s age who had a daughter named Maggie a year ahead of me in school. Ms. Billie would have a tragedy of her own a few years later, and I am sorry I could not be there to return just a little for her kindness.

I hated leaving her because – even though I didn’t think about it much at the time – I saw her as a mother-figure. As great as Mama was, as you will learn soon enough, our generation had no shortage of mamas who had a hand in raising you. They all could pinch your head off in a minute if Mama wasn’t around to do it.

But Ms. Billie had a special, quiet way about her. She was the type who could talk to you and tell you things even without saying anything. Thinking of it now, I am glad that I remembered to include her in our story, because she was a special person and kind of took me in without my even realizing it. Talk about a sharp contrast to Red and Doocy.

Despite my closeness to her, I wanted a man’s job. I wanted to get out in the sun, get a man’s tan, build some muscle, and maybe even become as rough and tough as Squatlow, although it would take a heap more than one summer of work to do that. That chasm was wide. A shoe salesman and a bricklayer are about as different as a calloused convict and a preacher.

“Billy Ray,” Ms. Billie said before I walked out of the store for the last time, “you go and work hard on that brick job, and you’ll be great. I know you will.”

I smiled and thanked her, but when she turned away, I saw her wipe a tear away, but I didn’t know why. I looked back through the store window when I got in my Nova, and I thought how sad she looked standing at the cash register by herself.

I thought of her and the shoe store as I drove out to the new job that Monday morning, and I could not help but wonder what lay in store. Did Ms. Billie really have that confidence in the young man she befriended, because I sure didn’t have it? I wondered, but as the love song says, “you really don’t wanna know.” If I knew, I’m sure I would have swung the Nova around and headed on back home and drawn up a different plan.

I soon was turning east off of the Roanoke Road at Cooley’s store, which stood at the east corner of the Roanoke Road as you come into Standing Rock. Across from the store, to the west, still stands an old, white wood-framed Christian church, which was a good landmark to help me not run past the highway and make my turn. Pee Wee said to turn there, head east about two miles, and that I’d see another highway headed back north, and to take that one.

“Now, if you get lost, Billy-boy,” Pee Wee had said, “go on back to Cooley’s store and wait there until you hear Red’s old red truck rumbling down the road. Then you can follow us in.”

Surprisingly, I didn’t have any trouble finding the job. Pee Wee had told me the job was on a hill to the left and off of a long red-dirt driveway, and I found it even in the morning dusk. When I came to the long red-dirt drive that led up to the house, I could see the tall house in spots through the cluster of pine trees that decorated a good part of the homestead.

Later when I would look out from the other side – from the top of the hill where the house sat, or even, from the balcony of the house – I would see the world from an even more brilliant vantage point, one of the many lessons I learned that summer.

         If on the dark, gloomy morning of June 4, just before 7 a.m., you had driven up that narrow, paved road off of which the house sat, and if you had looked westward, you would’ve seen a big two-story house on the top of the hill, all framed and dried and ready for brick. In front of the house, you would have seen a lonely red 1965 Chevy Nova, but it would not be lonely for long.

I arrived early to make a good impression on my first day on the job. I had to laugh at that as I told the story to Cheyenne, because I did about everything that first day except make a good first impression. I guess I wasn’t in that business, either.

When I pulled up, I circled my car around facing back south, pointed for home. Pee Wee and Red would be coming would be coming from that direction since it was the only entry onto the property.

I watched several headlights go down the road before the red truck finally pulled into the dirt driveway and started roaring up the hill. I could not make out at that moment that the truck was red, because it was way too far away and the skies dark. It also was not exactly a red truck anymore, either, as it was so faded that you only knew it was red because a little red had survived around the front fender and tailgate. The truck rumbled up the long red-dirt driveway that started out about a quarter of a mile from the house. As it steadily challenged that hill you could hear the truck rattling as if it could all fall apart before it reached the top.

At its rear, it left a trail of dust half a mile high with all its rumbling, further explaining why it was red at one time but no longer. It looked more like it was hurrying to a fire than to a job; and, I would soon learn, that metaphor pretty much describes the truck and all of its high-strung contents – Red, Pee Wee, and the rest of the crew, except Pee Wee wasn’t high-strung, thankfully.

The whole summer was like we were heading to a fire, and, if you wanted to be a part of the crew you had better act like a fireman, too. Looking busy was always important on a job; and if you couldn’t look busy you had better find a spot where nobody could see you not being busy, which was hard to do.

I jumped out of the Chevy as the old truck topped the last hill and skidded into the dirt in front of the house. I smiled as I caught Pee Wee’s eye as he rode shotgun, and I stretched to help me wake up a little more before work started. I was about to wake up fast, anyway, though.

It was fitting that about the time the truck came to a halt a bolt of lightning struck across the sky and sparkled over the top of the tall pines that decorated the countryside for miles. It was white lightning, too, as white as the foams of the ocean.

Before the dust settled and the truck came to a complete stop, the men started jumping out of the back of the truck. I could see that in the cab there were two other men besides Pee Wee:

Riding shotgun was a heavy-set man with a beer belly – I knew that had to be my boss Red – and riding in the middle was a rough-looking black gentleman. I kind of chuckled when I saw the three in the cab of the truck and thought that they looked a little like sardines crammed into a can, which was a proper comparison because one or the other of the men would have a can of sardines for lunch every day of that summer.

          In the back of the truck were two other black gentlemen, making it a crew of five, not counting me, although I did not count all that much. I thought it curious that the one gentleman – and I say gentleman loosely – merited a ride in the cab of the truck while the other two laborers had to ride in the back that long trip. I was not the only one who noted that, because the two who had ridden in the back of the truck were in a much ‘sourier’ mood after that thirty-mile trip over from Georgia than the gentleman in the cab. Another bricklayer named Charlie – another of Red’s brothers-in-law – drove his truck out to the job and pulled up a few minutes later.

           The truck stopped, and, unbeknownst to me, the lightning show was about to begin.

Not just lightning, oh no. White lightning, white as the snow on top of a mountain.

 2

Doocy Dew

June 4, 1973

Red’s old work truck came to an abrupt stop, and the first thing I saw was the gentleman in the middle emerging rapidly from the passenger door. He jumped out as cheerful as if he had won the lottery, was wearing an Atlanta Braves hat backwards, and was singing enthusiastically with a tune playing on the truck radio. The song had been revved up enough that I could make out what it was as soon as the truck topped the last hill of the driveway. By the time the old red truck skidded to a halt and the gentleman in the Braves hat emerged, his spirited rendition of an old 60s song threatened to revoke the lease on all the air in his lungs,

  “Corinna, Corinna – Corinna, Corinna – Corinna, Corinna, I looooove you, sooooo …”

“Cheyenne,” I said, coming back to our dark, early-morning drive down the highway, “you ‘bettah’ hang onto the passenger door, because we’re about to go for a ride better than anything Universal has to show.”

Cheyenne grabbed the door, playfully, and waited for the showdown. He was about to take a front-row seat to a debacle for the ages, even giving the Thrilla in Manilla a run for its money – not just the one match about to unfold but for the hundred others on the docket.

About the time the last note faded, one of the fellas who had jumped out of the back of the truck started howling like a dog and laughing in a hoarse laugh,

“Doocy,” he said, “what-in-the-world did ya do with all thet money your mama give you for sangin’ lessons?”

The one called Doocy snapped back with a voice that sounded like an angel humming in the wind.  

“Awright, Willum, I thank I done the same thang you done with the money yore mama give you to get that ugly mug-face of yore’s fixed, that’s whut I done with it.”

I said he sounded like an angel humming, I just didn't specify what kind of angel's voice it was. If you'd been there, you would not doubt its origin. He laid into Willum emphatically, and I waited for a laugh to follow, but it never came, so I didn't know what might ensue at any moment. He didn't go at Willum or anything, for which I'm thankful, but he just kind of snarled as he grabbed a wheelbarrow out of the back of the truck and slung it to the ground.

Pee Wee walked over to me while all this small talk was going on, greeting me with a laugh and a nod toward Doocy. I’d seen Pee Wee use those exact gestures a hundred times. He would grin, throw his head back slightly, and then turn the grin into a million-dollar smile. His smile was always one of approval that made you feel good inside. Despite Pee Wee’s six-foot-two frame and a demeanor that could be tougher than a mad horned toad, he was as gentle as a cool breeze most all the time, not to be confused with the 'real' Cool Breeze whose acquaintance we were about to make.

“Cheyenne,” I said, again turning to my one-man audience: “I think the only two people who brought any kind of good vibes that whole summer were Pee Wee and …" – I paused as I turned my eyes back to the road – "… and you-know-who.”

“Oh, that’s funny, Popman,” Cheyenne snapped back in Doocy-fashion, “you bring You-know-who up as if I already know who you-know-who is, but you know I don’t.”

         “Oh, don’t you worry,” I said, “you’re gonna meet her for sho, and it ain’t gonna be long now,” and we both laughed at the little Southern slang.

I didn’t bite on his subtle hint to introduce the mysterious young lady at this point but stayed on topic with the matter at hand, continuing with Pee Wee.

Pee Wee was a man’s man, that’s the best way I know to describe him. Any time he gave you his approval, he’d make you feel as though you were the most important person in the world. Even after the passing of half a century, I’d say he is one of the best balcony people I ever met. He would effortlessly put you high on a pedestal, whether you deserve it or not.

He balanced out Doocy for me that summer, but the problem was that it wasn’t just Doocy he had on the other side of the scale. We had Doocy, Red, ‘Willum,’ and Hook, the group I affectionately began referring to as the “chain gang” as far back as June 5, 1973, which, you’ll note, was the second day on the job. Often as this tumultuous summer unfolded, I’d get to telling folks about this rough, tough, mean chain gang. I wasn’t the least bit afraid to speak my mind, even though I made sure I was thirty or forty rugged country miles out of earshot of any of them.

That morning of June 4, as Doocy and Willum continued to exchange verbal blows, Pee Wee and I had a good laugh, especially when Willum threw a counter punch about how Doocy’s face looked like a mud fence after a ten-inch rain.

Sensing Willum’s good nature, and feeling more relaxed generally because of Pee Wee’s welcoming, I unfroze and laughed out loud right alongside Pee Wee. I can say with certainty that this laugh was the first mistake I made that summer. It got me off on the wrong foot, something I wouldn’t advise for anyone for the first twelve seconds of being on a job such as this.

         “It reminded me of Scout, Cheyenne,” I said, “You remember how she gets into a fight with Walter Cunningham because she said he made her get off on the wrong foot with Miss Caroline in the beginning of To Kill A Mockingbird. That's what happened here.”

Cheyenne laughed, and added, “But Scout had that Cunningham boy to lay the blame on. You didn’t seem to have anybody to blame?”

“That’s for sure,” I said, impressed with Cheyenne’s sense of awareness. I knew all along that Cheyenne was the right man for the job regarding passing this pivotal summer’s story down to him. About the time he turned sixteen, he and I started reading classics together – the first of which was Harper Lee’s – and we discussed them at length, often making the connection to our own lives during some of the long hikes we took. The deeper I went into the story, the more I could tell he was constructing a novel of his own in his head, building mental chapters as we rode down the highway talking. If he were writing that novel in his mind, he was about to jump headfirst into the rising action right out of the chute.

         Pee Wee and I were in the middle of our good laugh, less than two minutes into the Summer of ’73. That’s when Doocy swung around toward me and threw a scowl in my direction that would’ve killed a lesser man. I say “lesser man,” even though, normally, I would’ve been president of that organization. In this case, for some reason unbeknownst to me, I wasn’t because the scowl didn’t knock me down dead right in my tracks.. I knew I had at least to be in critical condition, so, to take no chances with my life, I wiped the smile off of my face as fast as I could. It would've been really hard for Pee Wee to have to explain to Mama that I fell over dead five minutes into the job.

I wiped the smile off of my face, but it was too late. Doocy was two seconds away from introducing himself to me.

         “Wipe that smile off of yore face sonny before I wipe it off for ya”

         He said it with that same angelic voice he had used with Willum, one that came without any commas or periods or pauses or exclamation points. He just said it as if he made all the rules of grammar himself and dared anybody to object. I wasn’t about to. I don’t even think Ms. Long from my junior year of English would’ve objected, although she might’ve, because she was tough, too.

I didn’t know what to do when he told me to wipe that smile off, because I had wiped it off the instant I saw the whites of his eyes. I looked over at Pee Wee, begging for help, but Pee Wee was about as much help as that old stump sitting there on the north side of the house. He just raised his eyebrows and chuckled. That’s one time I kind-of resented Pee Wee’s good-naturedness.

        Doocy wasn’t finished with me as I stood on this abandoned island in the stream, all alone.

        “Look at me sonny when a man be talkin’ at cha. Don’t look at Pee Wee yonder. He can’t hep you none. Look over heah at Doocy Dew, look heah in these eyes, and jus’ tell the Cool Breeze what your baby-blues is seein’ right ‘bout now?”

        That got a big laugh from Pee Wee. I heard it, but I wasn’t about to turn and look. I was told to look at Doocy Dew, or the Cool Breeze, or whatever name he preferred, and that was what I was going to do until he told me otherwise. I think I would’ve stood there and stared at his rugged self until the sun went down if I had to’ve.

        I fastened my eyes straight on him. My brain clearly was in a high state of turmoil at the moment, but somehow it was still clicking well enough to figure out that Doocy was the roughest-looking fella I had ever seen. That was a scary thought, because – while I was obeying the command to look at him square in the eye like a man – I straight-out disobeyed his second command right there in front of the world. He had asked me to tell him what I saw out of my “baby blues.” As much as I wanted to do that and to obey the creature standing in front of me, I could not. You have to be breathing to talk, and I had stopped breathing ten seconds ago.

I knew right then that I was a goner. If his glaring at me through the whites of those mean blood-shot eyes didn’t kill me, then the utter disdain in his wrong-kind-of-an-angel voice would. He had sucked every drop of air out of my body in just two sentences. My lips swelled up, my jaw bones tightened like a pair of vice grips, and the O2 that had been residing in my lungs packed its bags and hit the door headed for the Greyhound station.

If there was going to be an answer that day, it would have to come through my eyes, because my lungs didn’t have a drop of air left in them. Eyes don’t need air to breathe, so, as I saw it, that was about my only hope for survival. All I had in me otherwise was just enough oxygen to pray, “Help me, Lawd, help me, please!” before the end came.

With that final prayer released from my cold blue lips, I just waited for the angel band to come and lead me to the bright light at the end of that dark, lonely tunnel.

3

Time in a Bottle

If I could save time in a bottle

The first thing that I'd like to do

Is to save every day 'til eternity passes away

Just to spend them with you

I don’t know how many times Jim Croce's smooth tenor filled the air on the job site during the Summer of ’73. I do know that that his greatest hits You Don't Mess Around With Jim and Time in a Bottle were two of the regulars we'd hum around as we labored over that red soil on top of this Alabama hill. I learned in real time that you "don't mess around with Jim" or anybody else, as you'll see in what you are about to read, so, beware; and the latter captured this same scene and a hundred others during these hot months, all frozen in time solid as ice.

It would have been most fitting had both anthems played simultaneously during the inaugural two minutes on the job, had Corrina, Corrina not stolen the show. In a way, Corrina, Corrina stole the whole summer. You'll see.

There we stood, in that moment, beneath the dark clouds of that Alabama sky, facing Doocy with an audience of rough, ragged-looking bricklayers gathered around gawking and smirking. Time froze there, not because I chose it, because I didn't. Left to me, I would’ve burst the bottle into a smithereens; but the drama was going to happen, regardless – of that, I’m convinced. I just had to learn to hang on for the bumpy ride.

“Popman,” Cheyenne said, interrupting my thoughts as we continued driving down the dark highway, “you’d better get back to the story quickly. You haven’t been breathing for a good long time. I don’t want you to turn Granger blue.”

I laughed, impressed that he remembered the royal colors of our beloved alma mater.

“You’re right, that’s for sure,” I said, “and even now, as Doocy steps on stage to assume his leadin' theatrical role, I’m not sure there’s a great deal of breathin’ going on.” I then tried to scroll back in my mind to recapture as good of an image as possible of Doocy at our first meeting and of this entire Act I, Scene I as it unfolded.

“Cheyenne,” I said, beneficiary of a well-timed epiphany, “you remember my trip to Yellowstone a couple of years ago and all the drama that came with it.”

“Oh, I don’t think I could forget any part of that,” he laughed.

I was speaking of our fateful trip deep into Yellowstone hiking when a hiking buddy of mine and I got lost on the second day and had to spend three days trying to find our way out.

“That Wednesday," I continued, "the fourth day of the hike, was when I walked up on that Grizzly, a beautiful cinnamon-colored bear with a blonde streak straight down his back. He had been drinkin' from the creek that you come to jus' as you top a hill. When he saw me, he looked up and stood there lookin' at me for a good half a minute. I plopped down on the ground, and He and I jus' stared, as if we were memorizin’ each other”

Cheyenne smiled at the analogy.

“That’s a scene I’ll never forget, kind of a moment frozen in time. Not many people get to stand face to face with a Grizzly, fifteen feet from him," I said, "and the key word there is 'get to,'" I added with a chuckle. "And not many people got to stand before Doocy that-a-way, either. But if you do either, you just can’t forget those encounters. I still think that standin' in front of Doocy was 'bout as scary as facing off with the Grizzly, standing fifteen feet from me as he drank his evenin' brew on the other side of the narrow creek. Doocy studied me the same way the bear did, and I could tell for sure he didn’t like what he saw!”

I paused there and put a quarter of a mile of lonely highway behind us before picking back up.

“You know they say that the moments you most remember in life are the ones that take your breath away. My Grizzly in 2021 obviously was one of those moments, but it was my 'Grizzly' on June 4, 1973 that prepared me for it."

With the stage set, we began feebly to describe the scariest of the two Grizzly meetings.

What I saw standing before me in all his glory was a man about six feet tall but half that size again in width. He clearly did not have an ounce of fat on his whole body, and he had a face that belonged in the deepest, remotest, scariest part of that treacherous Yellowstone forest.

Doocy’s clothes were ragged, as if he had worn those same clothes for a solid month – and he probably had – and his clothes were even dustier than they were ragged. The whole time I stood there my mind was registering all of these details, and Doocy never took the whites of his eyes off of me. He was staring me down like a Doberman about to leap on an intruder who had stepped inside the gate. Without turning his head even an inch, he hollered out “RED” at the top of his lungs, speaking to the boss. Red, who would prove to be another Grizzly-type in his own right, was milling around in the tool box seemingly oblivious to the ongoing drama, but he stopped long enough to entertain Doocy.

“Red,” Doocy said again, “jus’ tell me whut ‘xactly you brung out heah on this job. Can you jus’ tell me thet? I’m lookin’, but I ain’t sure ‘xactly whut it is – Is it a man? Naw, he can’t be no man, maybe a boy, I ain’t sure ‘bout that neither.”

Doocy paused, wrinkled his brow as if he were getting more confused by the moment, then he added,

“Please, Lawd, don’t tell the Cool Breeze thet Red has done went and hired a puppy, a little-bitty, pee-in-the-floor puppy, please, Lawdy, don’t tell me thet.”

Doocy hesitated to deliberate again, illustrating to me early-on that he was a master of the dramatic pause, and he would daily utilize his great speech-making technique either to conjure up his next argument, or to give me a chance to breathe, which, in this case, wasn’t about to happen.

After a pause that I thought would take us to sundown, he resumed his dissertation, still gawking at me but talking to Red,

“Red, Lawd-have-mercy, this heah one you done hired don’t even shave a lick yet!”

As he articulated “shave a lick yet,” he raised his right hand, the one he had been waving around as if he had a gun in it, and he turned it backwards as if he were going to give me a deadly backhand slap. Instead, he ran the back of that hand – if you could call it that – down the side of my tender, baby-faced, unshaven cheek.

Friends, I do not know the science behind breathing and how long you can live without implementing it. I don’t think our sophomore biology teacher Ms. Rosa Brown ever got around to teaching us whether it is possible to stop breathing when, officially, you already had not taken a breath for a full minute. But whether science supports it or not, there is no doubt I managed to stop breathing again. It was not just because he ran his hand down the side of my face. I lost my breath again because of the hand itself.

Even after the passing of so, so many years, I still have never seen anything like it. It was the biggest hand I'd ever seen and rougher than the coarsest grade of sandpaper you can buy. The hand was white, even though Doocy was a black gentleman. It was stained as white as if he had plucked it down into a bucket of white paint. It was white as leprosy, white as fresh-driven snow on the side of a mountain.

And that isn’t even the worst part.

        He raised that hand and, although I was not breathing, and although I was having to count out of the corner of my eye, I could see he did not have five fingers the way that most hands that you run across do.

He had four.

Four fingers.

But it wasn’t just the number. Technically you could say he had five, it's just that the last two fingers on that huge right hand were webbed. It was as if they were welded or soldered like two pieces of iron that came out the fire as white as hot sand. Doocy reached out and rubbed that white-hot hand down the side of my pale, tender face, looking at me the whole time with the whites of his eyes showing as if he had just seen a ghost. I’m sure I looked like a ghost at that moment, pale as I was.

Everything was quiet, quiet as Sunday morning church. I was hoping Pee Wee would help me somehow, as his six-foot-two frame was somewhere to my left. I was even praying for it. I had been praying a series of those quick, instant prayers you pray when you know you don’t have long to live. But Pee Wee just passed by on the other side, just like the priest and the Levite my grandaddy Preacher Harvey often preached about. Here I was, all but robbed and left for dead in the ditch, and all Pee Wee did is pass on by, without so much as lifting one little finger to come to my defense. He was of no more help than if he had been walking down the road whistling Dixie.

Thinking on it, it seems that Pee Wee did a great deal of passing by on the other side that summer, especially at key moments when I thought surely Squatlow’s best friend would step onto the stage and rescue the lost puppy. I may have held that against him all my life, even to this day, had he not stepped up in the biggest moment of all and did something in defense of the aforementioned puppy that is worthy of the history books.

Truth is, I cannot even tell this part without having chills kind of run down my shoulders and arms and all the way up my spine. When Pee Wee finally stepped up that day, he did so in a big way, and the young fella they called Pup could not have been prouder.

But that would be a month later, thirty long, hard, grueling days that seemed like the biblical ‘a day to the Lord is a thousand years.’ So, I stayed mad at Pee Wee for every day of a few thousand years, from this very moment standing before the tribunal which was Doocy until the day a big cornfed Alabama boy came out on this very job looking for "one they call Pup." That story will have to wait, because plenty of water has to roll under the bridge before that. That'll have to be Act 5, Scene 5, I suppose.

"But trust me here," I said, turning back to Cheyenne, "it will be well worth the wait."

"Oh, I'm sure it will," Cheyenne said, "anytime there's a girl, and a boy, and then another boy, that's just bad 'arithmetic,' as you say. Any way you turn it, two fellas and one lady make for bad math," he said, laughing.

I just shook my head, because he remembered more of the bits and pieces we had discussed on our hikes than I had thought. Plus, I knew that he was right.

“There’s plenty of drama before we get to all that,” I said. "At the moment, my life  was still passin’ before me, and I knew I wasn’t close to bein' out of the woods.

"After Doocy ran those white-hot webbed fingers down the side of my baby-face, he showed me another unique feature that shocked me as much as the webbed hand, yet another reminder that this summer is as immune to hyperbole as a possum is to rattlesnake venom.

“Some things, Cheyenne, you just cannot make up, and we are about to get to the second one.

"And all this before the Summer of ’73 was five minutes old," he added.

"Yes sir," I said, "two minutes in, and Doocy was takin' my breath away, then stuffin' it in a bottle."

Cheyenne and I both laughed at the metaphors, and I utilized a dramatic pause worthy of Doocy himself, except I added some low humming of Jim Croce's music as we rolled quietly on down the highway.

If I could save time in a bottle, The first thing that I'd like to do ...

4

Knowing 'bout Doocy

                  “Cheyenne,” I said, “Mr. Croce was right in one way about savin’ time in a bottle that-a-way so you can store up all of those good, feel-warm-down-inside feelings. But he failed to account for the other kind of mem’ries – I mean the ones like I was havin’ the first five minutes on this job site.”

                  “Yeah, I guess sometimes memories can get stuck in a bottle so you can’t get them out even if you wanted to,” Cheyenne said, laughing.

                  ‘Oh, my,” I agreed, “those mem'ries are so stuck that it may take therapy to get through the first day. The bad mem’ries keep comin' like water out of a busted pipe. It was bad enough when Doocy jus' turned and looked at me with that mean scowl, but what he did after that made the scowl look as pretty as Lynda Carter."

                  I glanced at Cheyenne to see if he knew who the original Wonder Woman was. I couldn’t tell by his expression but didn't stop to explain. We had a journey to get back to, back to a hill in Rock Mills, Alabama, June of '73. Wonder Woman would have to wait.

As Doocy ran that hand that was more of a paw than a hand – with its four fingers instead of five – right down the side of my face, he turned his eyes off of me for the first time and turned to Pee Wee,

         “Yessir, we was right all along, Pee Wee. “This white babyface ain’t never seen no razor of no kind. It’s smoother’ed then a new-born baby’s hind parts, maybe ev’n a mite smoother.”

         He turned back to me, and I promise the only thought that came to my mind right then was there really wasn’t anything left for Doocy to do but to rare back and slap me all-the-way back to the Georgia line, if for no other reason than to show his disgust for having to deal with a “young’n” like me for the rest of the summer, if I happened to live that long.

But Doocy showed grace that early June morning, a grace I was privileged to see a number of times during those sweltering days of summer. It was a grace that was completely incongruent with the rough-and-rugged human being that stood in front of me at that moment. It reminded me, somehow, of the grace Preacher Harvey would preach about, bringing in the story of how John Newton's started life out being a slave-trader before he found the Lord and turned his life around, then wrote the world’s greatest song to tell about it.

Any grace from Doocy – I could not help but thinking – was amazing, that’s for sure.

Over the weeks that followed – as the sun began to get hotter and hotter and June hastened toward July – Doocy got to where he could see right through me, like he was looking through the clear water of the Yellowstone River, unlike that of the Chattahoochee. If I came on the job just a little down and out, not in the mood for any shenanigans, he would know it and would kind of reflect my mood himself, as though he felt he had to share the burden with me. There truly was something very biblical about it, kind of reminded me of Simon the Cyrene on the road to Calvary. I never would’ve thought I’d make that comparison, but it really fit Doocy the further the summer crawled along.

One day a week or so into the summer, I came in to work that way, with a particularly long face. It's pretty easy to figure why, I guess. Doocy noticed it as soon as I pulled up to the job and crawled slowly out of my red Nova. He just came over by me as he was beginning to grab some tools out of Red’s old truck, and without so much as a Good mornin’ said,

“Pups, we gots to do lots of work t’day; you jus’ steer close to ol’ Doocy heah and you’ll be awright.”

I think he meant "stay," not "steer," but, among Doocy's many talents, he was a wordsmith and could make almost any word in the English language fit one of his sentences. Even singing a song, he was as apt to say “love in a bottle as “time,” or “Delta Dean” as Delta Dawn. If anybody said anything, he’d just spout back,

                  “Doocy will sang t’song the way Doocy sangs it, and you can sangs it the way you sangs it.”

                  Every time he did that, Pee Wee would look at me and throw his head back with his unique laugh. Pee Wee enjoyed all the tidbits that went on, and I think in a way it was like he enjoyed my getting to know all of these characters. That was the way Pee Wee was. To my knowledge, I never saw him mad. He was always “as cool as a cu-somber,” as Doocy would say and dare anybody to correct him.

Something funny about Doocy, though: He would seldom look at me when he was being ‘a mite tender’ as he’d call it. He’d carry on his work with that same air about him as if he were made of nothing but tough beef jerky through and through.

              What I was telling was about that day I came in brooding a little: The day wasn’t ten minutes old, while we were working on the south side of the house – the side where the mixer was – that Willum didn’t like something I did, or didn’t do. It could have been a hundred things. He started to fuss at me about it the way Doocy did. But he had hardly gotten five words out when Doocy dumped the load of mortar in the wheelbarrow and turned the mixer off and started our direction. When the sound of the mixer died down, which takes a few seconds, Doocy could hear Willum clearly, because we weren’t more than twenty feet away from him, down at the far end of the scaffold. When he heard Willum fuss at me, he lit into him as if the poor fella were fussing at his mama. It surprised me, because it wasn’t a big deal but also because I had never seen Doocy come unglued that way before.

                  “Willum, you bettah get your behind-end away from t'Pup thar and gets to doin’ somethin’ someplace else, ‘cause you gonna find more trouble over heah than you want,” he yelled, “Can’t you see the Pup’s got thang’s on his’n mind t’day? Huh? Can’t yuh see thet? Is ya blind, Willum? Let the Pup be, and get on with yerself,” he said, ever what that meant. I wanted to smile but I sure didn’t have enough chips on my side of the table to take that gamble.

Willum was a slow learner that day and started to argue with Doocy, which is something I never tried. When Willum started in, Doocy slammed that wheelbarrow down and grabbed the shovel out of it with mud clinging to it, and moved toward William with that scowl that made the one he gave me on the first day look like another sweet glance from Wonder Woman. He meant business. Ol’ W illum didn’t say a word, just grabbed a brick hammer Pee Wee had been yelling for and hurried around to the front of the house. Doocy scared me that day more than he did on this first day. I think he would’ve used that shovel if Willum had said another word.

Glancing back over at Cheyenne, I added, “I tell you something, Cheyenne. Folks who hear this story may not understand it all. But I can tell you that there is no doubt in my mind that Doocy would’ve swung that shovel across Willum’s back if he had taken another step toward him. I don’t think he would’ve tried to kill him, but he would’ve done some swingin’. Those boys were for real. They meant business. As tough as Willum was himself, he wasn’t about to tangle with the “Cool Breeze.”

Cheyenne and I both laughed at the “Cool Breeze” reference, because any use of it always seemed to ease the tension. He was getting a true picture of Doocy now, and the realism of what went on that summer was flooding back to me in living color, as ABC and its multi-colored peacock used to advertise when I was boy.

“I’ll tell you this, Cheyenne, and then I’ll move on: A time or two after that, Willum would get on to me about somethin’, but if he saw Doocy comin’ that direction, he’d lower his voice and say somethin’ like, 'Don’t worry ‘bout it, Pup. You awright, jus’ keep doin’ what cha doin’ there,' and then he’d hurry on. As he scooted off, I’d see him check over his shoulder to make sure Doocy wasn’t coming for him. He became a fast learner fast enough, especially when it came to learning that Pup was hands off.”

         That must have been one of the first times that I realized who Doocy was – I mean, who he really was. Before then, I saw him as being sometimes funny, and all-the-time rugged around the edges. Doocy never was the tolerate sort to anybody. But in a way, he was a tad more tolerate to me than anybody else on the job, even though he rode me the hardest. He would get onto me hard, that’s true, but I could tell he wasn’t really mad, just “playing mad,” I guess. But with the other workers, he’d get hot in a flash, and that’s when I stayed as clear of him as I could.

I realized something else, something personal, the day he jumped on Willum the way he did. Doocy was one of the first people, at least out on any job, I had ever met who would have my back no matter what. Of course, I can't forget about Miss Billie at the shoe store. She was special that way, too, just she was tender around the edges, so to speak. And Pee Wee, too. He would've taken on an army for me, I know. But with Doocy, he would've gone as far as violence if need be. I didn't need that kind of protection, and I had never found the need for a bodyguard; but I got one out on Red’s brick job, whether I wanted it or not.

         Naturally, I didn't see all of this on the first day. A complex fella like Doocy wasn’t going to show you all his different sides at one time. He was like a kaleidoscope, I guess. Learning Doocy would be an exercise that would have to come along slowly. One day, when I was braver than at the first, I said to Doocy,

“Doocy, I know you. I know how you are.”

         Doocy snapped back as if he had been waiting for me to say it:

“No sir, Pups, you don’t knows the Breeze at all. You jus’ knows ‘bout him. Thet’s all. You knows ‘bout him!”

         I never forgot that. There are some people that you know, and there are others you just know ‘bout. My webbed-hand friend was one of the latter.

Don’t think now, that Doocy had gotten soft, because he hadn’t. He had a soft side, sure, but it wasn’t to anybody but me. That’s the truth. I never saw him show a soft side to anybody else. And that first day, and for many days after, I’d be surprised if he divvied two drops of grace to me. The only thing he showed was the restraint to keep from hauling off and knocking me across to the brick pile stacked in front of the house.

“Oh,” I said, coming back to Cheyenne's and my long drive down the dark highway headed eastward, “Cheyenne, here’s what I haven’t gotten around to tellin’ you.

“Doocy did shock me again that first mornin’, right after he ran his webbed hand down the side of my face. He looked at me with a curled-up lip, then, in a flash, took a step back, threw his head back like he was a supermodel, and laughed like nothin’ you’ve ever seen. He had an unusual laugh, one of those where he would open his mouth as wide as it would go until it looked like the openin’ to a dark cave. When I looked – or gawked – I saw that his teeth were white as sand on both sides of his mouth; but in the middle, there was nothin’. Not a tooth one. It was like lookin’ through a dark, black tunnel, and there wasn't a bit of light at the end of it.

"I suppose it was kind of a symbol for that whole summer, with everything that was goin' on, except the Lord made sure I saw the light, as Hank Williams, Sr. sang and even filled the air on the job site more than once that summer. And maybe I saw the light, even then in the middle of the quagmire, Cheyenne," I said, "It's hard to remember how much of how God's workin' while you're right in the middle; but I think even then I must've known that this story at its core was about how great God is, even if at times the light hid behind some dark, gloomy clouds."

After a moment, I added, a bit wistfully, "Sorry, Cheyenne, I didn't mean to philosophize."

But Cheyenne just smiled. He was usually ahead of me and could decipher the symbolism and look deeper into the magic of things as fast as I could “philosophize.” I knew from the start that I was putting this story into good hands.

  Pretty soon we got back to the theme of the day, which was Doocy.

“When Doocy threw his head back,” I said, “and laughed that vintage Doocy laugh – I’m still standin’ there now, gawkin’ and barely breathin’ – a number of things could’ve happened, almost all of them bad. But in this case, it turned out favorable. Trust me here, I was not forgetful to glance up to heaven when I finally realized that I had a good chance to pull through the day. … I was not forgetful to give the Lord credit for allowin' me to see the sun set that evenin' and see Mama before she went to sleep.”

But Doocy’s laughing, I continued, stirred up the hornet’s nest and got everybody else going, too. I looked over to Pee Wee for help, but there was no help coming. He had joined in on the frolicking with the rest of them. I knew it was going to be a lonely summer if I was going to stand around and look for help.

Doocy wasn’t even through with his laugh when Red – who had walked over for a minute to examine something on the house – came lumberin’ back up toward the crew when he heard all the commotion.

         “Are ya’ll still foolin’ with that kid?’ he said, but he didn’t say it, he hollered it, and his holler had such a depth to it that you could hear its echo bouncing off of the pine trees in the distance.

         “I ain’t makin’ no money out here while ya’ll are carrin’ on with the boy,’ he said. ‘Git that truck unloaded and git to work!’ He pointed toward where he wanted to start laying the brick, “Willum, get to haulin’ brick on that north wall, Hook start settin’ up the scaffoldin’, Doocy crank up the mixer. We gotta go fellas. It’s liable to rain in an hour.”

         Red never stood waiting for a response, just barked out the orders and moved on. He knew that his voice demanded respect and he didn't need to stare somebody down to get him to do what he commanded. I learned later in life that a confident leader does that, that he doesn't have to stand and watch to see if people are going to move when he speaks.

Red stormed back toward the house, and I stood there and watched everybody moving in unison, as if they were all parts of a well-oiled machine. Doocy hurried to unhook the mixer Red had pulled behind the truck. The mixer was heavy – I would learn that all too well later – and hard to pull by yourself, but Doocy grabbed it and pulled it as if he were pulling a little red wagon. I thought right then that Doocy Dew may have been the strongest man I’d ever seen. I still think that. About the time he got halfway to the sandpile with the mixer, he remembered me.

       “Pup, grab that wheel-barrer thar and a coupla them shovels and meet the Breeze o’er by thet sandpile.”

       As he said it, he let go of the tongue of the mixer with that big right webbed hand and waved it over in the general direction of the red truck. He didn't wait to see if I'd obey, either, but immediately threw that wild right hand back on the tongue of the mixer and manhandled it to the sandpile. I jumped to it, naturally, and pulled the wheelbarrow off the truck, and as I did I heard Doocy talking to himself in a grumble, making sure I could hear every word, of course:

       “I guess if somebody’s gotta teach Squatlow’s lil’ brother,” he mumbled, “it might’as well be Doocy Dew hisself.”

5

Storm-clouds Gathering

Around eleven that morning storm clouds started rolling in like a seventeenth-century scroll; but, truth is, they had been rolling in all morning way before that, starting at eight a.m.

I say ‘eight,' but you have to remember that Alabama’s time is an hour earlier than Georgia's. So, when we hit the brick job at eight in the mornings, it is actually nine a.m. across the state line where I woke up every morning. Our feet still were going to have to hit the floor early for us to be on the job site by eight a.m. Alabama time because of the forty-minute drive; but we did gain an hour, which helped.

After a while this time difference got kind of confusing and the workers just tried to talk in Georgia time, mainly so we would know what time to eat lunch and to go home. One day while we were sitting around on buckets eating lunch, Doocy got the bright idea that we would start on Alabama time but go home on Georgia time, all of which would give us a free hour of pay. Red Williams didn’t even honor that suggestion with a reply, which in itself made Doocy mad and had him pouting the rest of the day, making for a bad day for me. I thought, "Red, couldn't you just've said you'd think about it?" He knew how Doocy was, but, no, that'd be too easy, and the Lord forbid anybody take the smooth and easy way that summer.

“Cheyenne,” I said, turning back to my listener, “you might be interested to know that a week or two into that hot gruelin’ summer, the Georgia-Alabama time difference created some added stress one night when a, uh, certain young Georgia boy still wet behind the ears went out on a date with a young lady who hailed from this Roanoke town.”

"You talking about the 'you know who' we have not yet talked about?" Cheyenne snapped back.

"Oh," I said, deadpanning it, "so you already know about the girl. Hm, I thought I forgot to mention it."

"Oh, you keep mentioning her, but that's as far as it goes. But while we're talking her," Cheyenne said, seizing his moment to probe deeper, "just how long do you think it'll be before she makes her grand appearance out on that job? I mean, so far everything's is pretty rough and ugly; and I'd just as soon walk down a dark alley at night than to step out onto that job the way you describe it. It's gonna be nice to add a little 'beauty' to it."

"Oh, yeah," I said with a smile, "it's gonna be real nice. Everybody was on their best behavior, at least when she showed up.  You're gonna think that the whole crew went to a holy-roller revival and came back newborn again, at least for a moment or two. You'll know it won't last, though, but it'll be a breath of fresh air."

We laughed at the exchange, and I couldn't help but feel good deep down at the thought of that part of the saga that was not very far down the road of ’73. It is true there's a special relationship between a Doocy and a Pup, but this other one will take us to another level altogether. In time.

I went on to talk about lunchtime on the job and some of the idiosyncrasies that marked it as unique. It was almost as sacred of an hour as that holy-roller revival we were talking about. The boys out on the job wanted to eat pronto, and that is as big of an understatement as saying in Noah’s day he and his folks got a little bit of rain. It wouldn’t do for Red to cheat the boys out of half a minute of their lunch break. Oh, no mistaking: Red was a boisterous man, all right, and not to be trifled with; but lunchtime was lunchtime, and even his boisterousness had a limit. I saw World War III almost break out more than once when Red wanted to "use all the mud up" before taking the break. In such moments, Doocy, William, and Hook, in particular, were not opposed to just walking off the job if need be. Usually, they just fussed and grumbled, but the supreme threat of “walkin’ all the way back to Gawgia if I hav’ta” was always in the mix in their grumblings.

         By noon, the boys deserved a break, because there was no 'breaking' of any kind from the time your boots hit the red dirt in the mornings until noon. None. Half a day’s work on a bricklaying job is like a week’s work on most jobs I’d seen. I was a young man then myself, as you know. To use Mr. Twain's words, I was younger than I am now, younger than I’ll ever be again. I learned that quotation in Mrs. Long’s junior English class when we read Huckleberry Finn, and I liked to show off little things such as that every now and then. But, as we were saying, despite being a youth who was younger than he ever had been before, by mid-morning I was dragging more than the rest, because there was no place to hide on that job. When a certain part of your anatomy -- the "gluteous maximus" (something I learned from my sophomore Biology teacher and beauty, Miss Rosa Brown) -- started dragging, you just had to gut it up or else take added abuse from the likes of Red and Doocy or any of the bricklayers who were on the wall waiting for mud.

Doocy was in charge of making the mud in the ‘mixer’ and dumping it in the wheelbarrows and pushing the mud out to the bricklayers on the wall. That first morning, it took Doocy several minutes to get the mixer moved and set up by the sandpile. He had to prop the tongue of the mixer up on a concrete block and then wedge several small pieces of boards on top of the block to get the mixer level. Once leveled, he had to clean the mixer out from the day before by taking a brick hammer and hammering it out like a drum. He almost would put his whole body down into that mixer to clean it out, and I couldn't help but think he looked a lot like Jonah going down into the mouth of the whale. When he came up out of the mixer's belly, he would pour a bucket of water (which I had ready and handed to him) in the mixer, then crank it up so he could dump the excess dried clumps of mud on the ground. The blades of the mixer would get to churning a hundred miles an hour when he did that, because there wasn't any mud in there to slow them down. It was not at all unlike Doocy's stomach churning after eating a mess of chitlins he brought for his lunch some days. I tried to keep a safe distance from my friend on those afternoons, which were not rare occasions at all, unfortunately. I didn't know which churned the roughest, that mixer with nothing but water in it besides a few clumps of dried mud or Doocy's stomach after a mess of chitlins his mama had packed in his lunch the night before.

I helped Doocy take care of all the mixer chores, obeying his orders as promptly as I could along the way -- "Fill thet bucket of water and have her ready, baby Pup ... Hand thet shovel to the Breeze, heah, quick now ... Quit cha standin' 'n lookin' pritty, Pup, grab thet hammah," and so on. I never heard the word "please" I don't think the whole summer.. Usually we would go straight to making a batch of mortar after cleaning out the mixer, but on the first morning we didn't. It takes time to get the job set up, so, we shut the mixer off and he ordered me to come with him to help the others get the brick stocked up around the house. While we stocked up, the bricklayers hanged what they called 'story' poles on the corners of the house. In between helping Doocy load brick on the flatbed, then pushing them to stock the brick on the boards on the scaffolding that they set up about three feet from the wall, I  watched the bricklayers when I could. I could see that they would measure from the top of the house – or the cornice boards – and mark on two-by-four story poles all the way down to the bottom. When they got to the bottom, they may have to adjust the marks a little and make up maybe half an inch total by making up a sixteenth of an inch or so per course. The main thing I learned is that when you get to the top you need to have about six inches for the soldier course. 

The soldier course is just what you would think. It’s the last brick at the top where the bricklayers stand the brick upright. Since the brick on this Roanoke house – or Rock Mills house, more specifically – was what’s called a modular brick, which was just shy of eight inches, the bricklayers would make sure that they had about two inches of the soldier course to go behind the cornice board. On some houses, though not this one, they would lay what’s called a “walking soldier,” and let the bottom of every third soldier brick stick out about an inch, giving the appearance of the brick walking. Of course, I learned all this over a few weeks, not just on this first day.

But one big thing I learned was that if I was standing up straight at the end of a day like a soldier brick, and even able to walk straight, then that was a victory in itself.

Knowledge of bricklaying, both from the bricklayer's perspective and from a laborers, takes time. In the beginning, I naturally was still ‘wet behind the ears,’ as Red reminded me daily. Red had a special knack for reminding people of things, especially me. He could've gone in business just hollering at people. When Red wasn't reminding me of what I didn't know, Doocy would take over.

"Aw, Pup, you don't understand nuttin’ ‘bout nuttin’," he'd say. Or he might re-structure the thought in the form of a question, and say, “Pup, don’t you know nuttin’?” Despite all of that, I was curious enough about things that I didn't let the certainly of getting my head chewed off deter me from asking questions every time Doocy turned around.

“How long are these brick they’re layin’ on the house,” I asked about mid-morning the first day, a little while before the rain came. I waited until Doocy stopped going ninety-miles-an-hour long enough to take a swig out of his water jug before I asked. He was leaning on his shovel that was stuck half a foot into the sandpile, and between swigs entertained my questions.

         “Pup, those brick thar gonna be sev'n and five-eighth inches.”

         “Why seven and five-eighth?” I asked, emphasizing the ‘five-eighth.’

         “Because them’s whut you call ‘mod-ja-la brick,’” he said, “and mod-ja-la brick gots to lay on eight inches.”

He emphasized each syllable of ‘modular’ carefully as if he was trying to teach me to spell it. When he said 'eight,' he held up eight fingers, which, I noticed, was perfect for him. He just had to bend the two webbed ones down a little and show the thumb and other two fingers to get to three. I almost smiled at that thought as he held both hands up for me but wasn’t nearly that brave. I wasn't always the smartest brick in the pile, a favorite expression of Pee Wee's, but I learned early on that survival demanded at least a smidgen of common sense. So, instead, of giving in a foolish smile, I probed with another question, which definitely was a case of pressing my luck further than I should've.

         "If they lay on eight inches," I said, noticing he was still holding up those three fingers, "why are they seven and five-eighth inches?”

          “Pup,” Doocy said, now waving that webbed hand like a Georgia politician, “How’s you gonna lay on eight inches? Ain’t cha gonna put some ‘morter’ in-b’tween the brick? The morter in the head joint is three-eighths of an inch, so if you do yore math you’s gonna see that all adds up to eight inches. Don’t they teach you nothin’ over at thet prison?”

          "Thet prison” to which he referred was LaGrange High School. The high school had the look of a prison, being built of large off-white marble-like blocks. The original high school was made of red modular brick, much like the ones on the McClain house, but it burned in 1943 and was rebuilt and reopened in 1945, more than a decade before I was born.

In defense of my beloved school (more beloved now than then, I suppose), I was about to respond to the prison comment with a , 'Hm, Doocy, you seem to know a heap 'bout prisons," but a clasp of thunder saved me. A supersonic boom roared like a giant lion from the hovering dark clouds that had been gathering for a while. The thundering put the whole job into panic mode. A fire drill is the best way I know to describe it. You've never seen such a panicking that ensues on a brick job when the skies get dark as night and the bottom falls out. It is something to see. When the rain started pouring on the heels of the thunder, every man put his motor in high gear. Red knew it was coming, so he had already grabbed three large sheets of plastic, called polyethylene, and had them ready out by the wall on the north side of the house where the bricklayers were working. They had only laid maybe two feet brick high when the bottom fell out.

As soon as the clouds erupted, the bricklayers grabbed those huge sheets of plastic, put one end on top of the brick they had just laid, and set loose brick on top of the plastic to hold it. Then they pinned the other end of the plastic with the brick stacked up on the scaffolding. Red, Pee Wee, and Charlie – Charlie was another of Red’s brothers-in-law but much more gentle of spirit – had not jointed all their work, so they had to get to it fast. But a big gust of wind came along about the time they got the plastic in place, and it ripped the plastic from under the brick on the scaffolding, and chaos ensued again.

"Grab that plastic, quit standin' there, boy," Red yelled, and we grabbed it and held that end of the plastic over their heads to keep the rain off of the newly-laid wall. The result was that while we kept the wall and Pee Wee and Charlie dry, while Red and I got drenched until we couldn't have gotten any wetter if we had dived into the duck pond in the front of the McClain ranch.

         I said they ‘jointed’ their work: This is an important part of the bricklayer's job. A bricklayer uses a metal tool that looks like an ‘S’ to run through the mud joints in the wall to smooth them out. I would learn later – when I myself became a bricklayer – that in the South bricklayers laid more modular brick than jumbo brick. In Texas, where life’s river would ultimately take us, we laid more jumbo brick. Bigger jobs, such as schools, would use more of the modular brick, but houses were built with jumbo brick, some of which were a softer, less durable ‘Mexican’ brick. For a Mexican or most other jumbo brick, you could use a stick for a jointer that was like the end of a big broom handle to joint the wall. No few bricklayers had cut off the end of their wife’s big broom at home and faced the music later when she grabbed it to sweep only to find it was a foot shorter than when she bought it.

Few Georgia or Alabama jobs used brick that allowed that rough look. They almost always required the smooth finish of a metal jointer, which took more precision and time. After they would joint the wall, they would brush it down with a soft brush that had bristles soft as cat’s hair. Because even the soft brush would leave little marks in the mortar, they would have to go back over it more gently a second time after brushing the wall.

That first day, during the hectic rain storm, I saw that process for the first time and wondered why they would take the time to go back over their work with the sky falling down on all of us. Later Charlie gently explained it to me, teaching me a good lesson on doing things the right way, rain or no rain.

"The way you joint your work makes all the difference, Pup," he said, "Always remember that if you take short cuts you cut yourself short."

Charlie was a philosopher like that, very different from Red. Red's main philosophizing was "Git your butt t'movin' if you know what's good for yer, Pup," so talking to Charlie was like the calm after the storm. He reminded me a little of Miss Billie at the shoe store, it's just that we didn't have a great deal of time to get to know each other due to all the other hoopla going on.

Bricklaying, from the start, intrigued me. Even with the contrast between all the characters -- Doocy, Red, Pee Wee, Charlie, then Willum and Hook -- you could see how it reflected life a great deal. I would see every type of person on that job that I could ever hope to see the rest of my working days, and that would also include the dark-haired girl as well as her mama and daddy who would emerge on the second day on the job. But bricklaying in general, as I would learn in the years to come, was about as close to artistry work as I would ever do, unless you stretch ‘artistry’ into “wordsmithing,” a skill I learned I might have a slight knack for about the time I hit the hallways of Westside Junior High School. I think Mr. Singley, my eighth-grade Civics teacher, was one of the first to note some creativity in me, and I may as well make him solely responsible for any big-headedness that I developed from junior high to graduation.

But bricklaying is art without a brush, except the cat's-hair one you use to brush the wall. I suppose that its artistry with its incongruent marriage to the most ruggedness you've ever seen made the proper backdrop for the events that were just beginning to unfold, here in the fateful summer of ’73.

Not that I could've seen all of that connection then, but, still, life is far too abstract for a young boy of sixteen to see all that. But even in abstract art, the untrained eye can sometimes make out dark storm clouds gathering on the horizon.

6

Let Me Be There

When the bottom of the sky dropped out, the scene that ensued was a million reminders of the culture on the job. To use the word "culture" is a bit of a misnomer, because there was very little that you'd call culture on display. Pee Wee had a great deal, which is what made him stand out. I learned as I made my way through life that you would meet a good many people who had traits you would try to emulate. Pee Wee was one of those. One thing Pee Wee did -- and it was very "cultured," I'd say -- is that he stayed clean all day, something almost impossible to do on the brick job. He carried a rag in his back pocket at all times, and he would pull it out to wipe off sweat from his face or mud or that splashed on his jeans (when somebody you know would splash everything in sight when he threw mud on the mortar board). Sometimes you'd see him at the end of the wall brushing his clothes with that cat's-hair brush the bricklayers used. He didn't obsess with it, just knew how to keep himself neat and clean along the way. It really was a marvel. I tried borrowing that from him through the years, kept a small rag in my back pocket at all times as I worked, tried brushing off my dusty jeans all throughout the day, but I never could master cleanliness the way he could. That is just one of the things I admired about Pee Wee. He had the 'it' factor for sure, and this was just one part of it and his culture.

Charlie had it, too, being a construction-job philosopher and all, but as for the rest of the gang, the word 'culture' never appeared in their life dictionary. They preferred "torture" to culture.

Culture would drive up on the job, though, every day, in the form of Mr. and Mrs. McClain, the owners of the house. Mr. McClain owned the hardware store in downtown Roanoke, so he obviously was well off financially. At least, by the look of the house we were building on those twenty acres, with a duck pond in front and a white picket fence around it, and with a view on top of the hill that was worthy of a Norman Rockwall portrait -- I'd say he was cultured.

On the other hand, Mrs. McClain almost made Mr. McClain look as rugged as Doocy after a hard day's work. It's not that Mr. McClain didn't carry himself with dignity, because he did. He was a tall man, very distinguished, and he had a calm way about him. He was somewhat like Pee Wee in that, and he did so in a way that you couldn't tell if he was a millionaire or if he was a bricklayer working paycheck to paycheck. I don't think there was a nickel's difference between Mr. McClain and Pee Wee, even though they were clearly in two different tax brackets. They were not in different culture brackets, though.

Mrs. McClain, as we were saying, took culture to a whole new level, but not in a showy way. You could tell she was a lady. She was a Southern Belle through and through. She and her husband both were probably in the late 30's, but Mrs. McClain looked barely thirty and could have easily have been mistaken for Miss Alabama or somebody. She also had a richness about her that was rare, a gentleness and kindness that was as fresh as the country spring that ran back behind their house. When she talked to you, she kind of made the world stand still in a way that you thought you were the most important person in the world. Sometimes she would bring out brownies or cookies and give to the guys around lunchtime. She would walk up to the chain gang as they ate lunch sitting there on five-gallon buckets in the living-room-to-be, and she would treat Doocy and all as if they were knights and princes. She called everybody "Mr," It was Mr. Doocy, and Mr. Red, and Mr. Pee Wee, and, yes, Mr. Billy Ray, at least at first. I don't think she ever got so informal as to say Mr. Pup, but when she said Mr. Billy Ray, you couldn't help but feel as if you owned the bank and she was there asking you for a loan. I know this, if that had been the case, she could've named her price and I would've given it to her without so much as a signature.

After some time, when we became better acquainted because of a certain friendship we developed with a dark-haired daughter, she dropped the "Mr." for me and just made it Billy Ray. Even then, she said it with that Southern drawl that made me feel like the Prince of Egypt. Of course, the oldest daughter inherited all of her mama's Southern-ness, gentility, and grace, and then some.

In the middle of this monologue, I turned to Cheyenne, whose interest had been piqued with the mention of the McClain's.

"Sorry, I didn't mean to get ahead of myself. But I couldn't help but think of the contrast of the two cultures, yet they still merged as one."

"Oh," Cheyenne snapped back, "I know we aren't entering into that little wonderland with the 'oldest daughter' just yet, so it's okay. Everything in its own time, right, Popman?"

I laughed at his "wonderland" comment, and it made me think of the 1973 song by Olivia Newton-John, and said, ""Speaking of 'wonderland' reminds me that there's an old 70s song called 'Let Me Be There' that uses that word."

Cheyenne thought he had heard it, but I had him look it up and play it on the speakers as we drove down the highway, It is the Olivia Newton-John first great hit, and in the chorus she says, "Let me take you to that Wonderland that only two can share ..." We listened to the song as we rode along, taking a break a moment from the story.

"I like it," Cheyenne said, as we listened, "did it play on the radio that summer while ya'll were working?"

I wasn't sure, but when we checked we saw that it did come out in that famous year of 1973 but not until September.

"We didn't miss it by much," I said, "and it definitely fits right in with the little romance we're 'bout to see up ahead."

With that, I jumped in with Miss Olivia and added my own version of the 70's music to our trip, something I could tell Cheyenne appreciated to no end.

"Let me be there in your mornin', let me be there in your night -- ('Sang it pretty Olivia,'. I said over the music) -- Let me take whatever's wrong, and make it right Let me take you to that wonderland that only two can share. All I ask, is, let me be there ...

I let the music sink in a little and was thankful that it set the tone for where the story was headed. After giving Olivia all the help I thought she needed, I said,

"Talk about grace, Miss Olivia has plenty of her own, too, huh, Cheyenne."

"Oh, yeah," he said, laughing, "she had a little," then added, "It must've been that time period."

He was right, it really was the time period.

It was time of grace, and it was a time of culture, at its best -- and sometimes at its worst, too.

7

Fifty Summers From Then

                  Cheyenne and I couldn’t tarry too long thinking on the grace of 1973’s rising star Olivia Newton-John and the culture of Mrs. McClain and her family. Storms of various kinds were on the horizon, and they were all gathering all at once.

                  I don’t suppose I thought of it then, but the rain and storm on the first day served as a forecast of things to come. On second thought, perhaps I did think of it since chaos ensued once the first raindrop fell. The storm was not just from the thundering and lightning and the downpour, either. One storm came in the person of a gentleman boss Red, he with the beer gut and pants hanging way too low in the rear and with enough thundering in his voice that he would’ve made a great preacher if he didn’t cuss so much.

With Red, you never could do anything right. When I say ‘you’ I mean me, although Red must’ve been a Socialist, because he definitely shared the wealth with all around. The whole time we were trying to get that plastic up over the wall, he was hollering at me:

“Pup, gotta hold it up higher, boy … Sonny, cain’t you see that wall’s gettin’ soakin’ wet right there, bring it this-a-way … hurry, boy, this ain't a game of chess …” and so on. After no more than a minute of holding the plastic up, Doocy started hollering for me, too, and I looked around for help, not knowing which way to turn. When Willum heard Doocy hollering for me to come to the mixer, he snatched the plastic from me gruffly and ordered me to “Go see yore daddy, Pup” which earned him a dirty look from me, my first of the summer. They don’t hand out congeniality awards on a bricklaying job, and I sure didn’t want to get one if they ever decided to do it.

         I tore out across the already-muddy red clay to get to Doocy out on the south side of the house where the mixer was. I say I tore out, I should say I slipped and slid my way over to him and almost fell on my face the whole time. By the time I got to the mixer, Doocy was fisticuffing with a sheet of plastic trying to get it over the bags of mortar stacked up on the pallets by the mixer. But the wind was whipping up and blowing the plastic off, and he couldn’t get one end tied down before the other would fly up. The wind had picked up with the rain and was slinging the cold rain right straight into our faces, stinging our faces and eyes like little bees.

Doocy hollered at me to “Grab some mo’ brick fast, Pup.” I looked around, but there weren’t any brick on the south side of the house except for the pallets in front of the house that were bound with metal straps. I ran over there and tried to pry some brick loose from one of the stacks but couldn’t. Doocy hollered for me to grab the clawhammer on top of the pile and break the band. I tried, but I had not yet learned how to hook the metal band in between the teeth of the claw hammer and pull it to you with all your might to break it. Sometimes we’d have wire cutters, but usually a claw hammer did the job, if you knew what you were doing.

I struggled for a minute to no avail, and I could feel sweat popping up on my forehead despite the rain that was stinging my face. Doocy caught sight of my struggle, let loose of the plastic, and ran toward me, just shaking his head and mumbling words that would not be appropriate to put here in this chronicle.

When he came to me, he snatched the hammer from me and in one swift motion broke a band, threw the hammer on top of the other pallets of brick, grabbed seven or eight brick in his big hands, and hollered for me to “grab some mo’.” I grabbed four or five and tried to catch up with Doocy, but I lost my footing and fell headlong into a mud puddle, the brick flying out of my hands and red mud splattering my face and eyes. By the time I had gotten up, retrieved the brick, and made it to the plastic to cover the mortar bags, Doocy had used up every word in the basement-part of his vocabulary in ordering where to put the brick.

We finally got enough brick on the plastic to hold it down, and Doocy grabbed the hose pipe that was down in the water of the fifty-five-gallon drum, bent it to keep the water from coming out, handed it to me with a “Hold this!” and then grabbed the handle of the mixer and dumped the unused mortar into a wheelbarrow. We only had one wheelbarrow full of mud left in the mixer, so he filled that up and ordered me to push it “without turnin’ the thang over if Lawd you can hep it” to the back of the property to dump. He grabbed the hose pipe away from me while saying that, and I handed it over and took ahold of the wood handles of the wheelbarrow and made my way, slipping and sliding to the back of the property.

  You never wanted to waste mortar because that was wasting money, and I had heard a dozen times already that morning that “Money don’t grow on them trees yonder,” as Red would say, pointing at the tall pines that surrounded the house, but you don’t have any choice when a deluge comes. By the time I got back to the mixer, Doocy was finishing up washing the mixer out with the hose and ordered me to turn the wheelbarrow “up on its nose thar,” and then he sprayed the excess mortar out of that wheelbarrow. I learned quickly that if you cleaned the mixer well the day before and washed out all the wheelbarrows and washed off the shovels and hoes that you wouldn't have to beat them off with a hammer the next day. One way that Doocy was like Pee Wee was that he valued cleanliness, especially when it came to his mixer and tools. Those were his domain, and he didn’t want them a mess.

One mess he could not avoid is the excess watered-down mortar he washed out of the mixer. He dumped it all on the ground in front of the mixer after he washed it out, and the slime covered the ground for ten-feet square or more. It was a milky-looking substance that looked a lot like snow on the ground – nasty, wet, chunky snow, not the pretty snow Mama and I saw back last winter when we stood out on our front porch admiring it and talking.

Despite the downpour's coming from all different directions, we somehow survived that first day, which was perhaps the first miracle of the summer. Doocy saw me off with a Doocy-ism about how the Breeze’s always goin’ to be there for his Pup, ending with “You can always count on t'Cool Breeze heah, jus' call the Breeze any ol' time.” I smiled at that as I pulled off through the muddy driveway. That may’ve been the first smile I’d risked the whole morning. By the time I walked in through the back door of our 901 Juniper Street home around 1 p.m., I was feeling good about the day, mainly because I had lived to tell about it. Mama was sitting up in the living room waiting for me when I came in, so I had to fill her in on a few of the happenings even though I was still wet head to toe. Talking to her reminded me how much bigger things were at home than even the hoopla that I knew I would be facing every day of the summer out on that job. I told Mama about Doocy, Pee Wee, and Red and the rest, all in living color. Talking, I could see the rain still coming down and hear it beating against the side window. Seeing Mama looking weak and tired reminded me that Mama was facing the biggest storm of her forty-two years that summer, and that I would be facing it with her.

What I tried not to think about was that for the next fifty summers, I wondered if I'd have her with me when all the storms blow in.

 HERE IS SURPLAS MATERIAL FOR LATER ...

SAVE THIS MATERIAL TO AFTER INTRODUCING MAMA AND THOSE CHAPTERS

It was on Tuesday, June 5th, that the whole McClain family drove up on the job. I was out by the mixer when I saw the car coming up the long red-dirt drive. I didn't pay much attention to it, because it was early, and Doocy and I were just getting our first batch of mud made and Red was storming around barking out orders as if he was Napoleon or somebody. I did glance over at the car when it pulled to a stop. I could see it was an old, black Studebaker. I wasn't sure of its model but learned later it was a '51. I say it was old, but it was shiny, and it was classy. It looked as if the whole family had come out, I suppose because they were excited to see the brick beginning to go up. Mr. and Mrs. McClain got out first, and I figured right then they were the owners. Two girls were in the back seat, and I could tell that the girl on the other side of the car was pretty young, maybe thirteen, or fourteen, but the one on the side nearest me was a bit older, maybe sixteen – my own age – but no more. Naturally, I took a second take when I saw her. What is a sixteen-going-on-seventeen-year-old gentleman to do, right? All you can afford on a brick job is a glance, and even that might earn you a butt-chewing. In that glance, my mind registered that the older girl was slim, medium height, had long dark hair, and was wearing some sort of blue and yellow outfit. And sandals. That's right. Yellow sandals, with a small butterfly or something on top.  As I said, I only had time for a quick peek. 

               As soon as Mr. McClain got out of the Studebaker, Red lumbered over to see him. I say "lumbered," that's how Red walked. It was always a hurried lumbering, never a casual walk. I did notice that he, all of sudden, became quite the gentleman himself, another one of those incongruities on this job. I think I saw a little culture in Red there maybe, but I cannot be sure. I had finished filling the wheelbarrow with mud and was about to grab the handles to push it over to the wall when Doocy, who had gone to grabe a wheelbarrow off the truck, came stomping up to me pushing that wheelbarrow and hollering to hurry up the mud. In disgust, he took his right hand –the one with those webbed fingers on the right side – and grabbed ahold of the wheelbarrow, kind of pushing me out of the way with his body at the same time. For the first time, I rebelled -- I don't know what came over me -- and pushed back and said, “Doocy, I got this, I got it.” I think the unexpected sassiness threw Doocy off his game, and that element of surprise must've been the only thing that prevented him from beating me to a pulp right then and there.

Sometimes pride will make you do strange things. I could feel our new guests watching the scene, because the girls and Mrs. McClain had walked from the car to toward the front porch area, and they were standing there talking and pointing at different parts of the house. I sure didn’t want their first impression to be that this young boy on the job was helpless – which I was, of course, but I didn’t want them to think I was.

As soon as I pushed back on Doocy, I gripped the wood handles, prying his webbed hand off at the same time, even had the courage (or lack of sense) to give him a little ‘Doocy’ glare of my own, and started pushing it toward the bricklayers. I was making sure to balance it carefully, because a barrow full of mud weighs a couple hundred pounds, at least. About the time I got ten feet,

Ah, friends, I suppose I should close the curtain to this part of our tale by engaging a basketball metaphor, since that is one of the things I know best. In that vein, I'll say that our eager and brave young cager is about to take the last shot as the clock winds down. Until the full tale is told, all we can do is hope the outcome is a glorious nothing-but-net outcome, a hope that we will grip for now the way I was gripping the handles of that wheelbarrow.

For us and our hopes, though, I'd recommend you not hold on too tightly.

No Place For a Dark-Haired Girl

As fate would have it, the glance was a second too long, and it got me in trouble at the most inopportune of times. Maybe that’s our life story in a nutshell. A wheelbarrow full of mud has to be handled carefully, and if you get it out of balance, even a little, it will ‘tump over’ in a heartbeat. It didn’t help that Doocy was right behind me griping,

“Come on, Pup, ya pushed ol’ Doocy away like you be a full-growed man, so if you’s goin’ to do this, do it in a herry.”

 That’s when the wheelbarrow leaned to the left. I tried to pull it back right, but it’s like driving a car. Once you swerve the wrong way it is harder than anything to get it straightened back up. I flexed my forearm muscles with all I had to try to save it, and Doocy, who saw it coming, ran up and grabbed the side of the wheelbarrow with his webbed hand trying to steady it, but it didn’t do any good. I dumped that entire load of mortar right on the ground, not thirty feet from Mr. McClain and, more importantly, from the young dark-haired girl in the baby blue and yellow outfit.

And it gets worse: When Doocy jumped over to steady the wheelbarrow and failed, I dumped the whole load right over on his right pant leg and foot, splattering it all the way up to his knee.

Some moments in time freeze right where they are. Truth is, I guess I am entrapped in that very moment as we speak. It has been frozen in memory for half of a century, a never-fading half-century moment: There’s Doocy standing right there today, just as he was then, with mud covering his right leg and standing in the pile of it two or three inches deep. The clock just seemed to stop fifty years ago.

Then the scene turns to slow motion:

 There’s Red’s hurrying over to the crime site … spitting out a handful of his favorite words half under his breath so as not to be heard distinctly from our visitors ... There’s Pee Wee on the scaffold hollering in slow-motion words, “My good-ness Pup, you did-n’t just dump that mud all over Doocy, are ya kiddin’ me right now?” And so on and so forth.

It was a Polaroid moment if I’ve ever seen one.

I’ll close the curtain on the rest of the scene and save you a bit of the agony that I enjoyed, except to say that somehow, right in the middle of the scene and without even meaning to, I glanced over at the dark-headed girl, who was standing over by the Studebaker watching the scene with the rest. When I caught her eye, I know I saw a little smile, a sympathetic smile, perhaps, maybe even a grimace, but beneath it a smile. I didn’t dare look back again, but it was enough sunshine in it that it almost made me ignore the beatdown that would go on for the rest of the day and would be rehearsed for years and years to come, along with the rest of the drama that is forthcoming in our story.  

The smile, the best Polaroid moment of all, just erased the rest of the scene at that moment.

It just could not erase it over the next half of a century, but that’s okay. 

4

New Storm

                    As I stood with shaky knees in front of my newfound ‘friend’ Doocy – his hand with the white-hot, webbed fingers having just journeyed uninvited down the side of my face – my life passed before me for the first time since a summer day I was swimming at Mud Creek when I was about eight. that summer. Fact is, this summer your life could easily pass before your eyes on any given day, and it did.

                 Fifty years ago, I did not have a long life to pass before my eyes, but that was about to change. A great deal was changing quickly. Only a month prior to our meeting Doocy, I was winding up in the final month of my junior year in high school, and I was finishing up my final few weeks of working at night and Saturdays at the Pic-and-Pay Shoe store at the shopping center where Roses was and just down from Winn Dixie where we had spent hundreds of hours working before taking our employ across the parking lot to sell shoes.

More importantly, by the time the May flowers bloomed, a bigger storm than the one that loomed that Alabama morning was on the horizon. Mama, Fanny Louise Bowen, was entering the twilight phase of her life. Since her surgery for breast cancer in the Fall of that junior year, she had steadily gone downhill. In January she had returned to work in the cotton mill, where she had worked a good part of her life. Things looked good then, I mean, in February. We were so proud that she had recovered from her surgery and was able to go back to work. She was happy, but Mama was always happy. That was the way she was. In the past half of a century, we have told her story over and over, always making sure to tell all listeners and readers that if that lovely lady had lived in Bible times the Lord would have pointed her out and said in His calm complimentary voice, “There’s a woman who has faith that can move mountains.”

That was Mama; and, by all accounts, she had a faith that would have been rare indeed, even in Galilee. I would see that faith firsthand as the summer months unfolded. Sometimes as we look back things are as clear as the morning sun, and sometimes it is hard to turn your mind back fifty years and capture just the exact perspective you had then. As a junior in high school – only sixteen years old, but that not keeping you from thinking you were almost a man – I am a little amazed at how well we functioned. I did not have trouble in any of my classes at LaGrange High School, not that I remember, at least. Mama and I had some good times together that year, too, since it was just the two of us at home. My older sister had moved to Texas many years before, and my second brother Wayne – four years my senior and the one responsible for giving me a love for basketball – had followed her to go to work out West. Tim, a year older than Wayne, had already joined the Marines but was able to arrange my job there with Pee Wee Light and Doocy and the gang, from his camp in South Carolina. It was because of Tim, I guess, that I was standing right at that moment between heaven and earth. I was “standing in the gap,” as my grandfather Preacher Miller, Mama’s daddy, would preach from an Old Testament story; and at any moment I am sure I was about to fall into that gap and be swallowed up.

Funny, isn't it!, how a life has to kind of pass before your eyes before taking that fall into that gap. In this case, our witnesses would be the boss-man Red, Pee Wee, and Doocy and the rest of that chain-gang crew that early Alabama morning.

A singular detail that always seems to pop up – invited or not – as this sixteen-year-old’s life passes before him is that he was the baby of the family. Aw, do not think for a moment that this woman with a faith that could move mountains would ever let even one tiny, little-bitty opportunity pass to make that grand announcement to any and everybody we met while downtown shopping at the square or any other inappropriate place.

“And this is my baby,” she’d say, and she had enough pride in her voice there that she couldn’t have said it happier if she had been saying “This is my brand spanking new, shiny red Corvette fresh off of the showroom floor.” Her saying that would have been more like saying she had a headache compared to how she said “And this is my baby,” with a smile as wide as the Chattahoochee, and with a brush of her hand through my sandy brown hair. Oh, I resisted (any twelve-year-old boy would resist that), and I always pulled away and exclaimed, “Aw, Mama, I’m not a baby.”

But Mamas can just be deaf to such protests, and she would carry on her conversation with whomever she had just run into as if I wasn’t getting red with embarrassment and my lower lip wasn’t poked out like I’d just gotten hit in the mouth by a bully. I knew about that, too, because I had been confronted by a bully once, like that, but I’m here to tell you that it was that bully who went away with the lip the size of a tomato and a cheek twice as red. I was only eleven at the time of that little skirmish, and that might have been the highlight of my eleventh year had it not been for two big traitor brothers who caught wind of it later in the afternoon and carried it straight to Mama as if it had to be told in flying colors or they would burst. And Mama didn’t do anything to improve on that year. Her faith, surprising to me, didn’t keep her from employing a big switch when needed; and a certain part of that eleven-year-old boy’s anatomy was redder that night than the bully’s swollen left eye.

But we’ll save that account for a later time, because it will give me some bragging rights when we get to the point where another bully comes into the picture, this a bully-to-be who came out on this bricklaying job looking for trouble. Suffice it to say that that Alabama boy was a mite bigger than the boy down at the Y, but he had the same ill-intentions on his mind. Unfortunately for him, he was on my turf, because this Roanoke bricklaying job would become my domain, even if it didn’t look so promising on that first Monday morning in early June. But that story won’t come until late July, 1973, and we have to survive this encounter with Doocy to get to it.

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