Rant Du Jour

Yesterday and today

Today, September 30, 2007,I received a piece from a friend that described how different things were in the past, when things were simpler.  Being nearly 73, and beginning to long for times that I remember to be  better, I wrote these rememberences in reply.  I get these blank stares from my children and grandchildren when I describe how things were, as if what I am telling is a fantasy. We have become shrinkwrapped.

Screaming in the night

Screaming in the night

It was probably around 1947, and I was in the 7th grade, around twelve years old, at the time of the wreck.  Our house was on a hill and a road ran in front and down the hill to come to a T intersection with another road that ran parallel to a railroad track and both ran together the quarter mile to the right into Castor, my home town.  The road that ran in front of our house and down the hill was newly blacktopped during the War and the road that intersected from the right at the intersection was gravel.

The mail truck would come blazing down the road paralleling the track every day around noon. It was during the days before eighteen wheelers, and was more like a ten wheeler, with a big square box on back. I was in school that day and so I missed the excitement, but I could see the smoke from the high school and heard there had been a terrible wreck at that intersection just a hundred yards from my house.

A big rattletrap flatbed truck, loaded down with a rather poor family's entire possessions, with the family riding on top of all their furniture, clothes, junk, had just arrived at the top of the T of the intersection at the same time the mail truck reached that identical  spot. The mail truck simply ran over and on top of the flat bed truck and squashed it, and all the passengers.  The driver of the mail truck found himself wedged between his seat and the steering wheel with his foot lodged beneath the pedals, and couldn't get out just as both vehicles seemingly simultaneously exploded and caught fire.

I had a feeling of dread as my daddy drove me home from school, slowing for a long time, enough to see the smouldering remains of the vehicles and what seemed to be what was left of the driver.  The family, and I understand there were several including kids and uncles, were all beneath the big truck that, like a huge beast, had somehow flown on top and sat down on top of the other vehicle, family and all, who were evidently all killed instantly and cremated as well.

The driver of the mail truck simply burned to death screaming, unable to disentangle himself from the foot pedals, and finally was silenced as the blaze from both gas tanks literally reduced everything to rubble.

That night I had terrible dreams. Then for as much as two years after, though I had not heard the driver screaming as he died, I heard him in my dreams and I lived in a kind of terror of sleeping for I knew I could hear his shrieks---and something more---for as many as eight or nine others died instantly because this hot rod truck driver who constantly ran through that intersection at breakneck speed.  Rural Rigdon, who lived at the corner there at the interesection, a mail carrier himself, had complained about the speed of this driver, but it did no good. There were no markings or stop signs in those days at most intersections and people just watched out as best they could, unfortunately the family didn't watch out well enough.

And I wondered at hearing the hollering and screaming, for sometimes I heard it when I was not asleep, deep in my mind, and for years would pass that place, long after the bured rubble was removed and the grass grew back over the blackened spot, I would shudder in horror.  He may still be there, in that truck, his body immolated in the melting of the cab around him, hanging, screaming for help,  in the most horrible of ways to go. 

LDSledge

July 30, 2005

Remembering a dark eyed girl

Friends and Kin:

It's July 7, 2005. Another steamy South Louisiana day in the offing.  I have no idea how I was able to live here before air conditioning.  My company's VP, Larry Firebaugh, flew into Baton Rouge two weeks ago and, accustomed to the mile high city of Denver, almost panted by the time he got to my office. He smokes  a lot, so he spent some time outside in the steamy mornings and afternoons talking on his phone and puffing away. I should talk, because I spent thirty years puffing on cigars, pipes, cigarettes, roll you owns, doing snuff and chewing tobacco. I couldn't get enough, and gradually, as I hit my late forties and fifties, the stuff started reacting as a poison to me and would make my head feel weird and it just finally wasn't worth it---particularly since it would kill you.  But I still love the taste of it.

This morning's The Writer's Almanac by Garrison Keillor, had this wistful and sweet little poem that brought back memories to me. I may be getting in trouble by reprinting it without his or the Author's permission, so sue me.  I am not getting paid for it, but am spreading the poet's joy a little more.

Poem: "The Exchange" by Ron Rash from Among the Believers. © Iris Press, Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Reprinted with permission.

The Exchange

Between Wytheville, Virginia
and the North Carolina line,
he meets a wagon headed
where he's been, seated beside
her parents a dark-eyed girl
who grips the reins in her fist,
no more than sixteen, he'd guess
as they come closer and she
doesn't look away or blush
but allows his eyes to hold
hers that moment their lives pass.
He rides into Boone at dusk,
stops at an inn where he buys
his supper, a sleepless night
thinking of fallow fields still
miles away, the girl he might
not find the like of again.
When dawn breaks he mounts his roan,
then backtracks, searches three days
hamlets and farms, any smoke
rising above the tree line
before he heads south, toward home,
the French Broad's valley where spring
unclinches the dogwood buds
as he plants the bottomland,
come night by candlelight builds
a butter churn and cradle,
cherry headboard for the bed,
forges a dougle-eagle
into a wedding ring and then
back to Virginia and spends
five weeks riding and asking
from Elk Creek to Damascas
before he finds the wagon
tethered to the hitching post
of a crossroads store, insidev the girl who smiles as if she'd
known all along his gray eyes
would search until they found her.
She asks one question, his name,
as her eyes study the gold
smoldering there between them,
the offered palm she lightens,
slips the ring on herself so
he knows right then the woman
she will be, bold enough match
for a man rash as his name.

====================

Daddy had a big general merchandise store in Castor, Louisiana, a little village (hamlet?) in the dry hills and woods about fifty miles south of Shreveport, LA for fifty years. I grew up in that store and worked there as a teenager until I went off to LSU in 1953 when I was seventeen. Until then, I was in the store every day of my life.  Before they moved the big old building over to make way for the big, new cinder block store with it's colored cement floors, the store was a two story structure sitting on the corner across from the depot, a service station and a barber shop up the street. Castor had five general merchandise stores, a hotel, two filling stations, a barber shop and a butcher shop and when I was very young there was an honest to goodness blacksmith shop with hammer and anvil to shoe horses, etc.

The reason this poem hits me is that I remember a dark eyed girl. I can never forget her. I was probably in the fifth grade. Daddy would make me study when I came in from school. I would walk to the store from school which was maybe four hundred yards down the road and across the railroad track from the store. I was sitting cross legged on top of one of the counters that particular afternoon, studying my multiplication tables, when out of nowhere appeared this girl who was about my age. I had never seen her before. This was a very small town, and there were few strangers who came through. It was a year or so after WWII, and many vets were coming home trying to get settled and adjust their lives to civilian living, so it wasn't that unusual to see new people. Until then there was literally nobody new. But here was this bold, dark eyed girl who was so like someone I should know, who simply walked up and began talking about things that were terribly interesting and I was so comfortable and yet fascinated and I remember my heart nearly jumping out of my chest as we talked.  We talked for a while and I remember the sadness when she was called away, her turning and giving a little wave and then was gone. Gone forever this lifetime and yet her image is indelibly imprinted in my memory and she still impinges and I long after her after sixty years.  I knew her. I wanted her then and want her now as a desirable thing that I did have for a moment and then lost. At least I had her for a moment.  It is a dream-like memory, almost unreal, but I know it happened, and I feel that there was someone with whom I connected, again, having been intimate somewhere in the long lost past.  And here I am, approaching the three score and ten milestone on the 22nd of this month, still thinking of that dream girl I knew so well, but did not know.

I am one of the lucky ones who was raised in the real country before TV and computer games and Nintendo, HIV, ADD, and  Ritalin (which I am sure some crazy teacher today would try to get me to take so I would be stupid and dull and calm like the rest of her leveled off drugged class). It didn't matter where you lived, if you walked three minutes you were in the woods.  There was a cotton gin and a sawmill in Roytown just three miles south of town. You could always hear the whine of the big saws and the clacking of lumber being stacked.  From September through the fall you could hear the thump thump thump of the cotton gin's big engine as it separated the seeds from the cotton and packed the cotton into those big burlap bales with the metal straps.  Cotton was strewn all along the roads leading into town in the fall, hanging in the bushes along the road, having dropped from the many mule pulled wagons and trucks filled to overflowing with white boles headed to the gin.

We sold everything: feed for livestock, hay, building materials and hardware, dresses, shoes, flour and meal, sugar and salt, canned goods, flyswatters,  cigarettes, chewing tobacco and snuff, cold drinks and candy, peanuts, pickled pigs feet, and like Keillor's "Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery," of Lake Woebegon, Minn., if we didn't have it you didn't need it anyway.  There was a big iron stove in the center of the store sitting on a bed of sand which was in a big wooden frame on the floor. I guess the sand was to catch any sparks and to catch any of the tobacco spit by the old men who sat around the stove in the winter chewing tobacco, spitting on the red hot stove to hear the sizzle, and tell lies and stories.  I sat and listened.  It was a warm and cozy life.

My grandfather, Dr. Chester Sledge, had a dental office in the corner next to the street, across a small hallway leading out the back across from the flour room. I remembered it as being larger, but before they tore the old building down a few years ago I went back there and took a picture of the cluttered old boarded up room, and it was no more than ten feet by twelve feet.  In the summer he would pull a tooth and flip it out of the low windows behind him. Those men standing alongside the building outside the windows would move aside to let the tooth come by to come to rest on the tooth graveled drive behind.  My granddaddy kept a cigar stub in his mouth and would turn to spit out of the window from time to time and the dental observers, who were watching the dental proceedings while they talked to granddaddy, would then move aside to allow the spit to sail by.  Granddaddy pulled teeth and made dentures by making a plaster-type impression, sending it off and the teeth would come back, and sometimes we would deliver the teeth in a box, along with the other groceries, to the patient who couldn't come into town. He or she would fit them in and clack them together, smiling with pleasure.

I wrote a little story called "A Good Day," about three little black children coming into town on the top of a wagon loaded with cotton in 1942. If anyone reading this wants a copy I would be happy to send it.  I also wrote a short story called "Callin' Mary," about an old man living down the hill from me whose wife had died and how he sang every evening while he sat on the porch and called out for her.  And there is another story called "My Southern Belle," about a young boy (me) standing by the track at midnight as the big freight rushed by. It was published in "The Dead Mule," an online publishing journal. There are several poems and other things published in "The Spillway Review," another online publisher. 

Have a great day everyone.

LDSledge

I would love to continue this Rant but I have to get on with my day.