Under the Pecan Tree
After we got used to jumping trains and learned how to avoid getting chased off, we were able to start moving west a little quicker. Even then, our longest run was across the plains for only about twelve hours between Billings and Tulsa. Everybody thinks hopping trains is easy. Well, let me tell you, it’s not. First off, every time Bug and me got near those big spinning wheels and pistons, all I could think about was daddy getting crushed at the roundabout in Florence working on the job for Southern. I don’t have visions and don’t believe in that nonsense, but, sometimes I get a flash of my future and those usually involve me getting killed in some dumb way like trying to jump on a train and slipping under the wheels or falling into the Grand Canyon. Second, those bulls in the yard meant business. We never got beat on, but heard plenty of stories from the hobos we met along the way about being marched off the property before being slap-jacked and left to lie in the woods until they came to.
Leaving Columbia, we spent half the morning trying to build up the courage to even get close to an open door on one of the boxcars. When we finally steeled ourselves and climbed up and settled into the dark corner of an empty car, we grinned at each other about how good we were at this new life. About the time we relaxed just a bit, the damn thing moved and pulled out going east, back the way we had just come. We figured out quick we weren’t really good at all at riding the rails yet, so we hopped off and slunk back to the filling station on the highway, bought two packs of nabs and Pepsi’s, and stuck out our thumbs.
I recognized the name on the side of the produce truck that pulled up a few minutes later and called out to the driver, “You headed back to Saluda?” He looked us over and nodded his head, “Yep. Just dropped the last load of cabbage at the farmer’s market and headed home,” so we jumped in the cab with him and rode the two hours out into the familiar country. He dropped us in front of the little yellow house right as you get into town. It was the one my granny had built and raised her nine children in and where I had spent many a night as a little boy trying to sneak the hard candies she kept in a ceramic chicken on the mantle. The house is still there, and when I drive past it these days, that little spot in the back of my jaw still starts to water at the memory of the sour lemon drops she’d always have in there
Granny had a soft spot for me as I was the youngest of her grandkids and the one that would sit with her and string beans and shell pecans for hours on end without complaining. I never met her husband as he had died before I was born, but she told me the stories of him joining the confederate army at thirteen as a water boy when they started getting desperate and getting the young boys and old men into the ranks.
She never did care much for either side in that war, I don’t think, and she always gave a hard look to anyone at church or on the street who tried to tell her how valiant her late husband had been along with a stern “You can worship some damn, dead fools if you want, but leave me out of it.” Granny was a hard woman when she wasn’t feeding me stories and home-cooking and told me all the war did was make life harder for her and her family along with everybody else in the County and that romanticizing it was slowing the recovery from it.
When the Yankees came through on the way out of Columbia in 1865, they found the locals scrounging for anything they could as the local troops had beat them there and cleaned out the barns and silos in retreat. She said the Yankees felt sorry for her and her sisters and that when they had marched through and seen their skinny arms, the bluecoats told the girls to hold up their skirts like baskets as they dropped pecans they had collected along the way, until they were heavy and full. I don’t know if that was why she always loved pecans so much and had me shell them every time I came to stay with her, but I didn’t mind because she always had pies and pralines and my sweet tooth was pretty strong back then.
I hadn’t necessarily planned on stopping this trip to see her, but it made sense as it was on the route and we could use the strength her cooking would give us for the trip. Granny was frailer than last time I’d been there, but it had been a while and she was pushing ninety at this point. Everybody on that side of the family lived a long time unless they got killed like Daddy and they stayed strong up until the end. The gardens and animals needed tending every day no matter how old you were. Of course, once one of them passed, the work still had to be done the next day so another aunt or uncle or cousin just got plugged in and the world kept on spinning and the goats and pigs kept on eating.
I think Daddy saw some futility in that system and he got out of Saluda after years of working fifteen to eighteen hour days in the red clay, trying to make a living and feed his kids that kept popping out with regularity. When he saw an ad in the Columbia paper for “unskilled labor” in Florence, he packed a bag and left the next day, telling Mama he’d see how it went for a month and then send for her and the kids if it worked out. It did and, a month later, Daddy showed up in a 1922 Ford truck along with two other fellas who worked on the railroad who’d driven trucks down as well. They packed everything and split up the kids between the vehicles and drove to Florence the next day. Mama told me later that she wasn’t happy to leave everyone she knew but that Daddy’s smile had convinced her that everything was going to be alright in a new city.
She spent the first week scrubbing the entire house they rented from the company in the little village close to the workshops from ceiling to floor and the next tilling a garden and getting Daddy to build a coop for the chickens. By the time I came along a few years later, she had organized most of the other households into a community that shared vegetables and eggs and worked out trades for handmade clothes and blankets so they didn’t have to go into hock at the company store any more than absolutely necessary.
Daddy wasn't working eighteen hour days anymore and always had a full day off each week which he would spend out in the swamp fishing and hunting. He had a set of climbing chains and wouldn’t leave a raccoon in a tree if the dogs had chased it up one. We always had raccoons, squirrels, and fish along with the eggs and an occasional bird or hog on a special occasion. He wasn’t much for eating deer, but he’d kill a few every year in the fall and let others process them. He’d end up giving most of it away to the families that had a little less money or luck or a few more kids.
Daddy liked to be alone and rarely took anyone with him, but I begged enough and one Saturday, he brought home a 20-gauge and taught me how to load and shoot it at some cans set up at the edge of a empty field. Later that week, I took it out after school and walked into the woods, pointing it at trees and rocks for a bit before I saw a squirrel on the forest floor under a pecan tree me and the other kids came to in the late summer to climb and get as much as we could before they fell and the deer and other animals could get to them. My arms shook as I raised it to my shoulder and looked down the barrel while the squirrel kept shuffling in the leaves. I squeezed the trigger just like Daddy had shown me and fired. I think I aimed a little low, but enough of the shot either hit the squirrel on the fly or got bounced off the ground into it that it was thrown back a foot or so.
I stood still and didn’t lower the gun for a minute. My breathing was so heavy and I swear I could hear my heartbeat in the air outside my chest. I finally walked over and put the gun on the ground and kneeled down and saw that the squirrel was still alive, breathing fast but shallow, its eyes gazing up at me, looking scared. I started crying and apologizing to it and god before the spark faded and it stopped breathing. I must've stayed on my knees for ten minutes, crying and regretting what I’d done.
It was funny. I didn’t mind that Daddy killed animals and I was happy to eat them, but being the one that pulled the trigger made me feel so sad and lonely out in the woods that day. Eventually, I stopped crying and wrapped the little body in my handkerchief and buried it at the foot of the tree it had been looking under, using my pocket-knife to get the hole as deep as I could and throwing in some mealy looking pecans on top of it, all that was left in the short days of that December. After, I walked back to the house and put the gun in the closet in the bedroom and, when Daddy asked me on Saturday night if I wanted to skip church and go out with him the next day, I told him “no, sir.” I think we were both relieved at my answer and I know mama felt better having one less absent heathen to pray for the next morning.
After we got out of the produce truck, I didn’t knock, but walked on in after we dumped our sacks on the porch. Granny was sitting at her kitchen table drinking black coffee when we walked in the door. “Good lord, boy. You startled me. I thought the Yankees had come back.”
“No, ma’am,” I said. “I don’t even have any pecans.”
She smiled at that and I reached down to hug her as she made no motion to get out of her chair. It was like hugging a ghost as her body felt like bones held together by her housecoat. “Me and Bug are on a little adventure, Grandma and thought it’d be nice to stop by and see you.”
“‘Bug and I,’” she replied. She was a stickler for grammar. “Well, I am glad you did. I haven’t seen any of your group in forever. It’s been since the funeral …” Her voice trailed off and she grabbed her cup, but didn’t take a drink. The railroad had paid for Daddy’s funeral and had offered to send a car to pick her up and bring her to Florence, but she had turned them down and had one of his brothers drive her up and back. She had been pretty spry then to my eyes so seeing her like this less than two years later was a shock.
Mama was strong, but I had never seen anyone like granny when it came to keeping herself, and everyone around her, busy. I had expected her to be up and out in the yard picking up wayward sticks or stirring a pot of catfish stew in her kitchen, but she just sat there, looking at me, but it felt like she was looking through me at something else she was waiting to come through the door.
“Hello, Mrs. Gunter,” Bug said and I jumped as I’d almost forgotten he was there in the minute since I had said his name.
Her eyes finally came into focus and she looked past me. “Hello, Percival. Are you keeping my Grandson in line on this little adventure of yours?”
Bug hated being called Percival and always turned red and protested whenever anybody said it out loud, but he had been on the severe end of a lecture about “proper” names and their importance the first summer he’d come down to spend a month with me in Saluda when we were eight. He had tried with her for the first few days, explaining that his name was Bug and that nobody, not even his teachers called him Percival. “Well, that is a shame on them, then,” she replied. Your Father gave you that name and I am going to call you that as long as you are under my roof.”
I don’t know if Bug picked up on that, but I did. Grandma was always careful with her words and said exactly what she meant. The first night we were there, I had gone into her room at bedtime and explained that Bug wasn’t allowed to be called Percival around Florence because, if his step-daddy heard it or heard about it, Bug would have to pay for it in a beating. Percival had been his Daddy’s name and he’d been killed when Bug was a baby. It wasn’t long before his Mama took up with Bug’s step-daddy and he’d been the one to give Bug the nickname. There wasn’t anything sweet or funny about it. He just said little Percival looked like a bug to him and was about as useful as one. He beat on Bug’s mama any time she mentioned her dead husband or his name or namesake and it didn’t take long for her to stop.
Every new school year, Bug went into a panic thinking about how he would have to beg any unfamiliar teacher to call him Bug and never mention his real name. His step-daddy never came to the school, but every once in a while, a teacher would run into him on the street where he was probably staggering home and make some vanilla remark about how Bug was such a good student and respectful and that it showed what a good role-model his step-father was on him. I saw this happen once and stood a few feet away, not able to breathe while I waited for the man’s response. He stared at the teacher for a moment, enough to make her doubt her own safety a bit before he spoke. “I ain’t that boy’s step-father, father, or any damn thing and if he’s good in your class, that means you ain’t paying attention because he ain’t worth a shit.”
The young teacher stood and shook. It was her first year teaching and I am sure she thought that she was helping Bug out by saying such a thing. She couldn’t know what she had unleashed, but it was lucky I was there to see it that time. I backed away so he wouldn’t notice me and ran to Martin's store to warn Bug. He took the news grimly and said, “thanks.” Bug was safe in that building as old-man Martin had known Bug’s step-daddy for years and they’d been running buddies for a while and he wouldn’t take any crap from him in the store. Martin was a big, tough man and not so bad when he wasn’t in the bottle himself, which wasn’t too often.
After Bug thanked me, he went back to stocking the shelf and I went and looked for Martin to tell him that Bug’s step-daddy might be on the warpath. He was in his office and I was worried it was a bad day to try to talk to him, but he was going over the books and looked up at me irritably when I knocked on the door-jamb. “What do you want, boy?”
“Jones might be headed this way in a minute,” I said.
Martin set down his pencil and stared at me. “He been drinking?”
“It’s Tuesday, ain’t it,” I replied. I immediately regretted being a smart-ass, but Martin actually gave me a little smirk in response.
“I suppose it is,” he said. “I’ll keep a lookout for him.” I stood there for a moment. “Go on, boy. I’ll watch out for Bug today. You’ve done your watch.”
I started breathing again because I knew Bug would be safe for a while. Bug’s step-daddy wouldn’t mess with a sober Martin who’d stay calm and usher him away from the front of the store without too much hassle. Drunks sometimes get mad when another drunk tells them what to do but, when the teller is sober, it sometimes calms them and makes them a little sad to realize that they’re the one causing the trouble.
I watched from across the street, looking for Jones to come stalking down the street. When he appeared, Martin walked out onto the curb and stayed calm while Jones waved his arms around for a few minutes. Martin never said a word that I heard, but when he held up his finger, I saw Jones give up. Apparently, Martin had said some magic word and Jones had had a minute of clarity, realizing he could get to Bug later, outside of Martin’s protection. He threw his hands up as though his old friend was the problem and turned and walked back from where it had all started with the innocent remark from the teacher. I knew he was headed back to the bottle so he could relive the confrontation with Martin in his mind and win it somehow this time.
Bug stayed in the store until Friday, sleeping on a pallet and eating crackers and tins of sardines. He was able to go back home and change clothes and get a real meal by Friday, when Jones would be out of the house for the next three nights drinking, giving him a little bit more time until the next trigger was pulled that would set Jones off.
Years later, after his Mama died and Jones had been long-passed, Bug cleaned out his Mama’s papers and he found letters granny had written to her every summer he had come down with me. She never called him anything but Percival under her roof or section of sky, but every letter to his Mama ended the same way, “And thank you for letting your precious little ‘Bug’ spend some time with me.” Granny was something else.
