Whirl

It was a hot summer afternoon in 1963-everything in sight seemed to be bleached pale by the sun. I’d been playing near her flowers and somehow managed to get myself stung by a bee. Seeking comfort, I ran onto the wide front porch and Maudie was the first adult I found. She was sitting in one of her old rockers, staring out over the fields which lay across the road. I was tentative in my approach, we didn’t talk, she and I.

I held out my swollen little finger and she eyed it for a few long seconds. Then in a single fluid move she extracted a large brownish glob from her mouth and lay it squarely on my wound. The pain vanished instantly-more than likely from pure visceral shock, as opposed to the effect of the snuff.

She watched my face but never ventured a smile. The slight twitter in her eyes tells me today that she may have been amused. My grandmother was 76 at the time and she’d dealt with many a 4 year old. The thrill of new progeny had long since passed.

I was the youngest child of her youngest daughter. The last of her 10 grandchildren.  Maudie Mae was tired. She had birthed three of six children in this house.  She’d watched her husband die twenty years before in a bed just yards from where we stood.

This is the only personal interaction can I remember between the two of us. I’m sure others happened, but none have left such an impression. Even then, she was beginning a long, slow slide into dementia. For the rest of her life I would be part of the background. She would never answer my questions or tell me about my mother as a child and she would die before I emerged from adolescence.

Though I have no conversations to look back on, I still remember my grandmother with great fondness, mostly for her quirky behaviors that are now family lore.  Here was a woman who refused to sit in front of her TV without dressing up-concluding that if she could see them, then surely they could see her.  Maudie would call her dog Rex in from the fields by shooting over his head.    She used the same gun to shoot mockingbirds on sight.  Why she hated them, we never knew.

This essay is supposed to be a tribute to her. That was my intention almost a year ago when I started it. A tribute to her pioneer spirit; to her farm, which gave us all retreat; and to Maudie Mae, the legend. Our gun-toting granny who toughed it out through the Great Depression with six kids and an ailing husband.

So is that how it works? Do we take an ordinary, hard country life and make it into legend? And though legend certainly makes for an entertaining story, what is it that we are ignoring? Is legend enough to tell me who she really was?

In this instance, the legend does not fill the void between what we are now and what my grandmother was back then. Yes Maudie Mae was a bit crazy, but she was also a tough, distant, suspicious,  and sometimes mean lady. These traits are as much a part of our family legacy as the legends.  They persist from one generation to the next. 

So although I adore the legends, I can make no more use of them than I can of her dusty snuff bottles adorning my desk. They do not fill in the gaps or make sense of the cycle. I take little from my grandmother other than stubbornness, bad genes, and a sense of place.

And so to me the real story is about choices-survival choices-made long ago by children who lived in a very hostile, not-so-distant world. It is about work, struggle, abuse, neglect, ignorance, emotional distance, and a host of other downstream effects. It is about growing up female under a man’s violent control. It is about growing up on an American family farm.

One hundred years ago, most American farms were not the mechanized, scientifically controlled, chemically dependent wonders we see off in the sterile distance today. The farms of 1888, were smaller, meaner, and there were many, many more of them. Each one was a running experiment of barely harnessed animal power and carefully controlled lust. On the typical turn of the century family farm, nearly every seed was put in place by a human hand, and in Arkansas most of those calloused hands belonged to woman and children.

Thus my grandmother, Maudie Mae Rosenbaum, was born a farmer. She was the middle of three sisters and the sixth of eight children overall. Her matriarchal ancestors had worked farms for at least five generations. Starting in Germany, and arriving in Arkansas, via Pennsylvania and Tennessee. What’s interesting to me is that though she would spend all but a few of her years on a family farm, she never really held the title “farmer”. Look at the census records from this period and you find it is usually the men who are described as “farmers” whereas the women are most often listed as “housewife” or simply “wife”.

This was the audacity of being a 19th century female. You can live the life of a farmer; you can plant the seeds; harvest the cotton; cook the food, carry, birth, and raise the next generation of farm hands. But you can never own the farm. That honor goes to your father, brother, or husband.

My grandmother was born and apprenticed in but one occupation. By the time she reached 20, she knew it inside out. Yet she also knew that it would be one of her brothers who would carry the family business into the next generation. They would get the land, equipment, and livestock. For her to practice the only skill she knew, she needed to move on, marry a man with land, and start from scratch.

Put in that context, who the hell wouldn’t be bitter?

Arthur W. Edwards seems to have appeared out of nowhere.  I do not know the circumstances of how he met my grandmother.  Hell, my mother doesn’t even know how it happened.  But I do know there is one consistent rule in southern families-if a story isn’t passed down, then it isn’t all that pretty. 

I also know she married late (almost 20), and she married poor.   And, though she likely didn’t realize this, she also married an alcoholic.  Later in life, she’d see three of her daughters do the same.

They moved around for a while, but by the time my mother was born, they had built a good sized farm, about seven miles northeast of Fulton, Arkansas.

My mother grew up working this farm.  Their cash crops were milk, eggs, and cotton.  Even today, mom is more than happy to complain about picking cotton, and of seeing her fingers bleed from it.

But then she will jump to her teenage years, of her petty (and apparently still heartfelt) jealousies over her older, prettier sister Sue.  And of preparing for school every Sunday night in the kitchen. They’d haul water in from the hand pump out back and heat it on the cast iron stove. Then the girls would take turns bathing in a galvanized steel tub on the floor (I shudder to think of going last) .  

On summer evenings, boys would work up their courage and visit.  They’d sit in the swing together, and look out over the gravel road to the fields in the east. The boys were willing to endure Maudie’s scornful gaze, while the girls endured the embarrassment of their drunken father, who would sometimes stumble out onto the porch in the late summer twilight. Far too inebriated to walk to the outhouse, he’d settle for peeing on Maudie’s roses.

By the time Arthur died in 1942, they were doing very well.  By the time she passed on in 1975, the farm was gone, taken by taxes and another man who didn’t even have the patience to wait for her to die.

Though no longer a reality, today that farm still exists in our collective family memory.  It is a reservoir of identity that all the grandchildren dip in from time-to-time. Through the years I’ve heard many stories, and they ring very true because I can still sense the place.  I’ve stood in that kitchen were momma bathed, and swatted flies on that porch (for some reason I really got into it).

It is the memory of the farm which personifies Maudie Mae in my heart. I cannot bring myself to think of her ten years later, living out her final, sad days in a darkened cinder block nursing home.  No, to see her properly I need to return to the unpainted frame house with the wide porch, and the tall oak tree just outside the front gate.  For me, Maudie’s soul will always be reflected in the memory of her large, neatly organized yard; surrounded by a chicken wire and always, always, swept clean of all grass (in the tradition of African-American slaves, though I doubt she knew that).  

There are no farmers in our family today, Maudie was the last.  But if she were alive, she could count lawyers, teachers and PhD’s among her great granddaughters.  All of them carry their title well, and all of them carry her strength within them. 

Today the land is empty, just another grassy hill in just another field as you drive past on just another paved state highway. But our family farm was more than a patch of dusty land. It funneled five generations of brutal livelihood into a nexus of love, sweat, and hard cold decision making. The seeds of that compression have scattered across the country, spreading weeds, flowers, and clean swept soil.

© 2008 by Rodney Gleghorn. All rights reserved.

“Oh yeah, we’d snort gasoline, paint thinner, any kind of get high”

At this moment I knew I was in over my head.

We were in Jacob’s crappy little apartment, in a crappy little subdivision, about a three miles from the base.

Jacob, (the guy talking), Sam and I were snorting speed. Well at least they were. I was watching and peppering them with questions.

I’d arrived in the PI about five months ago. By now it was all old hat, my tuition was complete.

Prior to reaching my teens I’d set an absolute, dogmatic rule with regard to drugs, including cigarettes and alcohol–I would never use them. My thinking did not stem from any sort of moral code, instead it came from fear. As a result of this self imposed policy, most of my adolescence was dedicated to finding a middle ground. One where I could keep the friends I had and yet not take on their expanding habits. That worked well until I left home.

When I arrived in Denver for tech school, I found myself isolated. The straight kids were the people whom I seemed to have the least in common. Many of them loved, even craved, power and authority. Their thinking was even more rigid than mine, their sense of humor was crippled, and half of them were jesus freaks.

So after 2 years of self-inflicted solitude, I’d decided to use this new assignment as a chance to re-set my lifestyle; to taste a few forbidden fruits.

At this moment I wasn’t so sure I’d made the right call.

Another friend arrived and we left for the bars. We were a long way from Fields Avenue, and there were no jeepneys around, so we started walking.

The weather was nice that night, not too hot (meaning under 90 degrees) and dry, very dry. It was nearing dusk. The road wound through some pretty bare stretches; places with no street lights; areas where the land was too low and hilly to build. But people lived here, uninvited.

Of the road, down in the gulley’s, you could see candles burning through cracks in the thin walls of several little shacks. These were fairly nice, as squatter’s shacks go. In Manila I’d seen families living under cardboard and garbage bags. These shacks were solid, made of plywood and tin.

The mothers were putting their children to bed. The coal fires, where they had cooked their dinner, were dying off. The men were sitting around them, smoking cigarettes and silently watching us pass.

I could feel their dark eyes on me. I wondered what it must be like to lay on the ground late at night, in a little tin shack with your children on one side of you and your wife on the other. Did every car or motorcycle passing on the road above remind you of what you could not give them? How do you keep them clean and safe? How do you keep them dry and warm when the rains come? How do you give them comfort when they are sick?

A jeepney passed and Sam flagged it down. I was glad to scurry off.

“Why?” I thought, “why did I feel anxious back there.”

I didn’t fear for my safety–I’d walked that road many times in the dark of night—so where did this uneasiness come from?

A few bumpy minutes later we disgorged ourselves from the jeepney in front of the main gate. Children swarmed us begging for money and offering to help us find entertainment for the evening.

In suburban America, kids this age would be in bed. Safe and content in their cartooned underwear, surrounded by plastic accessories. But these boys were on the streets, working hard to scrape up a few coins. Most of them were the children of bar girls, who were also working right now. It didn’t strike me as ironic that I may be chatting up their mother in just a few minutes. This was normalcy in Angeles City.

The four of us wandered into a bar we liked. The place was named Oliver’s at the time, but bar names in Angeles changed from month to month. It was a small dive. Maybe 25 feet wide and 40 deep. The bar ran lengthwise along the room. It looked much like any American bar might have looked in 1980. Dingy and smoke filled. There was a pool table in the back and a few tables towards the front of the place.

We were the only customers. We sat down at the bar and ordered San Miguel. At the time, this was the only brand of beer you could get in the PI. That would change.

As my friends talked, I sat back, nursed my beer, and took in the view. For some reason, all of the bar girls were lined up on the other side. I counted 18 young women. Eighteen of them to four of us; those were pretty good odds.

“Is this were the children in the gulley shacks will end up?” I thought. “Stuck on the wrong side of a ratio, in a dive best known as a good place to buy dope?”

I realized were my earlier discomfort came from.

A few hours ago, I’d walked into a pharmacy, parted with three dollars, and walked out with a few hits of Ionamin. A legal transaction in the eyes of the Philippine government (not the U.S. Air Force) conducted for purely recreational means. By American standards, I was not well off. Yet my disposable income was enough to keep a couple of Filipino families healthy and educated. I could not plead ignorance to that. I witnessed it every day.

Looking back tonight it would be wonderful if I could tell you that this moment of realization led to a major change in my behavior. But that’s not what happened. Instead I chose to turn back to the bar and order another beer. I chose short term pleasure over long term effect.

It’s easy enough to say this was an individual choice and it was. But despite our cherished individuality, our single choices mold the values held to by our society.

Uncle Sam was the most powerful nation on earth in 1980, maybe we still are today. We could have done so much with what we had. But the choices our nation made in that decade were not much different than the small moral choice I made that evening.

We chose to pour several hundred million dollars a year into the pockets of Ferdinand Marcos and his cronies. All so we could hold to a pair of military bases we really didn’t need. So our young airmen could strut their stuff on dusty streets, never bothering to look beneath their heels.

All so we could shoot the heady drug of imperialism into our leathered veins.

Any kind of get high.

© 2008 by Rodney Gleghorn. All rights reserved.

As a teenager, my brother Tony and I would often float the southern end of the Cossatot river in southwestern Arkansas. We’d put in at a public landing and use our little 10 horse Evinrude to carry us up the river a few miles, then we’d shut it off and float down stream. Talking occasionally, but for the most part just listening to the world around us and casting our lines into the gentle current.

My brother is gone now. These are the memories of him I treasure the most—it was here, on the river, that I knew him best.

Floating on a river imposes a different pace on your life. It can take all day to cover a distance you could drive in an hour. On a river, you have time to study the world around you. As you meander across the countryside, you start to develop an appreciation for the landscape. You begin to take on a new awareness. You are alerted to changes in current, to the color of the water, and to the diversity of the wildlife along the way.

If you drive cross country, one of the first things you notice is the utter blandness of our man made geography. Each town appears the same from the interstate, a never ending repetition of franchise signs and overpasses. But on a river, the natural landscape often supersedes the will of man. There are no billboards—few signs of any type. You have the opportunity to see the countryside as closely as possible to the way early pioneers may have seen it.

That is, in the few places we haven’t screwed it up. The river system is a guage of our environment. When Lewis and Clark floated the Ohio river in 1803; they observed places which they literally had to push their boat through herds of animals crossing the great river. In his book “River Horse“, William Least Heat-Moon made a similar observation whilst retracing their journey on the same river. Only this time he and is traveling companion were floating their way through a vast assortment of garbage: from tampon applicators to cigarette butts. 

Rivers are now our ashtrays. The next time you hear a smoker say that cigarette filters are bio-degradable, please challenge him–those things last for years. A butt, casually tossed out a car window on I-71 may someday reach the Gulf of Mexico.

Our arrogance extends far beyond garbage. Over the last two centuries, we have dammed, straightened, and levied our waterways beyond recognition. Each levee robs the land of nutrients and actually increases the severity of flooding for communities downstream.The reshaping of a river also robs it of one of its most crucial elements—the meander. This gentle zigzag across the countryside may not strike us as orderly or efficient. But it is a natural pattern that filters the water and shapes our geography.

A river that cannot twist and turn has lost its personality—It has become a canal, a ditch. Once that happens, travel on the river losses its greatest appeal—the curiosity of what’s around the bend.

I don’t think these things necessarily rose to the height of my consciousness when I was a young teenager. I was just soaking my feet and trying to catch a fish. But our experiences on that river gave me an appreciation for what we are losing.

But the story is not purely a tale of loss. Some 7 years after I left home, my father, daughter, and I revisited the Cossatot. We were motoring upstream towards the mouth of the river and as we rounded a huge bend our eyes were drawn to the top of a tall oak. There, in the highest branch, was a bald eagle—the first I’d ever seen in the wild.

I took that eagle as a sign of hope. Hope that we can restore our environment to a better state. Hope that my children and grand children can also float on a clear river, and hope they will feel the same burning question that still drives me forward today:

What wonder lies just around the bend?

© 2008 by Rodney Gleghorn, all rights reserved.

One summer evening in 1988, my childhood friend Bobby Beauford, was murdered on his front porch. Shot in the chest while his wife and children huddled just a few feet away behind a flimsy wooden door. To this day, the crime remains unsolved.

The night he died I was living 70 miles due south, in Bossier City, Louisiana. Living my Air Force life and working with my spouse to raise our kids. I have always felt guilt over Bobby. Guilt because when he died, we were no longer best friends. Guilt because I left him in Texarkana, and guilt because I avoided meeting with his family after the funeral; rushing back to my distant life instead. If this were televised fiction, I would address my guilt by tracking down his killer and bringing him to justice. Maybe at the last minute he’d pull a knife out of his coat and I’d be forced to kill him. I love it when that happens.But this is my world, and in my world all I can do is write.Robert Lee (Bobby) Beauford and I were six when we met. His name was not all that unusual in the 1960’s south. Only much later did I realize how quintessentially southern it was. We lived just a short distance from each other and rode the same school bus. We were both country boys-Bobby much more so than I. His parents owned ten acres of pasture, a huge barn and several dozen head of beef cattle. That seemed like a ranch to me then.

He was a friendly, freckle-faced boy with blondish bangs. He seemed to have the ability to get along with anyone. I think we hit it off because-like most of my friends to come-Bobby was very persistent. Every day he sat next to me on the bus and talked; it must have been two or three weeks of near one-sided conversation. But he was dogged enough to keep talking.

The bus would drop us off at Central Elementary-a magnificent old structure, built in the early 20^th century as the Texarkana Arkansas High School. It’s long gone now, but in the 1960’s it was entering its last full decade of life. If you look at this picture from 1913, you can see the main entrance of the school. As a child, those steps seemed absolutely huge! Just to the right of the entryway you can just barely see a door which led down into storage area beneath the stairs. This is the scene of our first brush with authority.

We found an open can of silver metallic paint. Bobby did not hesitate to make use of it. He wrote the f-word on the side of the building and proudly read it out loud (his reading skills were the best in the whole second grade). I was in awe.

Our principle, Mr. Filogamo, took a different view. Our punishment was to rake leaves at every recess for the next week. This was the first of many such explorations the two of us would make together-usually with Bobby in the lead. If one of us got into trouble, the other was likely involved.

Our mother’s established a hot line.

Bobby was a good athlete and always chosen early for teams. Not so for me. But through my friend, I did get a little exposure to sports and other social activities. Bobby introduced me to other kids and stuck with me if they turned on me. And as we grew, he respected my limits-not pushing for absolute conformance, accepting me as I was. So, though his grades were always much better than mine, I never heard about it. Though I stayed with band through high school, I was never a nerd.

There was plenty for us to do together: play Monopoly with the Jackson brothers; hunt the minnow ponds for snakes; hike through the woods to the airport dump-scouting for weird junk and a new obsession, girly magazines. We took up hobbies together. Or I should say that Bobby made a hobby of new hobbies. I followed him from stamp collecting, to tropical fish, to model building, then back to tropical fish, then on to coin collecting; the end came when he began to raise beef cattle.

Life turned to concerts, cars, and girls, and my friend was ok that I didn’t follow him down every path. We explored the world as teenagers-he with vigor, me with trepidation. We each took our different interest and yet, we still remained just as close as when our days were more about playing war and pulling decoy snakes across the road.

As usual, Bobby took the riskier path. He was the first to try dope and booze; the first to have a girlfriend; go to a party and have a job. I held off on all of these things. Yet I was never in his way, never un-cool, always welcome, always greeted warmly.

When we were 14, I think any school counselor would have predicted our future as follows: I was headed for vocational school or the military at best. Bobby was going to college. His grades and attendance outpaced mine by far. He was a solid A and B student. That never changed. Bobby continued to do well academically until the day he dropped out.

That’s right. He dropped out. His girlfriend became pregnant and he quit school to marry her and get a job. He was all of seventeen. He went to work in a mattress factory. Their twins were still-born in the summer of 1976. I suppose I expected the marriage to break up, but it didn’t.

A year went by. When things got too rough between my father and I, Bobby, and his wife welcomed me into their little apartment on Elliot Road and I stayed with them until shortly before leaving Texarkana-running off to join the Air Force.

The string of bad luck continued. In August of 1978, Bobby’s mother died of cancer. I was stationed in Florida and took leave to be at the funeral. This was the last time I would be the friend I’d always been before. The last time I’d live up to my own expectations.

My friend began to make poor decisions. He began living just to get high. Perhaps he was just trying to get away from a life he must have felt trapped in. This is probably my projection, but it seems real.

I’d visit them when I returned home on leave. Mr. Beauford had taken a job in Jacksonville and they were now living in the old neighborhood, Rondo. Back in the family home Bobby had grown up in. Sometimes other friends would join us. We would sit in front of the TV and talk-they high, me straight. It’s easy to make stoned people laugh. I liked that.

The last such visit was early 1980. I was on my way to the Philippines. Bobby had been busted for growing dope in the woods. He got probation and he stuck to it. I think this is the last time he would be arrested. He was now the assistant manager of a barbecue place. This was the latest in a series of jobs, but he seemed to feel this one suited him well. He talked of getting his GED and of a career in the restaurant business.

The next three years would be a time of immense change for both of us. I kept up with Bobby through my mother. She wrote me weekly and always fed me the little bits of gossip she had. So I knew he a daughter he adored. I knew he split up with his wife. I knew he was single for a period of time, partied pretty hard, and then re-married. That’s what I knew.

As for me, the Philippines nearly killed me. In the end, what saved me was family. I married my Filipino girlfriend of two years in January of 1983. She had a 10 year old daughter, so at 25, I was now a father. Now I had responsibility and now I was worried. As we made plans to return to the states in July, I wondered how well my mixed-race family would go over in the racist south.

They welcomed us with very open arms. Bobby and his new wife helped mom to host a wedding shower for us. Most of the community came. We tried to get to know each other again. It seemed to me we had gone in totally opposite directions.

But these were good things. Bobby was making progress. He was now an assistant manager at Catfish King, a rising chain store in the area. He felt that in a couple of years he’d be getting his own store.

I only saw him occasionally in the next few years. Though we were re-assigned to Bossier City in 1986, and only lived an hour away, I rarely made the effort to visit him. I rationalized that it was the job, the family, my schoolwork. Maybe I just thought there was plenty of time. Looking back on it now, I think the real reason was that I found it hard to mix the life I’d built on my own with the life I’d known growing up.

The last time I saw him was in early 1988. I stopped by the restaurant in mid-afternoon. He came out to greet me as though it were just regular thing. I don’t remember the specifics of our visit, but I left with the impression he was doing OK and that his career with the company was looking good. I should remember more, but I can’t.

And then he was dead. He was 29.

I was one of his pallbearers. I didn’t even know the other guys. When we went through the receiving line his father hugged me tight. “We’ve lost our Bobby” he said. He asked us to stop by the house, but I deferred with some poor excuse.

Why did I do that?

This was a man who had known me for 23 of my 29 years. He had signed me up for little league, and the boy scouts and drove me to games, the roller rink, and the movies on countless occasions. Now his son, my best friend, lay in the dirt not 20 feet away and I rejected him because…well because I felt guilty and I couldn’t face his family.

Call it survivor’s guilt, call it selfishness, or call it life. For some reason I’d drifted away from my friend at a time when I sensed I could have finally paid him back for what he gave to me-the courage and confidence to find my way into the world. Texarkana is a good place with good people, but it has nary a scrap of economic viability. Those who stay, usually stand in one place. Those who leave usually do not come back for good.

I know today that I could not have rescued Bobby. He would have had to do that himself. I just wish he’d had the time.

A few weeks after the funeral I had a dream. In it, I am back in the church where Bobby’s service was held. The casket sits in front of the altar and I am walking down the wide center isle towards it, gliding over the dark-stained hardwood floors. As I reach the casket, I see myself inside, wearing my Air force blues.

It’s been 19 years, but Bobby still drifts into my dreams now and again. He and I are usually trying to escape from something: a ship, a horrible factory, a ruined city. We fight through it together but always, just as we reach the end, he simply disappears.

© 2007 by Rodney Gleghorn. All rights reserved.