My Brother Must Have Loved the Hospital!

It was one of those sweltering summer days in south Mississippi, when you just couldn’t catch a breeze.  Mama was huge, pregnant with Rhoda Lynn and Aunt Shirley was also pregnant with Shelia.  My brother, Junior, and I were tired of sitting around watching them get larger, so we decided to take a walk up to the sawmill near our house to get a cold drink.  There was an RC Cola machine on the back porch of the office and it was quiet up there because the men were taking their lunch hour. 

Our dog, Gopher, had followed us up there and no sooner than we had stepped onto the little porch to get to the drink machine, Gopher and the neighbor's the “Bisquits” dog began to fight.  The neighbors were nicknamed Bisquits a long time ago.  I don’t know why.  The dogs knocked Junior off the porch onto the ground.  He became part of their altercation.  I grabbed him and pulled him back up onto the porch, only to find he had been bitten (chewed, even) on his leg, so badly that he couldn’t walk.  He was about four and I was only eight, but I grabbed him into my arms and carried him down the street, screaming all the way for my mama. The men from the sawmill still sat, all the while, eating their sandwiches from their little gray lunch boxes, never moving or lifting a finger to help me. 

Mama and Aunt Shirley emerged from the house, running, as best they could.  Mama took Junior from my arms and carried him all the way up to McNeill (the center of town), where daddy was in the only vehicle we owned at that time.  Then off to Picayune to the hospital.  While at the hospital, Junior got about twenty-something stitches in his leg.

Junior made many trips to the hospital before he was even five.  I remember when he was not even two, his stroller got stuck in an ant bed.  Mama and Grandma Polly were on the porch drinking coffee while Junior strolled around the yard.  By the time he began crying uncontrollably, he was already covered with the tiny fire ants all the way to his diaper.  He was taken to the hospital that day and given sulfur that Mama had to mix with honey to get him to eat as his daily “dose”.  The sulfur was supposed to help heel his now pus-covered legs.  I wandered in one day just after she had given him his two teaspoons and found the remainder of her mixture in a bowl on the coffee table.  Before Mama got back from her bedroom where she was changing his diaper, I had polished off the rest of the creamy mixture in the dish.  She had a hissy fit, claiming that now my bones would go brittle and I would die.  She would not let me have any water for fear of it killing me.  It didn’t.

Then there was also the time we were at Aunt Agnes’s house and her Chihuahua bit Junior all the way through his upper lip.  He was rushed to the hospital that day.  The poor kid!  He also had scarlet fever when he was about four.  That was when Mama found out that he was allergic to penicillin.  He had gone into convulsions after the first couple of doses and scared Mama half to death.

Mama and Daddy had waited for years to finally get a boy and he ended up to be the most troublesome of all the kids as a toddler! 

And he was the last child.  Mama lost Rhoda Lynn.  She was stillborn in May of that year.  It was devastating to me.  I still remember that little white satin covered coffin as they lowered it into that grave at Gipson Cemetery.  It was clearly devastating to Mama as well.  She was never the same.

The Good Ole Summertime

Although it was summer vacation, I woke up just after the sun came up, because mama made me.  Well, partially because she made me, but partially because there was no insulation in my bedroom and it got hotter than hades in my room.  The reason she made me get up this morning was because she and Grandma Polly had already been to the cornfield and there was a whole wash bucket filled with corn that had to be shucked.  It was a well run process.  Grandma cut off the ends in the kitchen and sent it back to us on the porch where we shucked it, cleaning off every little bit of cornsilk. Then we sent it back in to Grandma, who rinsed it and with her sharpest knife, cut the kernels off into a huge pot, where she cooked it and then put it in freezer bags for the winter.

Mama and Grandma picked anything anyone was willing to give them out of their gardens.  In addition to corn, they picked purple hulled peas, butter beans (the gray kind, not lima), squash, tomatoes or anything else they could can in jars or freeze.  Sometimes they dragged us out in the fields with them.  When there were pecans to pick up, we went for sure.  We picked up the pecans on halvesies.  We kept half of what we picked.  Then we’d have to bring them home and shell them.  It too, was a process.  Grandma would crack them with a huge monstrosity of a pecan cracker and then we shelled them.  They froze them too.

On the days that there weren’t vegetables to be canned, I usually walked up to McNeill to meet the bookmobile.  It was a traveling library from the big Crosby Library in Picayune.  I loved to read and would read about three books a week if I had the time, without even being told I needed to!  It was my window on the world outside of McNeill. 

If my cousin, Bridget, was staying with her Grandmother, she’d come over and she, my sister and I would go to the woods and build forts.  First we’d pack a big lunch and put Koolaid in a thermos.  Then we’d head out to the woods behind my Grandma Johnson’s house.  Sometimes we dug into the side of a bank that was from where a road had been cut years ago.  This would yield a nice little playhouse for a while.  Other times we would take hammers, nails and boards from my daddy’s shop into the woods and build forts in the pine trees.  My favorite area to build tree houses, though was my Grandma Polly’s Tung Nut trees.  But as soon as she found out what I had done, she would tear them down.  It was a futile effort. 

We never let my poor little brother go with us.  He was a nuisance.  He was four years younger than me and didn’t know how to build anything yet.  He had an imaginary friend named Balah.  Balah ate lunch with him everyday.  Yes, Mama played along and made a sandwich for Balah, too.  I think that might be why my brother was fat at that age.  He ate his and Balah’s sandwiches.   We didn’t let him play with us, so he invented Balah.  When he wasn’t playing with Balah, he was running his tricycle back and forth from our house to Grandma Polly’s house yelling, “Amamama! Amamama!” like a race car.  He was of no use to us.

Linda Ann and Bridget and I would stay in the woods all day unless a thunderstorm approached.  Then we’d hear Mama calling all our names frantically.  It could just be a distant thunder or two and she would go crazy until we got to the house.  “It’s comin’ a storm!” she’d yell as soon as she saw us coming out of the woods.  Then if it turned out to have lightening, she’d line us all up on the couch.  She would unplug everything in the house, including the air conditioner and fans and dare us to move.  “People have been struck by lightening moving around their houses during a thunderstorm!” she’d tell us.  “You stay right there until it’s over.”  And we did.  We weren’t even allowed to talk.  It was crazy, I tell you.  However, if there was no lightening and just rain, we were allowed to put on our swimsuits and run around outside, playing in the rain until it had stopped.