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.
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