Going
to the Country
My father had a
compulsion about ‘leaving early’ that bordered on a mental
illness. And that never showed itself with such clarity as when we
went to ‘the country’. Truth is, where we lived was
‘country’—extremely rural. I grew up in a town with less than
500 residents and McDowell County was about 1/3 the size of Rhode
Island and had some 68,000 citizens when I was growing up—nearer
25,000 now, which makes it a ‘ghost county’ rather than merely
‘rural’. Nevertheless, we called Monroe County, where my father
grew up, ‘the country’ and when we went there we had to leave an
hour or two before dawn.
When I was smaller,
he would take me from my bed and put me in the backseat of whatever
Ford he owned at the time and we’d stop somewhere along the two
hour drive for me to put on the clothes my mother had brought for me.
Later, he would simply wake me up at 4 a.m. and tell me “it’s
time to go to the country.” We went once or twice a month, leaving
before dawn on Saturday and coming back in the early afternoon of
Sunday. I have hazy and dream filled memories of those early morning
trips. We’d arrive before 6 a.m. at the house where my father lived
as a boy and be greeted by my Grandmother Bradley—her name was
Clieve, pronounced ClE-vE, which, if were short for anything I never
learned what. I was a teen-ager when I realized that Clieve wasn’t
truly my grandmother—she was my step-grandmother, the wife of my
grandfather in his later life, after my father’s mother had died.
But that wasn’t simply an oversight—not knowing our actual
relationship—it was the way the Bradley side of my family operated.
I grew up calling lots of Bradley relations “aunt” or “uncle”
only to realize when I was older that they weren’t aunts or uncles
at all. This for example: Aunt Ursa and Aunt Denie (Geraldine) were
the children of “Aunt Annie” and “Uncle Buford”, who were, in
truth, my father’s Aunt and Uncle. That made Ursa and Geraldine my
second cousins! Such misrepresentation would have never happened on
the Jones side of my family. The Jones’ were very precise about
relationships—“your third cousin by marriage”, like that. The
Bradley’s were less formal and anybody you were related to might be
called “aunt” or “uncle”—it just didn’t matter as much to
them. My actual first cousin Greg Bradley (well, actually, actually
my double-cousin, according to the Jones’, since his mother was my
mother’s first cousin and his father was my father’s brother…but
the Jones clan kept score relentlessly) tried to put together a
genealogy for the Bradley family but kept running into trouble since
no one seemed to know the exact relationship of relatives!
Uncle Ezra is a
good example. I called him Uncle Ezra all my life but as close as I
can get to figuring out how we were related was this: Ezra was the
first cousin of Filbert, my grandfather, and Annie, my father’s
aunt. That means that ‘Uncle’ Ezra’s mother was the daughter of
my great-grand mother’s sister. So, if I can do the math, that
would make him my third cousin, once removed, whatever the hell that
means! I need a Jones relative to help me sort it out. All I know is
that he was Uncle Ezra to me.
Ezra was a tiny man
married to ‘Aunt Clovis’ (actually my third cousin, once removed,
by marriage—go ponder that!) who was a woman of substance, which
means, in Bradley Family Speak, she was a big, big woman. The last
time I saw Ezra on this side of the mysterious door of death, his
eyes looked into my chin. I was only 14 or so and about 5’7” tall
(I reached my full growth at 15 which explains why I was a star on my
junior high basketball team and didn’t make the cut in high
school). I suppose, just guessing, Ezra was 5’4” or so and
probably weighed 115 pounds. At 14, when Clovis hugged her ‘nephew’,
my face was pressed against her ample breasts. So, she might have
been 5’10 and weighed, let’s be Bradley nice now…220 pounds.
Jack Sprat and his wife, for sure—that was Uncle Ezra and Aunt
Clovis.
Ezra’s stature
was fertile ground for jokes his whole life. One story I was told a
hundred and one times over the years was about the night Uncle Ezra
got saved. It seems he had gone to a revival meeting and felt his
heart convicted to give his life to Jesus. He’d gone up to kneel at
the rail and when the out-of-town revivalist came by to pray with
him, that preacher said, “God bless the little boys….” Well, as
it turned out, Ezra was 22 years old and long since fully grown.
After the service some of the local young men gathered around Ezra
and started saying, over and over: “God bless the little boys….”
As the apocryphal
family story goes, Ezra, who was little but not meek, hitched up his
pants and told the crowd around him, “I’d rather be a little
fellow like me and go to heaven than great big sons-of-bitches like
you and go to hell.” Well spoken, Uncle Ezra, well said….
Uncle Ezra, like
most of the Bradley side of my family, was a man not unacquainted
with strong drink. Whenever we visited my father and Uncle Russell
would disappear with Ezra into the barn of his farm while I was being
loved up and fed sweets by Aunt Clovis. When they returned, a
half-an-hour later or so, they were flushed and glassy eyed and full
of salt and vinegar. Aunt Clovis would shake her head and say, either
to me or the cosmos, “Men have to drink, but not in my house….”
Most of the men on the Bradley side of my family, all of whom liked a
drink or two, seemed inevitably to marry women who didn’t approve
of alcohol. My Uncle Sid was the exception that proved the rule. He
and my Aunt Callie (who was both my aunt and my second cousin—go
figure my family!) both liked a taste….God bless them.
When Ezra died
(since I’m still on him and will get back to Grandmother Clieve
soon) I was 15 or so. He died in February of one of the winters of my
life. His funeral was in the Union Church (Baptist 1st and
3rd Sundays, Methodist 2nd and 4th)
in Waiteville. The preacher took a great deal of time preaching Uncle
Ezra’s funeral since the young men hand digging the grave were
having a hard time. They’d started two days before but the ground
was so frozen and it was so cold to dig that they kept having to
pause for coffee and a drink of bourbon, just to warm them up. But
after a dozen or so pauses those first two days, they were too drunk
to dig. One of them kept coming in to whisper to the preacher that
the grave wasn’t quite deep enough yet, so the sermon got longer
and longer. Finally, after we’d been there for almost three hours,
one of the grave diggers stumbled up the aisle and said, in slurred
speech, “da hol is ready, preeecher,”
So Ezra joined the
scores of those sleeping in that little country cemetery. Many of
them are somehow related to me. I remember on one Memorial day,
wandering through the graveyard, coming upon two worn tombstones with
my name on them: James Gordon Bradley. The sky was white, as in often
is in those climes, and I felt dizzy for a while. It was my
great-grandfather and my great-great-grandfather. I hadn’t realized
I had a ‘family name’ since it skipped two generations. My
grandfather was Filbert and my father was Virgil—good time to go
back to what worked in the past!
Most Memorial Days,
my crazy ‘Aunt Arbana’, who I never saw because she was crazy and
a recluse (and Lord knows what my true relationship with her was—she
was probably a fifth cousin once removed or something) would come
over before anyone else got there and put little Confederate flags on
the graves of many of my distant relatives. Uncle Russell would take
them off in a huff while Uncle Del was laughing and Uncle Sid was
making jokes. My father would just shake his head and wonder. “Some
year I’m going to take them and stick them up her ass,” Russell
would say. “Do we even know where she lives now?” Del would ask.
“Or how big her ass is?” Sid would ask.
Back at Aunt
Clovis’ house, after Ezra had joined his not so clearly defined
ancestors in the so frozen and so rocky dirt of the Waiteville
Cemetery, I noticed that there were several bottles of whisky set out
with all chicken and green beans and pies and cakes. At that time, I
simply noticed it—now I wonder, why couldn’t that have been so
when Ezra was alive and thirsty?
We’d arrive at
Clieve’s house and she would start talking the minute we came up
the walk. She was the most talkative person I’ve ever met. When you
were with her you were reduced to listening and listening only, with
an occasional nod or clucking in surprise. My father’s brothers—Del
and Russell and Sid—would never come to stay with her. Russell had
a farm in Waiteville through his wife’s family—she was a LaFon,
just like my aunt Annie’s husband (actually my great uncle by
marriage—I’ll stop trying to explain my family now!) but
Russell’s wife Gladys wasn’t from the same LaFons as Annie’s
husband…just because I’m from West Virginia doesn’t mean I’m
the product of massive intermarriage). In fact, one of them spelled
it with a small ‘f’ and the other with a capital ‘F’, though
for the life of me I don’t remember which was which now. Anyway, my
father’s brothers wouldn’t visit Clieve because she never stopped
talking and they couldn’t stand her, never had. But we always
stayed with her when we were in the country.
So, surrounded in
stereo by Clieve’s constant chatter (oh, by the way, though I
called her “Grandmaw”, my father called her Aunt Clieve though
she was his step mother—one last example of the looseness of the
Bradley clan regarding relationships) we’d enter the little house
to the smell of a full breakfast. By ‘full breakfast’ I mean
this: sausage gravy, scratch biscuits, fried apples, grits swimming
in butter, country ham and red eye gravy, eggs fried within an inch
of their lives so the yoke was hard and the edges were brown and
crunchy, coffee perking on the stove, three kinds of home canned
preserves, fresh churned butter, and potatoes cut thin and fried in
bacon grease plus the bacon they were fried in. Clieve must have been
up before my father to assemble such a feast by 6 a.m. I had a method
to the madness of such a meal. I put sausage gravy on my eggs,
biscuit and potatoes and red-eye gravy over my grits and ham (usually
a lot since red-eye gravy is made with coffee instead of water and my
parents wouldn’t give me coffee yet). Then I’d have another plate
for apples and biscuits with butter and preserves. Lordy, lordy, what
a banquet! It was in Grandmaw Bradley’s kitchen, under the drone of
her gossip and stories (like elevator music, in a way) that I came to
believe, as I believe to this day, that gravy is a food group.
We made that trip
to the country dozens and dozens of times while I was growing up. And
the day we never missed was Memorial Day. There was a Memorial Day
dinner in the grange hall that raised the money each year for the
upkeep of the Waiteville cemetery where generations after generations
of my family lay sleeping. People who had years before moved away
came back on memorial day because someone they had loved was in that
cemetery and the only way to insure the well-being of that four acre
plot of hilly ground was to buy your ticket to the Memorial Day
Dinner and eat yourself into oblivion.
I’d be introduced
to and shown off to about a hundred people who I was told were my
relatives every Memorial Day. Given the Bradley proclivity of fudging
relationships, I have no idea how many of those people actually
shared my DNA. But let me try to tell you what there was to eat.
There was pork ribs
cooked off the bone with sour kraut, fried chicken to die for—crispy
on the outside and cooked to juicy perfection within, country ham
sliced as thin as paper (as it must be) and cured ham pink and
tender, beef stew that would melt in your mouth, baked chicken, and
fried pork chops. There was corn—on the cob, slathered with melted
butter; creamed, cut from the ear; beans cooked in bacon with
potatoes you didn’t have to chew; squash of many sorts (which I
didn’t like as a child and long for now); tomatoes huge as
softballs cut into thick slices; cucumbers and onions cut up and
brined in vinegar; tomato stew with dumplings; fried onions and
peppers; rhubarb cooked to tender, tart perfection; creamed onions
and peas; green salad made from lime jello, nuts and cottage cheese;
red jello with fruit cocktail suspended in it; baby carrots cooked
with brown sugar and walnuts; slaw—both vinegar and mayonnaise
based; and tossed salad with vinegar and oil. There was, for desert:
pecan pie, cherry pie, apple pie, fried apple pie, strawberry and
rhubarb pie, German chocolate cake, devil’s food cake, angel’s
food cake and homemade ice cream to pile on top of it all. And to
drink there would be (what else) sweet tea and perked coffee…is
there any other kind of tea, any other kind of coffee, really?
Here’s the point
to all this: one of the images that Jesus uses for the Kingdom is the
image of the Heavenly Banquet. I take great joy in that and in the
passages from the gospels where the resurrected Jesus seems hungry.
If there is a life to come—and for me the jury is still out,
probably will be until I come face to face with my finitude and stare
off into oblivion or whatever comes next—I am ecstatic to imagine
there will be eating and drinking there. And that Jesus chose to
leave us as a metaphor of what heaven is like, a table set with fair
linen and candles where we share in a Eucharistic feast of bread and
wine—that is the kicker for me.
Breakfast at
Grandmaw Clieve’s house and dinner at the Memorial Day dinner—I
couldn’t ask for anything more. Over the years I have certainly
developed a palate for other things: Chinese, Thai, Italian, French
cuisines; however, if it is eternity we’re talking about, for my
taste those two menus will suffice for the first eon or so.
I don’t have a
view of heaven much past a place where there are giant women—like
Aunt Clovis, sitting in enormous rocking chairs who will rock you and
sing to you and stroke you whenever you want. But beyond that, the
best I can do with the whole life/death thing is to imagine that
someday I’ll be lifted from my bed by strong, loving arms and
placed in the backseat of a car, covered carefully with a blanket
and, after a trip of confusion and dreams, I’ll wake up “in the
country.”
That’s the best I
can do about ‘heaven’.
And, for me, at any
rate, it works….
The
Trouble with Finitude
I try, from time to time,
usually late at night or after one
too many glasses of wine,
to consider my mortality.
(I have been led to believe
that such consideration is valuable
in a spiritual way.
God knows where I got that...
Well,
of course God
knows,
I'm just not sure.)
But try as I might, I'm not adroit
at such thoughts.
It seems to me that I have always
been alive,
I don't remember not being alive.
I have no personal recollections
of when most of North America was
covered by ice
or of the Bronze Age
or the French Revolution
or the Black Sox scandal.
But I do know about all that through
things I've read
and musicals I've seen
and the History Channel.
I know intellectually that I've not
always been alive,
but
I don't know
it,
as they say,
“in
my gut”.
(What a strange phrase that is,
since I am sure my 'gut'
is a totally dark part of my body,
awash with digestive fluids
and whatever remains of the chicken
and peas
I had for dinner and strange
compounds
moving inexorably—I hope—through
my large
and small intestines.)
My problem is this:
I have no emotional connection to
finitude.
All I know and feel is tangled up
with being alive.
Dwelling on the certainty of my own
death
is beyond my ken, outside my
imagination,
much like trying to imagine
the vast expanse of Interstellar
Space
when I live in Connecticut.
So, whenever someone suggests that
I consider my mortality,
I screw up my face and breathe
deeply
pretending I am imagining the world
without me alive in it.
What I'm actually doing is
remembering
things I seldom remember--
my father's smell, an old lover's
face,
the feel of sand beneath my feet,
the taste of watermelon,
the sound of thunder rolling toward
me
from miles away.
Perhaps when I come to die
(perish the thought!)
there will be a moment, an instant,
some flash of knowledge
or a stunning realization:
“Ah,”
I will say to myself,
just before oblivion sets in,
'this
is finitude....”
jgb
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