Posted November 5, 2002
Uncle Orin was a big, balding man with a mustache and steady eyes that twinkled when he smiled. He moved slowly, and he told stories that rambled into an interesting thing to know or a gentle joke, his amusement showing in his eyes toward the end of the story. He always seemed to be rummaging in his memory for something that had been misplaced, whether he was talking about his boyhood or something that had happened yesterday.
I remember a few of the facts but not a one of the jokes.
Sometimes I feel like my memory is a sinkhole that facts slip into.
What do I remember?
He told me how to cook poke, but never cooked any for me. He made a wonderful dense white "skillet cornbread" that his mother used to make, and he tried to teach me how to make it when I asked him to after I got married. But you need an iron skillet for it, and I never got the hang of caring for one.
That just because someone's a grownup, it doesn't mean they have enough money to buy you toys all the time.
That you hang a hog up by its heels to butcher it, to let the blood drain out of the carcass and to scald the hide before you skin it.
That getting a raise could put you in a higher tax bracket and reduce your take home pay.
Depressingly few facts for a childhood of stories, and I wonder about the scalding part now. Did he tell me that, or did I read it in a book? What good did it do to tell me these things, if I don't remember them?
He took me to the county fair once, and bought me a toy coach whip as a souvenir. I bet he told me about the horses he'd cared for. I know he loved horses, and he arranged the lessons I took as a child. I know he told me about his family, about his father. I don't remember a word, I only remember where we sat. On the crumbling concrete steps to Granny's front porch, the pleasant sunlight warming us. On our right, the disused driveway of red Calloway County gravel leading to the spooky garage stretching on one side of us past margins of weedy grass that needed a haircut, perennials clumped by the side of the house. On our left the road, and between us and the road Granny's front yard with its maples planted in a grid, all bare earth and upthrust roots, a harder, barer path beaten by the students next to the road. And the library standing across the street, the steps leading up to its entrance like a white carpet flung out in welcome. Something carved into the stone blocks (or were they concrete?) That crowned its facade. Names? A Latin Motto? How can I forget something I looked at five times a week for years?
I remember his voice, slow and gentle, sparkling with drollery when he was amused. But not what tickled him. Maybe he was easily amused.
Maybe it runs together, what he told me, what we read in school, Little House on the Prairie, what I learned later. I always knew the farm was work. I always knew the work was worth the effort. Maybe that's a fact too, even if I don't remember our roots he tried to show me, even if now I append "worth the effort - for the successful ones."
He and his wife Vida used to live in an apartment building across town, the first one I was ever in. She was my grandmother's younger sister, and if I remember correctly, he was my grandfather's nephew. I think that made him Momma's uncle and her cousin once removed, which she found amusing. I used to go over and spend nights once in a while. They'd never had children of their own, and they welcomed me like a little princess. I was never any good at the game I remember best, but they were, building houses out of playing cards, two cards leaning on each other's shoulders to form the support, another laid over them to become the base of the next level, storey upon storey growing higher until the inevitable collapse. I hoarded playing cards when I first got married, saving each old deck when it got worn and dirty. I guess I figured children in one's life were as inevitable as stray kittens, whether you wanted one of your own or not.
I think the decks are still in the house, but their number isn't growing now. First Jim picked up a TV off the berm one Trash Day, and then computers came along, and we don't play cards any more. But then, even if a child had come to spend the night, would that have given me the touch to build the houses of cards? I don't know what I was thinking.
When they got older they moved into the house across the street, a small house on a concrete slab with a garage and a breeze way. The guest room was barely big enough for its solid wooden bed and crammed with houseplants, and Orin gave me a few when I got married and into a home of my own, a trailer. I know there was a variegated wax begonia, a plant that bloomed sparsely if it got enough light, but that we grew for its round green leaves splashed with creamy yellow. I'm pretty sure there was an arrowhead and an angel-wing begonia. And an aloe, along with the information that they were first-aid for burns. I killed them all in time, of course, even the aloe. When you're lazy about watering, that happens. (Which reminds me that my current batch of houseplants is behind even as I write.) But the aloe was a surprise.
About the time I was married, Orin's sister Mary came back to town and moved into a different apartment house not too far away. She was the only one of my relatives who smoked. She was an outspoken old bird, with Orin's twinkle in her eye but a brisker way of speaking. I went to visit her when she'd recently moved back. The Church of Christ frowned on divorce, and she was enormously amused that, although she'd been divorced at least twice (the confusion on the number is mine, not hers) since she'd married a man named Smith the last time, now that Orin Smith's sister Mary Smith was in town, everyone assumed she was an old maid.
Time marched on. My grandmother died at 94 the year I was married, so Aunt Vida was in her eighties or nineties the year soon after when she became so ill she was put on life support. There was no improvement for a long time, and finally Uncle Orin was given the choice whether to continue the treatment, or to take her off it and let her slip away. He agonized over it for a night. Even in her weakened state he could tell the tubes and apparatus troubled her, and he finally decided, if there seemed to be no hope of her making a recovery, to spare her the discomfort of postponing the inevitable.
They pulled the tubes and turned off the machines, and she was home within the week. As a matter of fact, she outlived Orin, but not by much.
I wish I could remember more of what he told me. Of course, I was twelve years old when we moved away from Murray. Maybe that's just the way it goes.
At least I sat at the knee of a wise, loving old man as a child, and drank in his stories.
I was hundreds of miles away when he died, embroiled in my own affairs. I never said good by, and I wouldn't have come up with anything eloquent back then, and numerous more losses haven't brought me any eloquence now. Oddly enough it's some lines by Kipling that come to me as I think of him now, from "To James Whitcomb Riley."
By Ruby Jung, including the background. All rights reserved to the story. If you care for the background, you're welcome to copy and use it.