The Spyglass Tree (10 page)

But however young I may still have been at the time in question, I was also already old enough to have heard enough of her storybook stories to realize that when she put the tips of her fingers on your shoulders and held you an arm’s length away smiling her fairy godmother smile at you, it was her secret way of saying arise Sir Knight and sally forth doing good deeds time after time after time in place after place after place.

So first there was Mama herself, whose little scootabout manchild I already was even before I was yet old enough to stay up late enough to hear the tales told on midwinter nights in the semicircle around the fireplace and during midsummer evenings on the swing porch with mosquito smoke rising and spreading in the chinaberry yard. Then there was also Miss Tee who began calling me her Mister in her storybook voice rocking me back and forth in Mama’s cane-bottom rock-a-bye riverboat rocking chair.

By the time Little Buddy Marshall came along, I had outgrown most of the playthings in Miss Tee’s backyard and what he and I used to spend most of our times together doing was rambling here and there and elsewhere like explorers and pioneers who were bred and born in the briar patch and we also hunted with a slingshot and the main game we lived to play was baseball. Sometimes I also thought of myself as a boxer with eyes and hands as quick as Joe Gans and a six-inch uppercut like the one and only Jack Johnson.

When he stopped in with me to meet her the first time that day when we were on our way to the shortcut through the kite pasture to get to the foot of Buckshaw Mill Road and the construction camp at the site where the Cochrane Bridge was going to be built, I knew he would like her and the first chance he got he nudged me and whispered, Hey shit I reckon old buddy boy, hey shit I reckon. Then when the time finally came to open her surprise package of sandwiches and tea cake cookies that we had promised to save until the twelve o’clock whistles started, he also said, Man, you sure got yourself some big auntie.

And that is when he also said, Now that’s what I call a sure enough fairy story godmother, buddy boy, which was really something coming from him, because as much as he always liked all of the things you found out about from the chimney corner and the steps of the swing porch and especially from the barbershop, he really didn’t have very much interest in storybooks as such. As far as he was concerned, there was no difference between storybooks and schoolbooks, and he never did come to like anything at all about going to school, not even the playground activities. He didn’t even like football and basketball and volleyball, which were all school-term games in those days. Later on when cowboy movies began to become popular, he liked the adventures of William S. Hart and Tom Mix and Buck Jones and Ken Maynard and hated crooks like Bull Montana as much as I did, but he never did
become interested in reading anything about the wild West either, not even the Indians.

But whether Little Buddy Marshall knew it or not, Miss Tee was not only what fairy godmothers were really about, she had also always been a part of what school bell time was all about and when I became school age, she had been the one who gave me my first book satchel and blackboard eraser and collapsible aluminum drinking cup, and Mama had let her be the one to take me to be registered in the primer class at Mobile County Training School that first Monday morning.

Y
ou couldn’t see any part of the downtown business district from anywhere on the campus, and except during the wee hours and on weekends you couldn’t even hear the courthouse clock striking until you rounded the curve and passed by the wrought-iron gate to the old plantation mansion known as the Old Strickland Place. But you could walk all the way from the academic area to Old Confederate Square in less than twenty minutes.

Then you were at the hub of a cotton market town that was also the county seat, and across North Main Street from the sheriff’s office and the jail and the municipal complex was the Farmer’s Enterprise Bank and from that corner you could see along the sidewalk past the movie theater and the next street to the brick and lumber yard of the Carmichael Construction Supply Company and you could also see all of the stores on the other three sides of the elm-shaded square.

In those days there was also a Merchants Bank, and there
were also two drugstores, a Woolworth’s, a Bradley’s Furniture, and I don’t know exactly how many clothing stores, specialty shops, cafes, and lunch counters, but I do remember how Goldwyn’s Dry Goods store and Ransom’s Bargain Emporium used to look, and everybody remembers Tate and Davidson’s two-story department store.

My old roommate has a pretty good reason to remember the young women’s Intercollegiate Toggery shop that was next door to Tate and Davidson’s in those days, but most people have probably long since forgotten Dudley Philpot and his General Merchandise Store. Sometimes I forget all about him, too. I wonder if Will Spradley has ever forgotten, but I’m pretty certain that you would have to prod Giles Cunningham for a while and then he could probably say, Yeah, I think I can picture the old son-of-a-bitch. What the hell happened and what the hell was it all about?

The heavy interstate traffic westbound toward Montgomery and points south to Florida and the Gulf Coast and eastbound toward Phoenix City and the Georgia state line, Atlanta, and points north, came through on the south side of the square, so from the corner where the telephone central was you could see gas stations and automobile dealers’ pennants in both directions and the bus stop beyond the light and power building.

The downtown post office was one block due south of the square on the tree-lined street which was called South Main and also South End and which was also where the white supremacist white high school, several white Protestant churches, and the neatly kept but not very old homes of a number of the most prosperous local white businessmen lived in those days.

Most of the downtown white families who could trace their bloodlines back to the earliest settlers lived on North Main, also known as North End which was an avenue of mostly pre-Civil War homes and with a center strip of shrubbery and flower beds
and which began on the north side of the square and ended two blocks beyond the corner where it turned into a thoroughfare leading out to the campus.

As I had already found out in the library during the week before I graduated from Mobile County Training School, what the earliest settlers had originally established back during the days even before Alabama became a colony was a French trading post on an old Creek Indian trail. Then the post had become an English crossroads settlement and after that a federal garrison during the time of the Andrew Jackson anti-Indian campaign that ended with the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. It had become a cotton market town and the county seat during the flush times before the Civil War, none of which ever gave it any claim to fame even in Alabama. But since the turn of the century, it had been known all over the country as a college town.

What you saw as the bus pulled in were the mud-caked, dust-powdered jalopies and trucks and also a few horse-drawn buckboard wagons parked diagonally into the curb around the square, and there were the late summer shade trees and the concrete park benches along the gravel walks, and the gray stone Civil War monument to honor the brave.

It was the statue of a Confederate army infantryman facing North Main, and around the pedestal there was a spiked wrought-iron fence enclosing a flower bed in which, as I found out later on, there were always flowers in bloom, even in the dead of winter when they had to be grown in terra-cotta pots in a greenhouse and transferred pot by pot and embedded in straw and pine needles.

So I knew that I would also find out that you-know-which townspeople would have, if not one thousand plus one or more tall tales, riddles, rhymes, catches, and jokes to retell about Old Man Johnny Reb, as they called the rifleman, they would have at least two or three dozen. All you had to do was listen. You didn’t even
have to be alert. All you had to do was be in the right place at the right time.

And to be sure, there was one that you could always count on hearing repeated or, indeed, replayed every year when the first really hard cold snap hit town. All you had to do was be someplace, say like the old Greyhound bus station when the lie swapping used to get started in the semicircle of hand and rump warmers huddled around the radiator in the waiting room, as if it were an old potbelly stove.

Man, talking about a cold day. Man, Old man Johnny Reb up yonder on the courthouse square feel this weather this morning. Man, I bet you anything old stuff got his boney butt ass down off that goddamn thing last night
.

Man, I don’t blame him a bit
.

Got rid of that old musket and brought his frostbitten peckerwood ass on down off from up there in a hurry, pardner
.

Man, when old hawk hit that sapsucker, he said time to unass this area, colonel sir
.

Man, so that’s who that was I seen all snuggled up over yonder on the sidewalk by the drugstore last night
.

Man, doing what?

Man, what you reckon? Asking somebody where he can get him a long pull on a fifth of sour mash, white lightning, rotgut, or anything with some kick to it
.

Now, man, you know Old Man Johnny Reb know better than that. So what did you tell him?

Man, I told him that even a short snort been against the law in this county ever since they passed that Eighteenth Amendment back in nineteen-nineteen
.

Man, you told him right. Been right up there with the county jail less than a block off to his right elbow all this time now
.

But shoot, y’all. Maybe that’s exactly how come he know good and well
you can get all the bootleg liquor you can pay for right here in the city limits, Prohibition or no Prohibition. All you got to do is make the right contact, and you look just like a drinking man to me
.

Yeah, man, but Old Man Johnny Reb suppose to be up there watching out for the Yankees
.

Yeah, but, man, maybe the Yankees Old Man Johnny really on the lookout for is them revenue agents. Man, I wouldn’t put it pass Cat Rogers. Man, peckerwoods hate them folks
.

Man, I don’t care what Old Man Johnny Reb supposed to be doing up there, his gray ass liked to froze blue and dropped off last night
.

There were also mud-caked and dust-powdered jalopies and trucks and more buckboards all along the side streets where the markets, the grocery stores, and the hardware and repair shops were in those days. But most of the larger trucks and flatbed trailers were always pulled up on the back streets and in the alleys off the back streets where the loading ramps of the seed, feed, and fertilizer warehouses were.

I used to stay away from these blocks, especially on Saturdays, because I didn’t want to have to see all of the crap games so many of the farmhands always used to seem to make the weekly trip into town to get into with the local hustlers. Not that I was against gambling as such on any principle. Certainly not on any principle based on the conventional morality underlying the disapproval of the church folks of Gasoline Point.

Not me. Not the self-elected godson of the likes of old Luzana Cholly and Stagolee Dupas
(fils)
plus Gus the Gator all rolled in one. Not the longtime scoot buddy of Little Buddy Marshall. Not the one to whom the sight of sailors and longshoremen rolling dice in the cargo sheds along the piers off Commerce Street and elsewhere on the waterfront was as much a part of the storybook world of the seven seas as the dry-dock elevators and
the foghorns and the acres of naval stores out at Taylor Lowenstein’s maritime supply yards.

But I felt the way I felt about the back street crapshooters because it was as if they were still stuck in the same rut as the slaves of a hundred years ago, who used to be brought into town by the plantation master or overseer to reload the cotton wagons with supplies and provisions, and then used to spend their free time gambling away whatever slaves had to bet and fight each other about while the master or overseer finished his transactions and no doubt also found amusement elsewhere.

Not all slaves spent their precious free time in town on Saturday, shooting craps and indulging in frivolity, to be sure. According to many of the most often repeated storybook as well as fireside yarns, there were also those would-be and soon-to-be north-bound fugitives who deliberately gave off an air of frivolity not to spend such precious free time to pay court to in-town house servants if not sweethearts brought in on wagons from other plantations, but to make contact with whoever (sometimes male, sometimes female) could pass on the latest news and practical operational grapevine information concerning the signs, signals, passwords, and timetables of the local trunk line of the Underground Railroad.

Surely some instances of runaway slaves using the dice game as a cover have been recorded as historical fact. But in the stories I grew up hearing, the very notion of an invisible network of black and white people working together to help slaves steal away to freedom was no less farfetched to the overwhelming majority of back alley bone-rollers as all of the preaching and praying and singing about chariots taking you to heaven somewhere in the sky, and they almost always poked fun at it one way or another. Some said and may actually have convinced themselves that the so-called Underground Railroad was either a trick that Old Master and the overseer played to find out who they could trust, or it was
a trap set up by rogue peckerwoods who stole slaves from one plantation and sold them to another in another place.