 |
| Big Daddy, Granddaddy, Daddy & me |
Big Daddy was a man of longevity. My earliest memories are of the tall, very straight-postured great grandfather who seemed to carry a certain dignity around with him, the sort of dignity some few are simply born with. He grew the best tomatoes—according to most members of the family—in the town of Toccoa Georgia. He also went eighty-six years straight without missing one single Sunday at the First Baptist Church.
When I got the call that he had passed away, I was nineteen. He had turned ninety-nine that year and other than my brother Johnny, he was the last of a line of John Rush Herndons in my family, a family that had all but disappeared from the face of the earth.
Burning up my trust fund as fast as I possibly could, I was busy wasting time attending college on that sad morning. Putting on my funeral suit, the one I felt getting heavier as each member of my very wide, loving family died off, the memories of all of them weighed down the pockets. My tie was a noose, choking the emotion of one more loss.
Cussing the new 55mph speed limit, I rolled down I-85 from Gastonia. Just before I reached the Georgia line, a sudden urge to turn off and take the back roads came from out of nowhere. So, it was along a lonely stretch of South Carolina highway that I saw it.
The field that it rested in was a wide swath of bottomland; grass grew high around it. Nothing told me to, but I turned down the pitiful dirt path that had been used to park the big beast out in that spot. I pulled right up to it and cut off the engine. Moving around to the front of my Oldsmobile, I leaned against the hood and lit a smoke, then stood there staring at old paint, older steel, and ragged canvass from which time and exposure had leached all color. The huge trailer that it rested on sat on raised blocks; the tires had rotted away and hung in shreds. Even the ‘For Sale’ sign was faded; the letters and phone number hardly visible from the highway it faced.
Before I could blink, memories of my past, and this big machine, came flooding back. And, for the briefest of moments, those that I loved, now long gone, were there with me again…
~
Breakfast at Grandmomma and Granddaddy’s house in Toccoa was always a big production: eggs (scrambled by Granddaddy), bacon and grits and toast, orange juice and a huge plastic cup of cold milk. I was tearing into mine, happy to be big enough to sit in a chair without support of a stack of phone books or encyclopedias—like my sister Janice still had to use. Lisa, the baby in 1963, was still in a high chair; Johnny had yet to be conceived.
“We got a big day, fellas,” Granddaddy said. “Eat up.”
“What are we going to do?” I said, making a mess of spreading some jelly on my toast.
A bit of a rebel, for his time, Granddaddy went against the family grain in his early days, attending Clemson, instead of the family Alma mater over at the U of Georgia, where Grandmomma and everyone else in my family went to school.
“Do I get to shoot?” Of course, I figured there would be some sort of gunplay involved with whatever he was talking about.
“No, Scotty,” Daddy grinned. “Your granddaddy has a new machine, a ride that he’s calling ‘Shoot The Moon.’”
“It’s all a bunch of silliness.” Grandmomma muttered as she wiped up the debris from three eating grand children.
“A ride?”
“Like at a fair,” Daddy said. “Like the Tilt-a-whirl?”
I grinned.
I loved to get on the Tilt-a-whirl. If we drove by any small carnival or fair that sported one, I would bellow for us to come to a stop and demanded to ride! This ploy seldom worked, mind you.
“Can we ride it?”
“It’s not finished yet, Scotty-boy,” Granddaddy said. “But we need to go see how it’s coming along.”
~
Goat Scoggins was the first man I’d ever met that had no teeth and was missing an arm. He wore filthy overalls, kept a pint liquor bottle in his back pocket, and owned and operated a big salvage yard somewhere up in the surrounding hills of North Georgia. Enclosed by corrugated WWII surplus sheet-metal fence, the place was a treasure trove of junk. I crawled all over it that day; avoiding snakes and the rats they hunted, I explored the carcasses of several P-41 fighters, old jeeps and Army trucks, and countless car bodies that were old before the war ever started. It was like heaven to a five-year-old.
In a cleared corner of the big lot, Goat and (presumably) my granddaddy had assembled an enormous contraption of eight, huge crane booms, salvaged from the decks of old Liberty Ships. They were attached to a giant, rotating gear assembly that had been built onto a long flat trailer, the sort pulled by a tractor truck.
Some of the booms were higher than others; some seemed ready to scrape the ground. Fascinated, I watched as daddy and granddaddy climbed up two of the long booms. Made of massive I-beams, neither of them had any trouble reaching the tips where they sat on swathes of carpet. Daddy had on blue jeans and a white tee shirt. Granddaddy wore his usual black suit with tie and was chewing on his cigar as Goat started up an engine that belched black smoke into the sky.
It was loud, a heart-stopping clatter of noise that rattled my chest and hurt my ears. With my hands to either side of my head, I watched, horrified as Goat pulled and pushed a few long levers and sent the machine into motion. Both daddy and granddaddy had to hold on for dear life as it lurched, then began to spin, with each boom bobbing up and down as it rotated.
Although he kept grinning at me each time he circled, I screamed for my father to get down from this thing! There was no doubt in my mind that it was going to fling both of them off and over the fence, leaving them a broken heap somewhere deep in the kudzu that choked the borders and spilled over in spots. With no other option, I resorted to my stand-bye: crumbling into a hysterical heap on the oil-sodden dirt.
The noise of the engine changed, but I was too emotionally wrought to dare a look. There was no doubt that the men I’d come here with were lost forever; dashed to bits somewhere amongst the piles of junk. When I heard daddy’s voice, and felt him lifting me up to his shoulders, the relief flooded me, and I was ready to go back to the house and the egg custard that I knew Grandmomma was fixing.
At the time, I could have cared less to see the big machine ever again.
~
We rode to the grounds with Grandmomma, who had packed a bunch of food so we wouldn’t eat junk the whole day. She had a nervous posture the entire trip, but I didn’t understand just why until we got there, rolling into the parking area, which was just a wide section of roped off, hay-covered clay.
“Oh, my lord!” She said to no one in particular.
“What is it?” I said.
“Just look at those young’uns!” She pointed to a running gaggle of shirtless boys with wild colors striped over their sweaty chests. “Covered in cotton candy! Running bare-footed in this mess!” She turned to me. “You keep your shirt and shoes on, Scotty. You’ll get worms if you carry on that way—you hear me?”
“Yes ma’am,” I answered. As far as Grandmomma was concerned, everything I wanted to get into could give me some sort of worms.
“You watch out with those Carny young’uns. Don’t go running wild like that.”
“Yes ma’am, I sure won’t.”
“Why those children are allowed to just run wild…Who lets their children loose that way?”
“I don’t know, Grandmomma.”
“Just be glad we’re not Carnies, Scotty. Thank your lucky stars, young man.”
“Oh, I will…”
We had gotten out and were walking toward the entrance. The scents of the fair took hold of me at once. Smells of cotton candy, corn dogs and funnel cake frying in deep vats of hot fat wafted over the place. My tummy told me that it was happy to be here. “Can I have a corn dog?” I asked before we had made it through the gate.
“We’ve got food in the car, young man,” Momma said, with Lisa clinging to her shoulder and Janice on her free hand.
“No junk!” Grandmomma added for emphasis, making me hold her hand as we entered.
“Yes, ma’am…” I felt a bit deflated. What good was coming to an event such as this and not sampling what it was all about? I reasoned as best I could with a five-year-old’s logic. Didn’t she understand that this place was filled with that sort of mouth-watering goodness? Didn’t she know how much I loved French fries and onion rings and corn dogs and cotton candy? I wanted some of it all! “Could I get a candy apple?” I saw a man carrying them pass us.
“They’ll pull out all your teeth,” Grandmomma told me. I supposed it was her way of saying no, yet again.
The line for the Shoot The Moon was ponderously long. We actually saw the line before we realized that those people were waiting for the same ride we wanted. Nervous, still a bit uncertain about the whole thing since my first experience, I was totally surprised to see the beast in her full glory.
Out on the ends of the booms, eight shinny silver cylinders with blue nose cones were poised. The nose cones had blinking yellow light bulbs protruding from the tips. Inside of all of them, people screamed and cheered as they raced round and round, orbiting the big striped moon, until one-armed Goat Scoggins reined it all in with the throwing of his big levers and the belching of diesel smoke.
Granddaddy stood at the ticket booth and wore a wide smile when he saw us. “Whadaya think about it, Scotty-boy?”
“Wow! It sure is somp’m.”
“You bet it is! You ready to ride?”
I nodded, still looking up at it all as the ride started up with another full load of astronaut-wannabes.
“Got tickets for everybody. Soon as the line thins down, you can ride it all you want.”
Daddy took my hand and we walked off away from everybody, down the midway where all manner of attractions waited. At my size, most of what I saw was people’s kneecaps, dangling purses, and the straw-covered clay of the red Georgia earth, littered with peanut shells, cotton candy paper cones, half-eaten candy apples (which I scanned on occasion for missing teeth) and smoldering cigar and cigarette butts.
When I turned, I saw that I was alone in a sea of strange people. Terrified, I scrambled around, ran between knees and looked for the loafers of my father, desperate to find them amidst the swarm of strange feet. I looked everywhere. Nothing.
Hopeless, I began to cry. Then, the cry became another of my hysterical outbreaks: the world was ending, the sky was falling, the bitter end had arrived, and I wanted my daddy!
People I did not know bent down and looked at me with concern…
“Oh, look, it’s a lost little boy,” a woman with hair a foot high said. “Are you looking for you parents, honey?”
Snot ran down my face and mingled with the tears that flowed as I lost all sense of composure.
“Anybody lost a little boy?” The woman yelled out.
“Look yonder,” A man beside her said, I assumed it was her husband. “…that tall drink-a-water coming fast! Over here mister!”
Daddy’s arms came down and his hands took hold of me again. His gold, VPI watch was the best thing I saw that day. I clung to his neck and buried my face in his shoulder. Riding the Shoot The Moon would have to wait for another day.
~
I turned six that November. The President was shot right before my birthday. We had cake and ice crème while watching little John-John salute his father’s casket. Then, the fair came to Augusta and I agreed it was time to take another stab at riding the big beast.
Grandmomma came along this time as well. Again, as soon as she spotted a few Carney children, she vented her displeasure and oiled my thoughts with warnings about hanging out with wild young’uns.
It was a dreary day; rain threatened and thinned the crowds of the Richmond County Fair. When I made it over to the Shoot The Moon, Granddaddy handed me a wad of tickets.
“You can ride anything on the grounds with those, Scotty-boy.”
I looked at the fist-full like I was holding Spanish gold. The sound of laughter caught my attention and as I looked up, a group of five boys came running up to us.
“This him?” The one in front of the dirty little group said, pointing at me and looking up at Goat Scoggins.
Goat spit some tobacco and nodded.
“Scotty,” Granddaddy said, pointing at the kid in front. “This here’s Goat’s nephew, Corky. You boys stay out of trouble, now.”
“C’mon, Scotty!” Corky told me. He turned and the rest of the little assortment of Carney kids followed. I took up the rear, my clutch of tickets dangled from my fingers.
“This here’s the Zipper,” Corky said, hooking his thumb over a shoulder. “Ever rode it?”
I looked up at the thing and shook my head. As far as I can recall, this is the first time that peer pressure factored into my thinking; it would be repeated a lot over the years, often with unfortunate results. I gulped.
“Let’s go then,” he urged. “You got the tickets.”
Moving trancelike, my eyes never left the big machine as I handed over some tickets to the gum-popping girl in the ticket booth. The rest of the boys climbed, two at a time, into waiting steel cages. A greasy-looking man closed the doors and stuck something in to lock them in place.
“Them’s cotter pins,” Corky told me as we held ourselves in the cage and the greasy Carney stuck the pin into the lock-slot. “Them’s just ‘bout the strongest thing a man ever made—my uncle Snort says…”
I was still looking at the pin as the Zipper started revving up. We jerked upward and the door, the only thing holding us inside, rattled and threatened to release us into the massive drive chains that pulled each car to the top and flopped it over. The cotter pin, I noticed, appeared to be half worn in two!
Fear grabbed me and for the next three or four terrifying minutes, I held my breath while this hideous contraption flung us up, then back down with death-defying speed. We screamed and I was glad, for a quick moment, that I’d not had a corn dog yet. The cotter pin somehow held us inside, and when we came to a breathless stop, Corky asked: “Wanna go again?”
I nodded. My voice was still somewhere overhead, fluttering around the clouds over Richmond County.
“Your Granddaddy’s ride is really neat-o,” Corky said as we finished our fourth ride on the Zipper.
“Is it as good as the Zipper?” I said, still a little dizzy from all the flopping and flipping.
“Ain’t you rode it yet?”
I shook my head.
“Ge-yaw, it’s the coolest! C’mon!” We ran for Shoot The Moon and as we neared it I grew giddy. Here it comes at last! I was gonna ride Granddaddy’s beast.
The capsule we were placed in, like the other seven, was a fiberglass cylinder with a fiberglass cone on the front. A wire mesh cage gave us some view out the front. There were no control switches or flashing buttons we could punch on, just a metal bench seat and a bar across our laps that hardly held small boys in place. It pitched up, then down, and screamed around at what seemed impossible speed. We clung to the bar across our laps, one of my fists still tightly holding the rest of my tickets.
It occurred to me that I had not shared this maiden voyage into space with my father, nor any member of my family. Corky, a kid I would never see again was my copilot. He sucked snot, had dirt behind his ears and crammed under his quick-bitten nails. His shoes were a little too big; as was the filthy tee shirt he wore. I’d hardly noticed this until our second flight around the Shoot The Moon.
“Wanna go ride some more rides?” He asked after the third go round the moon.
“Yeah…” My stomach growled, though. “M’hungry.”
“Shoot, my aunt Kelly runs a stand, we can have all we want!”
I looked nervously around for Grandmomma, or anybody else in the family who might snitch on me for outright disobedience. No one was in sight. I felt guilty as all get-out right up to the point of seeing those corn-dogs coming out of the fat. We smeared ketchup and mustard over the food, and eventually our faces. I snagged my shirt several times on corners, ripped off the front pocket on something and never noticed until Grandmomma pointed it out, with a great flourish of vocal distaste.
“You’ve been eating that junk, haven’t you?” She pinned me down. I suppose the condiments smeared and dried on my face was a dead give-away.
But I rode, and rode, every ride that stayed open for us. And, I got to know Shoot The Moon intimately. I rode in every one of her capsules; a bullet-quick test pilot; soaring over my planet and its moon.
That Christmas I got a space Helmut and could hardly wait for the chance to get back on board the beast fully equipped.
The stock market took a dip early in 1964 and Granddaddy did not fare well. He had to get rid of a few of his more risky investments. I suppose Shoot The Moon was one of those. I never saw it again until the day I spotted her remains out in that field, on the way to another funeral I had to attend.
Grandmomma, with a love so deep and real that I compare all other love to it, was lost to Lymphoma in 1968. My dear daddy, collegiate All American football player, coach, Doctor of Surgical Medicine, husband and beloved father, died of a brain tumor in 1973, in only his third year of practice. Granddaddy passed not two years later.
I stood at Big Daddy’s grave as the procession drove into the site. I’d missed the church services with my turn down memory lane. My siblings and my mother and stepfather joined me with my Uncle Craig—the only surviving member of my father’s immediate family—as we put the old man in the earth beside so many others that were loved and honored in our hearts.
Those years of death were so full of heartbreak simply because of the deepness of the love we all shared. Looking back, I realize that we all went on with life, yet we have lived as if something dear could be taken from us at any moment. All of us must, in some way, endure loss one way or another.
Whenever I find myself in the storm of life’s disappointments, I can always fasten my small boat to the memories of these people, and of a time now gone and sealed away with the varnish of things I hold precious. In that place of memory, I can ride out the storms, and I can soar into possibility, with all of their voices urging me on. I can Shoot The Moon.
~
1 comments:
Loved reading this, Scott. You live well, the legacy these people left to you. xo
Post a Comment