On the Journey Back

On the Journey Back

Jimmy Pollard

On the Journey Back

Published by Whiss Records, LLC at Smashwords

Copyright 2011 Jimmy Pollard

Edited and rewritten by Barbara Milbourn

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Contents

Part One

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Part Two

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Part Three

Chapter Twelve

Last Chapter

A Note From Jimmy Eugene

About the Author

PART ONE

A man travels the world over in search of

what he needs and returns home to find it.

George Moore (Novelist 1852-1933)

Chapter One

Joys of my journey with steps never told.

Jimmy Eugene

What God-fearing, right-minded parents pack up their young sons and send them off on an unsupervised road trip without a second thought? Mine, that’s who—Judith and Andrew Pollard. But things were different back then. People were less evil and more trusting. Bus stations were more for middle-class travelers and less for unsavory characters hanging around pushing drugs and preying on those who were down and out. Besides, it wasn’t exactly an around-the-world trip, although it might have been, so great was the difference between our days at home in Lake Charles and summers on our grandparents’ farm a stone’s throw from Louisiana’s border with Arkansas.

I settled into the aisle seat next to my older brother William as the bus pulled away. From the side and then from the rear of the coach I watched Mama become smaller and smaller. The fading vision of her tugged at me and began to form an impassible dam in my throat that would burst and spill out my eyes. William never teased me about crying when we were very young—he had his own tears to fight back.

Leaning my head against the seat and clamping my eyes shut, I could still see Mama’s toothy smile, her slender arm sweeping the sky, her hair pinned up at the temples. She had worn the dress Daddy liked best—a dark blue/near black number that looked like a collapsing umbrella on the bottom with a tailored top and a skinny, rolled-down collar that showed just enough skin to reveal a string of pearls her father had given her as a wedding gift. Daddy liked her in things that weren’t flashy and didn’t show too much skin. I liked her in this particular dress because of its buttons. They were round and smooth like river pearls. I remember being very small, sitting in her lap against her warmth, and rolling them around with the tips of my fingers.

Mama always gave us a little money for the trip to be spent on food. Fifty cents a meal did it. The thought of that juicy burger hot off the grill with lots of ketchup and mayonnaise washed down with an RC Cola sent the glands under my tongue into overdrive. My mouth flooded with a river of tangy saliva I could hardly contain and usually didn’t. The burger’s juices mixed with mine and ran down my fingers and hands to be swabbed onto my pants with no conscience of laundering.

Stopping to eat meant we were halfway to Mamaw and Granddad’s where one could walk half a mile and be in another state entirely. There was a hundred miles to go.

My mother did not think twice about sending us on the Trailways bus ride alone every summer from the time I was three, with only the promise of the bus driver that my brother and I would make it to the top of Louisiana from the bottom safely.

The bus rocked along northward, and I dozed while the salty, clammy air of the Gulf slowly turned woodsier. I dreamed of the farm and could smell its rich loam and conifers—so different than sandy, swampy Lake Charles. Through my reverie, I heard the driver call next stop, Haynesville. William tugged on my arm. We’d be there soon. A few minutes later we made our way down the aisle and descended the tall steps to steady ground where the driver opened the bus’s belly and unloaded our suitcases.

Haynesville proper, Granddad had told us, was once a big boom town in the 1920s—built on one of the biggest petroleum booms in the state. Long since before we’d been coming, however, its numbers had been dwindling and now it was barely a shadow of what it once had been. Not that we cared much about Haynesville itself; it was Granddad and Mamaw’s place about three miles out that we came for.

My excitement mounted at the thought of seeing them, but I knew from past experience their picking us up from the bus station was out of the question. Neither drove or had a driver’s license. It would be Old Man Percy, a black driver for Mr. Martin’s grocery store who would fetch us in his old pickup and tote us and our luggage to the farm. And there he was in his overalls, quickening his steps and breaking into a broad grin as he spotted us.

Why, look at you boys, he exclaimed beaming at us like we were his own. Yo mama must be feeding you real good; you done grown a foot since I seen you last!

He reached down to pick up our suitcases and closely inspected our faces in the process. Friendly and pleased that we were the same Jimmy and Willy we were last year, he shuffled us in the direction of his Chevy. Old Man Percy knew that Granddad would pay him for the chore with something good to eat—probably a big mess of fresh-caught fish.

Sitting up high in the truck flanked by Mr. Percy and William, I felt on top of the world as we pulled away from the bus station. In a few short minutes the last buildings of town gave way to stands of pine and fields of crops and cattle. I grew antsy in my seat as Granddad’s cotton fields came into view.

More than anything or anyone, I was excited to see Mamaw; all five foot eight inches of her. She was rail thin; so thin you could see the blue veins and sinew under her leathery sun-tanned skin. Her hands were as twisted as the ropes of laundry she rang the suds from, and her knuckles were arthritic and knotted-looking like a tree suffering from gall. There was not a tooth in her head.

Edentulous, she’d say. It was a big word in her normally simple vocabulary that she used to amuse us. Temporarily edentulous, she’d laugh and pull her dentures from an oversized pocket. I liked her best without teeth; the way words flowed soft and smooth over her soft, smooth gums. Mamaw didn’t have a hard edge to her.

A first glance might have a lot of people thinking this little spit of a woman was a weakling, but she was anything but. She built the fires to heat water for laundry, cooking, cleaning, and bathing. She tended the animals, the garden, Granddad, and us when we came to visit. She taught school too, and oversaw the general operations of the house and farm. Women half her age griped about doing half the work Mamaw did. She never complained—not one word. I’d never seen anyone, man or woman, before or since, work the way Mamaw did. She was strong all right. She had to be; she had married Dude Bernum.

Granddad bragged to us about being born in 1882, a year that sounded ancient to me, but an important one he had insisted because the tuberculosis germ had been discovered. He raised cotton on some of his 50 acres and harvested resin from his pine trees on the others, both of which he sold for a good profit most years. He fished and hunted and had provided well for the eight children he fathered that included my mother. People in town knew and respected him for being resourceful. He’d even built the house they lived in, a house with a shiny tin roof and porches in the back and front. The front was where Mr. Percy was pulling to a stop now. We’d arrived.

At the sound of the truck, Mamaw came out of the house, wiping her hands on her apron then wrapping her skinny arms around William and me at the same time. She crushed us to her with stunning strength. I took in her fresh laundry smell bosom-high and squeezed her back as hard as I could.

Go on in there, eat your supper, and get settled, Granddad said after prying us free from Mamaw and greeting us with his own bear hug. His hand patted us on the fanny and propelled us in the direction of the house. As we went off with Mamaw, Granddad turned to square up with Mr. Percy, and then called back to us, Then we’ll turn on the radio. It’s Saturday night, Grand Ole Opry time.

Mamaw had set our suitcases in the breezeway that separated the sleeping room from the rest of the house. We entered the large, familiar room that was kitchen, dining room, and sitting room all at once. The big, square dining room table was set with our plates and William made straight for it as he was told, but I stopped to peer down at the table I had been warned not to mess with since the time I was eye-level with it.

Mamaw’s voice rang in my ears, You kids stay away from Granddad’s table now. That’s his space. Jimmy, ya hear me?

Yes Ma’am, I must have told her a hundred times.

It looked the very same. A pack of Panatella cigars, Juicy Fruit gum, Old Spice aftershave, the same shaving cup with horsehair brush whose bristles had long since relaxed to one side, straight razor, pocket knife, and pocket watch—everything exactly the same and arranged neatly on the red and white checked oil cloth year after year. The hand mirror and razor strop hung on their same nails to the right of the window under which the table sat.

There’s a difference between siblings, you know. I’m not sure how or why this is, and it doesn’t matter. The truth is some are satisfied and obey once told, and others are born with a natural itch to explore what’s beyond. Precocious, Mamaw would say. Trouble, said my mother. Most times when someone told me not to touch something—like Granddad’s table—my curiosity piqued and I’d start itching to know.

Why can’t I touch it? Why?

I had to walk by that table every single summer’s day since I was a young, young boy. The forbidden contents had drawn me like a magnet. I was like a boy walking in his sleep. Who, besides my brother, could possibly resist reaching out a young arm to finger the razor and rub the shaving brush around on one’s own chin? The fascination with Granddad’s table remained, but it had changed through the years. Now I eyed the Panatellas.

Later that evening Granddad picked up WSM-AM out of Nashville as everyone gathered by the radio. Dude Bernum puffed his cigar and rolled it between his thumb and index finger. He reclined in his chair and rocked slowly tapping his foot in perfect rhythm to whatever song was broadcasting from the country’s most famous stage. Mamaw claimed he had perfect rhythm and she smiled at the music, at us, and at the sight of her husband’s enjoyment, her toothless face a beautiful and comforting image to me. When she caught me out of the corner of her eye looking twice at Granddad’s table, the corners of her mouth curled upward and she gave me a look that said no. She seemed able to detect my every whim—a schoolteacher’s gift perhaps.

In her lap was a garment for hand mending. For Mamaw, but not the rest of us, there was always something that still needed doing at the end of the day.

Idle hands are the devil’s workshop, she said. The needle moved in and out with perfect precision, Mamaw’s hands deftly maneuvering the fabric without thought or effort. As I watched her sew I’d look intermittently at the radio, as mesmerized by its sound as I was by the soft lines in Mamaw’s face. I took mental leave of the room as if watching it from above. I savored the soft, low light and music and smoke from Granddad’s cigar. The faces and smiles and toe-tapping all pleased me. I was understood here; a boy who mattered.

I basked in the warm pool of approval. The nervousness that had been growing like a tight knot in my stomach was melting away. It seemed to dissipate in the night air coming in the windows. It was going to be another very good summer.

I refocused now on the radio, a maple-colored wooden box with two knobs on either end of five push buttons. I had learned to count to five on those buttons and got into trouble because I always wanted to push in on the grill cloth covering the speaker. Old time country music reverberated against clapboard walls and filled the room with its tinny, familiar sound. This was the Opry before strictly-country Opry manager Jim Denny told Elvis he ought to take his rhythm and blues back to Memphis and keep his truck-driving job. This was the Opry after it had moved to the Ryman Auditorium and lifted the ban on drums and horns.

Worn out from the bus ride, relaxed, fed, safe, and lulled by the music, I drifted off into a peaceful sleep. Granddad most likely carried me to bed, because it was there I woke up alone surrounded by a sea of rumpled sheets. A long ray of light reached into the breezeway and fell across the floor.

Granddad was already out behind Beulah the mule, his steely blue eyes focused on plowing under Mamaw’s spring garden, the delicate salad greens, radish, and onions having all been eaten and long since gone. On my way to the two-hole outhouse, which was uptown in those days, I waved to him but he was too intent to wave back, although he may have nodded in my direction. I took no offense; he was a quiet man who meant what he said about everything, including actions speaking louder than words. The sun glistened off his skin and set his red hair aflame. I stared at this short man with muscles of braided rope bending backwards in full effort to dig the plow in deeply and carve out another day. How different from the man last night tipped all the way back in his rocker as relaxed as Gumby and enjoying music and cigars.

On my return to the house I saw Mamaw by the fire pit standing between two big iron pots, one for washing clothes and one for rinsing. Before the clothes could go into the rinsing pot after being stirred around in the boiling-hot washing water, they were scrubbed on the washboard. Her arms pumped up and down across the board and I thought I recognized my pants from yesterday.

Morning Jimmy, she called looking up and still scrubbing. Morning Mamaw.

You boys need to get ya something to eat and ready yourselves for church. Food’s on the table; wash basin is on the sideboard; your white shirt and black bow tie is hanging up.

Yes Ma’am, I said picking up my step.

Mamaw had already milked the cows, started the laundry, and mixed flour, milk, and lard together to make biscuits. Sometimes she added a pinch of sugar just for William and me. Biscuits, gravy, bacon and eggs were warm and piled high on two plates on the table. I flashed William a grin intended to register that this was a real breakfast compared to our usual Sunday morning bowl of lackluster cold cereal back home. Here was my plate, my very own special plate, full of my favorite things. A few summers ago I’d taken a liking to a plate with a wild rose pattern on it. It had a tablespoon-sized chip out of one side, was thin and lightweight, and was easy to spot among the others. It may have been damaged goods, but it suited me just fine. That it was my plate was an unspoken understanding between Mamaw and me. It had never been discussed; it just was, and we both knew it.

By the time we finished eating, the water in the basin had lost most of its heat. I rubbed as little soap