My PaPa's Chair

Oct. 10, 2007

PaPa’s brown naugahyde chair sits by the side window. A green glass ashtray rests on the floor where the footstool juts out when he’s sitting. A pipe – the mouthpiece chewed -- is laid carefully in the center of it. Three cans of Prince Albert are lined up in the windowsill, the rectangular four-inch high tin canisters arranged in order of how full of tobacco they are. We grandchildren would prank-call people on the party line – when Rodie Huggins up the road wasn’t gabbing on it – to ask if they had Prince Albert in a can. “You better let him out then,” the cousin charged with making the call would yell and hang up the phone, and we’d all convulse in laughter, the boys punching each other in the arm..
My PaPa would not be sitting in the chair when we called. We would never have dared call if he had. It wasn’t that we were afraid of him. Just the opposite. Instead, it was the idea of maintaining a quiet dignity. Of not showing disrespect to his neighbors he’d lived by for 60 years. It was the idea of not disappointing him somehow.

He could do all kinds of things we grandchildren didn’t see anymore. There was a passel of us – 14 in all, with lots of in-laws and great-grandchildren almost the same age as the youngest grandchildren. I remember being 16 and staying alone for an extra week with my grandparents – a special treat that didn’t happen often enough. It was summer in Alabama, hot, sticky, 95 degrees. My grandfather was 79 years old, and he was hoeing in the garden – an acre filled with butterbeans and okra and tomatoes and tall stalks of corn – that he always planted 100 feet from the house. He had on his work overhauls, the faded ones, with a yellow plaid shirt with sleeves that came down to his elbows. His arms were tanned and ropy with muscle, even though he was an old man. If the sleeve happened to move up, a glimpse of pale white skin with tiny blue veins in it would show – sun never saw that part of his arm. He’d push up his straw hat and wipe his sweat-beaded brow with his nicely pressed white handkerchief; then he’d fold it back just so along the creases and stuff it back in his chest pocket. His hats, his overhauls, his boots were all a part of who he was. He had his pair of faded but pressed work overhauls, his neatly starched, dark-blue going-to-town overhauls, and his dark church suit. He had three hats: the straw work one with the sweat-stained crown, a newer, cleaner straw version he wore to town, and his taupe fedora he religiously wore to church. He had two pairs of boots: the mud-caked work boots with tired creases in the ankles and the brand-spanking new going-to-town boots. The neatly polished black shoes with the black laces were for going to church. Except for what he was wearing, his clothes were lined up neatly in the closet he shared with my grandmother, the closet he had built himself when he built the five-room house they shared for so many years.

PaPa always seemed to have a blue truck – except for that seafoam green one he bought one time. It was the ‘60s, after all, and you were supposed to live dangerously. Living dangerously might not have been his style, but saving money was. My grandparents’ farmhouse sat in a plateau at the bottom of one big hill and the beginning of another one that led down to a shallow creek. PaPa would go to town once or twice a week, although when some of the grandchildren were visiting he seemed to take more trips to the triangular-shaped store where the roads forked at Needmore, always buying us bottled orange drinks or “pops” for the cousins from Ohio. But it was the journey home that we all anticipated – that we all still talk about so many years later. We’d crest the top of that last hill and start toward the house. You could just see the outline of the roof through the trees. PaPa – without saying a word -- would snap the transmission smoothly into neutral, take his foot off the brake, and coast – at an ever-increasing speed -- down the hill. The windows were always down, and the wind would blow harder and our hair would whip faster around our faces. With a slight right turn, we’d sail into the pebble-strewn driveway right up to the front porch before he’d jam his foot on the brake. It was the thrill of a lifetime.

He milked the cow every morning for the first 10 years of my life. He’d be up at dawn, dressed in his work overhauls, heading across the two-lane road. Two green chicken houses – the industrial-sized ones – surrounded the house, one behind the double clothesline in the back and one on top of the slight incline across the road, in the middle of one of the cow pastures. The milk cow stayed to the left of the chicken house, the one that housed the blue tractor that if we were lucky we got to ride on with PaPa. He’d go to the gate and call the cow with a little whistle. It was brown, and it had horns, and it was tame. She’d trot to the gate, walk serenely out and head almost unprompted to the barn across the road, ready to be milked. PaPa would come in the house with a full tin bucket,, steam rising slightly from the warm milk. I would never drink it.
When I was 11, we came to visit. The cow was gone. I don’t know what happened to it. The milk in the refrigerator was pasteurized, in a carton, bought at the store. Things change.

PaPa loved to sit on the front porch, most often resting in a straight-backed kitchen chair, maybe leaning it against the wall, pipe in hand. If the grandchildren would stop, he would talk. He loved to talk. He mainly told stories about serving in the army during World War I. I think about it sometimes, the stories I wish I had paid more attention to and that I had written down when I had the chance. He was 19 when he went to war, a boy fresh off the farm from Alabama. I remember him telling about being on a ship going to France and a German U-boat firing torpedoes at their ship. Other boys didn’t know what the torpedoes were, yelling about the logs heading for them. I’ve often wondered if he was one of those boys.
My cousin Mike says he told him stories about the girls, the French girls. I’ve seen the postcards he bought. But he never told me those stories. Instead, he told me about someone in his camp who bought a monkey. That monkey got into lots of trouble and was one of his fondest memories. It was only after PaPa started telling me stories that my mother realized her father hadn’t been a cook in the army, but an orderly. It suddenly made sense to her, why he was so helpless in the kitchen.

My brother and Wayne were the two youngest grandchildren. When they were together, PaPa would take them to the “crick” at the bottom of the second hill. It ran its course through the middle of the “bottom pasture”; sometimes cows were there, sometimes not. The creek was clear some of the time, although it had an orangey tint to the water from the clay banks that bordered it. PaPa, however, would not go fishing when the water was clear. “Fish can see you if there’s no mud stirring,” he’d tell the boys. They would nod in agreement. Of course. But he would take them for treks through the woods bordering the pastures. Sometimes I went too. We would climb the hills, hopping from one fallen log to another or sighting good places to dig worms. If we got thirsty, PaPa would strip leaves off of the bright green “cowcumber” trees and fashion cups from them – cups that would hold cold water from the spring that bubbled under the bluff. In the winter, the boys and PaPa would go squirrel hunting, PaPa toting his .22 rifle and the boys trying to walk as quietly as they could, their hands jammed inside the pockets of their corduroy jackets. Even when he was 80, he could sight a squirrel 100 feet away and knock it out of the tree with one shot. Andy and Wayne would smile. Of course he could.

He wasn’t always a grandfather. At one time he was a 25 year old marrying a blue-eyed girl with long dark hair on a snowy February day. Both families were waiting; his about-to-be mother-in-law had baked a chocolate cake, a novelty in northern Alabama when a customer had to order the cocoa from a New York catalogue. The preacher, who had promised to be there come rain or shine, didn’t show up in the snow. So the about-to-be groom rode on a horse to a nearby town to fetch a preacher. He found one.
Then he was a father of seven children, a father who plowed fields with two mules during the day and laughed when his second youngest daughter – my mother – clucked her tongue and imitated him --“Git on up Belle” -- at the mule when she was five years old. He smoked his pipe and read the Bible aloud while my mother sat in his lap. He stayed up in the middle of the night when my mother had a earache and blew warm smoke into her ear when she cried with pain. It was magic because the pain always went away.

The year my grandparents married, my PaPa carved a rolling pin for my grandmother out of a single block of wood. It was a light golden color, made out of pine, slightly uneven on one side where my grandfather pressed too hard on the planer when he was smoothing the wood. But it worked. It helped make thousands and thousands of cathead biscuits. It helped make hundreds of blackberry pies, berries picked by my grandfather and sometimes my grandmother from the prickly, scratchy bushes growing wild in the ditch across the road from the house, berries that occasionally came with the cost to a grandchild of chiggers and scratched arms. It shaped dumplings for the chicken stew and pot-pie crusts, hundreds of them consumed at a metal kitchen table loaded with bowls of “country” food that always held a bowl of English peas --my grandfather’s favorite -- the bright green kind from the frozen food section at the Piggly Wiggly. That rolling pin was an object of fascination for children who would rub their hands on the side of it and for grown-up grandchildren who would good-naturedly jest about who would get it one day. It became a symbol, somehow, more than just a rolling pin.

My PaPa would sit in his brown naugahyde chair, smoking his pipe, watching Wheel of Fortune religiously at 7 o’clock every evening, going to bed by nine every night, even when company was visiting and the house was full of people. When a car came rattling by on the road, PaPa would pull back the white sheer curtain and glance to see who it was. More likely than not, he recognized the car, knew who it was.
After my grandfather died, the family gathered – all of us, the ones from South Carolina and Ohio and Tennessee. When my brother and I pulled up in the driveway, only one other car sat in the driveway. No one pulled back the sheer curtain to look, to see who was coming.
It was one of the saddest, loneliest moments of my life.