Chocolate and Biscuits for Jezebel

By David Fletcher

This insightful narrative makes an effort to chronicle the celestial warfare foisted by a supreme enemy upon a hapless southern boy of remedial intelligence and insufficient means to respond in kind. An assembly of memoirs initially, it transcends historical recall and eventually matures into a regal tablet of wisdom. In doing so, it draws heavily from Biblical truths and in conclusion it hangs its hopes on vivid warnings to those souls unaware of the dangers of succumbing to Jezebels spell.
From open-minded evangelicals to renaissance rednecks throughout the book-reading world, there is something between the covers to spur a giggle or a gag from the presence of this story on their bookshelves. Intellectuals in need of cerebral samples for academic study would most likely find Chocolate and Biscuits for Jezebel an absolute requirement in the halls of investigative psychoses. It will provide them with an endless source of amusement.
Most of all, though, there will exist a written legacy of one life lived and the deductions wrought from it. Perhaps it may serve as an explanation as to why weve all come up short in the race of life. Hell, Ive even laughed at some of it.
Deemed by some as "courageously personal", it draws equal billing as "slightly entertaining". This books content seems to pluck a chord in each and every personality who has taken the time to browse the pages.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: May 10, 2011
• ISBN: 9781456744229

David Fletcher

David Fletcher MBE was born in 1942. He has written many books and articles on military subjects and until his retirement was the historian at the Tank Museum, Bovington, UK. He has spent over 40 years studying the development of British armoured vehicles during the two World Wars and in 2012 was awarded an MBE for services to the history of armoured warfare.

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CHOCOLATE AND BISCUITS FOR JEZEBEL

SKU-000451636_TEXT.pdf

By David Fletcher

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AuthorHouse™

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.authorhouse.com

Phone: [phone]

© 2011 David Fletcher. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 4/27/2011

ISBN: 978-1-4567-4422-9 (e)

ISBN: 978-1-4567-4424-3 (dj)

ISBN: 978-1-4567-4423-6 (sc)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011902692

Printed in the United States of America

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

This book is dedicated to my wife, Suzanne. Her patience, understanding and support were on display throughout the silent battles I fought while wrapping up this work. Her selfless attitude was tested often, yet she persevered.

I pray that we both are better for it.

Introduction

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I stood there as solidly as I could. I was stiff. But I was trembling.

My tears plopped into a stainless steel sink, only to get lost amidst the dozen or so water drops from the previous night’s dishwashing. I gazed aimlessly through the fogged kitchen windows. Frozen in a fixed stare, I searched my heart for the elusive answer to all of life’s uppercuts! Desperate thoughts raced through my mind and the only fleeting thoughts that had a chance of surviving—given my present state of weakness—were these…

I just never seem to learn…just not able to see it coming…

The spirit of Jezebel had struck. And it had struck hard!

It was as if I had somehow been born with two hearts in my chest instead of one. Now, the second one had suddenly become the ‘elder on its deathbed’. The first heart had died many years before.

I have known pain, intimately. Truth be known, there’s nothing that pain can do to me that wouldn’t be considered a mere victory lap!

The seared cavity of a soul exposed by this onslaught always sends the mind racing; dashing down the path of precious memories to reclaim better times. This I do to salve my nightmare. Consequently, I have arrived at a number of conclusions from the rawness of life’s experiences. Some of them are probably outright unfair. However, this is what comes from the cerebral matter of such a poorly educated and unwashed country music fan as me!

Chocolate and Biscuits for Jezebel

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She is framed in my mind’s eye. Her sway is breathtaking and alluring. The picture slowly comes into a spooky focus…

She was there at the edge of the field that day. It was the day that I was tearing up the fertile earth from a worn, cushioned seat of the John Deere 3420. She was reading all of my thoughts and grinning from ear to ear!

Indeed, it was a pivotal time for her, as it was for me. I was beginning to enter adulthood, making decisions of accountability and peeking out from behind the hedge that God gives us all as children for protection.

She was in the company of only one earthly being that could see her, three fence posts down from the hawk. His keen eyes were scanning the loamy soil for the scamper of any meal that I managed to flush out. But the raptor also kept an alarmed view on the ghostly figure of Jezebel, her with an equal agility on par with his athletic claw hold!

She is life-like in size, yes, but she is perched in a surreal grasp of a mere three and a half inches at the crown butt of the fence post! The first notice comes from her flowing strands of jet-black locks, brindled with umber-like brown streaks that blend fashionably down the entire length of her mane. The gentle briskness of the South Georgia wind provides her hair with a life of its own. Lightly splaying across her olive-tinted face, all of the curls seem to beckon me to her. She fades in and out—like a bad TV reception.

From the sculpted, yet soft shoulders, her arms angle downward to place her delicate hands in a vise-grip of barbed wire coming from each side of the nails in the posts to reach outwards to the next fence-post down the line. For effect, the grip on each side is squarely wrapped around the barbs in the wire, prompting black ooze to drip from her palms into the dirt, splattering on the green kudzu piled up at the surface of God’s green earth. This is done in a blasphemous poke at the Savior’s crucifixion wounds!

Even though her knees are crouched inward and pressed against the fullness of her breasts, it is clear that Jezebel’s limbs are of magnificent proportions! An eye-startling segment of her left leg is unsheathed up to the groin, revealing a sinewy, lively display of pulsing leanness that could jolt the desire of any mortal man, even one like me!

Just above the knees, though, lies the heart of what she is all about. The graceful line of her neck curves rapturously in a fall from the symmetrical jaw lines…downward and sleekly. It then rests upon a plateau of clavicle and breastplate before it ascends in a silky upward heave.

The evenly divided mounds peak in rapt attention. Chiffon brushes ever so lightly across the pinnacles, blowing softly in the same breeze that is lifting her hair. In her dark, sultry majesty, Jezebel is the most enticing specimen ever seen. And she knows it!

Following the cranial plate in halo fashion, a bejeweled rope slings sparkles of intensity outward. It is designed to kindle the fire of mankind’s inner beast. Almost hypnotically, we sop it up, dripping from the corners of our mouth! From there, our eyes follow the beads to a point centered in her forehead. This is where the battle is joined with the Whore of Babylon. Dancing prisms of light emanate from here.

Exquisitely delicate lines of color trim her legs and arms with tattoos of pagan influence and they are all working in unison for this Seductress of the Ages. Blackness is all that is seen of her nails; fingers and toes. There is no hint of imperfection found on this prurient spirit of curvaceous hips! That is, until you look into the deepness of her eyes.

Her subtly, thick eyebrows will betray you first. They convey the innocence that you so deeply yearn for in your primal lust! Eyelashes woven by an artisan of immaculate worth frame the swirling chocolate orbs on each side of her Romanesque nose, enticing you inward…

Deep inside the eyes of Jezebel you will lose yourself…lose yourself forever! Ecstasy will lead you through in a fit of burning, unquenchable desire and cold, raw death will catch your lifeless soul on the other side!

This is my demon, Beelzebub’s most powerful weapon.

As the dust settled at the end of that day from the yellow seat of my diesel stallion, Jezebel clocked in for work. She’s planning on getting off at five. It’s my job to keep her on for overtime. Now it may be clearer to you.

It’s tough being me.

It was such a magical and memorable time, my beginnings were. As a young boy, I passed through a true and genuine Southern bookmark of time. The pages were alive with sights and smells that stirred my senses in a way that would make romantics pine for heavenly visions!

But aside from gilding the lilies of my youth, it was apparent in my early years that a price would be exacted from me in return for all the joy that would come my way on this journey; my journey to manhood.

God knows the effort that I’ve given to this journalistic labor of love. If, by chance, I forget to include somebody or something, there is probably a suitable reason for it! But I want to recount it all. For I feel it will serve as an explanation as to why I have come up so short in my dash to the finish line.

Bad Bleedings

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It could be said that some previous family re-union conversations overheard by my tiny ears could have placed this vision on the cusp of my recall. I doubt it, though. My memory places me there so clearly…

It was the early sixties’ and I was in cloth diapers. The chickens were always a treat to me as they strutted around the dirt yard. They circled around me over and over, again. It was as if they were waiting for the right time to scratch through the black dirt that I had been excavating with the kitchen spoon in my chubby right hand. The only dirt that was safe from the curious birds was the soil caked in the overlapping folds of my thick, infant arms. This day, however, would be different than others.

Distant shots disquieted the heavy afternoon air. The disturbance didn’t seem all that threatening, seeing that it was nowhere near the old wooden shack I was sitting in front of.

The yard birds sensed it immediately!

The underside of their colorful wings filled my sight as they scattered about in feathery chaos. It all seemed to happen in a mere second of time! The cold, black steel of the barrel tore through the screen door first and on the other end of it was Herman, my daddy. His face was so distorted with rage that he appeared as if he were a character from the book of Revelation!

I don’t see how that old time-ravaged pine frame stayed attached to the hinges as Herman ripped back and forth to free the weapon from the wood and wire.

Once free of the doorway, he flew off the old porch. Clearing an old broom, he landed on his bare feet and bounded to the vicinity of the repeating gunfire. He was enraged and not a lot could be done to assuage that anger. Hell, if hogs were made of gold and silver instead of fat and hide, it would have made much more sense in retrospect!

As it was, Uncle Bandy was taking target practice at Herman’s precious swine. The only thing that I am aware of that would have prompted such a calling-out would most likely have been either high noon on Gunsmoke or the longed-for Second Coming. Daddy aimed to kill Uncle Bandy. It was just that simple; a brother seeking another brother’s blood.

The story, at the time, goes like this: Uncle Bandy was driven to this ‘ham-i-cidal’ frame of mind due to the unsolicited and repeated carnal advances by Herman toward the mama of his young’uns. Jezebel smiled ever so slyly. Of course, I was much too young at the time to have an opinion of what would constitute Eve-like beauty. So I’ll take a second fiddle to those in the know who would have put the seductive qualities of Aunt Avie somewhere between catfish grunts and sand lugs. But, you know, Daddy ain’t always been known for his discriminating tastes—that is, should the challenge happen up!

Plainly put, with the talent of unbiased assumption in place, it was probably a justified hog-killing. It doesn’t make me very proud but, hey, my pride has taken a lot harder hits than this before.

Blurred Beginnings

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Here’s where I think that if there was a beginning, it had its genesis on the sandy, gnat-infested banks of the backed-up Alapaha River. It was known to the locals as Fletcher’s Lake. Granddaddy Fletcher possessed all of the earmarks of debilitating health problems. But they were paired heroically with gladiator-like embellishments of legendary status.

Always decked out in Liberty overalls and topped with an old floppy hat, he was a common man by most standards. His hat was always tilted back in cock-eyed fashion to expose a part of his wrinkled forehead that was seldom allowed to go toe-to-toe with the brutal southern sun. He always seemed more at ease in the gangly, abstract shadows of the colossal live oak trees. Running a close second for his company would have been the beggar blue-tick bird dogs. They seemed to care not a bit whether he stroked them behind their ears in kindness or kicked them in a fit!

I think he loved us grandchildren and that’s my view—substantiated or not.

I can remember sitting on his lap. There, I would playfully tug at the Prince Albert can in his partially zipped overall pocket. Then he would respond by removing his old, ragged hat and pull it down over my cotton-top head with a crooked smile that revealed his trademark unshaved dimple. That’s about all that I remember about the man who I called my Granddaddy.

So with the memory of my Daddy’s daddy secure, well…that leaves all other impressions open to your scrutiny. And let me tell you, there’s going to be a lot of this stuff that will not be suitable for the discerning, genteel reader accustomed to love stories that always work out and dogs that never die! Real life, even with the edges softened by my noble literary effort, was hardly ever a joyous adventure in the stifling heat of church pews and tobacco fields. Actually, it was kinda’ hard.

It was very hard.

As a matter of opinion, I sometimes think that we country folks unwittingly invite scorn and suffering almost instinctively, as if it were part of our DNA. It is almost like a redneck birthright! It’s like the only way that anyone can claim the greatness associated with sweat, blood and corn liquor has had to have worked like a dog, stepped on a rusty pitchfork and got ‘tore up from the floor up…’

Anyway, my Granddaddy spent the last years of his life, according to the biblical version of the family tree book, sitting around the lake that once utilized a working grist mill. There he whittled oak twigs and flirted with the rubber boot-clad womenfolk who would occasionally wet a hook nearby. Spitting brown stained tobacco juice into the few weeds that sprung up just outside the reach of the yard broom, I feel sure he had ample time to think back over his existence with certain pride and maybe even some gnawing regrets.

One sordid event that I feel sure replayed over and over in his mind was his participation in the documented lynching of an Irwin fellow in the nineteen-thirties. It had something to do with a white girl’s abduction and murder. Harder yet to fathom, though, was that he would hoist upon his labor-burdened shoulders, his eldest son to view the hideous spectacle. The frenzy of a mob mutilation of the black man must have been confusing to a child! Uncle Buddy was no more than four or five at the time.

Of course, being a local Klan leader afforded him some degree of respectability and deference, and siring such a pile of offspring certainly increased the odds of the notion that someone would wind up loving him in spite of it all.

He left this world when I was just a little boy.

He left with no assurance that his two boys would ever be able to settle the issue of the precious family farm, by now the widely accepted and common knowledge to be the real reason for the aforementioned shootout. He was disowned by some of his kin at one time or another. He even once faced the business end of a shotgun leveled by his own flesh and blood through the open window of an old Ford parked in the front of Fred’s Café!

It’s better though to leave all of the story-telling and legend-lending to us. We are a little farther removed from the fuzziness of what might have been right or wrong. Lord knows, those boys already have a lot to answer for in this world.

I did get to ride in a Georgia State Patrol car, though.

To Daddy and Uncle Bandy, thanks for the memories. Seems the uniformed men with the badges felt an urgent need to transport the innocents to a safer place while they convinced the boys to put their guns away.

Bless His Heart…

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Regardless of how it sounds, my Daddy was really not that bad of a person. Well, I mean, you know, when compared to some. The bricklayer with oaken forearms stacked up as well as he knew how. Of all the apparent or perceived shortcomings that he may have been guilty of and all the anger and resentment he suffered through in his life, he was not ever, ever a worthless lazy sort.

I think he may have been aware of his numerous faults and, consequently, he may have found a degree of redemption in the way the brick and mortar cracked open the weathered skin of his knuckles to bleed at the end of each long work day.

He certainly made sure that my sweat glands were in proper working order, which is more than I can say for today’s crop of young men. As a matter of fact, he thoroughly despised laziness!

So do I.

Discipline was swiftly and easily enforced with a leather belt from his waist across the flesh of my legs or a swinging open hand to the back of my head for something as innocuous as…having my hands in my pockets! He always said that it was a sign of plumb sorryness.

Ever the paradox, he dearly loved gospel music. He loved animals of all kinds—cats, especially—but distrusted those whom he did not know, hated those who did him wrong and achieved ‘redneck’ nirvana by outliving his hog-killing brother. It was probably tough being him.

I have quite a tough time writing this because I want everyone to understand the searing complexities that make up the man as I see and discern them as his oldest son.

I mean, here was a man who would come home at the end of the work day, step out of his old truck and smile at me as he would dust the powdery mortar mix from the cuffs of his threadbare khakis. Then he would shed his boots and grab a baseball glove. In bare feet, he would squat behind a dead patch of centipede grass, doubling as home plate, and rave about his nine year-old’s curve ball! Sure, it was probably the lack of velocity from a child’s arm that caused it to curve downward, but, by God, he wasn’t gonna’ tell anybody any different! As the coach of my Farm League baseball team, there didn’t seem to be any one of the opposing coaches that escaped the eventual threat of carrying an ass-whipping from the short, thick brick mason that I call my Daddy.

He hated to lose. He never backed down because I’ve seen him fight.

He feigned never having regret in life. Oh, he didn’t fool me because I’ve seen him cry, probably one of only a handful to lay claim to such a rare site.

On the other hand, his rage keeps him company in the absence of the joy of those he could have loved.

In these last days, his country acre is the site of tomato plants, onions, pole beans and sugar cane that seemingly grow so fast as to want to exit his company as well! Goats, chickens, ducks, peacocks and a vast army of malnourished cats peruse the damp, black garden soil of Herman’s home, the only