King

By Lonnie Coleman

King is a short account of a boy growing up in a small Georgia town of five hundred people during the 1920’s. Orphaned, the boy is raised by his Aunt and Uncle; his dog King becomes the focal point in his life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Classica Libris
• Release date: May 3, 2020
• ISBN: 9788835820116

Book preview

WREDEN

Chapter 1

I did much of my growing up in a little town in Central Georgia in the twenties. The population of the town then was about five hundred. Now it’s less. Those country towns, once shopping, banking, and cotton-ginning centers for surrounding farms, were killed by the Depression and the automobile and the decline in the importance of cotton as a money crop. But at the time I tell of the town I lived in was Eden for a boy.

The roads were not yet paved. In summer, when the heat shimmered in the air and rain had been scarce, the dirt roads were powder, and my bare footsteps raised clouds as I walked. The passing of a car sent me choking and running to jump the ditch to the hard-packed dirt sidewalk, like pavement itself, and just as hot to my bare feet. The tufts of grass along the sides and edges which kept the sidewalk from eroding were oases for burning feet. When it rained, to walk was to wade through mud. Spatters of mud streaked my legs up to the thigh where my khaki shorts or rolled-up overalls began. To squeeze the mud between my toes was a delicious experiment in depravity.

In winter the earth was often frozen, with ice in the ditch and anywhere a puddle of water had been yesterday. The ruts of car and wagon wheels were hard and sculptural.

The only real paved sidewalk was in the couple of blocks of the business center across from the train depot. There were the two banks, the post office, a barbershop, a drugstore, and three general stores where the smell of a thousand things became one smell, however various a compound of nails, bolts of cloth, groceries, candy (my favorites were the chocolates shaped and wrapped to look like small silver bells), coffins, harness, vinegar, kerosene, and new shoes. This was the part of town everyone meant when they said they were going to town. There were two trains a day, the Up Train at eleven in the morning, and the Down Train at three in the afternoon. There were sometimes special trains early in the morning that carried us to Savannah on excursion rates. People generally, at least one member of a family, managed to be in town around traintime. The women and the young people frequented the drugstore; the men hung around the banks or the barbershop, waiting for mail to be sorted.

Across the tracks and beyond the depot were modest houses, set not very close together, becoming grander but never very grand as the churches were passed and the hill lay ahead. The churches were two, Baptist and Methodist, set in the same shady grove of trees. Sitting in one church we could sometimes hear the tone of sermon or song in the other. There was rivalry between the churches, but never bad feeling. The Baptists looked down on the Methodists, and the Methodists looked down on the Baptists, but everyone was friendly and polite about it. A joke enjoyed by all was that when one congregation sang Will There Be Any Stars in My Crown? the answering hymn of the other was No, Not One.

People from nearby farms left their cars and buggies in the grove while they enjoyed spiritual instruction inside. And enjoy it they did, at least the adults. The women sat still and attentive with patient looks on their faces, making an occasional slight shift of position on the hard pews slowly, with dignity, so that no rustle of apparel intruded on the religious atmosphere. Only in summer was the scene livelier. The windows were open, diluting the musty, sanctified air with a fresher smell, and the rhythmic movement of the cardboard fans of the women made a sound like birds on the wing. The occasional dropping of a fan to the floor and the retrieving of it were done with a self-admonishing smile.

The men sat stiffly, seeming to pride themselves on how long they could sit without moving or blinking. Even the children were fairly still. They had better be, said the flash in a mother’s eyes at the restless squirming of a cub. The father ignored them. Light discipline was the job of the mother. If that failed, the child knew that later, at home, he would have to face Father with the belt or strap.

In the main, though, people enjoyed church. Even my uncle, who was not much of a churchgoer, was heard to say on the two or three occasions a year he did attend that he enjoyed a really good sermon. The implication was that the preacher made a special effort when he saw Uncle there and that his lesser efforts served very well for the rest of us the rest of the time.

One thing about church was that you saw almost everybody you knew all together. After Sunday school and the sermon the children were allowed to run and play in the grove, the town children getting to know the country children, inventing secrets and scandals, beginning loves and grudges that sometimes were to last a lifetime. The women chatted with the women on the porch and steps of the churches, and the men talked to the men below the steps in the churchyard about crops and politics and conditions.

When Uncle came to church Aunt always, before leaving for home and midday dinner, led Uncle and me across the road to the cemetery shared by both congregations. There she would stand, looking intently at the grave and headstone of her only child, a girl who had died at four. Uncle and I waited mutely. After a bit Aunt would blink her eyes, hold her handkerchief briefly to her nose, square her shoulders, and turn to us with a smile.

We lived in the other direction, away from the main residential section. Back past the depot and the town were the icehouse and the filling station that was soon to make obsolete the blacksmith shop which stood next to it. The loyalty of the town boys was about to shift to the filling station, but when I first went to live there, the blacksmith shop still held us. We would stand or squat in a loose ring watching the smith work. He noticed us seldom as he pounded and bent white-hot, red-hot metal into wondrous shapes, but once in a while, if he were not overbusy, he’d make rings for us out of horseshoe nails. We wore them with pride until they rusted. The smith was not a large man, but his arms and back were muscular, and the black beard he wore—he was the only man in town who had one—made him look to us like God. Mostly, I remember how greatly we respected him. The creative concentration with which he labored might have been that of a Cellini.

Beyond his shop was a vacant place where a house had stood. Now there was only a monumental chimney, ghostly at night—I hurried by when I was alone, even if King were with me—brooding over the charred remains of a thing that had contained a family; now ash, grass, and weeds edged ever closer.

After that there were no houses until you came to the edge of the creek and the woods. There was a wooden bridge over the creek, and I can still remember the quick, clattering sound a car made driving over its planking, and the solemn, doleful sound of the hooves of a mule pulling a wagon of cotton to the gin on the other side.

My uncle’s house was on one side of the road, back among oak trees. Wind in those oak trees made a lonely sound at night, but it was comforting, too. They were there. They had been there a long time. They would be there forever. Under them and to one side was a deep, bricked artesian well. I used to sit on the side in summer, dangling my feet into the cool air below. Steps led down to a concrete bottom, sometimes flooded when leaves from the oaks clogged the drain; and over the drain, in a well within a well, a spout poured endlessly the coldest, purest water I have ever tasted. We used to keep watermelons under the spout to cool.

The house was a comfortable but undistinguished wooden one. There were big porches, the front one open, the back one screened. The roof of the front porch was supported by red-brick columns, and there were green-painted wooden rocking chairs with rush seats and cushions, and there were many pots of flowers and ferns, the particular pride of Aunt.

Once birds built a nest in one of the ferns, and Aunt had to teach King to let them alone. King had been trained by Uncle as a hunting dog, so he had a natural interest in birds. Unsentimental about animals raised for food, Aunt had a love for those birds. They had chosen her fern to nest in. Very well, she would do what she could to keep them safe. The first time King went near them, his whole body stiffening expectantly, she was there. At his approach the two birds hovered and scolded, without deserting the nest.

Aunt grabbed one of King’s hind legs and twisted him over on his back. He howled, more with surprise than pain. After all, birds were things he had been taught to get. She slapped him several times across his muzzle before letting him rise to his feet and shake himself rid of the indignity. Then, pointing to the nest and pointing to him, she gave him to understand in a scolding tone not unlike that of the birds that he was never again to go near it. He was a smart dog, he understood. She always talked to him as if he understood every word she said—as indeed I think he understood everything everybody said. Anyway, he never went near the nest again.

Eggs were laid and brooded over. Little birds were hatched. I remember the day they were taught to fly. The parent birds pushed the little ones out of the nest, one by one. If they fell, they were caught, put back into the nest, scolded, encouraged, and pushed out of the nest again. They learned to fly. It was a warm day. Aunt had brought her foot-pedal sewing machine out to the porch to watch the birds. She often sewed there, to see who came and went along the road. That day she had her cat Mildred beside her; Mildred had learned before King to leave the birds alone.

King and I were sitting on the ground in the yard a short distance away. I had my arm around him, not to restrain him, because he needed no restraining, simply for contact. We were both fascinated by the lesson in flying. When all the young ones had been taught and Aunt was sure the nest was deserted, she took it out of the ferns carefully, stored it in a cardboard box lined with cotton, and put it away in a trunk. I think she may have it still.

Back of the house were grassy fields, used mostly for grazing by our two cows. Aunt had her kitchen garden near the house, and just beyond it a small section was planted in soybeans for which the cows had a passion. Chickens had the freedom of the yard, but the pigs were, of course, penned. There was a chicken house for night or storm roosting, a smokehouse, a big log by a windmill (only our drinking water came from the artesian well), a great woodpile, and a barn.

The lower part of the barn served as garage for Uncle’s model-T Ford, a wagon (he had only just stopped keeping mules there), and a buggy that would never be used again. The upper barn was a storage space for all manner of things in addition to hay. I remember old harness, stiff from disuse, and a corn-shelling machine that didn’t work very well. I used to arrange the bales of hay into tunnels. It was a hot place, but it was private. It was there Lamar told me about what are called the Facts of Life. He told me as casually as he had taught me how to row a boat and how to weight a fishing line with lead sinkers.

Lamar, who was thirteen to my seven when I went to live with Uncle and Aunt, lived across the road in a smaller house with his mother, May, whom I called Aunt May, although she was no relation, and his sister, Johnny-May. Those hyphenated names, so often a combination of the mother’s and father’s names, sound tacky and old-fashioned today, but I wonder if the fancier names some children are now given won’t sound just as foolish in forty years. Anyway, Johnny-May knew who she was.

She was then five-going-on-six to my seven-going-on-eight, and so I ignored her generally. The gap between our ages was more unbridgeable than that between, say, forty and sixty. The gap between Lamar’s age and mine was so great and so readily acknowledged by me that it did not matter—and we were boys.

The first time I saw Johnny-May she was squatting over her private flower bed, located unwisely under the eaves of the house. She wore an apron dress, sash tied in back, and no bloomers, so her bare behind showed. Johnny-May had firm ideas about bloomers. She hated them. She’d wear them to town, to church, and to parties, but when she was at home in her own yard, a dress was all that stood between her and the world. That first time I saw her Lamar was leading me around his house to the creek to show me his flat-bottomed rowboat. No boy ever tries to resist a tied sash, so of course I untied it. Johnny-May whirled around. Shit-ass! she berated me.

That’s my sister Johnny-May, Lamar explained. She cusses. I don’t know where she gets it. Not from me and not from Mama. Tie your sash, Johnny-May, and keep your dress down. It don’t look nice showing your tail thataway. She gave her dress a yank. Come on, he said to me.

Why don’t my flowers grow? she demanded of us, but we neither turned nor answered.

Johnny-May was forever digging up ferns and flowers in the woods, then sticking them in a hole in her garden, as she called it, only to have them die on her. It was only when Aunt took her in hand that she learned to grow things. Aunt could grow anything. She got Johnny-May over her cussing, too, finally. I imagine Aunt saw in Johnny-May something of her own little girl who died. Johnny-May’s mother couldn’t do a thing with her; in fact, she was terrified of that child, although she was quick enough to give Lamar a slap if he did something she thought wrong.

Johnny-May doesn’t