Those Boys

By L. E. Saunders

Although growing up in the 1950's and 60's in the United States may seem idyllic to many, back then everyone did not find life so wonderful. Young Jimmy Russel and his brother were born into a life of poverty in Nashville, Tennessee, and were initially raised by t

• Language: English
• Publisher: amz publishers house
• Release date: May 17, 2024
• ISBN: 9798330236626

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ACKNOWLEDGMENT

Thanks to all who have made this book possible through proofing, reading, and marketing.

KINGSTON SPRINGS, TENNESSEE

1962

My younger brother Sam and I raced barefoot across the front yard. Our threadbare jeans left trails on the dewy, grassless dirt spots and onto the gravel driveway. It was early on a cold Friday morning in February, and the crows were loudly cawing. We half looked right and left as we ran across the narrow asphalt road, the same road where Mr.Vern had his fatal wreck with Upset, his mule, that he had bought at Mule Town USA in 1949.

According to the locals, Mr. Vern, a colored man, took his young mule to Mule Days in Benson, North Carolina. Benson was the place where Nowell Smith, Jr. and the McLamb brothers put on a festival to celebrate the farmer and the mule. Mr. Vern’s Upset won so many pulling events that the festival was closed for the next twenty-four years. Some say he was lucky to get out of there alive, with Upset when the town banker wanted to buy the mule, and Mr. Vern wouldn’t sell him.

Mr.Vern, a short, stocky man with a large smile and hearty laugh, was the nicest colored man we knew outside of Mr. Toomey, who owned the Bell Town Cafe with his wife, Katie Bell.

Mr. Vern drove a wooden wagon pulled by a single mule. He picked up junk metal and re-sold it from Craggie Hope to Kingston Springs to Bellevue, on this side of Brush Creek, and in White Bluff. We knew when he was coming because we could hear the hanging metal pots and cast-iron skillets clatter and bang against the sides of the wagon. Mr. Vern knew everyone, and everyone in the area knew him. His claim to fame was that when he was sixteen, he was a groom for a racehorse named Upset, who defeated the great two-year-old Man O’ War.

Dat Upset was a great horse. Defeated Man O’ War, Mr. Vern bragged.

He had worked his way from groom to exercise rider. He got his first ride as a jockey on a brush track in New Jersey on his seventeenth birthday. That same day, his riding career ended when his horse broke down, and Mr. Vern destroyed his right knee. Years later he named his mule Upset in honor of the racehorse who defeated Man O’ War.

Upset, the mule wore a big, floppy hat, brayed quite often, and every kid laughed to see him.

Unfortunately, one of the hot rod boys from White Bluff came flying over the crest of Ward Hill in his black ’51 Chevy and hit Mr. Vern’s wagon, scattering pots and pans everywhere

and killing the mule Mr.Vern had for fifteen years. Nearly killed Mr. Vern, too. Mr. Vern received a plow horse to replace his mule, a gift from Mr. Ament, but things were never the same. Mr. Vern grieved over that mule till the day he himself died two months later. My stepdad Ned said he just gave up on life.

Sam’s and my hard-callused feet never felt the rocky ground as we raced across the Thorntons’ front yard and up the three concrete steps that led to their wooden front door. We banged our tender knuckles hard. Terriers barked frantically on the other side of the door, the same nasty terriers that always nipped our ankles and shoelaces when we had to wear shoes. In a phlegm-restricted smoker’s voice, Mrs. Thornton yelled, Trixie! Dixie!Shut up! She began to cough. Back.

The door knob turned. She pushed the door open. The terriers raced by her pink fuzzy house shoes, barking and attacking our pant legs. Get back, dogs, I said!

I had never seen Mrs. Thornton look like that before. Her red hair was in disarray and sticking out all over her head. Her left hand clutched the lapels of her red housecoat together, but her freckled legs still showed.

You kids shouldn’t be knocking on people’s doors this early in the morning, she said angrily. It’s a school morning!

Mrs. Thornton was usually pretty nice in the evening when I’d go over sometimes and play with Stanley and his younger sister in an old car resting on concrete blocks. Whenever Mr. Thornton wasn’t home, there was always some uncle visiting. Since Mr. Thornton was a truck driver, he was gone a lot. Stepdad said none of the Thornton kids knew who their daddy was.

Stanley’s older brothers and sisters made fun of us. They called us scabby and stupid. Stanley and I hadn’t been friends for a while because he threw a rock and hit me in my side. I threw one back at him several days later and bruised his right ankle bone, so he had to have crutches. Mrs. Thornton threw a fit at our house as if everything had been my fault.

Our momma’s dead! I yelled.

Your momma’s dead? she asked dumbfounded.

Yeah, she’s dead, Sam said excitedly. He jumped down from Mrs. Thornton’s front porch and raced toward the Knobles’ house next door. Barking like crazy, the terriers bolted down the steps and chased after him. I realized he was trying to outdo me. With only a year between us in age, Sam was a fast runner.

Get back here, dogs! she yelled loudly in my ear.

I jumped down and raced after my brother. The terriers were still on his tail. I heard Mrs. Thornton screaming cuss words. She was the only woman we knew who used words like that. Now I knew she was really mad.

Sam banged as hard as he could on the Knobles’ front door. I hoped Mr. Knoble wasn’t home. I bounded up the steps to the front door as the terriers again attacked Sam. Suddenly, the door jerked inward. What the hell’s going on? he yelled. ‘Uh, oh,’ I thought. I could smell the whiskey. He’d been on one of his drunk nights. His face was covered in grey-black stubble, his black hair mashed to the side of his head. I could hear Mrs. Knoble crying in the living room.

Get your asses home, he demanded. Damn dogs, too." He kicked at the terriers, catching one of them in its side. The terrier yelped and raced back home, with the other one nipping at its head.

Don’t you ever kick my dog, you bastard! Mrs. Thornton yelled.

Sam looked at me, ready to run away, his green eyes large with fright.

Our momma died last night, I interrupted loudly.

Momma died, Sam repeated.

Mr. Knoble yelled back into his house, Fat woman across the street’s dead. He stepped back and slammed the door in our faces. I wondered what my friend Luke was doing while his momma was crying.

Sam and I raced back across the road from Luke’s house and into our yard. Our stepdad Ned stood on the porch. He looked mad.

Where you boys been?

We told our friends that our momma was dead, I explained.

Y’all get in the house. That’s not the way you tell someone your mother has died.

Helen, our mother, was dead at the age of twenty-eight.

NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE

1957

CHAPTER ONE

The sweet smell of burning coal filled the cluttered room. I awakened all cozy and warm under the colorful patch-square quilt my great grandma had sewn lovingly before her palsy made it impossible to sew anymore. My brother stayed asleep behind me.

On the peeling, painted iron bed next to ours, Helen sat cross-legged on the sheets surrounded by Green Lantern, Superman, Casper, and Archie comic books. She wore nothing but her huge slingshot bra, her step-ins, and a smile as she looked at a picture in a copy of Romance Stories of True Love. Her mother, who we called Donna Jean, lay sound asleep next to her. No one was allowed to touch Donna Jean’s comics until she had had a chance to read them first. The comics were new copies, and Helen flirted with danger. One morning, when she couldn’t suppress the giggles while reading an Archie comic, she took a hard slap to the right side of her jaw.

Was that my daddy here last night? I asked as I slid out of bed and walked over to the side of Helen’s bed. She placed her right hand over her mouth to muffle a giggle.

Shhhh, don’t wake Donna Jean, she whispered, never taking her eyes off the romance comic. I told you your daddy was a pilot. Killed in World War II.

I knew that man from last night wasn’t my daddy. I don’t know why I asked about him.

The two men had sat on the faded, thread-pulled brown couch in the living room. The room reeked with the smell of their haircut tonic water. I already knew Herman, a tall man with sandy blonde hair and a stubbled face. He was Donna Jean’s friend. Now, another man had joined him, a short, chubby, older man with brown hair slicked backward.

Helen, come out of the kitchen. I want you to meet Bill, Donna Jean yelled. He’s a friend of Herman’s.

Bill wasn’t like the guys Helen would oooh and ahhh over in the romance comics.

Helen hadn’t even been home an hour from work. It must have been close to eight o’clock at night. She still had on her work whites with the mustard and ketchup stains and the smell of burgers and beer.

I don’t feel good, Helen replied.

Helen was pretty. She had dark brown hair, puppy-wide brown eyes, smooth skin, and was slim. Donna Jean was heavy-set with a scarred face. 

I told Bill you’d go out with him. Now come and meet him and get ready, Donna Jean demanded.

Listen, Donna Jean, if she doesn’t—

Donna Jean interrupted. Shut up, Bill. I told you she wants to go out. A single twenty-one-year-old woman doesn’t want to be sitting at home with a four-year-old and a three-year-old. I was four.

He’s got plenty of money, Herman baited. He turned to Donna Jean. Babe, you got a beer for us?

Donna Jean walked into the kitchen and returned with two cold PBRs and Helen. The only time you would see Donna Jean in the kitchen was to eat, make banana pudding, and get men beer.

These sure would go down good with some pickled eggs,

Herman hinted.

They give you gas, Herman, Donna Jean laughed.

My great-grandma, affectionately known as Grandma, sat in a kitchen chair, not saying a word. She just continued reading her Bible, shaking her head, and silently spitting the moist snuff from her mouth into an empty dog food can.

Sam was already asleep on the bed, but I was awake and peeping out from under the covers.

Donna Jean grunted and rolled over, interrupting my memories of last night. Wasting no time, I hurried into the front room, only a few feet away. In every corner of that room, coal-sooted, blackened cobwebs hung like eerie veils. Coal was cheap, ten cents for a five-gallon bucket from Alley Cassety just a block up Nolensville Road in Nashville. On Saturdays during the winter, the Alley Cassety truck would stop at the house. Some man would dump two buckets of coal on newspapers behind the living room pot-belly stove. Grandma would pull out her flowered and knotted handkerchief from her apron, carefully untie it, and count him out two Mercury dimes. The man would say, See you next Saturday, Miz Wright.

Every two weeks, the insurance man would come, and she would go through the same routine. He would show up at the door in his wrinkled blue suit, his bald head gleaming, and greet Grandma with, I see you’re still living.

She always laughed politely and reached for her handkerchief to count out some coins. I later learned it was to pay for a five-hundred-dollar life insurance policy with Life and Casualty Insurance.

Sunlight bled through the half-curtained, dirty windows. The light played games with the blue and gold plastic cross of Jesus hanging on the wall. I zipped into the kitchen wearing the briefs I wore to bed.

Queenie, our Chihuahua, was eating her Tony’s dog food. At times when my belly hurt from hunger, Grandma would let me eat spoonfuls from the can, saying it was good horse meat. One can of Tony’s only cost seven cents and had a cartoon dog sheriff on the front.

Grandma’s reddish brown and grey-streaked hair was mashed into a bun held together with bobbie pins. She wore the same old flowery second-hand dress from Aunt Rose she had worn the day before, the same old apron, and the same old worn-out house shoes. She had that special grandma smell.

Morning, Baby, she said as she hugged me tight.

Morning, Grandma.

I hugged her back the best I could since she had a humped back and only stood four-foot-six, having broken her back decades ago.

Water boiled on the large iron coal-burning kitchen stove that heated the room as well as cooked the meals. I climbed up on a rickety wooden chair, glad to get my bare feet off the torn linoleum. Resting my hands and arms on the white and red enamel table, I waited patiently.

Grandma opened a new box of Quaker Oats and removed the free green juice glass that came in the box. It was sorely needed. Sometimes, we got lucky with a bowl or saucer, which was even more appreciated. I loved oats with plenty of butter and clear Karo syrup. Somedays toward the end of the month, Grandma would break up pieces of Sunbeam white bread and mix them with the oats. That didn’t taste so good, but she said it made the oats stick to my ribs.

On special occasions, we’d have bits of bacon in our oats. On those days, Grandma would save the bacon grease to rub on our sores and scrapes. Grandma used lots of home remedies. When we coughed, she would put some sugar in a tablespoon and pour coal oil over it, and then we’d eat that to stop our coughing. To stop an earache, we peed into a spoon, and she would pour the pee into the hurting ear.

As Grandma poured a cup of oats into the boiling water, Sam groggily wandered into the kitchen wearing his bedtime briefs.

What’s to eat? he asked, climbing up in a chair across from mine.

Oats will be ready in a minute, Honey, Grandma replied.     Oats again? Sam moaned. Then, quietly, he said, Momma’s got Donna Jean’s comics.

Grandma mumbled something