I got up and fed the cats and made a cup of coffee. A cup of coffee is significant; I'm weaning myself from the stuff, and have tapered down to one full cup per day. Going cold turkey on caffeine is not a wise thing to attempt; the headaches can be murderous, and I speak from experience. The cats are not concerned with caffeine. They focus their energies on ensuring that catnip stays legal. And they have a poweful lobby in Washington.
MeeMaw arose not long after I did, and we dressed and took a stroll down the road, almost to the turnoff. MeeMaw picked a curious pink wildflower that looks like some sort of miniature orchid on a woody vine. When we came back to Possum Cough, we went up to the south pasture and picked a few ripe apples. They're starting to drop from the trees like little baseballs in an outfield.
Yesterday when I arrived home from work, I heard our neighbor, Mr. Davidson, calling his cows to come get a drink. We exchanged waves, and since a conversation was overdue, I walked through the front pasture and down the curving gravel to where he sat in the cab of his truck, smoking a cigarette and watching me with gimlet eyes.
Shaking hands with Mr. Davidson is very difficult to describe without using a train of worn cliches. But I can attest from personal experience that it feels precisely like being latched onto by a hydraulic vice wearing a catcher's mitt. I am perversely proud of the relatively straight face I managed to maintain while screeching with pain inside.
He's leathery, hard, no-nonsense. Sort of what I imagine Bill Craig would be like if Bill actually had to do years of demanding physical labor. But unlike that particular Lufkin Presbyterian, Mr. Davidson has no desire to share his knowledge of anything to anyone. His sentences are short, abrupt bayonets. And his voice...oh, what a voice. So deep it makes your jeans ripple. One of those old Don Williams cigarette voices. And Mr. D likes his cigarettes. He smoked three in the fifteen minutes we chatted. He wears feed-store giveaway baseball caps, snap-button short-sleeved shirts with faux nacre buttons, blue Dickies work pants, and heavy work boots. I imagine that if one mentioned "hair gel" to him, he would think one was referring to a hide treatment for his livestock.
We bantered back and forth in the way I remember older men talked when I was a boy. He told me a bit about his daily work, I told him a bit about mine. He complained of his torn rotator cuff, I allowed as to how my knees were kicking a bit. When I asked him how many head of cattle he owns, he took a final drag off his current Camel, flicked it across the pasture, blew out a blue cloud, and squinted into the sun. "One hunnert," he rumbled. "Used to run a hunnert fifty, but I cain't keep up with 'em as good no more. Cain't git no one steady to help me. Ever'one wants too much money, or they won't stay with the job. So I do it myself. Keeps me runnin'."
I told Mr. Davidson that if he ever needed any help with anything, to come and call on me, and I'd be happy to pitch in. I told him that I don't know the first thing about cows, but that I learn quickly, and that if he'd show me what he needs done, I'd do it.
His face creased in the closest approximation of a smile I would see in the entire conversation, and he spat into the weeds. "'Preeshate it."
There is no poetry in Mr. D. He doesn't look at his cattle and see the hand of the Creator. He doesn't see a calf being born and stop in wonder at the miracle of life. He doesn't pause to memorize how the dew looks on the morning glories climbing up the side of his hay barn. He doesn't smile at grasshoppers who land on his legs as he strides through the johnson grass. These things are annoyances, things to be batted aside on his way to the next task. In this lack of poetry, he is joined to the Bill Craigs of the world, but this is one of the few kinships Mr. Davidson has with postmodern males. And I'm not picking on ol' Bill; he just happens to represent an archetype I see all around me.
We talked of drought and bulldozers and grandchildren and presidential elections. Mr. Davidson had very colorful opinions on all things we discussed, and he proved to be one of the more profane men I've met in a while. He never blasphemed and he never used the most popular Anglo-Saxon word in the English tongue, but he managed to damn, hell, and sumbitch his way through the underbrush of our shared likes and dislikes. There are too few men like Mr. Davidson left in this land, and too many prissy, preening dillatantes.
Mr. D. also let slip that he owns a funeral home down in Weber City. "I cain't run it, legal like. I mean, I know all about embalmin' and all that, but I ain't certified. And I ain't about to go to school for two years to git certified. So I hired me a fella runs it for me. Few others to work under him. It's done right smart of a business the last year or two."
("Right smart" is one of my favorite local expressions. When our neighbor Gabriel was about to mow the hay in our south pasture, he said, "I'll mow down to here at the ridge, but I'll stop there. If I remember, there's right smart of trash and logs on that ridge." And one of the girls at work bragged about making "right smart of canned tomatoes."
Last night after MeeMaw got home, we crept up into the woodlot, hoping to see deer. And we did. I was in front, making a path through the high brush, when I noticed a blurry sillouette about thirty yards in front of us. The shape had ears. My vision is so poor without glasses at distances, I couldn't squint hard enough to really tell. I whispered to MeeMaw, "That looks like a deer." She whispered back, "It is a deer." And about that time, the shape, a finely formed yearling, snorted and fled. Lovely thing in flight, a deer.
I've been reading several things, among them
A World To Build: Britain 1945-51 by David Kynaston. It is a well-acclaimed social history, and has some fine writing and original observations. I was particularly struck by some almost poetic passages listing the many things that have utterly changed in that country:
Britain in 1945. No supermarkets, no motorways, no teabags, no sliced
bread, no frozen food, no flavoured crisps, no lager, no microwaves, no
dishwashers, no Formica, no vinyl, no CDs, no computers, no mobiles, no duvets,
no Pill, no trainers, no hoodies, no Starbucks. Four Indian restaurants. Shops
on every corner, pubs on every corner, cinemas in every high street, red
telephone boxes…. No launderettes, no automatic washing machines, wash every day Monday, clothes boiled in a tub, scrubbed on the draining board, rinsed in the
sink, put through a mangle, hung out to dry….Abortion illegal, homosexual
relationships illegal, suicide illegal, capital punishment legal. White faces
everywhere….Heavy coins, heavy shoes, heavy suitcases, heavy tweed coats, heavy leather footballs, no unbearable lightness of being. Meat rationed, butter
rationed, lard rationed, margarine rationed…. Make do and mend. (p.
18)
Britain in 1945. A land of orderly queues, hat-doffing men walking on
the outside, seats given up to the elderly, no swearing in front of women and
children, censored books, censored films, censored plays, infinite repression of
desires. Divorce for most an unthinkable social disgrace, marriage too often a
lifetime sentence…. Children in the street ticked off by strangers, children at
home rarely consulted, children stopping being children when they left school at
14 and got a job…. A land of hierarchical social assumptions, of accent and
dress as giveaways to class, of Irish jokes and casually derogatory references
to Jews and niggers…. A pride in Britain, which had stood alone, a pride even in
‘Made in Britain’. A deep satisfaction with our own idiosyncratic, non-metric
units of distance, weight, temperature, money…. A sense of history, however
nugatory the knowledge of that history. A land in which authority was respected?
Or rather, accepted? Yes, perhaps the latter, co-existing with the necessary
safety valve of copious everyday grumbling. A land of domestic hobbies and
domestic pets…. A deeply conservative land. (pp. 58-59)
Someday, perhaps, someone will write a similar social history of America, this tortured place that once was a nation.
MeeMaw is finished preparing late breakfast/early dinner, so I'll go. After we eat, we have right smart of errands to run and chores to do.
