Journal Entry: June 26, 1972
“Today was a day when my mind dwelt of things other than God. Today I slipped and lost much hard earned ground...”
Forty-four:
“Hot as the devil’s armpit.”
I’ve never heard better words for it. Not then or since. There were days on the Delta when humidity and sunlight fell so hot and hard upon the land that it seemed almost hateful. If early morning was a soft caress, high noon was the backhand that followed, unexpected and cruel, spiked gloves; clear, humid skies lensing down so much sunlight and heat that the Delta seemed a furnace; asphalt roads turning soft underfoot, till merely walking their tarred edges could burn blisters through the soles of your shoes.
People go peculiar in that kind of heat. Some do. Many closed their doors and windows, drew their shades and remained safe within, air conditioned isolation until well after nightfall. They simply refused to come out. Others who could not afford air conditioning or tolerate its unnatural feel merely traveled inward in their minds, seeking the cooler recesses of memory while fanning themselves, cardboard church fans depicting Reverend King or Jesus praying in Gethsemane, waving rhythmically, back and forth, back and forth, sweaty palms and muggy air.
Some got lost in there. They might not find their way back for days. Others fared better but still gave up entirely on schedules and appointments, excusing themselves from all manner of commitments during those hottest afternoons, mumbling miserably into the phone or simply to themselves, prattling on and on about how unkind it all was.
For those of us earning our hourly dollar at the fish farm it didn’t much matter how hot or muggy the world got, we were still expected to show up for work, only moreso, for the hotter it got, the more our labors and quick thinking, our diligence were required. Sustained and building heat like that can kill a million dollars worth of catfish quicker than your momma can fry up a batch of hush puppies to go with ‘em.
During the worst of it we were continually making our way from pond to pond, servicing and adjusting those big, diesel pumps, pulling as much cold, well water up from the sandy depths as they could manage, then pushing it through eight inch pipes into one corner of each pond to spread and cool, flowing toward the overflow pipe at the pond’s opposite end.
Farmed catfish may not be the smartest creatures on the planet but they were certainly smart enough to mass and huddle in this cooler, fresher, more highly oxygenated flow of water as it moved, almost like a river from one corner of a pond to the other, and most found their salvation by breathing its oxygen-enriched waters. The weaker ones found their tipping points instead, gasping and shuddering until they eventually expired, Then, white bellys skyward, they bobbed and drifted in the even warmer surface water, carried within that indiscernible current toward the screened outflow.
As dead fish bodies were sucked in and began piling up against those outflow screens they plugged them so that water levels in the ponds rose higher and higher, rather than being flushed through. Sweltering days meant continually wading or swimming out to each of these outflow pipes to ‘pick’ dead fish and leaves, and globs of green algae out of the screens to keep them clear, to keep the flow of water moving. Better to pick and dispose of these dead, bloating creatures before the water levels rose too much, before the accumulating mass became too overwhelming, their decomposition too nauseating. Picking bloated catfish was just one of the punishments, one of those brutal backhands a cruelly hot day might deliver. Basket after basket of rotting catfish ferried from outflow screen to muddy shore, then dumped down the side of the levee, there to bake and rot further, ultimately feeding a hundred thousand wriggling new maggots and swarming, metallic blow flies.
With every one of the diesel pumps running at full tilt during an extra hot stretch of days, things broke or went sideways more often than normal. I was the worker with the thinnest skill set to draw upon and the steepest learning curve; so many new tasks requiring action without time for instruction, so when tallying up the pros of my being an eager, careful listener and white (and thus, less likely to be hassled or questioned in town), versus the cons of my not knowing shit, it made sense that I was often drafted into the role of errand boy when something was needed from town, despite the fact that I was also the only one on the fish farm without a legal driver’s license.
Six miles of oiled, rust-colored, gravel and pavement into town. Pickup windows down, music cranked up, sunburned arm surfing that river of air flowing past the side mirror at fifty miles an hour. Days of hateful swelter almost always meant at least a few emergent town runs during work hours, which I quite relished. Vernon might have sent me to retrieve a long sleeved work shirt and broad-brimmed straw hat from his double-wide while he, in his beloved and sweat-stained, Rebels baseball cap, flaming red ears and sunburned arms kept on feeding hungry fish till I could complete my town list and get back. Or those desperately needed parts for one of the ‘broke-down’ diesel pumps might have come in on the afternoon Greyhound from Memphis.
Town itself had such a different feel from the farmland beyond, a steady calm that wasn’t about to be broken by an additional dozen degrees of heat. For one thing, there were trees, big trees, which meant at least some shade.
Hoofing it between supply stops in Comfrey or fidget-circling a few shady blocks while waiting for a flat tire to be fixed at the gas station, I couldn’t help but notice how heat-imposed loneliness inspired perfect strangers to holler vague threats from shady vantages as I walked by in a pool of mid-day sun; mawkish, disembodied voices implying that I was a fool, warning that I was flirting with danger.
“Sumpthin’ wrong wit yo’ head, deary?” a wavery old woman’s voice fluttered toward me from the shadows of a shady porch one day. “Why, it’s over a hunnert degrees out they’ah and just look et you. Why, y’all ain’t even wearin’ a proper hat. Didn’t yo’ momma teach you nuthin, son?”
One supposes her reprimand and others like it were well intended, but finding yourself on the receiving end of words like ‘crazy’ and ‘catch your death,’ and ‘sunstroke’ couldn’t help but leave me feeling a bit uneasy and chastised when piled atop the swelter. And though paying heed to such heat-stroke warnings might have aligned me more closely with the common-sense intelligentsia of a backwater like Comfrey, such payment was a luxury I simply couldn’t afford.
Fifteen years old and ninety-five degrees in the shade; people and fish counting on me. I had places to get to, parts to pick up, things to get done. No snot-nosed kid like me was anywhere near important enough to be discouraged or hog-tied by something as benign as melting pavement, …or sunstroke. So I pushed on through the swelter, dragging my feet and sipping in that hot, magnolia-scented, gravy-thick air like everyone else while musing inwardly at the comedy; I was being chastised and counseled by the disembodied voices of invisible people with nothing better to do, hothouse, prisoner-philosophers hawking insults and free advice to any stranger passing by.
What could I do but smile, nod in their directions and feign my gratitude in reply?
My intemperate, youthful behavior almost certainly marked me as a dolt to some of these hidden detractors, obviously lacking proper sense and breeding, for any well-bred, white Southerner, genetically selected over many generations of privilege would have understood innately that proper people stay indoors during the meanest parts of the day, or at the very least, stay out’a the sun. Only ‘coloreds with the skin for it’ and ‘simple folk’ worked in such ovenlike conditions, or so I was told, one genteel white person (wink, wink), to another.
Funny. That refined sounding term ‘genteel,’ used with so many shadings in the whiter parts of Comfrey after its untimely resurrection by the ladies salon, seemed always to imply but one thing; a person too white, too elegant and dignified to risk breaking a sweat. It was definitely a class thing …which meant it was also a race thing.
One of these ladies, Mrs. Eunice Atwater had been reading some steamy romance novel set in the old South and had stumbled upon this term ‘genteel,’ and well, ‘lawsy mercy, child,’ she simply loved the sound of it. Genteel instantly became her new, absolute favorite among the author’s many colloquial descriptives and she began to use it incessantly in each of her self-referential expositions. Then the others, not wanting to be left out and eager to at least seem to be in the know began to use her new term, too, having decided that it would be easier than actually reading the book.
Genteel, in pragmatic, Deltaspeak meant that white women had their black maids carry in the groceries and waited for husbands or other polite gentlemen to open doors. They never, absolutely never, went outside when it was warm enough to melt their make-up. They also kept thermostats set between sixty-eight and seventy-two degrees, steady, and the shades drawn during much of the day.
Mrs. Simms’ crony, Eunice Atwater was, by her own proud pronouncement, ‘genteel,’ as were many of her higher class friends. Gathered together, they pounced, almost comically on each feeble opening they could find to bounce this newly rediscovered descriptive into conversations, often in places where it hardly fit, resembling nothing so much as a bunch of blue-haired, verbal hooligans, each with the same new toy.
Within their bastardized contexts, ‘genteel’ nearly always came out inferring some strange, hybrid cross between civilized snobbery and horse sense. One night, Mrs. Atwater sat in the sisters’ front room, sipping iced tea and carrying on about Prissy Eubanks, a friendly but completely unsophisticated woman whose husband was filthy rich. When Eunice arched her wrist and said that Priscilla Eubanks was, “indeed, a genteel woman of the highest order,” the rest of us (I was eavesdropping from the bottom step in the darkened hallway beyond), who had our own acquaintances with Miss Priss smiled, understanding it only to mean really, that she’d been smart enough to snag a wealthy husband, bless her heart. His fat bank account qualified her for an air-conditioned Cadillac, two colored maids to do all her housework and shopping, and a high enough position in the country club pecking order to get the coolest morning tee times and tennis reservations.
On the Delta, that white-hot glare of summer’s mid-day reduced everyone to the status of prisoner in one form or another, even the obscenely rich. For Eunice Atwater and Prissy Eubanks, gentility didn’t mean you were especially smart, or kankle-free, or elegant, it simply meant you didn’t quite have to care.
From the very advent of television people began discovering its effective use as a narcotic and became happily addicted. Women discovered soap operas (or was it soap operas that discovered them), and suddenly there was a new, far less demanding way to pass sweltering summer afternoons. Television required none of the preparation and effort of women’s gatherings, no fear of the often, acidic criticisms that went into prim salons or teas, and none of the focus required of reading and book clubs. Instead, genteel ladies could sit comfortably in their summery shifts, feet up and legs askew, electric fans droning, and healthy breezes whispering sweet nothings to their privates.
The old sisters were especially fond of afternoon soaps and strategically placed fans, and whiled away the hottest hours of nearly each summer’s weekday, sloppy and lethargic, entranced before the flickering tube. Rising Tide, General Hospital, As the World Turns. Five minutes with any one of these shows and you got the gist of them all; at least that’s how it seemed to me.
At noontime, they fed poor Buddy his dinner, then wheeled him into the front room and propped him up in his wheelchair with pillows. Laden that way with a full stomach, he soon drifted off into a predictable two-hour nap, and they could watch their favorite shows, undisturbed.
At 12:30 sharp, they brought in their own plates of food from the kitchen and sat down on each end of the sofa. Then, over the next few hours, they sat entranced, chewing and swallowing, and swatting flies like a couple of old cows.
I never could understand the phenomenon completely; sipping iced tea and hanging, moment by moment in pretend suspense while some half-developed character declared an undying love that clearly wouldn’t last through next Friday, or plotted cruelly to destroy someone else’s. What a bore! I’d tried to watch a few times as a kid when I stayed home sick from school and nothing else was on, but decided each time that nothing was the better deal. Inevitably I turned off the TV and dozed, knowing cartoons would be on at three.
Twice that summer I needed to stay home from work, sick, and both times the sisters kept to the same priorities and schedule; afternoon soaps and Buddy, the focal points of their very predictable days.
Bessie spent most of her morning caring for Buddy while Mrs. Simms cooked, went to the store and puttered in the flower beds. After changing his diaper, and getting him out of bed with an ingenious chrome version of an engine hoist and swing, Bessie wheeled Buddy into the kitchen for breakfast, followed by an enema and a bath. Shaving his slack-skinned face added another fifteen to twenty minutes of fuss, but that usually only happened twice a week.
By the time she had finished dressing him, it was nearly eleven-o’clock and time for his stretching exercises. I watched them go through the paces once, but it seemed to me poor Bessie was working a heck of a lot harder than poor Buddy was.
Finally, nearly four hours after beginning this daily cycle, Buddy had been fed, bathed and exercised, and sat drooling onto a tea towel tied loosely around his neck, in his wheelchair. Bessie then moved cheerfully to the kitchen to help “Sister” finish getting dinner.
I can’t imagine how my aging friend did everything that was required of her each day, and day after day, without going stark raving mad. But, never once, ever did I see her act cross with Buddy or complain. She was an angel. Truly! And not just toward Buddy, but toward nearly everyone, which only made some of the other things I saw all the more confusing.
Buddy sat, most of the day, in a knee-length hospital gown and white tube socks with a plastic urinal wedged between his legs. The sisters had lived with his exposed privates for so many years that it didn't occur to them to cover him up when company was around, or well, maybe I just wasn't company. Whatever the case, I sat there in an armchair one afternoon nursing a feverish headache, when Bessie thoughtlessly flipped up Buddy’s gown and whisked away the urine bottle, to empty it.
I thought I'd die of mortification at first, but then when neither of them seemed to notice my blushing and gasping for breath I decided maybe it was no big deal. Like the time I walked into a doctor’s office where a stunningly beautiful woman sat openly nursing her baby with her breast fully exposed. Everyone in the room was slightly unnerved by her nonchalant display but no matter how cool and unaffected we all tried to seem, our nervous eyes and reddened faces sold each of us out.
There were no beautiful women or suckling infants in this room, only Buddy's pathetic dick hanging, flacid and wet, and homeless while Bessie traipsed off to dump his piss in the toilet. Of course I didn’t begin to know how to sit nonchalant and pretend not to notice a thing like that but I did try not to stare.
When Bessie returned, she casually reached in, picked up his uncircumsized pecker with her thin fingers, as coolly as if it were her own, and began to poke it back into the empty bottle. Try as I might, I could not keep from watching. It was just too amazing a scene to ignore.
More amazing yet, Buddy noticed too and smiled. Whoa!
I had only ever seen him smile one other time that I remembered, and that, with his first mouthful of a piece of banana cream pie. Let there be no mistake, Buddy liked the feel of Bessie’s hand on his Johnson.
In fact, in the few seconds it took her to get him pointed right and stuffed back in the hole, that whang of his grew about three sizes. Dang, Buddy! Maybe ol’Buddy couldn't sit up by himself, but that dick of his sure could.
Bessie got a little flustered then, Buddy leering at her, me sitting there watching, blushing. Buddy didn’t care. Hell, he probably didn’t even know I existed. He just kept grinning at Bessie and sporting his bone. She quickly pulled his gown down and walked into the kitchen, seeming uncharacteristically rattled.
Mrs. Simms kept right on yapping through the whole affair, explaining to everyone and no one what was happening on her stupid show. Her rambling monologue afforded both Bessie and me the luxury of a place to hide, and for once I was grateful. But I couldn’t help sensing that I had just witnessed something larger than the scene itself, a dangerous crack in some closely held armor.
My mind began to race.
During a Tide commercial I begged off sick, which was absolutely true and the only reason I wasn’t out at the fish farm working that sultry afternoon instead of watching soaps with the sisters. I went back up to my room to take another nap. But as soon as I was safe behind my closed door lewd thoughts came rushing out of closets like roaches in the dark. Juicy little question marks. Dirty little exclamation points. Temptations circling and hovering above me on the bed.
Of course I peeked in at them.
And though what I saw there confused and disgusted me, it also held me fast in its claws and pulled me further in. I pictured that quiet old house during the school year, Mrs. Simms away at the high school cooking for three hundred. The renters all off at work. Buddy and Aunt Bessie there alone, all alone, day after day, after day. Maybe loneliness and his excitable, upright member had created a curiosity and hunger that would have led her to tempt the gods at some point and risk her own salvation.
I pictured Bessie many years earlier, while the blush of youth and her beauty were still full upon her. Buddy was likely still a young man when she’d first discovered his ability to be aroused. She did have the chore of washing and caring for him daily, so it would have made her discovery nearly inevitable.
I imagined her standing naked in front of a mirror looking at her own loveliness, watching it fade, bit by bit with each passing year. Tears streaming down her face as she realized there would never be anyone to worship her fading beauty. No understanding hands to move over her body in confident appreciation. No smoldering eyes to fan her inner fires.
It hurt me to picture her that way. To see her swallowing hard in bitter acceptance of the fact that she would bloom and fade like a rose, having never been seen or touched, never adored by another's eyes. I imagined the bile in her throat as she surrendered that beauty, finally, to her own animal needs and a slobbering, retarded child in a grown man's body. How torn she must have felt. How sinful and full of self-loathing. Yet curious as well, and somehow, full of love.
I wondered if she’d found pleasure in his quickening breath and the pained look of pleasure on his guileless face as he discovered how it feels to climax. I wondered if she'd done it at first for him and his pleasure, or for herself… or if she could even really know.
When I realized what I was thinking, the terrible, filthy leaps I'd allowed my adolescent mind to make from that one grinning boner, I fell to my knees on the floor and began to pray with every ounce of fervor and clench-fisted terror in me. I was horrified with myself. Terrified.
“Oh Lord Jesus,” I entreated, “please drive these wicked thoughts from me!”
“Please, please,” I begged, “entreat your mightiest angels to come and drive away Satan and his wicked army with their powerful, righteous wings.”
But no matter how hard I scrunched my eyes or quoted texts, the pictures remained. Again and again, I caught myself wandering off from my prayers and peeking in on naughty fantasies; Aunt Bessie was doing Buddy while no one was around.
If God and his angels actually were watching me that day, or the Devil and his, I know I made a pathetic, laughable sight. Kneeling there beside my bed, eyes and hands squeezed tight while a boner creased the front of my jeans. Why, Satan would have laughed God right out of the room.
I was no faithful Job, stalwart in the face of trial. Maybe wayward Jonah, who ran from his duty and was then punished in the belly of a whale for three days.
As for God, he would certainly have found no bragging rights in me that day. I simply could not not keep my mind focused even long enough for one decent prayer. The wedge of lust was driven too deep within me. Forbidden visions of Bessie and Buddy; achey, potent, delicious fear. Finally, I conceded the moral battle completely, letting my mind race down every delicious, filthy little back alley it wanted. I was sick, feverish, too whipped for prayer, I reasoned.
“Forgive me, Lord, I’m running a fever,” I whimpered.
Down, down, down I sank, into the belly of the whale. My thoughts raced back to Bessie's bedroom of some thirty years past. She stood silent, again in front of a mirror, again full of sadness and resign. I pictured her putting on a pretty robe and going in to Buddy; trying to create a bit of romance and drama as she slipped off the robe and swayed awkwardly back and forth, naked in front of him. I followed her sad eyes to his. He sat unmoved and unregistering. His watery eyes staring straight ahead into space.
When she moved close to him and pressed her breast to his mouth, she shuddered at the feel of spittle and whiskers against her sensitive skin, then mashed herself into him, to wake him from his trance. Something from childhood took over then, an instinct too deeply rooted to be lost with time or his sickness, and he began to suckle her without looking up. He still instinctively remembered how to nurse.
Deep within her then, far below the revulsion and shame, something stirred. A spark. A warmth. A sense of purpose she'd perhaps hoped to find without ever having known it was missing. She pressed into him harder, and the tiny flame grew, burning its way slowly, then violently toward the surface, until she surrendered to its heat.
Deep, moaning sighs escaped her.
She reached down to pull the urinal away, and began to rub and stroke Buddy's swelling dick with her hands. He couldn't speak, but his breathing had grown heavy, and his eyes were darting back and forth. He sucked harder on her breast until she was aroused and wet, and the room began to spin.
Then she took her hand from Buddy's shoulder and reached between her own thighs, shuddering. She had never touched herself like that before, having been told again and again since girlhood that it was sin. Having believed it. But she was drowning in sin and discovery just then. At that moment the threat of one more transgression no longer held any power over her.
She entered herself with tenuous fingers, steadying against the swaying room by resting a knee on Buddy's lap. She rocked back and forth for a while, fingers moving slowly within. Her eyes clenched tight to block out revulsion, Buddy's blank grin and a stream of spittle sliding down her stomach.
She wanted more. She wanted to feel the pulse of a man inside her. Once. Just once. Even an intellectually disabled man was better than none at all. So she opened her eyes, trying to mount him without breaking her rhythm. She straddled the wheelchair first, but he sat too low in it. When she couldn't reach him, she turned her back to him lowering herself onto his lap and guiding his penis in from behind.
Except for his upright member, Buddy was useless in the proceedings. He had no idea of what to do or the coordination with which to do it. So he just sat there, making excited mumbling noises while Bessie let her animal fires buck and rage.
In just a minute it was all over. Buddy had innocently climaxed, lost pressure and his rapidly deflating member would no longer stay in her. Bessie had not been nearly ready for this pilgrimage to end and she collapsed, sobbing in a heap on the floor. Stranded. Lost. Starving. Alone.
She had risked everything in those few minutes, absolutely everything. And now look. What did she have left? She was an old maid, nearly past marrying age, and not even a virgin anymore. No one wanted or loved her, and she had just given herself over to a spastic, drooling moron. Her own nephew.
Thoughts of killing herself entered the room and courted her.
But the splatter and trickle of water falling to the floor pulled her back from the edge. She had left Buddy sitting there without a urinal. As he’d relaxed and calmed down following his climax his bladder had let down, as well. The results ran spreading across the floor.
Duty appeared with the sound of waters, and duty it was that saved her. She rose from her sobbing huddle to fuss over poor Buddy. He sat there quietly, wet and unknowing. She lifted him out of the wheelchair with the hoist and into a warm bath. While he soaked, she cleaned his chair and changed the pad, and then washed him more gently than she ever had before. He was the only one she'd ever allowed to touch her like that. The only one to see how desolate and lonely she was. Buddy had seen her utterly naked, both of clothes ...and of pride.
From that morning on they had a secret together, the twisted beginning of a complicated new chapter in their lives. From that morning on she would pour all her love into this muttering hulk and share everything with him, even her depravity and hunger. They would find a way to comfort each other, she promised. Perhaps from their two broken lives she could piece together a semblance of one, she thought.
Buddy understood none of it. He soaked in the warmth of the water and her gentle voice as she explained it all to him, and felt warm and safe. But that was the most his mind could register at one time. He had already forgotten the events of less than a half hour before.
Heavy footsteps clomping up the staircase. A small piece of my attention went to examine them and they awakened me, jolting the rest of me back into the present. The road workers from down the hall were home.
I wiped beads of sweat from my face and threw my drenched covers back and as I came stumbling out of my daydream I felt more sad for once than ashamed. I had seen into the dark recesses of an angel’s despair, a despair Bessie never once hinted at or complained about, though I had always known her life must be a kind of prison. I had glimpsed the kind of secrets walls would whisper if they could. And yet, I suspected her walls would keep their secrets safe for her, out of respect. Bessie was an angel after all. Surely the walls knew that as well.
I still adored Bessie. Perhaps even more than before. In one brief afternoon at home, I'd seen her suffering and love for Buddy in a whole new light, and could never forget it. I could not imagine that God would punish my friend for such a thing. She was so good to Buddy, so patient, so loving. Didn't she deserve something in return? Wasn't it understandable? So what if she’d found some solace, some simple animal release in her private moments with him? Wasn't she entitled to something?
I was torn into a thousand pieces, adoring Bessie and wishing I had been born fifty years sooner, just to have been her lover. I found myself hoping that at some time in her past, Bone had found and made love to her. Yes, perhaps that was how they knew each other, I thought.
I wanted to believe that she had, even just once, known what it is to be worshiped and desired, and felt the same in return. I knew Bone would have been both passionate and gentle. He surely would have made her feel alive. I prayed that he, or someone, anyone besides drooling Buddy had touched her and been touched, marveling in the poetry of shared passion and release, before her youth and beauty were gone for good.
Everything I had been taught in my religious upbringing told me that she was wicked and fallen, if indeed she had found any such pleasures with Buddy. But nothing within me could find a way to agree. From that day on, my mind continued to race downward into the private spaces of that old house. I still pictured her as a younger woman making love to dreams and fantasies in the presence of Buddy. But it only made me feel more akin to her and more affection. Maybe this angel wasn't so far different from me. Maybe we were all slaves somehow to our bodies and inner drives, and yet could still find ways to be as gentle and angelic as she was.
I know it was a long way to travel on so little fuel. Half a century later it is still gutting, peering into the fog of memory and teasing out such adolescent evocations. I was that sinner boy. It was me who connected those scattered dots. What the hell did I know? Of any of it? I saw Buddy grin and swell just a handful of times after that and could only infer meaning from the gentle, appreciative way she looked at him and occasionally, he at her. Maybe nothing had ever happened. Maybe it was all just my own depraved, teenage mind. Fifteen can be a swamp. My fifteen was a freaking Delta bayou.
I adored Aunt Bessie nonetheless, and no longer felt quite so sorry for Buddy. I hoped he knew how lucky he was to be so loved and cared for. It was something I had never yet known.
How could someone so beautiful and caring ever have had to make do with so little for love, I wondered? Good people, wonderful people everywhere, starving for love, praying for some adoring soul like hers to surrender their hearts to. Everywhere I looked, it was the same; lonely, forlorn hearts, emptiness, grief.
Somehow this was the lot Bessie, too, had drawn.
Life made no sense. Only her struggle did.
©David E. Perry. All rights reserved.
When I was fifteen I lived in a boarding house in Mississippi during the summer and worked, seventy and more hours each week …on a catfish farm where I earned just a dollar an hour. The work was honest, if the circumstances surrounding it were not. My mother was dating the fish farm’s married owner. His wife wrote and signed my paychecks every week. He knew I knew. I knew he knew. I was both liability and oddity, a hard worker trying like hell to be worthy of my paycheck rather than the nuisance brat of some fancy piece of tail.
It was complicated.
Wow! What a moving piece.
Soap operas, yeah, so shallow and boring and predictable; but this, "Hot as the devil’s armpit.”, this was layered on so many levels---I'm struck by your insights at age 15. "My fifteen was a freaking Delta bayou.", is a 7-word painting---so much going on in your vulnerable inner and outer world! And God-shame is such a brutal trap...
When I read "I hoped he knew how lucky he was to be so loved and cared for. It was something I had never yet known.", I just had to pause awhile...many thoughts, many feelings...and then this: "How could someone so beautiful and caring ever have had to make do with so little for love, I wondered?"
And I saw those words, maybe, as a mirror you were looking deeply into... everything is packed into that sentence...everything. And even more so, in the photo of the child spinning so fast on the swing...
I feel honored to be your friend, Dave, always.
Thank you for this vulnerable glimpse.