Sitting Up With the Dead: A Storied Journey Through the American South. Pamela Petro
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a little boy in her class called Leon, who is a fantastic storyteller. She said, “He can tell tales, and he tells them with a gift like Mark Twain. He’s fantastic. But what I think is, that he’s lost touch with reality. Now Leon is just lying. And I’ve created a monster. What should I do?”’
When Colonel Rod got to the part about Leon his voice changed. He started tugging on his vowels as if they were made of spandex, stretching out ‘lying’ to sound like ‘li-on’. It occurred to me that a story might have started without my knowledge. I was a little confused until he said he’d advised the teacher to tell Leon the silliest, most outlandish, ‘most lyinist’ story she could think of–‘maybe that will break him out of it.’ Then I knew I was right.
Colonel Rod held my eyes to his, almost without blinking; my peripheral vision caught a ceiling fan spinning directly above his head, like a whirligig hat. He was saying that the teacher could see Leon was getting worse. So she told him a tall tale about being attacked by an Alaskan bear on the way to school, on the corner of Alligator Avenue and Center Street. A little black-and-white dog had killed the bear and saved her.
‘Leon,’ Colonel Rod concluded, ‘just sat there goggle-eyed. Big-eyed as a bug. You got to believe me. And the teacher looked over and said, “Now Leon, do you believe that story?”
And Leon said, “Yes ma’am. That’s my dog.”’
Colonel Rod was on a storytelling jag. He’d told me he’d numbered his stories one through twenty-one as a fail-safe mnemonic for when he’s performing. ‘OK,’ I said, ‘Quick: what’s number seventeen?’
‘A cracker in a bus station!’ he roared, and he was off.
After dinner – a healthy, low-fat meal fixed by his wife Brenda – Colonel Rod had led me through a shoulder-sized gap in the electric cattle fence surrounding his house to a replica of an old Florida Keys fishing shack that he’d built out back. It looked like the retreat of a degenerate boy scout: kerosene lamps for atmosphere, even though it was wired for electricity; pots and pans hanging from the ceiling; two sets of bunk beds; photographs of people who had caught big fish; a makeshift bar stocked with gin and bourbon; old Southern state flags emblazoned with the stars and bars of the Confederacy (all since replaced as politically incorrect, except that of South Carolina, which is the subject of a bitter debate).
A violent thunderstorm had trapped us in the shack and Brenda in the house with our cappuccinos. ‘This,’ Colonel Rod had said, beaming, ‘is where friends of mine come and turn the monkey loose. Y’know, guys getting together to get drunk and fart.’
As the storm worked itself into a full gale so did Colonel Rod. I could feel him shrewdly calculating audience response – in this case, a captive audience of just one – judging if he had succeeded in his two favorite, occasionally incompatible, aims: to startle and to please. As I betrayed only pleasure (politeness is like a hormonal imbalance with me – I can’t help it), he got a little reckless. Not only did he slip into what he called his ‘cussin’ stories’, but others that took tired, if belligerent, pot-shots at women, gays, and a variety of other minorities. On cops: ‘There are no policemen left. Only social workers.’ On blacks: why there should be highway signs for exiting white drivers in parts of Miami that read, ‘Beware: Ghetto ahead.’ But then he added, ‘I guess the same goes for them, too. Man, I wouldn’t want to be a black guy made a wrong turn in South Boston.’
Colonel Rod was a storyteller caught between personae – Florida cracker or worldly businessman? – in the presence of a fastidiously indulgent listener who refused to offer directional signals. He veered all over the place, from cracker jokes to a troubling tale inspired by a Flannery O’Connor short story, and I liked him for having humility enough to lay bare the lifeline between storyteller and audience – or perhaps he just couldn’t help himself. During a long tale about a pulpwood truck driver and a psychiatrist, I decided that I would trust Colonel Rod with my life, but never my feelings.
After an hour and a half the storm grew worse, and I got too tired to consider anything but the sounds coming out of his mouth.
It was the Depression. Everybody was broke all over the whole country. And in Atlanta, Georgia, there were two city slickers up there, worked downtown, lived in an apartment downtown, had never been anywhere except downtown. All they knew was asphalt and concrete. Well, when the Depression slammed in here, both of them lost their jobs. So they decided – they wasn’t too smart, but they was good old boys – they decided they was gonna pool their money, come to Florida and go farming. Now I wouldn’t think that was too smart, but they was industrious. So they bought an old black Model A truck, and here they come south with this Model A truck, looking like the Beverly Hillbillies.
They was comin’ down Highway 27, which was a gravel road in them days, and they got just south of Ocala, and they seen a sign nailed to a live oak tree, and the sign said, ‘Plough Mule For Sale.’ Old Slem was driving the truck, and he said to his partner Clem, ‘Look at that, Clem! I forgot about that! We got to have us a plough mule.’ Said, ‘We can’t farm without a mule. Pull in there, we’ll see what that guy wants for it.’
So they pulled in this farmyard, and the guy was sittin’ there. He said, ‘Get on out, boys, get on down, come on in.’ And he said, ‘Sir, sir, we saw your sign back there says you got a plough mule for sale.’
Farmer said, ‘That’s right, and he’s a good ‘un too, son.’ Clem said, ‘Well, we want to buy a mule for farming. We’re from Atlanta.’ So the farmer heard opportunity knocking right away, see. He recognized these guys being city slickers. They said, ‘What do you want for that mule, sir?’ Farmer said, ‘I want two hundred dollars for it.’
TWO HUNDRED DOLLARS? They couldn’t believe it. Their eyes was bulging. ‘We just come from Atlanta wantin’ to be farmers. But two hundred dollars? We can’t afford that.’ Now I’m going to give you a little history here. During the depression, you could buy a ridin’ horse for five or ten dollars, but a trained, young pack mule was running a hundred seventy-five, two hundred dollars. Worked just like a tractor. Anyway, Clem said, ‘No, we just quit our jobs, we can’t afford that.’ Farmer said, ‘Well, how much money you boys got between you then?’ They said, ‘We ain’t got but twenty-five dollars.’
Well, the farmer said, ‘Boys’ – he had been peddling them old central Florida watermelons from his watermelon patch, and he had two of them left over, on a wagon over there where he’d been sellin’ em, and he was just fixin’ to bust ’em up because they was rotten, you know, and throw em over the fence and feed em to his cows – he said, ‘Boys, see them two green things over there on that wagon?’ They said, ‘Yessir.’ He said, ‘Do you know what they are?’ They said, ‘No sir, we don’t.’ He said, ‘Boys, you just happen to be looking at two of the finest mule eggs in the state of Florida, right there.’ They said, ‘Mule eggs? Never heard of such a thing.’
The storm was directly overhead at this point and the shack was shaking. Thunder followed lightning before I could start to count the seconds. About the time Colonel Rod pronounced the words ‘mule eggs,’ a lightning bolt lit up the window behind him, stinging my eyes with an instant image of cross-hatched tree branches across a background of seared white shards. I thought incongruously of the German Expressionists, and felt anxious.
The farmer said, ‘You’re lookin’ at two of the finest mule eggs in Florida. Look, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’ll let you have one of them mule eggs for five dollars.’ He said, ‘I’ll tell you what else I’m going to do. I’ll get some straw out of the barn, and I’ll make you a nest up the back of your truck. You put that mule egg in there, you throw a blanket or a jacket over it, keep it warm, and in about two weeks it’ll hatch out, and you’ll have yourselves your very own baby mule. It’ll be gentle as a housecat, and you’ll have a fine mule there.’
‘Boy, luck is on our side,’ said Clem and Slem. So he got the straw, and he made this big old nest, and they put that