“But Poppa said, ‘Now, baby girl, that’s just not so. You’re gonna be the most beautiful bride in the entire state of Alabama.’
“Poppa had this great big handlebar moustache … then he looked at us and he said, ‘Isn’t that right, children?’… and we all put in our two cents’ worth to make her feel better and to get her to shut up. All of us except Buddy, that is, who just sat there and giggled. Idgie was his pet, so anything she did was all right with him.
“So anyway, Leona was finishing her cobbler, and just when we thought she was all calmed down, she screamed so loud that Sipsey, the colored woman, dropped something in the kitchen. ‘Oh Poppa,’ Leona said, ‘what’s gonna happen if one of us dies?’
“… Well, it was a thought, wasn’t it?
“We all looked at Momma, who just put her fork down on the table. ‘Now, children, I’m sure your sister will make that one small concession and wear a proper dress if and when that time ever comes. After all, she’s stubborn, but she’s not unreasonable.’
“Then, a couple of weeks later, I heard Momma tell Ida Simms, the seamstress for the wedding, that she was gonna need a green velvet suit with a bow tie, for Idgie.
“Ida looked up at Momma kinda funny and said, ‘A suit?’ … And Momma said, ‘Oh I know, Ida, I know. I tried my best to get her to wear something a little more weddinglike, but that child has a mind of her own.’
“And she did, even at that age. I think she wanted to be like Buddy, myself … oh, those two were a mess!” The old lady laughed.
“One time, they had this raccoon named Cookie, and I used to spend hours watching him try to wash a cracker. They’d put a little pan of water out in the backyard, and then they’d give him a soda cracker, and he’d wash cracker after cracker, and never could figure out what happened to it when it would disappear. Each time, he’d look at his little empty hands and be so surprised. Never did figure out where his cracker was going. He spent a good part of his life washing crackers. He’d wash cookies, too, but that wasn’t as funny … he washed an ice cream cone once …
“Oh, I better quit thinking about that raccoon or they’re gonna think I’m as crazy as Mrs. Philbeam, down the hall. Bless her heart, she thinks she’s on the Love Boat, headed for Alaska. A lot of these poor souls out here don’t even know who they are.”
Evelyn’s husband, Ed, came to the door of the lounge and motioned. Evelyn wadded up her candy wrappers and put them in her purse and got up.
“Excuse me, that was my husband. I think he’s ready to go.”
Mrs. Threadgoode looked up, surprised, and she said, “Oh? Do you hafto?”
Evelyn said, “Yes, I think I better. He’s ready to leave.”
“Well, I’ve enjoyed talking to you … what’s your name, honey?”
“Evelyn.”
“Well, you come back and see me, y’hear? I’ve enjoyed talk-in’ to you … bye-bye,” she called after Evelyn, and waited for another visitor.
OCTOBER 15, 1929
Ownership of Meteorite Questioned
Mrs. Vesta Adcock and her son, Earl Jr., have claimed that they are the rightful owner of the meteorite because she said that the Otises rented the house that the meteorite hit from her, and so it is her house and her meteorite.
Mrs. Biddie Louise Otis was questioned on the matter and it is her contention that the meteorite is hers because it was her radio that it hit. Her husband, Roy, who is a brakeman for the Southern Railroad, was working late shift and was not home at the time, but said it was not unusual because in 1833, 10,000 meteors fell in one night and that this was just one, and nothing to make a fuss about.
Biddie said she thought she’d keep it as a souvenir, anyhow.
By the way, is it just my imagination or are times getting harder these days? My other half says that five new hobos showed up at the cafe last week, looking for something to eat.
… Dot Weems …
OCTOBER 15, 1929
Five men sat huddled around a low-burning fire, orange and black shadows dancing on their faces as they drank weak coffee out of tin cans: Jim Smokey Phillips, Elmo Inky Williams, BoWeevil Jake, Crackshot Sackett, and Chattanooga Red Barker—five of the estimated two hundred thousand men and boys roaming the countryside that year.
Smokey Phillips looked up but said nothing; and the rest of them said the same. They were tired and weary that night, because that cold nip in the night air meant the start of another raw, heartless winter, and Smokey knew he would have to be starting south soon, with the great flocks of geese, just as he had done for so many years now.
He was born on a frosty morning, back up in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. His daddy, a knobby-legged man, a second-generation moonshiner who had fallen in love with his own product, made the fatal mistake of marrying a “good woman,” a plain country girl whose life revolved around the Pine Grove Free Will Baptist Church.
Most of Smokey’s childhood had been spent sitting on hard wooden benches for hours, with his little sister, Bernice, at all-day singings and foot washings.
In the regular church services, his mother had been one of the women who would occasionally stand up and start babbling, out of her head, in an unknown tongue.
Eventually, as she became more and more filled with the Spirit, his father became less so and stopped going to church altogether. He told his children, “I believe in God, but I don’t think you have to go crazy to prove it.”
Then, one spring when Smokey was eight, things got worse. His mother said that the Lord had told her that her husband was evil and devil-possessed, and she turned him in to the revenue agents.
Smokey remembered the day they brought his daddy down the path from the still with a gun at his back. As he passed by his wife, he looked at her, dumbfounded, and said, “Woman, don’t you know what you’ve done? You’ve done took the bread right out of your own mouth.”
It was the last Smokey ever saw of him.
After his father left, his mother really went off the deep end and got mixed up with a bunch of backwoods Holy Roller snake handlers. One night, after an hour of ranting and beating the Bible, the red-faced, wild-haired preacher got his barefoot congregation all excited. They were all chanting and stomping their feet when suddenly he reached into a potato sack and pulled out two huge rattlesnakes and started waving them around in the air; lost in the Spirit.
Smokey froze in his seat and squeezed his sister’s hand. The preacher was dancing around, calling out for believers to take up the serpent and cleanse their souls in the faith of Abraham when his mother ran up, grabbed one of the snakes away from him, and looked it right in the face. She began babbling in the unknown tongue, the whole time staring into the snake’s yellow eyes. Everybody in the room began to sway and moan. As she started to walk around the room with it, people began falling down on the floor, jerking and screaming and rolling around under the pews and up and down the aisles. The place was in a frenzy, while she babbled on … “HOSSA … HELAMNA … HESSAMIA …”
Before he knew what was happening, his little sister, Bernice, broke away from him, and ran up to her mother and pulled her by the hem of her dress.
“Momma, don’t …!”
Still wild-eyed and in a trance, she glanced down at her child for one split second, and in that second the rattler lunged and struck the woman in the side of her face. She looked back at the snake, stunned, and he struck again, fast and hard this time, striking her in the neck, the fangs puncturing her jugular vein. She dropped the angry serpent with a thud, and it crawled contemptuously away down the aisle.