Southern Moments

We never made it to California. We blamed it on the flat tire. The good thing about the flat tire was its timing. Three incredibly good-looking boys happened to be passing by when it blew and stopped to help us. They fell madly in love with us, married us in elaborate wedding ceremonies and gave us beautiful babies, who grew up to be as rich and famous as their handsome fathers, who were really movie stars in disguise. Even though we spent weeks and weeks driving the Studebaker down Route 66, we never made it to California.
            There were other reasons that we didn't get to California, of course, besides the flat tire. I guess the main obstacle was -- well, we didn't know how to drive. We could steer if we sat on a pillow, but we couldn't reach the pedals. Then, too, there was the minor problem of a Studebaker with no tires at all, hoisted onto concrete blocks in the Twins' back yard. Route 66 didn't follow the circular driveway around the Twins' house and sometimes their mama parked her car in the wrong place which messed up our storyline. These facts were mere technical difficulties, easily overcome by a little ingenuity.
            The smell of honeysuckle wafted through lazy afternoons as the Twins and I traveled Route 66, falling in love with the men of our dreams. And, oh, the men we met!  One afternoon, Troy Donahue, Edd Byrnes and Frankie Avalon fixed a flat and fell in love with us and an hour later, Tim Considine, Fabian and Moondoggie proposed marriage.
            I was four when we moved to the house on the hill, directly across from the Twins. Ours was the first house on the right after you turned off the highway at Mr. Moore's store and crossed the railroad tracks. A few houses were scattered along the other side of the road between the tracks and the Twins; old people lived in them. We didn't really live on Route 66, just a narrow blacktop which passed our houses to become a web of dirt roads eventually dwindling into farm driveways. Few cars traveled our road and dogs sunned peacefully on the hot pavement, arrogantly ambling toward the ditch whenever a car dared to interrupt their naps.
            Our world was a quarter-mile long and walking distance wide. There were a few abandoned gravesites in my back yard at the entrance to our woods. Honeysuckle and blackberries covered this graveyard; its sole monument worthy of our attention -- a large concrete slab at the base of a small headstone. A deep gap protruded down into the earth at the side of the concrete, begging the question of whether someone were trying to get out. We used that gap as a prop for ghost stories when my little brother tried to horn in on our back-yard campouts. The cemetery was a natural playground and we knew it intimately. The woods surrounding the neighborhood houses halted our wanderings as we rarely ventured past them into the stark heat of open fields.
Our only fears were poison oak and the occasional snake sliding through brambles -- not so much for their own sakes, but for the lectures we'd have to listen to later if we weren't careful. We didn't know about property lines. The entire neighborhood was ours and we roamed at will wherever we pleased, being careful to sidestep Mrs. Fleming's pansies or leave enough blackberries for Miss Savannah to make a cobbler. We'd stop by Mrs. Poss' house on our jaunts to Mr. Moore's store to see if she needed a loaf of bread before her son made it back on Saturday to take her grocery shopping. Mrs. Fleming taught us to make potholders and we helped her plant flowers; she would stop whatever she was doing to sit in the swing and listen to our adventures. We could sit in Mrs. Poss' swing if we helped her shell butterbeans, our compensation being the taste of sun-warmed sweetness as we slipped the ones we dropped into our mouths. We by-passed the Pig Man's house, except on Halloween, and steered clear of Charlie Dean when he started acting goofy. We roamed the countryside safely, with dolls instead of beepers, and knew every secret spot within walking distance.
The neighborhood grew slowly, one house at a time, and other children joined our gang. Unfortunately, they were all boys and quickly assumed the status of brothers, alternately fighting and playing with the feminine minority. Ours was not always an easy alliance -- the Twins and me -- but to the neighborhood boys, we presented a united front, quite the Three Musketettes.
Our respective roles evolved slowly and companionship blurred the edges, but looking back, I see clearly who we were. Susan was the brains of the outfit -- first with everything we considered important in life. She found the best library books and discovered the newest, most handsome movie star to be in love with before we even knew he existed. Susan's true expertise, though, was instigation. Whenever we ended up in trouble, we could trace it back to one of Susan's plans.
Sandra was the peacemaker and mediator. If I argued that one of Susan's plans was crazy, Sandra would step in with a big smile and cajole me into going along with it anyway. When the boys begged us to play ball, we put Sandra in charge of cutting the deal and they never knew what hit them, even as they allowed unlimited strikes.
My job was to get us out of trouble and to be the butt of the Twins' jokes. I'm sure it was Susan's idea to tell me the Alka-Seltzer was a new kind of fizzy;  I know Sandra was the one who convinced me to drink it; and I definitely stood there gasping for water while they doubled over with laughter. Most of the time, though, our partnership worked smoothly. I could usually come up with a logical excuse for the things we did. If there were occasions when I'd hear my mother calling me right as their Daddy started to punish us -- well, such is life.
            When you grow up in the South, some things you take for granted -- grits for breakfast, crazy neighbors, red clay. And kudzu.
Kudzu coats the Southern landscape like blue paints the sky, but we’d be hard put to point you in the direction of a kudzu field if you were to ask. We’ll drive past an abandoned homeplace in an open field and we might notice the dilapidated house and wonder why someone left it to rot, but we won’t see the thick, green vine clambering over the roof and up the chimney. We pay no more attention to kudzu than we do to dogs barking in the night or yellow jackets swarming around a watermelon.
Some things just are.
And so it was with the acre of woods that stood between my back yard and Charlie Dean’s house. It was just there. A bunch of pine trees in a nest of weeds, a snarl of vines smothering the ground before swooping up along the trunks, tendrils reaching for the highest limbs. In the wintertime it was a brown and barren wasteland, but come warm weather, those huge green leaves coated everything in sight with a lush heaviness.
From my back porch, the kudzu patch looked dense and forbidding, impenetrable.
But we knew better.
We knew it was a magic place and we knew its secrets.
The path started at Mr. Harper’s foot. Mr. Rufus J. Harper, Beloved Husband of Maudie Caudell Harper, 1812-1873, lay covered in honeysuckle at the far corner of our yard, but Maudie’s not there. We never knew whatever happened to her, but we suspicioned that she moved off and became a Beloved Wife somewhere else, probably in China where she went to be a missionary to all those starving children that wanted my leftover green beans.
About five steps into the kudzu, the path began to branch and weave among the trees wherever the vines dipped back to touch the ground. The narrow passageways rambled through the woods, circling around and doubling back on themselves like an old-fashioned maze lined with thick brambles instead of neatly-trimmed shrubs. We figured Indians had made those paths in the olden days and accepted them as our natural right without question.
Once you stood inside the patch, you could tell that the vines formed a net of leaves only on the top. Underneath, nothing. You could lift the top layer like a blanket, exposing old roots and bare ground. The leafy blanket would climb the pine trees, but inside, close to the base of the tree, empty space formed a teepee up the tree -- almost like an encased private room and big enough to have a tea party in, should you be so inclined. The trick was finding the door.
Kudzu grows thick, killing everything in its path, even honeysuckle. The main advantage is that a kudzu patch has few briars to catch at your shorts and scratch your legs. The main disadvantage is, well, snakes. So we made Shorty go along with us, just in case.
Shorty was a yard dog that took up with us one day and wouldn’t leave. If we’d’a known he was going to stick around for 15 years, we’d have worked on a better name for him but we figured he’d disappear as quickly as he showed up and it didn’t seem important at the time. I don’t know that Shorty was any great protection against snakes but we thought he was. The real protection probably came from the noise as the neighborhood gang swarmed, stomped and yelled through the kudzu patch.
There is one other thing you should know about kudzu vines -- they are not strong enough for you to play Tarzan with and if you let your little brother try to swing on one, you're going to have to stay at home by yourself while your mama takes him to the hospital and gets his arm set and then he's going to get all the attention for weeks because everybody wants to sign his cast. It’s one of those things you don’t know about until it happens to you.
The Twins and I would stake claim to our kudzu tent as soon as those huge leaves started to come out in the early spring. The boys would gang up on us and try to invade our castle and mess up our stuff. There were a few troublesome times and a lot of name-calling, but for the main part, their armies would fight around us and we'd pay them back by eating Oreos in front of them and not sharing. It was a draw -- we wouldn't tell on them for messing up our playhouse and they couldn't tell us on for not sharing. We never considered going to the adults in situations like this -- after all, we weren't supposed to play in the kudzu anyway.
If you were to take a vote of all the children in my neighborhood back then, there was one thing we'd all agree on about the kudzu patch -- it was the best place to hide and spy on Charlie Dean. See, if that kudzu had edged onto Mrs. Poss' back yard, it wouldn't have been any fun. Who'd take the time to crawl through those vines just to see Mrs. Poss sit in her swing and shell butterbeans?
            I wonder how many times my daddy lectured us about leaving Charlie Dean alone. I never got the feeling he was really worried about Charlie Dean since he always added, "You don't want to cause Miss Lula any problems. She leads a sad life."  It never made much sense to us, but we were raised to believe anything a grownup told us and not to ask questions; some things children didn't need to know.
The Twins and I were content for the most part to play in the safety of our kudzu tent. Once you ventured off the main paths, you quickly became entangled in the vines unless you went under them. The older vines are thick, like wisteria, but the young tendrils are thin and greedy, twisting and clinging in small knots. The greenness on top provided a cover, but if you got on your hands and knees and crawled, you could move through small tunnels, as long as you could find a door later to get out without having to back up the whole way. So when we crawled down to spy on Charlie Dean, the blanket of green covered us, but we could peek through the leaves to see out without being seen. The enticement of spying came naturally. Had we ever been caught, we would have been truly caught because there was no quick escape route. You’d have to crawl all the way back through. There’s no stepping through and over kudzu, only under.
Underneath the vines, knowing you can’t stand up through the snarl, it’s creepy with bugs and rotted limbs and the possibility of wild animals. We never saw any lions or tigers, but the thought was with us as we made our way through the cool, deep shade. The air was thick with the musty scent of decay and dust.
And it was quiet.
Deathly quiet.
As if you were the only person on earth.
The thick undergrowth created a vacuum of sound, except for the metal jangle of Shorty’s nametag as he moved through the tunnels ahead of us. We would shiver with the excitement of secrecy as we approached Charlie Dean’s yard, safe under the thick green mat and hoping like crazy that we could find a door out if he happened to spot us.
Anyway, we were glad the kudzu patch edged onto Charlie Dean's yard because he was the only person in our whole neighborhood worth spying on. He lived in a big old wood house that I'm sure had been painted back when it was built, but by the time I saw it, the only vestige of paint was under the tin roof of the back porch. His yard was solid red clay and Miss Lula was out there every day with a broom, sweeping up any leaves that fell from the huge oak tree.
The door and windows facing the road were always shut tight, giving the house a dank, abandoned look. If a car went down the dirt road, the dust would raise and settle in the air. And stay there. Red clouds hanging in the air. Slowly, oh so slowly, they would drift across the yard to coat the house with a light film.
The back door  stood open in the summertime, leading into darkness and lending a spooky air to the house once the Twins and I discovered Nancy Drew and decided to solve a crime. Not that we ever got up the nerve to get close enough to the porch to see inside, but we were sure that if our neighborhood had any mysterious doings, the dead bodies would be in Charlie Dean’s living room.
Not far from the back porch was a well with a bucket on a rope and on past the well, near the edge of the woods, was a little shingled shed that stank to high heaven. Halfway between Charlie Dean's house and the kudzu patch was the chicken coop.  
Charlie Dean spent Monday through Friday working down at the dairy. We'd see him walking up that way when we waited on the bus early mornings and we'd see him going home late in the day as we played roll-hit-the-bat in the side yard. We'd speak to him, and ask how was Miss Lula doing, and did he have tomatoes yet. But come Friday evening, when we saw Charlie Dean coming, we high-tailed it on out of there.
Because once Charlie Dean left the dairy on Friday evenings, he stayed drunk till Monday lunch.
Now, we didn't exactly know what being drunk meant. We weren't sure what beer was and we’d never heard of liquor and we certainly had no idea that Old Man Tate sold moonshine from his shack out behind the dairy. The Twins' daddy kept beer in their refrigerator but my daddy drank buttermilk. Beer was one of those adult things like steak. Adults drank beer and kids drank Kool-Aid; adults ate steak and kids ate hot dogs. We never wasted time wondering what beer and steak tasted like.
To us kids, getting drunk meant walking down the road sideways like Charlie Dean did. He'd clutch a brown paper sack in one hand and sorta lean halfways over lopsided-like as he walked down the road with one foot in the ditch, preaching and shaking his finger at anything he happened to notice.
Daddy said if we ran into Charlie Dean when he was preaching, we needed to be polite to him just like we would anybody else but try to get away from him as quick as we could and get on home. He was a common enough sight around the neighborhood that nobody paid him much mind. He was generally pretty good about staying down at his house most weekends, but there were enough of his neighborhood rambles that folks would see him weaving his way down the road holding onto that paper sack and nonchalantly say, "Well, Charlie Dean's drunk again," and go on about their business.     
It was late one Friday afternoon that Mama sent me down to Miss Savannah's house to see could Emma Lou come give her some help because we were having company. There were two ways to get to Miss Savannah's house -- the dirt road going down in front of Charlie Dean's house and a path crossing his back yard behind the chicken pen. I knew better than to take the shortcut by the chicken pen, even if the dirt road was longer, because you had to be careful of the poison oak that way and I was barefoot. Besides, there were blackberry bushes down along the dirt road and it was almost time for them to start turning and I thought I might sample me a few on my way if they were ready.
I took a couple of passes on the Tarzan swing (we had tied an old rope into a tree on the bank edging the dirt road after my little brother's stunt with the kudzu vine). I was thinking it was getting on close to time for Mr. Mose to come home and he could take word to Miss Savannah for me and Emma Lou could stop by and tell Mama could she come next time she passed and I wouldn't have to go at all.      
Well, I waited a while and then I got a little bored and since it didn't look like Mr. Mose was going to come home any time soon, I headed on down the road. I made it past Charlie Dean's house just fine. Blackberries covered the rusty fence leading to the cow pond and they were dark red, with one or two that had started to turn black, but when I bit into them, they were still bitter. Besides, some car had come along and covered them with dust. I decided it'd be a couple of days or a rainshower before they'd be worth messing with.        
I spent longer than I meant to down at Miss Savannah's house that evening. Mr. Mose had gotten home early from work and he’d been fishing down at the cow pond. He was coming under the barbed-wire fence right about the time I happened along and I walked on to the house with him -- wishing Mama would let me wear a big straw hat like his. He let me carry his bamboo pole, but he was afraid I'd drag the fish in the dirt, so he toted them himself.
We got to the back porch and he hollered out for Emma Lou to come here and see what I wanted and then we squatted down on the stoop and started skinning the catfish he'd caught. Well, he skinned and I watched. I decided right then and there that skinning catfish was menfolk's work because it was an awful job to get through -- too much blood and guts for my liking and you have to pull like the dickens to get that skin off.  
When I left Miss Savannah's house, it was getting on toward dark. The sun was setting behind the kudzu patch and the heavy scent of honeysuckle lay over the road, that sweet syrupy smell that chokes the day’s heat and flavors the breeze of a Southern evening. My mind was on fried catfish and hushpuppies and I wasn't even thinking about Charlie Dean until I got to his yard and, Lord love a duck, there he was, standing in the middle of the road, preaching to his mailbox.       
I'd seen him preach to our mailbox plenty of times. Heck, he'd saved just about every mailbox on our road at one time or another. But it caught me offguard to see him there and know that I had to get around him somehow and still be polite        
Now, like I said, during the week Charlie Dean was a quiet man and a sober Charlie Dean was fine and wouldn't hurt a fly. He was part of our landscape, like the kudzu patch -- safe as long as you weren’t trapped beneath the vines.
But this day, Charlie Dean was preaching and I was caught with him right smack dab between me and the house. And I didn’t have a door.
I kept on going, though -- you know, hoping I could pass behind him and he wouldn't see me or that Superman would happen by and fly me on over to home. He was wagging his finger at the mailbox and yelling verses at the top of his voice.
He turned and stopped, towering over me.
Then, he boomed "Have you been saved?" 
I squeaked out "not yet" and looked down at the ground to kick some gravel and see could I find me a hole to climb down into.
All I'd meant was that Superman hadn't shown up yet to rescue me, but I guess he thought I didn't know who Jesus was because that got him started yelling at me good.      
I was enthralled.
I'd never seen him go to church on Sundays with Miss Lula and one of the biggest unanswered questions of my childhood was how a man who never went to church could know so much scripture.
I had spent many sweltering afternoons peeping through the kudzu and watching from a safe distance while Charlie Dean stood in his backyard preaching to the chickens. Every now and then, Shorty would wander down to join the congregation and he'd plop down in front of Charlie Dean and sit there staring up at him without moving a muscle. Charlie Dean would shoo Shorty off if he happened to notice him, which was fair enough because Shorty was an egg-sucker and was just biding his time, waiting for a chance to sneak into the chicken pen. Most of the time, though, Charlie Dean didn't care who or what he preached to. And the chickens never seemed to care if he preached to them so I always reckoned it was a fair swap.      
But now, as evening shadows crept across his face, I had a fifty-yard-line ticket and I was having my own special adventure. I should have been scared to death. And maybe I did get a bit jittery but I was too excited to notice. All I could think was, please, Lord, let me remember what he says so the Twins’ll believe I really got this close to Charlie Dean when he was drunk.
I gradually inched my way around on the yard behind the mailbox and after a bit, he quit looking at me and focussed on the mailbox again. I was writing down every word in my mind, so I could tell it back to the gang. I heard my mama calling me for the third time and knew I'd better get home quick because three yells was her limit. She was my door. Minding your mama is the best escape route in the world. So I took my chance and skee-dattled on out of there, past Charlie Dean’s shaking finger and up the dirt road toward the safety of my yard.    
Daddy told Mama not to let me go down to Miss Savannah's again by myself and I never did. I was the neighborhood hero for two whole days until my older brother finally conquered the King's Throne in the cemetery, which was naturally more important than being preached to by Charlie Dean, but that’s another story.
Life went back to normal. The Twins and I picked blackberries along the dirt road and rambled through the woods. We had tea parties in our secret tent while the boys fought Evil Doers around us. We’d watch Shorty plop down next to the chicken pen during preaching time and Charlie Dean receded into the landscape of a red clay yard that bordered onto the kudzu patch.
When we weren't driving to California or playing under kudzu tents, we rambled through the woods. Southern woods are mostly pines which grow in tight bunches and bottom limbs tend to disappear as the trees grow old together. This makes it hard to find a tree with limbs low enough to get a grip on and use to pull yourself up onto a branch. Once we graduated from the low-hanging magnolia in the Twins' front yard and started the search for better climbing trees, our future looked dim.
A good climbing tree's hard to come by. Oh, we had  lots of trees but a climbing tree is a peculiar thing -- it's got to fit. Not just any old tree you happen to have standing in your yard will do.
To be a good climbing tree, it's got to be some distance from the house because you don't want grownups yelling at you in front of all your friends not to go too high or you'll fall and break your neck. It's got to be close enough to hear when supper's called, but far enough that you can't hear when it's time to mow the grass.
        To be a good climbing tree, it's got to be outside the smaller children's boundaries. It won't do you any good to climb a tree if your little brother can stand at the bottom and bother you to death. Half the point of having a climbing tree is to get away from him in the first place.
 When you settle on a tree, it takes a while to break it in because you  have to get rid of all the little twigs that will only scratch your face and arms. Then, you've got to sit on the same branch enough times to even out the bark so it won't prick you. It doesn't hurt if you scrape off the loose bark while you sit. In fact, if you're really mad, every piece of bark you pinch can be your brother's nose and the tree won't tell your daddy if you say "durn." It may take an entire childhood to get the rough edges of a limb smoothed out correctly, but that's what makes a good climbing tree. You want it comfortable.
Like I said, a climbing tree's got to fit and it's a complicated business to find a good climbing tree. Naturally when we found one, it became the Tree.
So the day we saw the yellow flag on the Tree, we called a meeting. It didn't matter that we weren't speaking to Mack Carson or that the older boys were in the middle of  a baseball game. It didn't matter that the younger kids were too little to understand the problem or that the Twins and I were extremely busy. Fear brought us together.
There was a yellow flag on the Tree.
None of us put it there.
Somebody had been to the Tree and if it was a grownup, it couldn't be good.
            Calling a meeting in the 50's in a small Southern neighborhood wasn't the organizational phenomenon it became in the business world of the 80's. There were no  hors d'oeuvres unless you count a half a piece of Juicy Fruit and a fireball with the red already sucked off. There were no conference calls unless you count yelling underneath Mack Carson's window up to him what was going on because he was being punished and couldn't come outside. There was no memo to schedule the meeting -- we just sort of hollered for everybody to come here and see what we found. There was certainly no chairman to head the discussion because the Tree was off limits to the person who first saw the yellow flag and it took a while to convince his sister not to tell on him for being there in the first place.
            Billy was supposed to be playing on the swingset and he wasn't allowed to cross the ditch where the honeysuckle started unless one of us older kids was with him. If he got near the honeysuckle, his mama promised to tan his hide and he was pretty sure she meant it. In case you don't know about honeysuckle, yeah, it smells good and you can suck the juice out, but the important thing to know about honeysuckle is that snakes love it.
            We had forged a secret path through the honeysuckle covering the ruined graveyard and on down into the woods by the simple expedient of always jumping over the narrowest graves and landing in the same place. We used this path without a problem -- being extremely careful, you know, not to step on anybody. Billy wasn't allowed down in the woods by himself because he was one of those people who can get hurt standing still. His mama said if there was a snake in the honeysuckle who was going to get anybody, it was going to be Billy because the Lord only knew he was just an accident waiting to happen.
            But on that day, as Billy got the swing pumping so high it was rocking the swingset and going to tip over and he was going to get in trouble when his daddy got home and had to fix it again, he kept seeing something bright yellow down by the Tree and he couldn't figure out what it was. He glanced back to the house and climbed up on top of the swingset, but he still couldn't make it out. So he did the only thing left to him -- he snuck off down there. He must have jumped over the half-opened grave and run like the dickens to grab a yellow flag without his mama catching him. He brought the yellow flag to the Twins and me and said he’d found it on the Tree and there were billions more down in the woods.
            We were in the middle of making witches' brew in the driveway, but we didn't  make him eat any because we had promised his mama that we wouldn't poison him any more. In case you don't already have a good recipe for witches' brew, the Southern version is:  you mix up some sand, red clay, whatever leaves and berries you can find, water and sticks and top it with crumbled pine needles. Then you convince somebody younger and dumber than you to eat it.
Susan took the flag from his hand and gave Billy a serious look. “I double-dog dare you to show us billions of these flags.”
I thought he’d back down on a double-dog dare, but he kept on arguing, so we followed him to the edge of the woods and, sure enough, little yellow flags covered our woods. We watched them fluttering in the breeze all the way down to the Pig Man's house.
            So we girls, with Billy tagging along behind, crossed the street to where the boys were playing a game of roll-hit-the-bat because they couldn't get up enough people for a real game. For a real game, they needed us girls and we were mad at them because they stood by laughing when Mack Carson bent my hula hoop. We held the meeting under Mack Carson's window.
            The bigger boys didn't care about the flags because it was just an old tree and nothing special. We understood they were tall enough to have moved on to worthier trees and begged them to help us, but the Twins’ big brother, Kim, was already on base and they went back to their game. So the Twins and I were pretty much on our own. The younger kids weren't supposed to go down to the Tree and being little, we scorned their help. We did have a captive audience in Mack Carson who was hanging out his bedroom window, but we didn't count him either since he couldn't leave his room.
            First, we decided to find out what those flags meant and for that, we needed a grownup. Now we knew, in the way children do, that the grownups were better off not knowing that we ever actually climbed the Tree. Oh, they knew we played down in the woods, but some things, grownups don't need to know and they start lecturing you whenever certain subjects come up -- tree-climbing, crossing the pasture when you know that bull's mean, spying on Charlie Dean when he's preaching to the chickens and throwing pine cones at pigs being particularly notable for lectures. So we couldn't ask our parents.
            I thought of Mrs. Fleming. Mack Carson yelled out the window, "She won't know. She's too old to know stuff like that." 
He was right.
Mrs. Fleming was so old that even her son was a grownup and old himself. But, using the logic which would bring me some degree of notoriety in later life, I yelled back up, "Yeah, but she knows how to grow pansies." 
So I went off to get an answer from Mrs. Fleming. This took some time because when you visit old folks, you have to spend a while being polite before you can move on to what's really on your mind. You have to ask them how they're doing and what do they hear from their son and have they finished making that apron yet. I finally got around to the point and she said, "Well, honey, you don't need to be playing down in those woods because they're pulpwooding down there. Lord-a-goodness, why those men won't pay you any mind and if a tree were to fall on you, nobody would ever know what happened to you. That yellow flag marks a tree they're going to cut down."  I could feel the fear in my stomach and I quickly excused myself and went out to report to the gang.
            I had taken so long being polite that when I came back outside, everybody had disappeared on me. It's a real disappointment when you're bursting with important information and your audience has gone home for lunch. By the time we finished eating, the little kids had to take a nap and the big boys said they didn't care what happened to the Tree.
But I did.
            I stood on the precipice of womanhood without knowing it. Every young girl faces a moment when the menfolk don't care and she's on her own. So she just "does."  She reaches down in the pit of her soul, gathers up her fears until they form a hard ball deep inside her stomach and marches forward to face the enemy. Once you've got the knack of it, you can pretty much do anything in life when you absolutely have to, but it never gets easier.
With Mrs. Fleming's warning in mind, we came up with a plan. Well, Susan came up with the plan. Sandra talked me into it.
We followed the path through the cemetery and held our discussion in the shade of the Tree. We could see a huge truck parked behind the Pig Man's house and we heard the low whine of a chainsaw. A man with huge shoulders and tremendous arms was cutting stray branches off a tree as two men loaded the truck.
Susan looked at me and said, "You're going to have to go down there and ask that man not to cut down our tree."
The fear in my stomach became a baseball and I said, "Why do I have to do it? Look how big he is. He's not going to listen to me. Why don't you do it?"
Sandra spoke up, "You talk to grown-ups better than we do."  She smiled. "He won't pay any attention to us. Do you think my daddy would have listened to us that time he caught us with his magazines? If you hadn't been there to talk him out of it, we'd’ve missed Walt Disney for sure, and probably had to stay in our room for a week. You do better with grown-ups and you can make the big lumber guy stop."
I looked towards the Big Lumber Guy and suggested, "Why don't we all go? Three is better than one. Y'all need to go with me."
Susan looked at the ground and shook her head. "Remember what Mrs. Fleming said. If a tree falls on you and kills you, nobody'll ever know."
Sandra smiled as she added, "Yeah, you don't want your mama not knowing where you are. Somebody needs to watch out for you. We'll squat down here in the honeysuckle and keep a lookout. Then if you get killed, we'll go tell your mama."
I was being had. I knew it right then and there. They were scared to go talk to the Big Lumber Guy. I was, too, but I wasn't about to let the Twins know it. I searched for a way to back out without looking bad. "But I'm not supposed to talk to strangers. What if those men know my daddy and tell him I was talking to strangers?"
Sandra was a master of her craft. "The rule is that you can't talk to strangers when you're by yourself. You're not by yourself. We'll be right up here in the bushes, so it's okay. Go on."  She flashed her smile as she gave me a slight push down toward the Pig Man’s house.
I took a minute to think it all out. I figured I was pretty much dead meat. The older boys didn't care. The little kids were totally useless. The Twins were not going to go with me. If my daddy found out I went near those men, I’d lose all my privileges for the rest of my life. The Big Lumber Guy wasn't going to listen to a word I said. Nobody was going to do anything. I was going to lose my Tree.
I made the Twins cross their hearts to stand guard and they crouched down into the honeysuckle as I looked over my shoulder toward my warm and inviting house.
I felt the baseball in my stomach grow into a basketball.
I sucked in my gut, took a deep breath and headed down the path toward the Pig Man's house. I could hear the chainsaw going, but the Big Lumber Guy was behind an old pile of uprooted stumps and I couldn't see him until I was almost up on him.
            He was big -- not as tall as the Pig Man, but big. His face and hair and overalls were covered in sweat and pine needles. I needed for him to turn off his saw so he could hear me and the eyes in the back of my head knew the men loading the truck were watching me. I prayed none of them knew my daddy. I stopped short of the range of flying bark, waiting for him to see me.
The Big Lumber Guy turned off his saw when he noticed me and I remember wishing his eyes would smile. That's always a good sign when you're dealing with adults. I talked fast and I talked loud. I thought I was carefully explaining to him how important the Tree was to me. I wanted most of all to tell him that the Tree was the only place in the world where I could be alone, but I never knew what I said. The Twins were too far away to hear the words and afterward, I couldn't remember. I know I said it loud, whatever it was, because I figured if he listened to a chainsaw all day, he was probably hard of hearing. He towered over me. He didn't laugh and I wasn't sure he was even listening, but he stood still while I talked and his head cocked once toward the tree I was pointing to. When I finished, he grunted, spit a wad of tobacco and said, "Well, I ain't making no promises" and cranked that chainsaw back up.
It's been 35 years since my family moved to another house. By the time we left the house on the hill, I had picked up an interest in local boys instead of movie stars and I never got around to finding a good climbing tree at the new house. Daddy planted a magnolia in the yard and nowadays my grandchildren claim its low-hanging limbs as their own. They're very young and we adults sit on the porch and yell at them not to go too high or they'll fall and break their necks.
In the manner of country communities, I've heard through the years of the various comings and goings in the old neighborhood. Most of the parents stayed put and the kids left, only to come back. Some left again, but some stayed and live there still.
Over time, someone painted Mrs. Fleming’s house blue. Her swing disappeared and nobody told the new people they were supposed to plant pansies in the cracked urns on the front porch. I guess nobody remembers Mrs. Fleming much anymore except me, every fall when I see those bright yellow pansies with purple faces.
            Somebody built a house right on top of the old baseball field and the dirt road we used as a short cut to Ronnie Simpson's house is blocked off. Mrs. Maxwell's cows disappeared and her grandson turned the barn into a garage. You can still see the pussy willow tree my mama planted seven years before it finally bloomed, the spring we moved to the new place.
            I went back last week. I pulled off onto the old dirt road and sat there a while before deciding to get out and visit some of my old places. Charlie Dean's house was abandoned by everything except the kudzu and the blackberries down near the cow pond were green. I wasn't sure what drew me. The old cemetery was still there, smothered by honeysuckle but our path was grown over. Erosion finally conquered the spooky half-opened grave and I could step across it rather than jump. The goosebumps were only in my memory. Once through the cemetery, our play area was fenced and the woods were replanted with houses.
            The Tree is still there. It's grown in the way of trees and I could not have pulled myself up on its bottom limb if I'd wanted to. There is no trace of the Pig Man's shack or his pigs.
            Looking up into the Tree, I noticed a weathered plank of wood, hanging by a nail on a low limb. Someone had come after me and made themselves a bench on my branch. I pictured them secretly hauling their daddy's hammer up there and creating a comfortable place to sit and think about all the problems of their ten-year-old world.
            Standing underneath the Tree, remembering the young girl who had stood in the same spot gathering courage to confront the Big Lumber Guy -- standing there, looking at some other child's forgotten tree bench, I smiled, slowly shaking my head as I turned to walk back to my real life. I took one last glance over my shoulder at the rotting board hanging by one nail from a limb and said to myself, "Okay, now, Susan, if you were so smart, howcome you never thought of that?"