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Dear Luther,

My mistake; I read Tompkins for Hopkins. Although having poor Samuel “fixed” would, I suspect, have little effect on Emily’s fecundity. Making a steer out of him won’t do anything about the horns. She was that way even when we were children; had a most unseemly curiosity and could not sit still. Grandma B. always said that Emily’s mom had watched the boar hog turned in while she was carrying and that the little girl would always be “scratching an itch” because of it. I always wondered what in h**l she was talking about until I met Lem, may he rest in peace, and though we were never blessed with any little ones, well…. never mind. I don’t want to get on that train today. Suffice it to say that, if Samuel were half the man my Lem was, all those encyclopedia salesmen would have precious little reason to get off the highway and make a stop at the Hopkins’ farm. Anyway, sorry for the confusion; you must have wondered what I was talking about, Samuel being a deacon and all.

This year I’m sure that the Nutty Buddy Miles Ice Cream pie will win at the fair. First prize this year is $20 and honorary (which I assume means free) admission to the Sneed family reunion. I’ve never been, for apparent reasons, but I hear that it’s better than the circus, since they say that, in the usual case, Sneed women don’t need to change their last name when they marry, if you catch my drift. This year there are two divisions in the three-legged race; one-man and two-man. Sounds like fun, doesn’t it?

Must get the pie out of the oven; love to C., A., and all those other ones.

Sis

P.S. That cat of yours showed up at my screen door last night, mewling like the dickens. How it finds its way half way across the county to bother me is a dubious miracle and no blessing. However, I fed it, scratched it between the ears and let it back out. Couldn’t sleep for sneezing, but no mind. When you see it again, give it a little kick for me (ha-ha). No sign of the “baster” yet. Honestly, Luther, the things you say. Bye again.

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Dear L’il Alex,

Well, Luther says that I should stop “fueling your fire” with stories about his youth; it’s my opinion that both of you have misapprehended my intentions; not the the first time that they have been so mistreated. I intended that you “grok” (You have read that book?!) only that your Dad was once the agonized pubescent that you are now, and that, if and when you used any of the info I’d passed on, he would be reminded of the same fact. The parent-child relationship should be a chivalrous playing field, not a bare-knuckled battleground of warring egos. I speak not from personal experience here, but rather from fond theory and years of public school indenturetude (ha-ha).

Remember that your Dad is plenty worried about things down at the plant; he doesn’t need any young buck, seed of his loins though you are, reminding him that the grass is always greener in tomorrow’s pasture; go easy on the “old geezer”. (Ha-ha, again.) The first lesson of true adulthood is forbearance; the second, of course, is finding an auto mechanic who knows a U-joint from his own. At any rate, I intend to keep “fueling” you with our families’ histories; please use them as bricks to build a wall of understanding; they’re not meant to be chucked at others, like Ignatz and Krazy-Kat used to do, before bosoms and bulges became de rigeur for children’s entertainment. But I don’t want to get on that train today.

In your Dad’s last missive, each one as precious, and more rare, than a paid day off at the factory, he alluded to my dear Lemuel’s (may he rest…) demise. I don’t know if he’s ever told you the whole story, and even if he has, I’m sure that some details in my version will be different, so humor your old Aunt Sis and read on. It probably won’t do me any good to rehash it for the millionth time, but you never know: old stories sometimes hold fresh chestnuts.

Late October, 1974; your mom was critically gravid with you, and all of our hearts were equally heavy with the recent turmoil that the Republican’s had put us through. It had been an unduly wet fall and the farmers here abouts were busting their respective humps to get the corn in before winter hit with a vengeance. We “agricolae” were just feeling the first flushes of the foreign trade prosperity brought about by that bastard Nixon’s detente; nonetheless, “a bushel left in the field has to be milked or plowed under.” Dear Lem had been in the field almost continuously for well unto a week; only came home to trade his greasy jeans for fresh ones, wolf down a rump roast or two and take a quick crack at creating a little cousin for your incipient self. Thursday, the 24th, he’d slept a bit between midnight and dawn and then gone out into the damp and cold of first light to repair the old Oliver corn picker that had broken down late the night before. You understand, our corn was all in the crib or sold down to McAllen’s; he was helping out our neighbor, Ashe VanderWilt (a man always lagging behind if not completely lost), get in his few pitiful acres before the whole family had to go to the County Commissioners for popcorn and peanut butter. I got up to soak the oatmeal and finish my lesson plans before another term’s teaching; I heard the John Deere roar to life and thought to myself, “Well, he must have fixed the thing.”, and then thought “We’ll be needing another picker before too many years.” and then thought of various other financial matters, and so on, when, clear as day, I heard him say, he could have been standing by the refrigerator, “Clytie, help me.” Quiet, no pain or desperation or panic, just like he was asking for a glass of buttermilk or something, but it chilled me to the bone and at the same time put a spark to my spine like the time that heating pad shorted out.

By the time I got to the tool shed, it was too late; he’d gotten his coat sleeve caught in the gatherers and that damned machine was chewing him like old Sheba used to use a squirrel. I shut off the tractor, grabbed a pipe wrench and backed off the PTO drive, used what was left of his shirt to make a tourniquet or two, but, as I said, it was too late.

Doc Samuelson (may he rest….) got here about the time the deputies did; nothing he could do but write down “accidental death” and ask if I’d like to go out to dinner soon. (The man always had a most forward and untimely way about him; perhaps because he was a doctor.)

I was, of course, pretty torn up for a while, but I just kept remembering the sound of his voice saying “Clytie, help me.”, so calm and all, and I eventually got to the place where I decided that he’d gone on to Zion to wait for me, and that he was better off there than busting his knuckles on some broken-down piece of equipment that he was putting off replacing so that he could buy me frilly underwear from Frederick’s in the forlorn hope that something would help get me as pregnant as your mom always seemed to be back in those days. At least, that was my understanding then; I have a different perspective now.

A few more words about some misconceptions and downright slanders vis ‘a vis Lem’s accident; first of all, your father always says “thresher” as if he knew a grain combine from an enema bag; it was a simple, green, 1953 Oliver corn picker that had more baling wire than bolts holding it together. We’d inherited it and worse debts from your Grandpa Hodgkins (god rest his…) after the flu took him in ‘69 and Mom (ditto) and Lem (double ditto) and I took over the farm to go with the piece that Lem and I bought from the DeBeques when we first got married.

I’ve heard (never to my face, and I pity the SOB who ever does speak such calumny in my presence) that Lem got up so early to have a taste of last year’s corn before putting in another day’s thankless effort, and that the old picker would never have been able to hold on to someone who wasn’t already half-dead from drink. That, young nephew, is an out-and-outright falsehood. To my knowledge, and I can sniff corn on a coon’s breath while he’s still in the tree, your uncle Lem had not touched a drop since the day, over three years before his accident, that he dropped an anvil on his foot while showing off with Luke Simkins and some of those other ne’er-do-wells he went to high school with and had to spend three weeks in February, must have been 1971, with his left nethermost appendage propped up in front of the TV watching “The Brady Bunch” and in too much pain to even show your old (then, much younger) Aunt Sis his “wherewithal for the continuation of the species”, which he was wont to do whenever he grew a little restless with the quality of the entertainment on that little societal evil we call a “medium”, but… Don’t put me on that train.

And no, we did not find any of his limbs, or members, in the corn crib that spring; for G**’s sake, the picker was in the shed and all our crop was already put by.

Just to satisfy your juvenile (no insult intended) interest in gore and the macabre, and so you won’t feel guilty for having questions in your head that you’re too well-mannered to ask, yes…. there was quite a bit of blood; he was mangled up pretty good and the Corelli’s had to do quite a bit of stitching to get only one piece of human in the casket; he’d lost an arm, the other hand, one ear and the better part of his nose. At the time I was so busy trying to get all of him out of that diabolic contraption that I don’t remember being shocked or nauseated; it was only later that the horror of the scene came back to haunt (and in some ways that neither I, nor, I suspect, anyone else could be comfortable with) excite me, and still even later that it faded to a seldom visiting memory that seems less real, in some ways, than dozens of episodes of “The Andy Griffith Show”. One’s mind plays sick tricks; the important things are ingrained so deeply into the ol’ cortex that they become as pedestrian as a congressman’s philosophy; yesterday’s weather report seems fresher and more real.

But that’s enough of enough.

Just to clear up one other thing; I did not say, nor did anyone in the family truly believe, that your father had attached himself to all that toilet paper while having a hormonal spasm during a glue sniffing session up in his room. I don’t know what romantic (as if drug abuse were romantic, rather than a time-honored rational response to this existential thumbscrew we call “life”) stories Luther has told you, but as near as we could reconstruct, after the fact, your father had been putting together a 1/32nd-scale model of the B-25 bomber, the one Billy Mitchell used to bomb Tokyo with early in WWII, had undoubtedly become somewhat affected by the 190-proof Revell contact cement, and had decided that, if your Grandpa wouldn’t give him a razor, he’d just use an X-Acto knife for his first shave, and the devil take the consequences.

It was toilet paper, not paper towel (that being an expensive new commodity at the time) that he staunched his mostly superficial (but notice, subtly, the thin scar above his upper lip) wounds. When he came down to supper, Grandpa (may he rest….), as usual, just laughed and said, “Next time I’ll start up the chain saw for you.” Your father’s embarrassment was acute, especially since the Junior Prom was the next evening and he was in a dog-fight, so to speak, with Hollis Sneed for your mother’s affections. Not that your mother ever saw anything in Hollis; she was always dead-set on your dad, and to see anything in Hollis Sneed would take, as others have pointed out, a Walt Disney, imagination-wise. Nonetheless, he was pretty upset at the time, and I advise you not to, even now, bring this story up the next time he catches you “twisting one up” out behind the garage. Just a word to the wise.

Well, I’ve nattered on long enough; you’ve doubtless got homework to do, and there’s an old MTV “Unplugged” I’ve been meaning to watch.
Write soon to your always affectionate,

Aunt Sis

P.S. Do not, I repeat, do not, as you love me, as you have any respect for the sainted souls of your ancestors, do not utter Hollis Sneed’s name in front of your parents. I’ll tell you why later (tee-hee).