Redneck Press with Fried Chicken and Coffee

I have tried many times before to write about my grandfather’s youngest brother, Bill, but I can never get it quite right—how his mouth turns into that half grin before he curls his lips to one side and squirts tobacco juice onto the ground, how he has that same slow way of speak­ing, that thick molasses tongue like my grand­fa­ther had, how he waits when you ask him some­thing, a pause so long that, just when you are ready to repeat your­self, he’s sud­denly answer­ing you, and, when he does, it is never what you expected.  It is inevitably wildly irreverent.

“That Bill’s a liar,” my grand­fa­ther used to say.  “Don’t believe any­thing he says.”

Which I don’t, of course.  Every­one who knows Bill knows that he is full of fables and exag­ger­a­tions and half-truths, a man who blurts out what­ever comes to his mind just to get a reac­tion.  Just the other day, he told me that a woman from a scooter chair sup­ply com­pany had just called him try­ing to sell him a chair.

“Hell, I don’t need one of those damn chairs!” Bill told her.  “All I need is a 19-year-old girl and a bot­tle of Viagra.”

Hell is one of my uncle’s favorite words.  When he uses it, it is not so much an exple­tive as it is a preg­nant pause.  Bill is full of con­tra­dic­tions and a few nuggets of wis­dom inter­spersed with a whole lot of non­sense.  Bill is at once a dot­ing grand­fa­ther who attended every one of his grandson’s high school bas­ket­ball games and a guy who has run a batch of White Light­en­ing up from South Car­olina once or twice, a guy who raises pink peonies in his back­yard and a guy who really wouldn’t mind sell­ing you a Per­co­cet, if you hap­pen to be in the mar­ket for one.  And, though he loves dogs more than just about any­one I know, Bill was the town dog catcher for years.

This is my ear­li­est mem­ory of Bill: I am five or six years old, sit­ting on my grand­par­ents’ brown sofa.  My brother is beside me, and I am wear­ing my favorite paja­mas.  They are white with tiny red flow­ers all over them.  My bare feet are propped on the cof­fee table beside a jelly glasses full of Trop­i­cana.  We are watch­ing The Flint­stones while my grand­mother cooks break­fast, and the smell of sausage seeps through the par­ti­tion sep­a­rat­ing the kitchen and liv­ing room.  My grand­fa­ther has already been out to water his gar­den, and now he is sit­ting in his recliner beside us.  He is wear­ing old gray work pants, a cream-colored button-down shirt, and navy blue slip­pers, and he is sit­ting with one leg thrown over the arm of the chair.  One arm is tilted over his head, and he rubs his hand back and forth over his shaved head.  It makes a tiny scratch­ing noise.  Sud­denly, we hear a rum­bling in the dis­tance, com­ing closer.  It rolls up Tram­mel and then down Lit­tle Oak Street.  My grand­fa­ther stops rub­bing his head and looks out the window.

“Well, hell,” he says. “There’s old Bill.”

“Hubert!” my grand­mother calls from the kitchen.  “Go outside!”

There is the hiss of raw eggs hit­ting the hot fry­ing pan as my grand­fa­ther heads for the base­ment door.  I run to my grand­par­ents’ bed­room.  From their win­dow, I see Bill’s white truck come to a stop in the drive.  The truck belongs to the town, and it has black let­ter­ing on the driver’s side.  In the truck bed is a large box with a wire mesh front.  I try not to look, but it is like try­ing not to stare at someone’s wan­der­ing eye or hand­less arm. My eyes keep drift­ing back to the crate, search­ing for a glimpse of an ear or a tail.  Bill’s legs spill from the cab—long, lean legs in baggy overalls.

Bill was born 86 years ago on a snowy Feb­ru­ary day in the Sandy Mush com­mu­nity of Bun­combe County.  His fam­ily soon moved to Hay­wood County, where his dad farmed and worked at the paper mill.  The youngest of seven chil­dren, Bill was always a mis­chie­vous kid.  He got into plenty of trou­ble but he always seemed to be able to talk his way out of it.

Bill mar­ried a local girl, a blue-eyed blonde named Mar­garet, whose father farmed and ran a pro­duce stand.  Bill and Mar­garet had raised their fam­ily on the thirty acres on New­found Gap that Margaret’s par­ents gave them.  Back then, the hills were full of cat­tle and horses.  Now, sev­eral years after Margaret’s death, pink and pur­ple rhodo­den­drons cover the moun­tain­side as far as you can see.

One day last spring, my cousin, Gail, called my mother with news that Bill had been diag­nosed with a malig­nant tumor in his neck, a metas­ta­sis from the prostate can­cer the doc­tors dis­cov­ered over a year ago. I drove to his house, and as soon as my car came to a stop in the drive, a hound dog began cir­cling my car and howl­ing.  A Bor­der Col­lie slunk through the rhodo­den­dron bushes on the hill above us.

Bill has had dogs his whole life—multiple dogs at one time—hunting dogs, mainly—rough and wiry dogs that could, for the most part, with­stand coun­try life.  He has a spe­cial fond­ness for Jack Rus­sells and once gave me a puppy from the lit­ter of his favorite one, a stocky, strong-willed dog he named Peanut.  Bill’s cur­rent favorite dog is the sleek, tri-colored hound he named Ham­mer.  Bill got Ham­mer for his grand­son to use as a hunt­ing dog, and when Ham­mer proved to be an inept hunter, Bill kept him any­way and loved him espe­cially, like a par­ent dot­ing on a par­tic­u­larly dull child.

“Ham­mer hates me,” I com­plained as Bill stepped onto the front porch.

Bill was wear­ing over­alls over a flan­nel shirt.  His hair was shaved close to his head.

“Aww, he don’t hate you,” he assured me, shoot­ing a stream of tobacco through his teeth.

The dog raced toward me, howl­ing, turn­ing away at the last minute and dart­ing under a nearby bush.  I had promised my mother I wouldn’t men­tion the tumor unless Bill men­tioned it to me first, so we walked together through his yard, admir­ing the roses that he started from a cut­ting some­one gave him forty years ago.

“You know you don’t pull the bugs off those?” he asked me, pinch­ing a tight bud between his fin­gers. “If you do, they won’t bloom.”

There is a spring that runs down the moun­tain and spills into the gul­ley beneath the bank.  It was sud­denly so quiet that I could hear the spring water hit­ting the rocks below.  I turned to look for Ham­mer, and he was slink­ing slowly toward me.  All quiv­ery mus­cles and wet nose, he crouched by my foot and sniffed my pants leg. Then he began yap­ping again.

“That dog barked for five hours straight one night,” Bill said proudly.  “Later, I found the neighbor’s cat dead at the foot of the hill.  I guess he killed it.”

“Wow,” I said.

“The doc­tor says I’ve got can­cer in my neck,” Bill told me sud­denly.  “Right here.”

He rubbed a spot just below his ear.

“I sure hate to hear that, Bill,” I said.

“Yep,” he said.

A shadow crossed the back lawn and dis­ap­peared over the bank—a red-tailed hawk.

Back in the house, Bill offered me a beer.  It was 11 a.m.  I told him I wasn’t much of a beer drinker, that I tend to pre­fer a good class of wine.

“Did you ever try any of that North Car-lina wine?” he asked.

Now when peo­ple from around here—and I mean, peo­ple really from around here—say “North Car­olina,” they often roll over the “o” like it doesn’t exist. “North Car-lina,” they say, which is how Bill says it.  Before I could fin­ish shak­ing my head, Bill was out of his recliner, headed to the kitchen to pour me a glass of Duplin Hat­teras Red. As I sipped from a juice glass, he held up the bot­tle and pointed to the light­house on the label.

“See?” he asked, as if the point could not be over­stated.  “This is from North Car-lina.”

From the liv­ing room sofa, I watched Ham­mer sit­ting at the front door, his black, wet nose pressed to the glass, while Bill told me how sick he had got­ten from his pain med­i­cine the day before.

“Hey, you want to see it?” Bill asked.

“Sure,” I said.

Bill dis­ap­peared into a back room and returned with a yel­low pill bot­tle filled with Per­co­cet.  He handed it to me.

“That cost me $26, with Medicare and my insur­ance,” he said.  “How much do you think one of them pills costs?”

I read the label.  There were eighty pills in the bot­tle.  I men­tally did the math and gave him an approx­i­mate answer.

“Are you going to take the rest of these?” I asked.

“Hell, no!” he said.  “Them things will kill you!”

Con­vers­ing with my uncle is like com­pet­ing in some grand word game with con­stantly evolv­ing para­me­ters.  Only Bill knows the rules.  But occa­sion­ally I take a stab at it, try to catch Bill off guard.

“I’ll tell you what,” I offered.  “I’ll take them down and try to sell them on the street down there in Can­ton.  What­ever I make, we’ll split 50/50.”

“Well,” he said, grin­ning slightly.

The next time I vis­ited, a cou­ple of weeks later, I asked him if he had been tak­ing his medicine.

“Hell, no,” he told me.  “I done moved that stuff.”

His poker face was flaw­less, per­fectly ren­dered from over eighty years of prac­tice.  Now, with­out pause or tran­si­tion, Bill was expound­ing on another of his favorite topics—how skim milk is a lead­ing cause of the dis­in­te­gra­tion of soci­ety as we now know it.

“Shit, I won’t touch that stuff,” he said.

I men­tioned that I some­times drink it, not so much because I like it but because it has fewer calo­ries than reg­u­lar milk.  He leaned for­ward in his chair.

“Hell­fire,” he said.  “I bet you 100 dol­lars I can drink one milk­shake a day and eat five candy bars every day for two weeks straight and not gain more than two pounds.”

I was about to con­sider tak­ing him up on it, but then I thought again of the manila folder lying on the chair on the porch.  Ear­lier, Bill had brought it to me.

“Here,” he said.  “Read that.”

The folder con­tained a series of MRI scans and a long report full of med­ical jar­gon, most of which I did not under­stand.  But I got the gist of it.

“86-year-old male,” the report said, “hx of prostate cancer…one kidney…spot on lung…malignant lymph gland tumor…”

Bill watched my face while I read.  I care­fully placed the papers back in the folder and returned it to him.  It was my turn to show my poker face.

“I don’t know what all that means,” I said.

Which was true.  The other truth was that, even faced with the hard facts, the evi­dence sup­ported by dark film­strips marred by omi­nous white spots, I still found it impos­si­ble to pic­ture Bill as sick or frail or even old.  In my eyes, he was—and would always be—a rene­gade, the moonshine-drinking, overall-wearing, dog-catching James Dean of my youth.

Sev­eral years ago, not long before my grand­fa­ther died, my son, a fourth grader, and I went to visit my grand­par­ents.  When I got there, my grand­fa­ther was sit­ting in his recliner, and Bill was sit­ting on the sofa next to him.  Even at age eighty, Bill was still ruggedly hand­some, tall and slim, wear­ing blue jeans and a red L.L. Bean jacket, his hair flecked only with spots of grey.

“Look who’s here,” my grand­fa­ther said as I walked in.

“Hey, there, Bill.  How are you?” I asked.

“Why, you, dirty rat,” he said.

This was how Bill had greeted me ever since he gave me that Jack Rus­sell puppy.  It was one of his favorite con­ver­sa­tion pieces, how he was going to take back the dog since I didn’t visit him often enough.

“He was just ask­ing about you before you got here,” my grand­fa­ther told me.

“He was?”

“Yeah.  He said, ‘Where in the hell is that damn Jennifer?’”

Bill wiped a trickle of tobacco juice off the side of his mouth with the back of his hand and spit into the paper cup beside him.

“How’s that dog I gave you?” he asked me.

“He’s a great dog,” I assured him.  “My very favorite.”

What’d I tell you?” he asked.

Then turn­ing to my son who was sit­ting beside him, Bill said, “You look like a girl with that long hair.  You know that?  Just like a girl.”

My son smiled, shrugged his shoul­ders at me.

“You know I’m almost eighty year old?” Bill asked me.

“I can’t believe that,” I said.

“Well, I am.”

“I remem­ber like it was yes­ter­day the night when he was born,” my grand­fa­ther speaks up.  “It was Feb­ru­ary, and cold, with snow all over the ground.  My mother turned me and my broth­ers out of the house.  I wasn’t no more than seven, but we always had to leave when there was a birthin’ goin’ on.  We walked sev­eral miles in that snow to our aunt’s house.”

He paused.

“I still hold that against him,” he said, look­ing at me but point­ing to Bill.

As the men talked, I lis­tened hard to their voices, to that old moun­tain way of speak­ing, the slow, gen­tle flow of words, the long, cav­ernous pauses.  Bill told us about his job at the local dry clean­ers, the lat­est “girl” he had been see­ing since his wife died, his grandson’s lat­est bas­ket­ball stats.

“Is he tall?” I asked Bill of his grandson.

“6’2”, and he’s only 15,” Bill said.

“He’s like our daddy,” my grand­fa­ther said.

“How tall was he?” I asked.

Bill said he was almost seven feet, that leg­end in town has it that one day a man actu­ally sprained his neck from look­ing up at their daddy for too long.  That man had to wear a neck brace for months after­ward, he said.

“Was he really that tall, Papaw?” I asked my grandfather.

“Well, I tell you, Daddy looked just like that one there,” he said. “When you’re lookin’ at him, you’re a’lookin’ at Daddy.”

Bill stood and put his spit cup down, a sign that he was ready to leave.  My grand­fa­ther rose and headed toward the front door to walk him out.  Bill headed toward the base­ment door.

“Where’re you goin’?” Bill asked.

“Well…outside,” my grand­fa­ther said.  “Ain’t you leavin’?”

“Yeah.  Do you wanna go out the front?” Bill asked.

“Well, no,” my grand­fa­ther said, “but I thought you might want to.”

“Why in the world would I want to go out front?”

“Well,” my grand­fa­ther said.  “You might fall goin’ down those stairs.”

“Fall?  I might fall?  You’re the old man!  You might fall!”

“Hell, I’m not gonna fall,” my grand­fa­ther said, still stand­ing by the front door.

“Hell, I could tap dance down them stairs!” Bill said, shuf­fling his feet back and forth across the car­pet, then throw­ing one leg high in the air.

My grand­fa­ther slowly crossed the car­pet, then felt for the knob on the base­ment door.  He turned it, and together he and Bill descended into the dark­ness below.

Jen­nifer McGaha's work has recently appeared or is forth­com­ing in the North Car­olina Lit­er­ary Review, New South­erner, Wilder­ness House Lit­er­ary Review, Pis­gah Review, Moon­shine Review, Red Wheel­bar­row, Smoky Moun­tain Liv­ing Mag­a­zine, and an anthol­ogy, Echoes across the Blue Ridge: Sto­ries, Essays and Poems by Writ­ers Liv­ing in and Inspired by the South­ern Appalachian Moun­tains.  Jen­nifer also serves as non­fic­tion edi­tor of the Pis­gah Review, a national lit­er­ary mag­a­zine based at Bre­vard Col­lege in Bre­vard, North Carolina.