Memories of a Good Man, my Father

In the year 2004, I don’t really know what the general concensus of society is about being a man. I have my ideas and opinions as to what the erosion and steady decline of our culture is.  I’m not fuzzy at all about what I think it is to be a man.  It’s the same thing my daddy thought. 

     I’ve seen my daddy cry on several occasions.  My children have never seen me cry.  My wife says that it would do me a lot of good to sit down and “have a good cry.”  I agree.  I just don’t know how to accomplish it.  When I was growing up, to cry was synonymous with being a sissy.  Not homosexual, just a sissy.  It had a negative connotation.   I get the idea that “political correctness” and the new modern “tolerance” encourages [if not downright demands] us to apologize for our testosterone.  Doug Davis would not have.  He came from a different era, a different mindset.

     I have undertaken the monumental task of attempting to capture the essence of my father and all that he was.  “I wish.”  I wish I could go back 40 years.  I wish I could “recover” and transpose my past and my history a couple of hundred years, and take all my kinfolks with me.  I miss him.  He yelled at me, he beat the piss out of me, he hugged me, he let me sit in his lap when I was still young enough to get away with it.  He lectured me.  He made me so damn mad that once, I packed up all my stuff and left home.  I slept in the back seat of my 1967 Ford Mustang in the parking lot of the supermarket where I had a job bagging groceries for about two months.  [“Boy, that was silly as hell!”]

    

My Birth

 

     I was born in Memphis Tenn. on December 31, 1956 at St. Joseph’s Hospital.  My mother was the most beautiful person, aside from Jesus Christ, to ever walk the face of God’s green earth.  Not on the outside, but on the inside.  Everybody who knew her, loved her.  She didn’t have a mean bone in her body. 

     In her eyes, I was a miracle.  She had suffered several miscarriages and had in fact, been told that she would never be able to have children.  Doug said, “Bullshit.  We’ll have kids.”  Years later, when my wife and I went to a fertility specialist, we found out that I have a translocated chromosome, just like Mama did.   The translocation results in either having a healthy baby or a miscarriage. Doug said she had about ten miscarriages, but I suspect that that may have been a little bit of an exaggeration.

 

Stories and Legends straight from the source

 

     Doug told a lot of tales.  Some were obviously crap, designed for entertainment value and others, were probably true.  He was an honest man.  He came from a different time and a different background than what society sees as “normal” at the time of this writing.  I always admired him for the wrong reasons.  He had a tattoo of a coiled rattlesnake on one side of his chest and a Rebel flag on the other.  Between them were three diagonal scars that varied between 3½ to 5 inches long that he got in a knife fight.  He said that the guy who cut him was an American Indian who was so short that he had to jump up to cut him.  As wild as he purportedly was in his younger days, I don’t doubt it. 

 

        Doug told a story to my cousins and me one night before we were about to “camp out” in the back yard.  He said that years ago, in Memphis, he was walking home after a night of drinking and hell raising.  He didn’t make it all the way home before he just sat down against a tree and went to sleep.  About 5:00 in the morning he woke up and found that he had stopped on top of a hill looking down into a valley that was home to a graveyard.  In the mist of the pre dawn gloom, he saw three people walking thru the headstones.  It appeared to be a man, a woman and a little child.  The child was between the two adults, reaching up and holding both their hands.  The child didn’t have a head.  As Doug said it, he “got the hell outta Dodge!”  He came back to the graveyard about noon the same day where there was a caretaker mowing the grass.  He told him what had happened and showed him the area where he had seen the three people walking.  Close by were three graves.  The graves were of a man, a woman and a little boy who had died in a car wreck.  The little boy was decapitated in the wreck.  He swore up and down that the story was true, but we had our doubts. 

 

     Doug was born in the community of Prospect in Blount County in April of 1921.  He was the oldest of 5 children. After him, there was my Uncle Don, Kenny, Aunt Virginia and J. E.   Doug was seven years old when he and his family took up the belongings they could carry and started out walking to Memphis.  The story goes that his dad, Cowan Davis, was a bootlegger.  Cowan’s cousin, Walter, was a Blount County Deputy Sheriff.  Being kinfolks, Walt came to Cowan and told him that he was going to be arrested the next morning for making illegal whiskey.  Doug says that he could remember his Dad, walking down the road in front of him with a pig under his arm.  Once they got to Memphis, Cowan acquired two restaurants and Doug said he was actually pretty prosperous.  Along with the legitimate businesses, Cowan also still made whiskey.  Doug said he would follow guys around all day who had bought a bottle, pick up the empty when they threw it away and turn it in to his dad who would give him a penny for it.

 

     I never knew my Uncle Kenny.  He died before I was born.  He was a paratrooper in World War II.  Doug used to say that when someone asked him how many jumps he had made, he’d answer, “Just one.”  “The rest of the time they had to kick my ass out of the plane.”   Doug said he actually made more than forty jumps behind enemy lines.

 

     I don’t know what he died of, but Doug said that Don, J.E. and he, kept Kenny alive for 17 hours by breathing for him while an iron lung was shipped into Memphis from someplace else.  After the iron lung was delivered and used, Uncle Kenny still died. 

 

     I have a half brother, Larry, who still lives in Memphis.  He had a brother named Kenny, named after our uncle.  He also died before I was born.  Doug and his second wife, Ruth, [Larry and Kenny’s mother] had divorced.  Doug bought Larry and Kenny two bicycles.  Kenny wrecked and hit his head on a concrete culvert and laid in a coma for about six weeks before he passed away. Not living in the house, Doug always blamed himself for Kenny’s death.  Kenny was eleven years old.  I was twelve years old or better, before I got my first bike.  This was, of course, after being told that I would never get a bike.

 

     Doug told me that Ruth had his ass hauled back into court one time for failing to make child support payments.  Doug said he sat thru the arraignment and didn’t say a word.  After Ruth tried to verbally crucify him, he stood up, handed the baliff copies of the cancelled checks and sat back down again.  He felt sorry for Ruth as the judge berated her and almost threw her into jail for perjury.

 

 

Barry Wade Davis was born on December 23, 1960.  I didn’t know until after he died on September 28, 1978 that he was my half brother.  My first memory of him was bringing him a turkey leg out of the refrigerator the night Doug and Mama brought him home.  He was blond headed and didn’t look anything at all like Kenny and me.  He and I fought a lot, but if anybody else jumped on either one of us, all hell broke loose.

     After he died, I found some adoption papers that referred to the fact that Doug and Mama had legally adopted him.  I had asked Doug on a couple of different occasions if Barry was adopted because of the difference in physical characteristics.  The question was always met with a volcanic negative answer.  I pressed him on it years later and Doug told me that Barry was his son, but not Mama’s.  I somehow got the impression that Barry’s mother was a bar room debutante of which Doug had met and become friendly with several.  One of our cousins-in-law told me the straight of it when I asked him.  He said that Doug told him and his wife, [Doug’s first cousin] that Barry’s mother was a nurse that he had met while he was in the hospital.  They allegedly flew off to Las Vegas [behind Mama’s back] for awhile where she got pregnant.  She told Doug that she wasn’t interested in having children.  This was 1960.  I imagine abortion was rare then as it should be now.  Doug persuaded her to have the baby that he wanted to raise his son.

     Knowing Mama like I did, it’s not difficult for me to fathom her welcoming, loving and raising this child that was conceived out of adultery.  That’s the type of person she was.             

 

 

     Kenneth Douglas Davis was born June 5, 1966.  He was named for my uncle Kenny and Larry’s brother Kenny.  He was four years old when Mama died.  She was in Blount Memorial hospital for about a year with Hodgkins Disease.  So, he really hadn’t known much of her past the age of three.  He had already gone to bed the night she died.  Doug called from the hospital and told us that she had passed.  I remember being up all night grieving, worrying about the next morning when Kenny would wake up and have to be told Mama was dead.

 

     I don’t ever recall Doug verbalizing he loved us.  Most of our conversation[s] with him consisted of him yelling and cussing.  We knew he loved us, he just never told us.  It wasn’t masculine.  When Kenny woke up the next morning, Doug came to the bedroom doorway and stood there for a few seconds in uncomfortable silence.  He said, “Well son, Mama’s an angel now.”  Kenny thought about  that for a few seconds and said as the tears began to gather, “Aw, Foot!” “I didn’t want Mama to be no old angel.”            

 

     “Dougisms”

 

“Ignorance infuriates me and I’ve been surrounded by it all my life.”

 

“Well, I’m a son of a bitch!”

 

“It’s as plain as a goat’s ass in a pea patch.”

 

“By Cracky.”

 

“Don’t just stand around with your finger in your ass, do something!”

 

“I shook hands with the devil forty years ago and hadn’t looked back since.”

 

“Every business deal, I’ve ever done, I’ve always tried to give the other man 51%.”  [I don’t know if this is pertinent to the deal referred to above or not.]

 

“Sho nuff?”

 

Early Childhood

 

     I have some old pictures of a couple of different houses we lived in when I was a baby, but I don’t know anything about them.  My autobiographical history begins at 3567 Winston Dr. in Frasier.  We had about 3/4 of an acre.  We had a barn in the back yard and a cornfield behind it.  Approximately a third of the yard was fenced off separately from the rest of the property which was surrounded by a chain link fence.   We called it the “dog lot.”  Both of my grandmothers lived with us at the time.  I never knew either of my grandfathers, but I have a picture of Cowan Davis holding me as a newborn. 

     I called Doug’s mother Mrs. Davis.  That’s what everybody else called her and that was also why I called my mother Mary, her mother Pat and Doug by his name.  When I was about 12, Mary asked me to start calling her Mama. It was a change that took a little getting used to.

 

          Mama’s mother, Patty Olivia Stockard, lived with us my whole childhood until she passed away in 1968 at age 86.  She had suffered a stroke and was completely paralyzed on her entire right side.  Mama would carry her from the bed to the living room every morning and place her in her recliner.  She kept her nightgown on all the time and was covered up with an afghan.  I used to sit on the arm of her chair with a towel draped over my lap and we would play, “Big Pat and Little Pat.” 

 

     She had been a school teacher and taught me to read and write before I ever started to school.   That gave me sort of a “head start” on the other kids that I seemed to have kept the whole time through grade and high school.  I never thought I was especially smart, it’s just that everybody else was so “damned dumb.”  The guys I ran with in high school were proud of the fact that they didn’t make good grades and thought it was sissy to be a good student. 

 

 

     Pat was a beautiful human being too.  That must have been where Mama got her characteristics from.  She taught me a lot.  We used to read books, the newspaper and the Bible.  She would tell me stories.  The cartoon characters, Mighty Mouse and Popeye, were my heroes.  So Pat would make up stories involving them and us.  One time, when Doug, Mama, Barry and I were supposed to go to the zoo, I decided I would stay home with Pat.  I never have regretted that decision.

 

     I was 11 years old when she died.  Mama’s brother, Uncle Buddy, [Edward Stockard] was visiting us from Tampa Florida.  Barry and I were going to walk to the Community Center several blocks away to go swimming.  I was standing out on the sidewalk waiting on him when something told me that I better go back in the house and give Pat a hug and kiss and tell her that I loved her.  The feeling was so strong that I couldn’t ignore it, so I did.  Barry and I went to the pool and hadn’t been there but about a half an hour when I stepped on a broken Coke bottle, cut my foot and we had to come home.  While we had been away, Pat had asked Mama to carry her back to bed because she was tired.  Pat somehow accidentally rolled out of bed onto the hardwood floor and broke her hip.  An ambulance came and took her to the hospital.  We were not allowed to visit her because children under the age of 14 couldn’t go above the first floor.  So, that was, in fact, the last time I ever saw Pat alive.

 

     I only have one clear memory of Doug’s mother, Mrs. Davis.  I was about 2 or 3 years old.  Doug and Mama were in the garden irrigating tomato plants.  I was watching cartoons and Mrs. Davis was trying to wipe off the TV screen.  Lord, I was a brat.  Mama had me so spoiled that I must have been a real terror to live with.  It made me mad that Mrs. Davis was wiping the TV screen while I was watching cartoons, so I pushed her out of the way.  Not only, did I push her out of the way, but she fell down.  I wasn’t big enough to help her back up and she was too old and frail to get up by herself.  I went running out to the garden hollering, “Doug! Doug! A bear pushed Mrs. Davis down!”  He didn’t believe me.  I hope I got my ass busted good for that one.    

 

     There was a man who lived on the street behind ours.  His name was Russ Bevel.  I thought they said he was the devil.  I was scared to death to go out into the back yard.  You could see his property from ours.  Later on, right before we moved from Memphis to East Tennessee, he was partners with Doug in custom yard work, garden plowing, bush-hogging, etc.  I never really was convinced for a long time that he wasn’t the devil.  I figured that being the father of all lies, he may just have been putting on a good front.  

 

Doug had a drinking problem.  He had a big drinking problem.  The drinking problem runs in my family.  I can remember begging Pat to go to bed at 4 or 5:00 in the afternoon so I could go to bed with her.  I didn’t want to be up when Doug got home after a day of heavy drinking with his buddies.  He worked the 11P to 7A shift at Firestone Tire and Rubber Co. as a tire inspector for 27 years.   One day before I got in the habit of begging Pat to go to bed early, he came home and decided he was going to teach me to box.  He got down on his knees and told me to put my “dukes” up to protect myself.  He told me to hit him.  I tried and of course couldn’t get past his guard.  He kept yelling, “Hit Me! Hit Me!”  “You better watch out now, I’m gonna hurt you,” and would “gently” slap me around like we were boxing.  At least, he must have been under the impression he was “gently” slapping me around.  I recall it being too rough, too loud and I was crying, wanting him to leave me alone.  He didn’t mean any harm, he was just drunk.

 

       Doug was not the type to take constructive criticism.  Especially, not from Mama.  I know she would not have let anything happen, but Doug was king of our particular castle and he had the power to pretty much do what he wanted to.  Not very many people told him no.  Pat was not shy about giving her opinion though. I have the mental impression of her shaking her fist in the air at him and cussing him out.  He said she used to call him a “long legged son of a bitch.” 

 

     One of my most vivid memories was when I was about four years old and we were fishing on Leaf Lake.  We were there with a friend Doug had that I knew only as Mr. Kelly. If I’m not mistaken, Mr. Kelly worked with him at Firestone. Mr. Kelly was white headed and wore black rimmed glasses.  He was big and always wore white shirts. He was as big as Doug was.  In my eyes, that was massive. 

 

     I remember hearing Doug later describe Leaf Lake as being about 40 acres big.  It had a lot of trees, water as far as the eye could see and definite smells that I associated with our fishing trips.  There was a wooden cabin on top of the hill above the lake that sold worms, crickets, tackle, drinks and candy bars.  Although candy was surely not foreign to me, one of the things I looked forward to most about going to the lake was shopping at the “bait shop.”  The elderly gentleman that ran it was named Mr. Prater.  Is it my imagination, or did all elderly men I remember from my early days have white hair?  He always wore a hat.  All old guys wore hats.  It must have been a law.  I remember I had on one of those old orange, foam filled life jackets that were common at the time.  It didn’t work worth a flip.  

 

     We were in an aluminum boat with no motor.  A paddle was used to get around the lake.  We fished with cane poles and crickets. No reels.  Being four, and very enchanted with the water, I was chattering about being a “skin diver” when I grew up. Yap, yap, yap, yap, yap.  Doug kept telling me to shut up because I was scaring the fish away and I would, for a minute or two, and then I went right back to chattering to him and Mr. Kelly about my future employment plans.  Doug, who was drinking as usual, looked at me and said, “Son, do you really want to be a skin diver when you grow up?”  I said, “Yes sir.”  He said, “Come over here.”  

 

     Well, I was four.  I wasn’t stupid, but I was four.  I remember a feeling of apprehension as I stood up and made my way over to him.  It seems like I remember Mr. Kelly voicing some sort of protest, but I can’t be sure.  Anyway, I walked over to him.  He took me by the scruff of the neck and the seat of the britches and heaved me over the side of the boat.

 

     I have the image ingrained in my mind of looking up thru the greenish water and seeing the boat and Mr. Kelly on top of the surface.  The sun was shining brightly above and behind him.  I floundered my way back up to the air.  Mr. Kelly was holding his fishing pole out to me and yelling at me to grab it.  Panicking, I couldn’t do it.  I sank again.  I resurfaced, sputtering and choking and thrashing around.  I sank again.  When I surfaced the third time, I took hold of Mr. Kelly’s cane pole and he easily hauled me back into the boat. 

 

     Doug was nowhere in sight.  As soon as he threw me in, he had jumped in after me.  Well, Doug couldn’t swim.  He was six foot three, 240 lbs. and not wearing a life jacket.  [I didn't blame him; they weren't worth a pinch of monkey shit.]  It took Mr. Kelly and two more guys who were fishing not far from us, to get Doug back in the boat.  I asked him as we were paddling back to the shore where we were going.  He said, “We’re going home, son.”   That was okay with me.  I had had about enough fishing for one day.

 

     Mama was not a loud or demonstrative person.  She took a lot of crap from Doug.  He had an explosive personality.  He would holler and cuss at the drop of a hat.  I think I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I heard Mama yell.  She didn’t yell when we got home.  When she asked why I was wet and Doug told her what he had done, she came unglued.  Mama took an iron frying pan and beat the living shit out of him.  He didn’t make any effort to fend off the blows.  All in all, I was pretty impressed.

      

      Doug wasn’t satisfied with mediocrity.  Whenever he did something, it had to be done in a big way.  Doug’s cousin, Arlen Hood and his family had driven down from East Tennessee for a visit.  Doug sent Mama and me to “Loeb’s Bar-be-cue” for supplies.  We bought 40 large pork bar-b-cue sandwiches, a gallon of baked beans and I really don’t know what all else.  I guess it’s a good thing we all liked bar-b-cues, because I imagine we probably were eating them for several days.  Knowing Doug, he probably distributed them out to the neighbors after Arlen left. 

 

 

Doug and animals. 

 

     I had a lamb named Lily Bell, for a short while. She lived in the dog lot.  Lily Bell met an untimely death because she couldn’t keep her mouth shut.  Doug was an “impulsive” individual.  Sometimes, he would act without thinking the situation through.  Actually, throwing me into Leaf Lake was a pretty good example of that.  Lily Bell was raising cain one day about something.  Baaa-baa-baaaa-baaaa.  Doug was trying to sleep because he had to work that night.  He hollered at her to shut up several times.  In a rage, because he couldn’t get any sleep, he got up, went outside and slit Lily Bell’s throat.  After that, he had no choice but to dress her out and put her in the freezer.  Yes, I participated in eating her.  After my initial crisis, I took the same fatalistic attitude I had years later when we raised a pig for the purposes of eating it.  After it was dead, and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it, there was no reason to starve.  Hey, don’t shake your head at this in disgust, I’m a carnivore, okay?    

 

      We always had animals around. We raised Boxers to sell.  My dog, Penny, a purebred Boxer, and I, had our picture  in the Memphis Commercial Appeal one year in 1959 or 60 when Mama thought it was cute that I wanted some garbage cans and a deck of cards for Christmas.  I was three and weird even back then.  She was acquainted with one of the staff reporters, Lydel Sims, and called him and told him about my Christmas list. He evidently must have written a little blurb in the paper.  A garbage can company in Cincinnati picked it up and sent me several trash cans, a bread box and a couple of decks of Bicycle playing cards.  Penny and I were photographed in a 33 gallon aluminum garbage can by the Christmas tree.  I thought I was going to “have” to be a garbage man when I grew up because I thought nobody else would want the job and if I didn’t pick up the trash, it wouldn’t get done.

    

      Mama told me that when I was a baby and would wander too close to the road, Penny would take the back of my diaper in her teeth and drag me back toward the house. The yard was fenced in but I guess Penny advocated the “better safe than sorry” point of view. Many was the time that I used Penny as a pillow and laid in front of the TV watching cartoons.  She died one day after she somehow got out through the chain link fence and ran away.  Doug figured she must have somehow gotten hold of some poison.  I got home from school in the first grade and was shown her dead body.  They had her in a wheelbarrow behind the barn.  I helped Doug bury her.  Other than Lily Bell, that was my first experience with tragic loss thru death.

 

     If you’re old enough, you’ll remember that back then,  you could get chicks, ducklings and baby bunnies at Easter that had been dyed pastel green, purple, blue, red, etc.  One year, Barry and I got a couple of baby ducklings.  We found their dead carcasses the next morning in the barn.  During the night, rats attacked them and ate their feet off.  Doug said, “Well, I’m a son of a bitch!”  

 

      A couple of times we had Easter animals that survived to adulthood.  Two white rabbits spent their post-Easter lives incarcerated in a chicken wire hutch at the side of the house.  One time, when money was tight, Doug decided that we were going to eat those rabbits.  I was probably 7 or 8.  I clearly remember following along behind him, eyeing the hatchet he was carrying with dread, attempting to talk him out of his murderous intent.  He lifted the lid off the hutch and reached in and took hold of one of the rabbits by the ears.  The other one, the lucky one, jumped out and took off running like it knew what was about to happen.

 

     There was an opening on the side or in back of the house about two feet wide and two feet high where you could get in under the house to do repairs, access the pipes, etc.  Barry and I used to crawl in under there and have dirt clod fights.  Doug told me to go stand in front of the hole and not let the rabbit get through there.  He said if it did, he was gonna “bust my ass.”  I stood in front of the hole and watched him chase the rabbit around the yard.  I thought about it.  I weighed the consequences of me getting my ass busted as opposed to the rabbit getting his head chopped off.  I took off running from the opening to a poplar tree that I climbed up to the top of and took refuge in. I looked over my shoulder as I made my escape and silently cheered as I saw the rabbit dart through the opening.  I don’t remember whether or not I actually got a whipping that time, but one of the rabbits lived.  For a while, anyway. 

 

     Doug didn’t get a driver’s license until sometime in his fifties.  Being an alcoholic, he didn’t need one because he didn’t intend to drive.  There was a guy who lived across the street from us that I’ll refer to as John Doe.  His son, John Jr., was deaf.  Two things, I remember about John Jr.  He had the most prominent adams’s apple that I’ve seen to date.  Also, his ears were small and much lower on his head than most people’s.  John Jr. thought he could talk.  He would stand there and say, “Baa-baaaaaaa buhhhhhh buhhhhhh buh, baaa baaa.”  He’d make hand gestures, point his fingers and punctuate his conversations with passion and sincerity.  He’d get mad as hell when nobody could tell what he was saying.  I feel the need to qualify this at this point by stating that I am not making fun of him or attempting to disparage deaf people, but this is the truth.  Anyway, Doug gave him two hundred dollars one time to drive him to East Tennessee.  Some place on I-40, the highway patrol had a road block set up checking driver’s licenses.  Doug said John Jr. was going off the deep end hollering bbbaaaaaa-baaaaaaa- ba buh buh baa baa!  Doug said at first he thought he’d been stung by a hornet.  Finally, Doug figured out that John Jr. didn’t have a driver’s license.  Doug went off the deep end.  He said, “Gee-Dee!  You Gee-Dee son of a bitch!”  “I hope your Gee-Dee ass is ready to go to jail, because I ain’t going!”  “Gee-Dee!”  “What kind of Gee-Dee son of a bitch takes two hundred dollars to drive a Gee-Dee car four hundred miles and don’t have a Gee-Dee driver’s license!”   When they finally got up to the trooper, Doug said John Jr. handed him a fishing license.  I was always laughing so hard by this point of the story that I don’t know what ultimately happened.

 

     Doug smoked non-filtered Camel cigarettes for 40 years.  Usually, after smoking about half of the cigarette, he’d toss it away.  Barry and I would pick up the longest “ducks” and smoke them.  One day we got us a couple and were standing by some honeysuckle vines at the edge of the yard puffing away.  Doug came out of the house and made eye contact with me.  Well, the jig was up.  No use denying it, he had caught us red handed.  Stripping off his belt, he came toward us.  He took me by the arm and said, “Son, were you smoking?”  I said, “Yes sir.”  He said, “Alright, you told me the truth so you don’t get a whipping.” 

 

     Now,I never understood this, Barry was standing there and witnessed this exchange.  Doug said to him, “Boy, were you smoking?”  Barry said, “No Doug, Not me! You know I don’t smoke!”  “I wouldn’t never smoke!” So, Doug whipped him.

 

     Barry and I were completely different when we’d get whipped.  I was stubborn.  I’d stand there and “try” not to move and wouldn’t make a sound.  I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing he’d hurt me.  Barry, on the other hand, would scream bloody murder.  Doug would have to hold him with one hand and beat him with the other.  They’d go round and round in a circle with Barry screaming at the top of his lungs, “Oh God! You’re killin me! You’re killin me!” “Stop!” “Stop, You’re killin me!”  I often wondered what the neighbors must have thought about that. 

 

     Our next door neighbors were Mr. and Mrs. Elmer Lee Sales.  They had a sixteen year old daughter named Eunice that I was deeply in love with.  One Saturday when I was about five years old, Eunice and her “real” boyfriend were going to take me to the movies.  I remember Mama putting “Bryl-Cream” on my hair to slick it down.  I was standing on the front steps waiting on Eunice and plotting on how to get rid of the guy coming with her when two yellow jackets swooped down and landed on top of my head and stung me.  This was when we found out that I was allergic to bee stings.  I began to go into anaphylactic shock.  Big welts arose on my trunk and my eyes were swelling shut.  Mama and Eunice loaded me up into the car and took off for the nearest doctor’s office.  I remember lying on my stomach as they started to pull my pants down to give me an injection.  I said, “Wait a minute, wait a minute!”  “I don’t want Eunice in the room!”  She had to leave while they gave the shot in my hip.

Early teens

 

Teens

 

Twenty’s

 

     I was 21 years old when Barry died.  He and I both had been kicked out of the house for fighting.  I was living with a friend of mine and his wife in Sevier County and Barry was sleeping in the cab of his pick up in a cornfield at the greenhouse where he was working.  He came to visit me on September 27, 1978 and stayed and talked for a couple of hours.  This was out of character for him as he was always on the move and didn’t sit still for very long.  I remember he wanted to borrow some money and I lied and told him I didn’t have any.  We split a six pack of beer and shot the breeze for awhile.  After that, he went over to Doug’s house and sat down and talked to him for an hour or so.  Doug could still get around pretty good, so they walked across the street and sat down on a log by a pond located there.  Barry had quit school and told Doug that he thought he might go back and get his diploma.  Doug said later that he remembered feeling pretty good about Barry’s plans.

     I know, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that this was God, allowing us an hour or two, to say good-bye.

     At 1:30 a.m. on the 28^th, my step sister, Carolyn called me and told me to come home.  Barry’s dead.  I found out when I got there that he and a friend of his had been in a wreck.  He had lost control of his pick up, climbed a steep bank on the side of Hinkle road and been thrown out thru the driver’s window.  He never wore a seat belt.  His truck rolled over on him and crushed his head.  His friend, Bobby, wasn’t hurt. 

     It got back to me later that he and Bobby may have been running from the Blount Co. Sheriff’s Department.  That wouldn’t have surprised me.  We had to have a closed casket funeral.  For years, I harbored the hope in my heart, that not having seen his dead body, he would show up.  I fantasized about someone having stolen his truck and that it was not really him in the wreck. 

 

      I never told Barry that I loved him while he was alive.  I corrected that mistake with Doug, several times, and never allowed myself to make that mistake with my two boys.

 

     I had a dream about him one night shortly after his death.  I dreamed that he and I were in a boxing match.  We were in a ring with a referee, a large crowd, noise, cigar smoke, the whole thing.  I dreamed that I was beating the crap out of  him and wouldn’t stop.  Even after he was on the mat, I kept hitting him. I realized what I was doing, knelt down and cradled his head in my lap.  I was crying and kept saying over and over again, “I’m sorry.  I’m sorry.”  Barry said, “It’s okay, I’ve written it all down in a little book under my pillow at home.”  I remember getting the book in my dream, but I never opened it up and read it.

 

     I have another hope that I keep hidden in my heart.  I remember once when Barry was eight years old, Doug took Barry and me to church where my Uncle Marvin preached.  He was actually my great uncle and Doug’s mother’s brother.  I had been saved while we still lived in Memphis and Doug wouldn’t let me get baptized until we moved to East Tennessee and Uncle Marvin could do it.  He “took” Barry down to the front of the church after the message to “get him saved.”  I remember Uncle Marvin asking him, “What about you?”  Doug said, “Not right now, maybe later.”  I don’t think Doug understood what getting saved was all about.  I think he thought that by “walking the aisle,” shaking the preacher’s hand and making a public profession of faith, that was all it took.

 

     Anyway, my hope is, that Jesus took him before he could sink so low as to lose his salvation.  Whether or not he was actually “saved” when Doug took him down the aisle, nobody knows.  God alone knows.  I “hope” he was.  I just know that when I cross over, I want to see Jesus first, and tell him how much I love him for saving my wretched soul, and then I want to see Mama.  I just “know” that she’ll be standing there right behind Jesus, waiting to hug me.  I “hope” with all my heart that Barry and Doug will be standing there behind her.  We’ll see.

 

     I had witnessed to Doug, or ‘tried’ to witness to him on several occasions, but he wouldn’t listen to me.  He was in the hospital several times before he actually dies and called for Kenneth Stansberry, Baptist preacher, to come to the hospital and talk with him on one of those occasions.  He called me later and told me that he had “taken care of” what I had been bugging him about for so long. 

 

---

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

• The Doug Jones Experience on location in Budapest - Part 4: The Cultural Bit
• ‘Why Didn’t I Think Of That?’ Moments
• Quotes From Pac-10 Football Media Day
• Ride the Phelps Wave While it Lasts