Weeds in Bloom

by Robert Newton Peck

  ALSO AVAILABLE FROM LAUREL-LEAF BOOKS

  BASHER FIVE-TWO

  Captain Scott O’Grady with Michael French

  THE BEET FIELDS, Gary Paulsen

  CAUGHT BY THE SEA: MY LIFE ON BOATS

  Gary Paulsen

  GUTS, Gary Paulsen

  CHINESE CINDERELLA, Adeline Yen Mah

  COUNTING STARS, David Almond

  FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS

  James Bradley and Ron Powers, adapted by Michael French

  ISHI, LAST OF HIS TRIBE, Theodora Kroeber

  Contents

  Prologue

  Part I: Vermont Boyhood

  Home

  Worshiping My Gods

  Mr. Carliotta

  Aunt Ida

  Mr. Diskin

  Early Pardee

  Miss Kelly

  A Tender Man

  Keepsake

  Joe

  Part II: Early Manhood

  Mr. Gene Autry

  Dear Elliot

  Saw

  Buck Dillard

  Paper

  Dr. Granberry

  Mary

  Wings

  Part III: Florida Years

  Ed’s Jewel

  Charlie Moon Sky

  Warm Quilts

  Movement

  The Jeeters

  Best Friend

  Spook and Rita

  Just as I Am

  Epilogue

  Know a man by those he honors.

  Prologue

  MY BOOK IS YOUR AMERICA.

  An album of my old friends and your new ones. Real citizens you deserve to greet, and know, and possible remember. You shall know me by the people I have known.

  There is no plot.

  A happy marriage of Yankee and Confederate, it rambles along Vermont dirt roads and Florida’s red clay, meandering like a cow path, seeming at first to go nowhere. But a cow path usual gets to a goal—a freshet of cool water, a barn at milking time, a puddle of shade beneath a meadow elm.

  Or a maple.

  On the outside, maple trees are rocky hard in their rough tough bark. Yet inside, a sip of springtime sap is sugar sweet. Also in spring, cow manure spread across a pregnant farming field produces a nourishing fragrance. Part of the unseen overture of birth. New life, not yet up. Brown creating green.

  Innards differ from hide. That’s the mission of my manuscript, to show how plain people can sparkle.

  Poverty can etch and furrow the faces of the old or smolder in the eyes of the young. Yet hardship is not always yoked with hardness of the heart. Along with rural innocence, many are graced with charm and backwoods wisdom. Horse sense and cow warmth. They are fresh milk, not from a store but from a stanchion, still bubbling, uncooled and unpasteurized. Raw.

  They can decipher the moonlit bugle of a blue-tick hound, dig up cure-all ginseng root, and perhaps steep you a natural remedy for miseries that might plague your body, or cloud your mind.

  A few still plant by the star signs.

  Others may hunt beneath a possum moon. Or tote around a horse chestnut (a buckeye) in a pocket to prevent an ache. They can skin and gut a rabbit without a knife, and mash wild red choke-cherries for a coughing child. Or snip off part of an implanted porcupine quill to let the gas escape from the shaft in order to reduce its size, and then extract the bloody barb from a newly educated Fido.

  Some can locate a bee tree and use the melted comb wax to seal a jar of rhubarb conserve. They drip their own jelly. Their cookstoves, cast only in black, burn nothing but gathered wood to raise biscuits that raise children that raise Cain.

  Complaints are rare.

  Our American poor are proud of who they are and what crafts they can accomplish (such as fashioning a crude collar for a mule), and will willingly share chow or shelter with a stranger. At times their generosity is a widow’s mite, their smiles braving adversity to spit in its eye. After personally digging a grave with their own shovels to bury a loved one, they grieve privately.

  Somehow, as uncanny as this may sound to you, country people sense that I came from a humble home and a mix-blood background. Although many are illiterate, they can heal far more often than they can hurt. In a way, for you, I harvest wild herbs of humanity. Some I have known since boyhood. Worthy of gathering.

  All, save one, are American, chapters and verses of our nation’s past and present. Stars in our flag. Not fancy folk. So please expect no long-stemmed roses from a florist. They are, instead, the unarranged flora that I’ve handpicked from God’s greenery.

  Weeds in bloom.

  PART I

  Vermont Boyhood

  Home

  “WAIT UP, ROBERT.”

  My mother’s soft voice couldn’t catch me. Being seven, I had to be first up the round and rocky slope.

  Conquering the summit, I turned to wave triumphantly at Mama, Papa, and Aunt Carrie … still climbing. Feet apart, standing astride the treeless top of Lead Hill, I looked far beyond my three family seniors to view our five-acre farm. Below, in the distance, stood mighty Solomon, our ox, with Daisy, our milk cow, black-and-white Holstein specks ankle-deep in silvery crick water, the tassels of their tails flicking the flies of August.

  Otherwise motionless, surrendering to a summer Sunday.

  From a split between two massive slabs of gray granite atop our minor mountain, juniper bushes erupted to offer smoke-blue berries. Awaiting my elders, I chewed a few; then, moving a few feet away found a treat less tarty. Gooseberries. Pale green beads.

  Age seven, in clothes Mama made, with my friend Sambo.

  Aunt Carrie, a measure leaner than Mama, came to meet me. Then my mother. Papa finished a breathless last.

  “Look.” I pointed. “Our barn and silo. Smaller’n toys.”

  Hefting me high to sit on his sinewy shoulders, Papa gripped my knees, then asked, “How’s it make you feel, Rob?”

  “Biggy. But not big enough. Someday I’m fixing to sprout up into a giant, like you.” Sigh. “I honest wonder when that’ll be.”

  “After you finish being a boy.”

  “When did you finish?”

  While my legs straddled his neck, my hands felt Papa’s face grin. “Never quite did.” His head turned to flash a wink at my mother.

  Mama smiled. “I hope Rob beats you to it.”

  From where she stood, Aunt Carrie beckoned to the three of us. “If’n you fetch Robert over this way, he’ll see a sight to behold.”

  Papa deposited me back to ground and we went to learn about whatever my maiden aunt had discovered. Turned out to be early fall flowers. Black-eyed Susans, neighborly to asters: yellowy petals surrounding a button. A brown hubcap, not black. Breaking open a dried center, Aunt Carrie blew away the husks to show me the Susan seeds. Tiny slivers, dark at one end, at the other a dull pewter.

  “My,” said Papa, “now there’s a bunch of boys.”

  Making a face, I asked, “Boys?”

  He nodded. “Every seed is a boy. Like you, it probable hankers to stretch at manhood and help to blossom a flower.”

  Holding one between fingertips, I asked, “Do all seeds actual get to bloom into flowers?”

  “No.” Papa shook his head. “There’s vegetable seed and stallion seed. As you’re my son, Robert, you are of my seed.” He glanced at Mama. “And of your mother’s egg.”

  I blinked. “Like chickens?”

  My mother smiled. “Right as farming.” Then, following a hurried glance at my father, she added, “And that’s a plenty on seeding for today.”

  With a nod, Papa’s long arm pointed downhill to our Holsteins. “See there, our dear ol’ Daisy knows something we don’t.” Staring at our cow, I asked what. “Well,” my father answered, “there’s a clock inside her that notes whenev
er it’s near to milking time. The hour of five.”

  True enough. Daisy had waded out of the crick water. She headed herself along the narrow brown cow path, dodging through the dandelions and smack toward our barn.

  An hour later, Papa and I were there as well. A hickory stanchion with a cotter pin was holding Daisy steady while my father squatted a milking stool. After wiping off her udder bag so that pasture grit wouldn’t freckle her milk, Papa began his twice-a-day devotion. Sunday included. A second later I heard the regular cadence of milk spurts chiming into the galvanized metal pail. There was a pure church-bell sound to the ring. Daisy’s hot milk blended with her warming animal fragrance, hale and healthy. Like me. While my father milked, Daisy allowed me to reach up and scratch her ears.

  Soft brown eyes offered silent thanks.

  On workdays, whenever Papa had left our farm to butcher hogs, he’d return wore to bone and more tired than an old boot. Milking on those evenings, my father usual rested his brow on the comforty soft pillow of Daisy’s flank.

  A plenty more’n once, I had seen Haven Peck do milking with his eyes closed. Possible in prayer. For me, the best prayers have no words.

  At bedtime in the loft, my head on rough but clean unbleached muslin, lying on the rustle of a mattress tick stuffed with corn husks, my eyelids were curtaining a long day. Yet prior to sleep, my brain kept digesting what I had been told earlier, away up high on Lead Hill.

  About how a life begins.

  Papa and Mama had sort of explained how I’d got here. From them. The pair of people who loved me the most: a flower and a chicken. It made me crack a grin.

  Someday I’d be more’n a giant.

  I’d also be a seed.

  Worshiping My Gods

  I WAS A LUCKY KID.

  Nearby to our Vermont farm a baseball diamond was paced off, graded level, and marked out. Truck-loads of red loam arrived for the infield. The outfield was little more than a pocked pasture of dandelions and daisies, and beyond, a rail fence festooned with poison ivy.

  Gods played there.

  Nobody like Mr. Tyrus Raymond Cobb of Georgia. Just a rowdy bunch of local guys with little education who toted black lunch pails to grunt jobs, working-day has-beens who became Sunday’s heroes. Our hometown baseball team. The Colonials.

  Even now, I still remember all of their names, and faces, and the positions they played.

  None got paid.

  My gods played baseball like a religion. No other reason. They practiced on Friday night, after a day of long sweating hours in wet work shirts. I’m uncertain whether the players wanted us kids to hang around underfoot, staring up at them with our adoring eyes. Yet they tolerated us, protected us, shared their baseball prowess, and gave each one of us a treasure to keep.

  A busted bat.

  Few of these men ever faked any social polish. They were tougher than the land they lived on, Vermont, and could endure the mills where they labored for a lifetime. Sometimes, following a swing and a miss at batting practice or a bumbled hot grounder, a salty word popped out.

  “Hey,” another player would remind, “there’s kids here.”

  Such standards ordain ordinary sinners into sanctity. Some of them drank spirits, chewed Red Man tobacco, and did a lot more than merely wink at the women. Yet among them they adhered to a code of righteousness, owing an unspoken duty to the knee-high parishioners in their outdoor chapel. To them, we were cherubs on the ceilings of their souls.

  They’d spit on home plate.

  Not on us.

  These dons of dignity had been knighted by the holy hickory sword of a Louisville Slugger bat, purified by the royal orb of a horsehide sphere. Their armor was flannel; their gauntlets were cowhide gloves, webbed between thumb and forefinger. They were uncut diamonds, worthy of worship, far more precious to me than Tinker or Evers or Chance, the famous double-play trio.

  Norm Catlin was our pitcher.

  He had freckles on his face and hands, I clearly remember, because Norm had taught me how to grip a curve, a fastball, and a drop. Today it’s called a sinker. One time Norm actual gave me a brand-new baseball, virgin white, to keep for my very own. Never had I owned a baseball (except for an old dog-chewed one I’d found), and here it was, all mine.

  It slept under my pillow.

  Norm was the best player on our team. So good that when he wasn’t pitching, he played right field to keep his bat in the lineup. He pitched right and batted left.

  Now, whenever Norm Catlin commanded right field, it meant that it was Bick’s turn to pitch. He was our left-hander. A southpaw. In a way, I almost loved Bick more than I did Norm, because we all knew that Norm was strong and solid, while our lefty had a sorry flaw.

  Bick could handle a baseball, but he could not handle a bottle.

  One time, in broad daylight, I saw Bick so drunk that he couldn’t stand up. He kept falling. The smell was awful. And there was dried puke staining the front of his good shirt. I ran all the way home and punched my fist through a small glass window in the chicken coop. My hand bled and took sewing. But the hurt of Mama’s stitches wasn’t the reason I was crying.

  Mama and Papa both asked me why I’d on-purpose busted the window. I couldn’t tell them the straight of it because I felt too ashamed for Bick, and they final quit asking. Maybe they reasoned that even a kid has a right to a secret.

  Bob Klein arrived.

  Mr. Klein was a jovial man.

  Everyone cheered him, even though he was the in-uniform manager of a visiting team. We all knew that Mr. Klein was well-to-do, as he’d sprung for spanking-fresh uniforms for his entire ball club. He’d made his fortune with a product called Save The Baby, which, I recall, was a bottled syrup that relieved cough, croup, fever, spasm, colic, and other childhood maladies.

  If his pitcher threw wild and walked a few of our hitters, we’d see Mr. Bob Klem waddle out to the mound. This was a cue for our crowd to sing the well-known radio jingle:

  “Save the baby.

  Save the baby.”

  This always made Mr. Klein smile and wave, as he appreciated the free advertising. By the way, Bob’s brother, Bill, was a big-league umpire, well known and respected. Mr. Bill Klein umpired in the National League, starting in the year 1905. He was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1953.

  Bob Klem had no such big-league aspirations. He just loved baseball enough to be a benevolent manager for a hometown amateur team in the little town of Putnam Landing.

  His opposite was Joe Gilbo.

  Joe, known in the north country as the Grand Old Man of Baseball, was a dedicated student of the sport. But as manager of the Port Henry team, he never wore a uniform. Just baggy clothes. People said Joe Gilbo was part Indian. (So were a plenty of Pecks.) Several of his sons (and a grandson) played for him.

  One of his sons pitched. And if we loaded up the bases during one of our lucky innings at bat, Old Joe would plod slowly out to the pitcher’s rubber to confer with his battery (pitcher and catcher). This private conference on the mound always prompted the familiar catcall remark that was hollered, all in fun, by the players in our dugout:

  “What’ll I do now, Pa?”

  There wasn’t even a bunt of hostility in this bit of friendly joshing. During the week, our guys and the Gilbo men worked together and were brothers under the horsehide skin.

  Sportsmanship existed in the crowd as well as among the players. Believe it or doubt it, whenever a baseball player from either team made an outstanding catch in the field, or belted a homer, our hometown rooters would always applaud his play. Why? Because we respected the game above winning it.

  Our team had a unique defensive weapon. We called it our Irish Combination: an able third sacker, Tickle Gunning, and a first baseman, Lefty O’Doole O’Roark. A grounder to third, followed by a crisp in-time peg to first, allowed local rooters to wink at one another, because our Irish Combination had nipped another opposing batsman.

  Saturday, to me, was as special as Su
nday. Because on Saturday a small pickup truck came to drag our grizzled infield and smooth the dirt for Sunday’s game.

  Kids, if lucky, got to be weights.

  Ballast.

  Seated on the husky drag boards overlapped to form a skid, we held on tight, inhaled diamond dust and Ford exhaust fumes, bruised our bottoms, and hooted in rapturous glee. It was dangerous. Hardly the type of excursion a sane mother would condone.

  Mr. Ray Catlin (Norm’s pa) resided in a tiny shanty close to the ballpark. Its only resident. His job was to chalk the lines. Home to left field. Home to right. He used a one-wheel dispenser over a stretched length of twine.

  I helped Mr. Catlin, for free.

  In a way, he was a Renaissance man. Owned a big black Belgian plow horse named Dobbin. Could fiddle, and also blow a spirited “Oh, the Moon Shines Tonight on Pretty Red Wing” on a tarnished key-of-D harmonica. Sometimes he’d clog-dance while he wheezed “Turkey in the Straw,” get winded, and have to stop to haul in a breather.

  All the kids loved him.

  As a cook, he seldom bothered with a skillet or a griddle. Instead, Mr. Catlin poured his pancake batter directly onto a hot stove top. He’d wait until each flapjack was riddled with holes before flipping it over. They were so tasty that they needed neither butter nor maple syrup. Just for deviltry, I sometimes teased Mama that even though her pancakes were delicious, they weren’t quite the same as Mr. Catlin’s.

  I’m sure she understood why.

  It had to do with baseball and getting coated with diamond dust and Ford fumes, fingernailing a knuckler, trying to tack and tape a broken bat, sleeping with Norm’s ball under a muslin pillow stuffed with straw, being hoarse many a Sunday evening in summer, or pretending to knock mud off my cleats (even when I was barefoot). And learning how to spit.

  A wise mother rarely tethers an unshod boy whose worst fault is worshiping his earthy August gods.