by James Aura
He said he had a big batch of brandy going too, different fruit flavors, blackberry and peach. He seemed real pleased about the sheriff’s department going in with him to sell some here and there.
Afterwards I walked with Tommy out to the car.
“I hate to say it but I am kind of depressed about school. I’ll find out how I did on finals in a couple days, but I am not optimistic.”
He nodded, and stepped into the Mustang. He looked out at the farm with the darkness settling in, and grinned.
“Well, we’ve always got Saturday night in town, Russell. Heck we could even catch some Friday night high school ball games now and then, if you’re in the mood.”
He was trying to persuade me that life here in the sticks had its finer moments. But his perspective was local and mine was wider. A big college campus with students from distant countries, college girls, brilliant professors, late night discussions about the ‘meaning of life’, had changed me.
Tommy drove down the lane and when he pulled onto the blacktop he gunned the Mustang. The roar from that engine made the chickens flutter and squawk out in the henhouse. I noticed the cats were still staring down from the barn loft door.
I wanted to talk some more with Uncle Wallace about things, but I was exhausted and we both turned in. He went up to the guest room, now his bedroom with the canned goods. I collapsed in my own bed downstairs.
But I tossed and turned for hours, trying to go to sleep. I kept thinking about Kim the curvy nurse, and tall, pretty Elaine and Roxanne, my miniskirt Spanish tutor, in her lavaliere and go-go boots and why the sheriff, of all people, would be saying this old dirt farm could be a “big money maker.”
I finally fell asleep and dreamed I was on a tiny boat with sharks all around, and the sun was blazing and there were little boys and women crying and machine guns going off in the distance. I wasn’t feeling heroic, either, just scared like the rest of the people in the boat. Some were Vietnamese and one was the Dean’s secretary, crying like everyone else. And we were all thirsty. I woke up in a sweat and stared into the darkness until I could drift back into a restless slumber.
I woke up to the smell of breakfast. The sun was up, chickens were out making their rounds in the orchard and I heard a strange voice in the kitchen. A woman’s voice. I had slept way past the time for chores.
Uncle Wallace rapped on my door.
“Wake up sleepyhead, breakfast is ready and there’s somebody for you to meet.”
I decided maybe I shouldn’t walk into the kitchen in my underwear so I threw on the clothes I normally wore for chores and, with great trepidation, eased into the kitchen.
Uncle Wallace was sitting at the table with a plate of scrambled eggs, toast, coffee and a large slab of butter sitting on a cutting board.
An Asian woman was standing at the sink, drying dishes. She looked either worried or afraid, I couldn’t tell which.
Uncle Wallace gestured toward her with his fork.
“Russell this here is Soo Jin. I am renting her my trailer and she has agreed to help us around the house in return.”
She nervously smiled and nodded. She was wearing shorts and a purple blouse that looked a lot like the one Grandma wore when she’d get spruced up to go to town. She was barefoot. What was odd? Maybe her age. She seemed young, but her face looked wrinkled, old.
“It is nice to meet you, Russell. Your uncle told me about your trip back to college. I hope you will be able to resume your studies soon.”
She spoke formally and precisely, as if she had been practicing the sentences.
I stared at the two of them stupidly. I go away for a week and Uncle Wallace practically turns the place upside down. Well not exactly upside down. The house was neat as a pin. The funeral flowers were mostly gone; front room had been tidied up and vacuumed. The kitchen had been a sloppy mess, now it looked like Betty Crocker’s cookery. Was this the work of this woman, Soo Jin?
The eggs and coffee and toast smelled good. There was bacon, too. I nodded, tried to politely smile and cautiously sat down.
It was time for a ‘come to Jesus’ with Uncle Wallace, but not now. The Asian woman dished out my food like a truck stop waitress. Eggs, toast, butter, cream, coffee and bacon laid out right under my nose. They were delicious. And the butter. I hadn’t tasted butter like that since Grandma and I had churned our own a few times. That had been years ago. It was fresh and salty. I could tell it came from our fresh cow’s milk. Pure white clover butter.
Soo Jin said, “I hope everything tastes good, Russell. I try very hard to cook the way your uncle say you like it. But tell me if you want different breakfast.”
She looked at me in a sort of pleading way and smiled. It was then I saw she had no teeth. That’s why this young woman seemed old. There were no teeth. No teeth at all. If there was a single tooth in that woman’s mouth, I couldn’t see it.
I couldn’t help but stare a minute, then shook it off.
“Thank you, ma’am. It was delicious. Best breakfast I’ve had in awhile.”
Her eyes showed relief. Uncle Wallace stood up, carried a plate to the sink and turned to face me.
“Finish up breakfast, Russell. Then let’s walk down to Blackwater creek and get caught up on a few things. It’s time to put in some cash crops.”
As he walked out toward the barn, I looked out the window and noticed the cats. They were still safely well off the ground, staring down from the barn loft door. I could read those cats like a book. Something wasn’t right. The cows were out grazing. They’d been milked already.
I went back to the bedroom to put my shoes on and stopped at the bill basket. Grandma kept all the bills in the bill basket right on the counter next to the hallway door. Then at the end of the month, she would write the checks, put them in the mail. The bill basket was empty, all cleaned out.
We headed out to the back pasture toward Blackwater Creek.
I tried to compose my questions in an orderly way. There were so many, I had to decide what to ask first, since I knew Uncle Wallace would take awhile to answer.
“What happened to the bills?”
He stopped and took a pinch of tobacco from the pouch in his shirt pocket. We strolled on toward the machine shed. The trees were in full bloom, now. Birds were making nests; grass was turning bright green, catching up with the clover which grew everywhere. I took a deep breath and the air was sweet and cool. I was alive and Grandma was dead. And all I had was my uncle, who had some explaining to do. I wondered what was going to come next.
“Russell, there are times in a man’s life when you’ve got to seize the moment. This is one of those times. We don’t get many chances.”
I reached down and picked a sprig of clover to chew.
“Yessir. What happened to the bills?” I felt one of Uncle Wallace’s speeches coming on when I just wanted a few simple answers.
“Russell, first of all, what happened down at school? They going to let you go back and resume your studies, or what?”
Then I realized he had some questions too, which I hadn’t yet answered. He had me off balance. If I answered his question, maybe he’d answer some of mine.
“Uncle Wallace, the Dean told me I had to go ahead and take all my finals, even though I wasn’t ready. I am not sure how I came out, but we’ll find out in a day or two. If I lose the scholarship, I won’t be going back to Auburn. The out of state tuition alone would be way more than it costs now.”
He grimaced. “You are a bright young man, and you ought to get a good education. I never did, and look how I turned out. Living in a run down trailer, hand to mouth most of my life. Sleeping with the green beans and peaches in your Grandma’s guest room. The high point of my whole life came when I was 21. You know what that was Russell? Getting the hell out of Korea. It’s a sad thing when a man looks back and something like that is his high point- at the age of 21! You can do better, than that, Russell. People always said I had a lot on the ball. Maybe if I’d gone to college You
got to do better. You got to!
He was gasping. Walking and putting that many sentences together so quickly was stressing him out. As we approached the machine shop, a dog began to bark. A deep, throaty bark from inside. Sounded ferocious.
Uncle Wallace slid open the side door where we kept the tractor and tools. There was a large black, white and orange canine, tied to the tractor by a rope attached to his collar.
“Russell, this here is ‘Wonju’. No varmint, or people, for that matter, will ever mess with our sheep again with this dog on duty. The sheriff got him for me, confiscated in a drug bust last week. We have a sheep and farm protection system right here for the price of one quart of Kentucky’s finest.”
Wonju was not a happy dog. His growl made my throat tingle.
Uncle Wallace went to the wall, just out of the dog’s reach, and opened a large bag of dog food. There were also dog biscuits. He tossed a biscuit towards the beast. The growling stopped and chewing began.
He then dished out a helping of dog food in a large plastic bowl and sat it within Wonju’s reach. The dog began to bolt down the chow.
“That is some dog. What breed is that?”
I had always wanted a dog on the farm, but Grandma was a cat person. Said they didn’t mix well. I was excited, in spite of myself. A dog would make a huge difference. And now I knew why the cats were cowering up in the barn loft.
“Uncle Wallace, no offense, but you’re doing a lot of things around here without discussion. Almost seems like you had some of this planned..”
He remained hunkered down, watching Wonju gulp down his rations. I could see him forming some kind of a response in his head.
Meanwhile the dog was fascinating. He was a beast but he was a beautiful beast. Big black eyes, gleaming white teeth, a body like a canine wrestler. Dog must have weighed 150 pounds, at least. And now that he had eaten, he didn’t seem so threatening.
“You know why I named him ‘Wonju’, Russell? Look it up when you’re at the library some time. I was with the X Corps outside Wonju when the Chinese Army invaded, came across the Yalu with those damn burp guns. It was hell on Earth, Russell. A frozen hell. We fought alongside the ROKs in the ice and the snow and was it ever cold. My buddy, southern boy from Biloxi, lost his toes in that cold. I thought we were gonna freeze to death out there, fighting the North Koreans and the Chinese, shivering in those damn army tents. So Wonju kinda stuck in my mind. He looks like a ‘Wonju’ don’t you think?”
I allowed as he did. And I began to wonder if my uncle would ever directly respond to my questions.
Uncle Wallace suggested I might help train Wonju to be a farm watch dog, which sounded like a great job and I readily agreed. He handed me a pocketful of dog treats and I gave the dog one. Wonju immediately wagged his tail and no longer seemed threatening. We slowly made our way on down to Blackwater Creek with the dog walking ahead of us on a long leash.
The stretch of pasture along the creek was bursting with vegetation. Clover, wild grasses, lespedeza and weeds grew faster here, with the rich black layers of topsoil created by the occasional flooding of the bottomland from the creek. This was also a favorite browsing spot for the cows and sheep, so years of livestock manure had also fertilized the soil.
“This here is an ideal spot for some organic crop-raising, Russell. No chemical fertilizers needed. We could stick an ax handle into the dirt here and it would probably sprout! Don’t you think this is a good place for us to get started?”
Unfortunately getting started involved the hard work of digging postholes and putting a fence around two acres of bottomland, to keep said cows and sheep from trampling and grazing our crop.
The next few days were good ones on Grandma’s farm. The weather was balmy, my Uncle and I spent long hours putting in the fence, getting the machinery oiled and ready.
Then I plowed. The pungent, earthy aroma from the freshly turned topsoil was rewarding. The rich black loam was full of fat earthworms and seemed to beckon the vegetables, herbs and seeds we placed into the ground.
Soo Jin showed up bright and early every morning. She cooked and cleaned and kept us well fed for breakfast and lunch. I showed her how to tell if a jar of canned vegetables had gone bad. A bulging jar lid was the clue that the contents should be thrown out, and never eaten. We were eating lots of canned goods now, until the spring garden came in. In the late afternoons, when she had tidied up the house, she’d drive Uncle Wallace’s Bel Air back to the trailer for the evening leaving us on our own for supper.
Turns out Uncle Wallace had not only paid all the bills, he had set up a little filing system for paperwork things in Grandma’s old desk in her bedroom. Apparently he had saved up some money over the years and seemed ready to spend it on our farming venture. This was a relief since our grand plan for the raw milk and organic vegetables was going to take awhile to pay off.
We had stopped talking about organic farming to the neighbors. They didn’t take to it. Our neighbor to the north said he doubled his yields with anhydrous ammonia and weed killer and why in the world would anyone go back to the old days when all we had was mules and grasshoppers?
Aside from being a little bossy—“Take you shoes off when you come in the house!”, Soo Jin was a good addition. She did most of the cooking and took over the kitchen garden plot behind the house. I even gained a little weight despite the hard labor outside. We completed the fencing, plowing and planting in a couple of weeks. The wheat crop would be next. It was close to harvest. Once the wheat was out, we’d put in soybeans.
Elaine called early one evening with the news. I had once again blown it. One ‘A’ a ‘B’ and two ‘C’s’ on my finals. My grade point average was going to drop to a 2.8 and I heard my scholarship flapping away on the wings of a Auburn War Eagle as she read me the test scores. If only I had studied harder, if only Grandma if only I wasn’t such a screw up.
I thanked Elaine. Told her I would let her know when I got the official results in the mail. But I already knew. I had worked out the GPA math over and over. It wasn’t looking good for my continued attendance at Auburn University. I told her I missed her and we hung up.
I sat on the front porch late on a Friday afternoon watching a Chickenhawk soar above the woods. I hadn’t experienced any mirages of Grandma in awhile. The dog was lying on the top step, a sentinel. A breeze was coming from the west, and carried with it the dull roar of Tommy’s Mustang approaching on the blacktop. He had finished restoring the body and as he pulled into the lane and came up the hill towards the house, I couldn’t help but admire the new and polished fenders. It was a mean machine, and he had single-handedly returned it from wrecked ruination.
Our plan was to drive through a couple of nearby burgs, cruise the downtown drags, stop at some drive-ins, and watch for carloads of interesting women, who would be doing the same thing. Tommy figured they wouldn’t be able to resist a shiny, souped-up Shelby GT.
But first, I had to finish milking. Uncle Wallace had milked Daisy but left Cherry for me, then left for town in the pickup. I had procrastinated, not expecting Tommy to arrive so early. Soo Jin was still in the kitchen, cleaning up. She had outdone herself that day, churning two large batches of fresh creamy butter.
I began to wonder about Wonju’s attitude. He laid there unperturbed on the porch steps, tongue hanging out, while Tom hopped out of his car and sauntered up to the house. Some watchdog.
So, while I finished the chores, I suggested Tommy wait on the porch, but he tagged along through the house, while I headed for the barn, and inside we ran into Soo Jin.
I awkwardly introduced them and she offered him some iced tea at the kitchen table. He readily accepted.
While I was running the fresh milk through the cream separator, Tommy emerged from the back door, a huge smile on his face. He lowered his voice and winked.
“Russell, you didn’t tell me you guys had gotten yourselves a hootchie mama!”
“Hootchie- what?”
“A hoo
tchie mama. You know, a Korean gal that the soldiers shack up with while they’re over there playing G.I. Joe.”
“And how would you, Tommy Gabbert, be knowing this about Soo Jin?”
“Pop was over there. When him and his buddies get together and get drunk, they talk about the hootchie mamas all the time. These Korean gals hook up with the soldiers, hoping to get a ticket to the States. My uncle Carl brought one back with him a few years ago. There was quite a whoop de doo about it in town for awhile. I would recognize a Korean woman anywhere.”
I heard Soo Jin starting up the Bel Air out front, preparing to leave.
“You didn’t say anything to offend her, or anything, did you?”
‘Russell Russell Russell do you see ‘idiot’ painted on my forehead? Of course not! She was bustling around the kitchen, and I just asked her where in Korea she was from and she started chattering like a magpie, talking about some towns I never heard of but, pretty sure they were Korean. Then she mentioned Camp Long, and that rang a bell. A bunch of Daddy’s VFW buddies were stationed there. Big hootchie mama scene around Camp Long.”
