On Grandma's Porch

by Deborah Smith

  I glanced over at Grandpa, who was silent. “You know, Grandpa, I’ve given it two weeks, and nothing’s happened yet. It couldn’t hurt to use that stuff—just sort of like insurance.” I braced myself for some sort of disapproval from him, but he still said nothing, appearing to concentrate on the peas.

  I went over to the corner cabinet and looked on the top shelf, which was loaded with all sorts of jars and bottles full of country remedies, both store-bought and homemade. The sight of some of these products made me blanch due to past association. Especially the Watkins green salve, which my great-grandmother ate straight out of the jar every night to ward off colds.

  Off to the left, I saw what I was looking for, a small glass bottle with a hexagonal plastic cap. I returned to the table with it and read the directions. I glanced up at Grandpa again, hoping for some sign of approval, but he continued to stare at the peas. I took the cap off the bottle and let a drop of the acid solution slide down the glass wand applicator onto wart number one. Even though the label said it was painless, I felt a sting when the chemical touched my flesh. I decided I would try it on just one wart at first and see what happened.

  “It’s okay, Grandpa,” I said, wincing. “This stuff will take off the warts, and Mose will never know I didn’t wait to see what happened.”

  Grandpa began to make that strange, tuneless half-whistling, half-hissing noise he sometimes made when his mind took him somewhere far away.

  The next day Mama dropped me off at Grandma and Grandpa’s as usual on her way to work. Grandma wasn’t there because she had to go to a meeting of the U.M.W. I could see Grandpa in the pasture a couple of hundred yards away rolling a salt block off the back of the truck. The cows had begun to gather around, jostling each other in their attempts to be the first one to get a lick of salt.

  I wandered out to where he was, through two gates, past the chicken house, avoiding cow pies as I went. By that time Grandpa had gone over to where a rope suspended some wound-up burlap bags between two trees. He poured used motor oil onto the bags against which the cows would scratch their backs. This was a home remedy he used to keep the horse flies from biting his cows. It seemed to me that Grandpa thought of everything.

  “How’re the warts?” he asked.

  “I guess that stuff took a tiny layer off that one wart I tried it on. I’ll put it on the others today.” I nudged a Betsy bug with my toe as it crawled along the ground, some bit of vegetation in its pincers. “Thanks for taking me to Mose’s, though. I really enjoyed meeting him. He’s pretty special. I mean, he asked us into his house and didn’t make any apologies for it even though it was in bad shape. And even though he was really poor, he wouldn’t take any money. That quarter he gave me was probably real money to him.”

  “Yes, I ’spec it was.” Grandpa removed his baseball cap and ran his hand through his thinning reddish hair. “Just because a man’s poor don’t mean he can’t be proud.”

  “Yeah. He even carried himself proud even though he was so old. But how can people keep their spirits up when they have to live like that?”

  Grandpa settled his cap back on his head and reached into his overall pocket for his pocket knife and chewing tobacco. “A man’s pride don’t always come from the things that money can buy,” he said, cutting himself a plug of Brown’s Mule. “Mose has a gift that nobody else has. Nobody in these parts anyway. It’s too bad he didn’t get to use it more. Once the older folks that knew him started to die off and the young folks started going to doctors for every little thing, I reckon nobody much came to him for wart witching anymore. Except us, that is.”

  Grandpa started back toward the barn. “Would you mind getting my inhaler off the kitchen table?” he wheezed. Then you can help me feed the cows.” Grandpa suffered from brown lung from working in the thread mill for thirty years in addition to farming, and he had to stop working frequently in order to catch his breath.

  “Sure,” I said. “I’ll meet you at the barn.”

  While I walked back to the house I thought about what Grandpa had said. That was why Mose had been so glad to see us. After a long time, someone had come to him and asked him for help, asked him to use his gift again. It was too bad that more people didn’t go to see him.

  I looked down at the wart I had treated with the caustic wart medicine. It still stung from yesterday’s treatment. I realized that I wasn’t sure I believed in Mose’s wart witching. I’d proven that yesterday. I hadn’t given it the full two weeks before I’d put that stuff on the warts, and Mose and Grandpa had both told me it wouldn’t work unless I really believed.

  I grabbed the inhaler off the table and put it in my pocket. Then I stopped by the sink for a cool drink of well water. I stared out the window past the profusion of African violets on the sill and felt a twinge of guilt that I hadn’t given Mose’s magic the full two weeks to work. Good thing Mose would never know. I would hate to hurt his feelings and his pride.

  I reached for the wart medicine, figuring I’d put on the second dose. It would only take a second. My hand froze in mid-air. As I looked at the warts, I felt my eyes grow wide and my face redden with shame. He would know. He would know when the warts didn’t come up on his own hands. He might think his powers had deserted him and that would make him very sad. Or worse, he would know that I hadn’t believed in him.

  I flung open the doors to the cabinet under the sink and grabbed the stiff brush that Grandma used to clean the dirt off of freshly plowed-up potatoes. I scrubbed and scrubbed the dried whitish residue of the medicine off the one wart until the whole area was raw and fixing to bleed.

  Then I ran out to the barn and up into the hay loft while Grandpa waited on the ground. I pushed bales of hay out of the loft window and onto the ground beside Grandpa, who cut the twine from the bales with his pocket knife. Then I joined him on the ground and we called the cows. “C’mon! C’mon!” we yelled.

  By the time I’d separated the bales into big chunks, and spaced them out, the cows were filing in from two pastures to the barnyard. Grandpa sat down on the top step of the corn crib to rest and use the inhaler. “So, did you put the wart medicine on?” he said when he could breathe again.

  “Nah. I decided to have faith.” I joined him on the step, hugged him around the shoulders and kissed him on the cheek.

  “That’s my girl,” he said.

  When the warts had not gone away by the time school started, I decided the solution to my social dilemma was Band-Aids. I wore them constantly, and one day as I removed them before a bath, I saw that the warts had disappeared.

  Grandpa took me back to see Mose a few times more. Whenever the church would have a barbecue fundraiser, I would take him a plate with a chicken quarter cooked all night over an open fire and slathered with a tangy sauce, coleslaw, baked beans, and loaf bread.

  He was always delighted to see us, and I heard he lived to be ninety-five.

  Now a few years ago, I read that you could make warts disappear merely by covering them with adhesive bandages. It’s supposed to smother them or something like that, and eventually they go away. But I still prefer to think that it was Mose and his magic—and my faith in an old man’s special gift—that did the trick.

  A 92-Year-Old Remembers

  When you picked sage only during a full moon in May and August and dried it for hog-killing time in October when you made sausage.

  When you hung your clean laundry to dry on the garden fence or a clothes line.

  When you stuffed your own mattresses with fresh new straw when you cut the wheat.

  When children went barefoot from May until the first bale of cotton was sold. That’s when you’d get your new shoes and a pound of cheese.

  —thanks to Maureen Hardegree, The Good Son, and her husband’s grandmother, “Big Mama”

  Things Grandma and Grandpa Probably Didn’t Have

  Instant
grits

  Microwave ovens

  Cell phones

  More than one phone, period

  Air conditioning

  Central heat

  Carpet

  Doorbells

  Automatic garage doors

  Frozen TV dinners

  A Patchwork Journey

  by Michelle Roper

  “Because I was born in the South, I’m a Southerner. If I had been born in the North, the West or the Central Plains, I would be just a human being.”

  —Clyde Edgerton, author

  One summer when I was a boy, I had to stay with my grandmother while my mom and dad worked. In the evening, while sitting in her porch rocker, Grandmother would piece together a quilt of patches, and as she did, she told me stories about the patches, and where they came from, and to whom they had belonged. Those patches and my grandmother’s stories took me on a journey, which I can still remember forty years later whenever I look at that quilt.

  “You’d best eat that muffin because you won’t feel like eating anything after your treatment,” I told my wife as she sipped her ice water. “You haven’t touched your orange juice, either.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  I leaned my cheek toward the sun, savoring the warming rays as my wife and I pretended to enjoy our breakfast outside the local cafe.

  My coffee had all the flavor of ground cardboard. Lately, everything tasted like cardboard. Just like Liza, I hadn’t had any appetite.

  Some people claim their hearts are tied to their spouses. Well, in my case, it’s my stomach. Same thing happened during her three pregnancies. I developed cravings for pickles, Chinese food, and Krispy Kreme doughnuts right along with her.

  Something cold and wet touched my leg. I looked down to find the café owner’s Chihuahua, Bob, sporting a yellow knit sweater studded with rhinestones. He sat in a begging position with his little paws extended up in the air.

  “Sorry, Bob. Dr. Blackshear put you on a diet. No more handouts.”

  Liza leaned over and threw him a chunk of her muffin. “Let him enjoy himself. He’s still recovering from his trauma.”

  “Trauma? That sweater is an invitation. I swear it’s so bright it’s a beacon to every hawk in the sky.”

  I leaned over the table toward my wife and spoke in a softer tone so Bob wouldn’t hear me. “If he was our dog, I wouldn’t dress him like he was a poodle. I’d put him in a leather biker jacket with a skull and crossbones on the back; make him feel like a man.”

  Apparently, he heard me. Bob moseyed back into the cafe.

  Liza glanced at her watch and turned to me. “If we don’t get a move on, we’re not going to have enough time to get to Wal-Mart and the bookstore before seeing Dr. Allen.”

  “Alrighty, let’s get you to Wal-Mart, I’ve got some shopping I need to do before we get ready for our trip.”

  Liza never argued. She merely tilted her head toward the left when she was upset with me. After twenty-five years of marriage, I’d learned to read her body signals, and they were all shouting annoyance. Her head was tilted now.

  On the side street sat the Winnebago I’d bought three months ago. In fact, I purchased it the same day the doctors diagnosed Liza with an advanced case of leukemia. They had said she didn’t have long to live. I told her she was gonna beat this thing.

  I had to help her climb up in her seat. Today she had stumbled, and I grabbed her upper arm to keep her from falling. But then she stopped and cocked her head to one side. “Do you hear it, Disney?”

  “What?”

  “Listen.”

  I heard some ladies talking outside the cafe and an old farm tractor rumbled by. Liza used to always tell me take time to smell the honeysuckle blossoms in the early summer. She’d make me get up from the work I’d brought home from the office and come outside to watch Anna and Mickey shovel sand into piles in the sandbox when they were little. She would say, ‘It’s the small moments that make our memories, Disney. Make a memory.’

  “Listen, it’s the creek.”

  I listened more carefully, and sure enough I could hear the burbles. “Well I’ll be darned. Can you imagine what the roars of the Colorado River are going to sound like when we’re gazing down at it from the rim of the Grand Canyon?”

  She turned and looked at me. “Forget the Grand Canyon. Listen to the creek. Listen, Disney.”

  As she sat down in her seat, my fingerprints showed whiter than the parchment like skin of her arm. I noted that she needed more vitamins. I’d stop by the health food store later. I had to build Liza’s resistance and stamina, so she’d have the strength to ride a donkey down the canyon.

  We’d talk about seeing the Grand Canyon lots of times, back when we went camping with the young’uns and all we had was a tent and a Coleman cook stove.

  As I cranked the Winnebago, the engine purred like a tiger on the prowl. “Well, my lady, to market, to market we go, and we’ll buy you a new television for the back so you can watch it while I’m driving the highways and by-ways of the U.S.A.”

  She didn’t answer but leaned back in the seat and closed her eyes.

  Liza leaned against me for support as we walked across the parking lot. Inside the entrance to Wal-Mart, she grabbed a buggy, and rested on the plastic covered metal bar.

  “That’s a good idea, I can put the television in there,” I said.

  “Get your own buggy. I’m going to the fabric department by myself.”

  I was taken aback by her crabby tone. Normally, she wasn’t this touchy before her doctor’s appointment.

  It had to be anxiety over the trip. We’d been talking about it for years, and now that we were finally doing it, she must be anxious to get on the road. “All right, I’ll let you pick out your fabric. What are you going to make? Curtains for the kitchen window in the camper?”

  She pushed her buggy away without answering me, and didn’t even speak to the nice grandmotherly greeter.

  I nodded. “Howdy, ma’am.”

  Then I snatched my own buggy and hurried to the electronics department, which was next to the fabric department. I watched as my wife moved up and down the fabric displays. She stopped to unfurl different bolts that caught her fancy. The red kerchief covering her head reminded me of the kind she wore in college. Now, rather than long blonde tresses, Liza only has clumps resembling dried up corn shucks. I cringed as she held up a bolt of pink material. I didn’t want any frou-frou fabric with flowers and bows on it, but if it made her happy.

  A television would make me happy. In the aisle next to the boom boxes, I found what I wanted. A television with front audio/video input jacks and a DVD built in. I envisioned Liza, Mickey and Anna watching movies as I drove through traffic in different cities around the West.

  I wheeled up to the fabric department with our new television set in the buggy. Liza had a folded blue square in hers. I didn’t get to see what was printed on it, but I was relieved. I could live with blue. It would look nice with the oak cabinets in the RV.

  “Did you find what you were looking for?”

  “Yes,” she said as she glanced at the box in my cart.

  “I’m ready to go. I have just enough time to get over to the bookstore.”

  “You have all the time in the world.”

  After Wal-Mart, we hit the road to Bigelow. At a red light, a man wearing an Atlanta Braves baseball cap leaned over the steering wheel of his Ford pickup truck to get a better look at the Winnebago. Desire sparkled in his eyes. From his facial expression, I knew the plans he was mentally making, what he was thinking. I could almost hear him say, “If I had me a motor home, I’d do such and such, and I’d go here and there.”

  Because I had made plans for years and years whenever I saw a motor home drive through our town. Finally, I was ma
king my dreams come true. Maybe, that was why I knew I was the envy of motorists everywhere I went—the RV represented unfulfilled dreams and adventures they yearned to have.

  Glancing over at Liza’s weary face, I’m glad I insisted on driving it to town, today. At least, she could lie down in comfort on the way home after her treatment. I laughed to myself remembering how she protested about riding in this gas-guzzling mammoth as she called it.

  Approaching the mall parking lot, I said to her, “Wake up, honey. We’re here.” Normally, she refused to patronize the larger discount chains as a matter of principle because of all the Mom-and-Pop bookstores going out of business, but this one was so close to Dr. Allen’s office that it had become her refuge.

  After treatments, we would always stop off and buy reading material. This way she had something to occupy her over the next few days as she rested and allowed the chemotherapy to fight the cancer. We had never stopped before treatments.

  As she picked out her books, I searched for an atlas. I found one I liked, Maps of the National Seashores. Liza loved the ocean. It was my intention to take her to every natural beach I could find in the U.S.A. after the Grand Canyon. I also purchased a laminated map of the United States.

  Being a gentleman, I paid for her books, The Fool’s Guide to Sewing a Patchwork Quilt, hence the need for all that blue fabric and the Treasured Memories Cookbook of New England. I didn’t know why she would buy a Yankee cookbook. Yankees didn’t know how to cook their vegetables, let alone bake a decent cake. I also spied a journal with an angel on the outside cover.

  The cashier with a nose ring and eyebrow studs slid our books into a plastic bag and handed them to me. I tried not to stare at the young man, but I was secretly praising the Lord that neither Anna nor Mickey had pierced anything other than earlobes.

  Out in the Winnebago, Liza placed the books beside her seat. “Why did you buy The Fool’s Guide to Sewing a Patchwork Quilt? Gonna make a quilt for us to snuggle under when we get to the Grand Canyon?” I asked.