Tales from a Free-Range Childhood

by Donald Davis

  I knew that these dead ornaments were the very reason that Mrs. Fox was so named. Mrs. Way’s name I understood also. Not yet knowing all the vagaries of English spelling, I clearly understood Mrs. Way’s name when Daddy observed that she was “a right fleshy woman.”

  When Joe and I were in the six- to eight-year-old range, a new tenant moved into the garage apartment. His name was Robert Louis Fitzgerald, and he was a new policeman in town. We came to like Robert Louis Fitzgerald very much, and he, being unmarried and without children, became almost our playmate.

  When it was his turn to be on call, he drove a police car home at night. It was one of only two police cars in town and had to be ready if needed. The car he always got to bring was a 1953 Plymouth that was painted black and white and had a single red light that could blink slowly just above the center of the windshield. One day, Daddy looked at the car and said, “That’s not a police car, that’s a joke. Why, that six-cylinder Plymouth couldn’t pull a wet booger out of a baby’s nose!” Mama turned red and frowned, but Robert Louis Fitzgerald agreed.

  The police car was the real reason for two little boys’ friendship with the policeman. Robert Louis Fitzgerald would invite the two of us to play in the police car and check out all of the switches and buttons, just to see what they would do.

  There was one switch that made the red light on top of the car come on and start blinking. There was a button that you could press and it would make the siren wail unbrokenly as long as you held it. When you released the button, the siren would start to wind down, and the best sounds were made by pushing it in and out and in and out over and over again.

  The police car had two exterior spotlights that were mounted on either side of the windshield. When it was dark, Robert Louis Fitzgerald showed Joe and me how to turn on the spotlights and work the controls from inside the car. We had sword fights in the dark with the light beams. We even learned how to talk through the radio with the dial set to the right place to make our voices come out through the front of the grille of the car.

  Robert Louis Fitzgerald would come driving home in the car in the afternoon. He would get out and would be wearing his black policeman’s uniform, complete with his wide black belt and his pistol at his side. The black belt had little leather loops that held a row of bullets running all the way around the back. It looked so exciting and so dangerous.

  He would take out a bullet and show it to us. Then he would say, “Do y’all want to touch a bullet?”

  “What will it do?” my brother would innocently ask.

  I gave the answer myself: “If you touch it and your fingernail happens to accidentally hit the bullet, it will go off and kill you!”

  We would stand way back and barely touch the bullets with great fear and trembling.

  One day, an old stray dog wandered out of the woods and into Miss Annie’s yard. Miss Annie saw the old dog staggering and slobbering and called us inside. “That may be a mad dog!” she said. She called Robert Louis Fitzgerald at the police station and asked if he would come home quickly and shoot the dog.

  Soon, the police car came in the driveway.

  My brother, Joe, and I wanted to watch. We had never seen anyone shoot a dog. Miss Annie would not let us watch. We did, however, listen to everything. We heard the gun go, Bang, bang!

  “Why did he have to shoot two times?” I asked Miss Annie.

  “Well,” she mused, “he is either a bad shot or he killed real good!”

  By the time I was about nine years old, Robert Louis Fitzgerald moved out of the garage apartment. He told us that he was getting married and that he and his wife-to-be were buying a house in town. The police car was gone. A lot of our fun was over.

  Joe and I got older. Miss Annie got older. By the time Joe was eight and I was ten, she had to be at least eighty years old.

  Then another thing happened: as we all got older, Joe and I decided that we did not need a babysitter anymore. “We are too old to keep having that old lady watch everything we do,” we both protested to Mama.

  Daddy tried to reason with us. “Don’t think of Miss Annie as a babysitter,” he started. “Think of her as a wise old teacher. She is an old, old lady. That means that she has seen a lot of life and has had a lot of experience. She knows how to handle things that I do not even know how to handle because I have not lived as long as she has. If you’ll watch her and talk with her and listen to her, she could really teach you a lot. She is a wise old woman.”

  Joe and I were not at all impressed. The only word of all those Daddy had used that we even heard was old, and we did not want to keep having her as our babysitter, no matter what you called it. There seemed no escape.

  When I was twelve years old and Joe was almost ten, we moved to the new house. At the new house, we got our first television set. “Now, we will not need a babysitter,” Joe said. “We have a television set. How could we possibly manage to watch two things at once? We need to get rid of that babysitter.” With this, Joe and I both thought that we had seen the last of Miss Annie for sure.

  One day not long after we were well settled in the new house, Mama came in to where Joe and I were playing. “Boys,” she started, “tonight your daddy and I are going over to John and Roselle Nesbit’s house for supper. We are going to stay over there for a while and play bridge with some other friends who are coming. You boys know most of them. I have called Miss Annie, and she is going to come over here and be your babysitter.”

  “We don’t need her,” my little brother insisted.

  “Why not?” Mama smiled at him.

  “We have told you before. We are too old for a babysitter. Besides, we have a television set. How could we watch a television set and a babysitter at the same time? We already told you that. Didn’t you listen?”

  Joe should have stopped talking right then and there, but his nine-year-old mouth just kept running: “That old lady is no good as a babysitter anyway. She is so old that she can’t even make us behave. I can outrun her. . . .” He kept on talking while Mama just watched and gave him more rope. “That old lady is so old that nothing on her works but her mouth. She can’t do anything.”

  Mama did not even bother to argue with him. She simply said, “We’ll see.” I noticed that she was smiling.

  Later in the afternoon, Mama called us to come to the kitchen and eat our supper before she and Daddy went out for the evening. Joe and I ate while the two of them finished getting ready to go. Pretty soon, we heard a car come into the driveway. When we looked out the window, it was Miss Annie’s old gray Chevrolet. We watched with dismay as she got out of the car.

  She came in the door as Mama and Daddy were pulling on their coats to leave. As they left, I heard Daddy say, “Try to learn something from Miss Annie while she’s here, boys.” And they were gone.

  Miss Annie came into the new living room and dropped her giant pocketbook on the floor beside the recliner chair where Daddy usually sat. When the pocketbook hit the floor, the top popped open and about a dozen Kleenex tissues floated up into the air and then settled on the floor all around it. As they settled, Miss Annie settled into the big chair. “Well, boys, I am glad to see both of you. Do you want me to read you a little story before it’s time for you to go to bed?”

  Joe answered, “No. We are too old for stories. Stories are for babies. We want to watch television.”

  “Okay,” she easily agreed, “we will all watch television.”

  I walked across the room and turned on the new RCA television set. We only got one channel. Joe and I sat down to watch Channel 13, Asheville, North Carolina, with Miss Annie tuned in beside us.

  When we had moved to the new house, Daddy and Mama had bought some new furniture to fill up the spaces in this house that was bigger than our old house on Plott Creek Road. The biggest purchase was a gigantic 1955 aquamarine-colored sectional sofa. The sofa ran down one wall on the side of the living room, turned the corner, and continued across the back. It was upholstered in loopy nylon st
uff that you could easily get most anything caught in if you were not careful. The sofa was so long that Joe and I could get on opposite ends and we were so far apart that we did not even have to touch one another. We loved it.

  The program that came on Channel 13 was a special feature show about the circus. As we started watching, trapeze artists came into view. They started swinging above the center ring of the circus, flipping through the air and catching one another at the end of each flight. “I wish we could do that!” Joe excitedly addressed the television set.

  When the trapeze act was over, the tightrope walkers came out. As we all watched them balance their way across the high wire, Joe offered again, “I wish we could do that!” He was so excited.

  In a few minutes, that act was over and a troupe of acrobats came across the television screen. We watched them run into the circus ring and begin to turn flips as they ran. “We can do that!” Joe was so ecstatic that he jumped out of his seat with excitement.

  He and I took one of the cushions from the big sofa and put it in the floor in the center of the living room. Once it was carefully placed, we would run across the room, jump on the cushion, and flip in the air, using our hands for leverage. Every time we did a couple of flips, we would look back at the television set to get more ideas. Every time the acrobats did something more complex, Joe assured all of us, “We can do that, too!” Miss Annie simply sat there and watched the whole thing.

  In no time, we had removed all five cushions from the big sofa, including the curved one from the corner section. They were aligned in a row across the living room. Joe and I were now going way down the hall so that we had enough distance to get a good running start before we jumped onto the first cushion. We were so clever.

  My ten-year-old brother came running full speed down the hall. He jumped on the first pillow, then landed on his hands on the middle pillow, and when his feet went up in the air, his hands slipped and he fell over sideways. Joe’s feet hit the coffee table, and Mama’s brand-new floor lamp flopped over against the wall, but it did not break!

  Miss Annie stood up from the rocking chair in which she was sitting. “Boys,” she announced in a steady voice, “that is about enough circus for tonight. It is now time for you to go to bed.”

  At that, little brother Joe looked at the eighty-some-year-old woman, cocked his hip to the side, stuck out his tongue, and went, “Pffffffttttttttttttt!” with spit flying out of his mouth at the same time.

  Miss Annie did not say a word. She simply reached down and poked all of the escaped Kleenex tissues back into her big pocket-book, picked up the now-closed handbag, walked out the door of our house, got into her gray Chevrolet, and drove away.

  Joe and I danced around the living room, laughing and celebrating. “We did it! We got rid of the babysitter!” We were almost singing the refrain over and over to one another. The two of us thought somehow that we had seen the end of Miss Annie.

  With our babysitting watchdog now safely out of sight, my brother and I proceeded to turn the house into the circus. We turned Daddy’s big chair upside down. Then we would run up the back of the overturned chair and flip in the air off the other side. We climbed on top of the dining-room table and pretended that the crack where you pulled it apart in the middle was the tightwire line. Then we walked, pretending great skill at balancing, back and forth along the crack.

  After that, we took the fallen floor lamp and laid it across two chairs to make a sort-of hurdle out of it. We would run and jump over the hurdle one time, then run and slide under it the next.

  The great climax came when Joe went over to the living-room curtains and caught hold of the bottom end of one of them. “I’m going to climb up these curtains and swing across the room,” he announced.

  At that very moment, our front doorbell rang. Joe went running across the room to see who could possibly be at the door. I went to look out the front window to see if I could tell who might be there.

  There, parked in the driveway in front of our house, was a black-and-white Plymouth police car. It sat idling with the motor running, with the red light slowly blinking on the roof. My brother opened the door. There, in his full uniform, stood Robert Louis Fitzgerald with his gun drawn.

  “What do you want?” Joe nearly whispered.

  “Where are your parents?” came the policeman’s quick reply.

  I tried to intervene. “Why do you need them?” was my question.

  Robert Louis Fitzgerald made a chortling sound. “Why do I need them? I’ll tell you why I need them. We just had an emergency telephone call at the police station. An anonymous person called to report that someone was wrecking the Davis house. Do you boys know anything about that?”

  My ten-year-old brother was trying to act bold. He was trying to use his little body to block the policeman’s view into our house. At the same time, I was desperately trying to right things in the living room into some sort of reasonable order. Neither of us was successful.

  In what seemed like less than a moment, the policeman we thought was our friend was standing in the middle of our wrecked living room. He did not look friendly. He used his still-drawn pistol as a pointer as he looked around the room and observed, “My goodness! What in this world got into this place? It’s either wild animals or hardened criminals that could have done this. Where are your parents?” He looked sharply at both of us.

  I asked the question again: “Why do you need to know where they are?”

  “Because”—his voice had a deep and serious tone—“I have to arrest them and put both of them in jail.”

  “What for? They didn’t do anything?” Joe was almost crying now.

  “That’s just the problem. They didn’t do what they were supposed to do. When parents go out, they are supposed to leave a babysitter with their children. They obviously did not do that. I can’t figure out how all this destruction happened, but if there had been a responsible babysitter here with you, none of it could possibly have happened.

  “It is against all laws to leave children unattended at home. Look here.” He held up two pairs of shiny handcuffs. “I have two pairs of strong handcuffs—a pair for each one of them. You boys better tell me where they are. They are liable to be in jail a long time for a crime like this.”

  My little brother was wailing, “Dooooon’t put my mama in jail! She doesn’t know what to do in jail. I don’t know about my daddy.”

  Robert Louis Fitzgerald had a very studied and serious look on his face. He slowly offered, “Well, boys, if you had someone here taking care of you, I would not have to arrest your parents. But you don’t, so I guess I will have to do it. Unless one of you has a better idea.”

  That was all it took. Joe raised his hand like he was in school, but he was already talking: “I have a great idea. I really do like it a lot when Miss Annie McIntosh is our babysitter. She is good at it. Is there any way to find out if she can come and help us straighten everything out?”

  “That might work.” There was the hint of a grin on the policeman’s face. “Let me use your telephone to call her and see if she is at home right now.” He disappeared into the kitchen.

  By the time he came back out, Miss Annie’s old gray car was pulling up into our driveway, and Joe and I had the living room put back together better than ever.

  Robert Louis Fitzgerald told us to have a good evening, and as he went out the door to get into the police car and leave, Miss Annie came back into the house.

  She dropped the pocketbook, and the same old Kleenex tissues jumped out as it popped open. She herself dropped into the now-righted easy chair. “Well, boys, do you want to watch some more television?”

  I did not say a word. Somehow, I knew that my brother would handle everything.

  Sure enough, he did. “No,” he said. “We got tired while you were gone. We were straightening up the house so Mama and Daddy will be proud of us when they get home. We are tired. Could we go on to bed now . . . and would you read us a little story?”


  “If that is what you boys really want,” the old lady smiled, “you know that I would.”

  We went into our bedroom and got into our twin beds. Miss Annie pulled a chair up between the two beds and read us some kind of story. I had no idea in this world what the story was about. There was no way I could pay attention to what she was reading. My entire mind was occupied with images of our mama and daddy going to jail in handcuffs. It had been a close call.

  Finally, our parents came home from their evening at the Nesbits’. Joe and I were still awake when they came in and thankfully saw Miss Annie out the door to go home for the second time that night.

  When Mama came in to check on us, she could tell that we were not asleep. She didn’t turn on the light but looked down at us in the darkness of the room. “We’re home, boys. How did you get along with Miss Annie?”

  I was not inclined to share my opinions of the evening with anyone, but Joe was. “We got along just fine!” he said.

  Mama asked, “Did you watch television?”

  “Not much,” Joe answered a little too quickly. “It wasn’t any good. There was nothing on but an old circus show, and they didn’t do anything interesting at all. Besides, we were tired. We asked to go to bed. Miss Annie read us a good story. We asked for that, too.” He rested his case.

  “That’s nice,” Mama answered as Daddy joined her, listening in the soft darkness. “What was the story about?”

  Personally, I had no idea what the story had been about, but Joe had a summary ready: “It was about two little boys. They almost got in trouble . . . but not quite!”

  “That sounds like a good story,” Mama mused. “I’ll have to thank her for reading that to you.”

  Now, it was Daddy’s turn to talk. “I told you that you boys would always have a good time with Miss Annie. You may not need an actual babysitter, but that old lady has had so much experience in her life that you can’t keep from learning things just by being around her.”