by Bud Kenny
In unison, half a dozen of them said, “New York?”
The man at the head of the table said, “They’re crazy! Hell, in New York they’ll steal everything they’ve got!”
We had just begun to eat our dinner when three older men came in and sat down at a table next to us. The oldest was tall and skinny with every silver hair in place. Before his butt even hit the seat, he put his right hand on my shoulder and asked, “You folks live around here, or you just visiting?”
No introduction, no hello or anything. He just grabbed my shoulder, smiled like a politician up for re-election and posed his question–it made me bristle. “Just visiting.”
“Just visiting, eh? Where you from?”
“Hot Springs.”
“Hot Springs, eh? You going to be in Heber long?”
This was beginning to feel like a police interrogation. “A couple of days.”
“A couple of days, eh? You visiting family or you out at the lake?”
“We’re just passing through.”
“Just passing through, eh? Where you staying?”
This was getting tedious. It interfered with my eavesdropping, and I didn’t like his hand my shoulder. I turned toward him hoping to shake his grip, but he held on.
I said, “We’re camped behind Miss Magnolia’s Cottage.”
“Miss Magnolia’s Cottage?” He let go of my shoulder. “I’ve lived in Heber all my life, and I ain’t never heard of any Miss Magnolia’s.”
Joyce Moss had opened her wedding cottage a year earlier. It was in a quaint stone house across the street from the city’s park that had Heber’s springs in it. Miss Magnolia’s Cottage sat on three acres surrounded by lawn and trees. She invited us to camp there as long as we wanted.
Speaking so I couldn’t be heard at the good-ole-boys’ table, I described where Miss Magnolia’s was and told him about our journey. Then I gave him a flyer that explained what we were doing. After reading a few sentences he folded it, stuck it in his starched shirt pocket and turned to his companions. “You boys go on and eat. I’ve got to check this out.”
We had just finished our meal and were about to get up from the table, when the man returned. “I went by and saw your mule. She’s sure a pretty thing. Hope you don’t think I’m nosy or anything like that. I just had to see it for myself.”
When we walked toward the cash register he got up and went to the good-ole’-boys’ table with our flyer in his hand. While the manager rang up our bill, I complimented him on our meal. Then nodded toward the good-ole’-boys. “That’s a busy table over there.”
The manager grimaced and shook his head. “You want to take them with you?”
At the door I turned to see the man with our flyer holding court at the table. His thumb was in our direction and all faces were turned toward us.
Miss Magnolia’s was on a corner lot with streets on two sides and an alley beside it. After dinner, we went back and set up camp. We were rolling out the tent, when Patricia said, “Sure a lot of traffic on these back streets.”
Most were pick-up trucks, and as they crept by I began to recognize some of the faces from the good-ole’-boys’ table. Throughout the afternoon traffic increased. A few times it was almost bumper to bumper, and many of the same vehicles went by numerous times. Some of the truck beds were filled with kids, and all eyes were on us.
Patricia said, “Now I know how a fish in an aquarium must feel.”
“Della and the cart.”
CHAPTER 2
KEEP THE FAITH AND LET GO
THE PLAN WAS WHENEVER DELLA pulled the cart, I’d be at her side on foot. It really wasn’t a cart because it had four wheels. But I called it a “cart” anyway. It had eleven doors. Some of them opened up, others swung out and there were doors that folded down as work tables. Behind each one was a compartment. One held the computer and printer. Others had plastic drawers with food, clothing, and first-aid supplies. And we had a junk drawer. Who can live without one?
On the front was a compartment with a door that opened up like a luggage trunk. That was Della’s part of the cart–we called it “the nose.” It held feed, grooming and shoeing tools, extra mule shoes and the top of it could hold two bales of hay.
But the most interesting door was on the back. It folded down. When it was up it held our bicycles on metal pipes that extended from it. When the door was down, the pipes were legs for our dinner table or stage.
I’ve always been fascinated with traveling entertainers. Not musicians or actors who rush from one gig to another in jets or buses. It’s the wandering minstrels, small big top circuses and old traveling medicine shows that intrigued me. What a way to make a living! Amble into town, pitch a tent or drop the stage and entertain the locals.
That’s how I planned to finance this odyssey–as a vagabond poet. Like the old traveling medicine men, I’d put on a show. But instead of pushing potions and pills, we’d pass the hat and peddle my self-published poetry books–books that we printed on the cart.
Electricity for the stage lights, sound system, computer and printer was produced by a solar panel on the top of the cart and two generators that were turned by the rotation of the back wheels. The power was stored in two golf cart batteries.
So the cart was our closet, kitchen, pantry, office, feed room, workshop, dining room, publishing company, theater and power plant. How’s that for mule power?
Several people said our cart looked like a red Model T Ford. My artist friend Benini dubbed it, “Model P”–P for poetry.
Two weeks after hitting the road, we produced our first show in Conway, Arkansas. It was in a vacant lot next to a coffee house on Front Street. “Something Brewing” was on the first floor of an old two-story white clapboard house. The front yard was covered with wooden decks that had tables and chairs on them. We parked the cart in the lot with our stage facing the decks.
I’m a performance poet. Meaning, I don’t just read the poems, I perform them–often acting out the parts of the characters in the verse. Like my poem, “Old Drunk Paul–A Tribute to Perfection” where I become stumbling-stuttering drunk. The show opens with “The Great American Way.” I hop on stage in the character of a TV car salesman and yell, “Boy have I got a deal for you!” In this piece I renounce the common conventions of American society. Things like owning an automobile, belonging to a church and holding a steady job. But in the end, the poem pokes fun at me when I ask, “. . . if you’re headed that way, could I catch a ride to Walmart?”
We only had two days to promote the Conway show. I put a handmade sign up in front of the lot, we hung posters in the coffee house and pinned some on bulletin boards around the campus of nearby Hendrix College. We had no press coverage, and yet, more than thirty-five people showed up. They were generous when we passed the hat, and I sold several copies of my book Songs Of Politics and Other Social Diseases.
For me, the most memorable part of the evening was a conversation I had with a man after the show. He was dressed in faded denim overalls and wore a tattered red cap with the words “Woo-Pig-Sooie!” across the front. His right cheek bulged from the wad of tobacco behind it as he shook my hand and said, “The only reason I’m here is ‘cause the wife dragged me. I’d planned on going cat-fishing tonight, but she insisted.” He stopped and spit on the ground to his left. “And to tell you the truth, I’m glad I came. Ain’t never seen anything like this. I had a damn good time.”
He extended his hand, and as I shook it I asked, “Was it better than cat-fishing?”
“You’re pushing your luck, son.”
The morning we walked out of Conway on Highway 64 East, it was hotter than any day so far. Above the pavement, the air wavered like a desert scene in a movie. The four lanes of cars and trucks charging past us created a wind that felt like it came from a blast furnace. And the forecast was for even hotter days ahead. So we decided to find a shady place to camp for a few days.
Several people suggested Lester Flatt Campground. They said
it was in a pretty mountain valley with lots of shade and a spring-fed lake. Going to Lester Flatt meant an eight mile detour, but everybody said it would be worth it.
That morning, as we walked down Highway 107 toward Lester Flatt, it was so humid I felt like we were wading there. I usually wore a bandana headband under my straw hat to keep perspiration out my eyes. But that day it didn’t make any difference. I was constantly wiping sweat out of them. Each time we stopped to drink water, I had to wring a small stream from my headband. It was like the water was flowing directly from my mouth to my pores.
Around two in the afternoon we got to the dirt road that led into Lester Flatt Campground. It had taken us nearly five hours to walk eight miles. Worn out from trudging through the mugginess, we were more than ready to put down for the day. Especially if it was in shade next to a spring-fed lake.
But it was still a mile back into the campground and most of it was uphill. In that mile we stopped to rest and drink water more than any other mile in my life. Finally, at the top of the hill, we found ourselves gazing down at a shimmering pool of blue cradled in the lush green Ozark foothills. It was oblong and prettier than I had fantasized it would be. Just the sight of it refreshed me. Before long we’d be soaking in cool spring water.
But on the road down to the campground we came to a hand-painted wooden sign nailed to a tree that read, “Absolutely no horses.”
“It doesn’t say anything about mules,” Patricia said, as she handed me the water jug. “Maybe when we tell them what we’re doing, and that we walked out of our way to camp here, they’ll let us stay.”
Before I took a drink, I said, “That sign is mighty emphatic.”
“We’ve come this far, I say we go down and ask.”
“And if we can’t use the campground maybe we could set up in the woods.”
The park was only on the east end of the lake. The rest of it was undeveloped woodland. Camping in the woods might be a solution to the “Absolutely no horses” rule at Lester Flatt. So we walked down into the valley.
Lester Flat had a sand beach, several RV sites, a large pavilion and a small store. When we stopped in front of the store, a man in his late sixties, wearing Bermuda shorts and flip-flops, walked out. His right arm below the elbow was missing. With that stub he pointed up the way we came and said, “We don’t allow horses here. There’s a sign up on the hill.”
“We saw it,” I said. “But we walked out of our way to get here because everyone said we’d be welcome. Are you the owner?”
He shook his bald head. “No. The lady who owns this place isn’t here. She works in Cabot. I camp here and keep an eye on the place for her. And one of her rules is no horses.”
It felt like I was whining when I said, “If I’d known that before, we wouldn’t have come here. It’s awfully hot. I sure would hate to go back out on the road in this heat. Do you suppose we could camp tonight in the woods somewhere around the lake? We’ll leave first thing in the morning when it’s cooler.”
He thought about it a moment, then said, “I don’t know if she’d go for that or not. She owns all the property around the lake. Let me call and see what she says.”
A few minutes later he came out of the store with a frown on his face. “She said no. Not in the campground or anywhere else.”
Now it felt like I was begging. “Did you tell her we walked out of our way because everyone said we’d be welcome here?”
Up to this point I had the feeling the one-armed man wanted to help us. But now he had a job to do. “She said those people don’t own this place, she does. And they had no right to tell you to come down here. She wants you to leave now!”
Flabbergasted I said, “I can’t believe as hot as it is she’s going to make us leave!”
“That’s not her problem. Her words were, ‘If I let one outfit traveling with a mule and a cart come in then I’ll have to let them all in.’ ”
“Right! And how many mules and carts does she have come by here?”
According to our map, there was a dirt road that would take us through a forested area to State Highway 5. Rose Bud was our first mail stop, and it was on that highway. I figured if we took the dirt road we’d find a shady place in the woods to camp. And at one time Ballard Road probably was a shady lane–but not when we walked on it. Property on both sides was private, fenced and posted. The forest had been cut back from the road to make way for pasture and lawns. It’s a valley road that skirts the base of the Ozark foothills. Long steep driveways led to hillside homes among the pines, cedars and oaks. It was fence after fence with signs written in various verbiage, all of which boiled down to one meaning–“Keep Out!”
Most of the folks who lived in that valley worked in or around Little Rock. So as our shadows grew longer, the traffic got heavier and the road dustier. The afternoon heated up and commuter dust turned our sweat into rivulets of mud.
Near the junction of Red Bird Lane, we stopped under an ancient pine whose shadow graced Ballard Road. We were there less than a minute, when two pick-ups sped past us. They were jacked-up and riding-high with wide knobbed tires that kicked up such a thick cloud of dust that Patricia and I couldn’t see each other. We both were coughing when she screamed, “I’m sick of this!”
I was too, but I didn’t want to feed her despair. So I said, “Something good is going to come out of this. I can feel it.”
Patricia snapped, “Oh yeah, like what? A Holiday Inn?”
In the two years that we’d been together, that was the first time Patricia ever snapped at me. I had seen her angry before, but she was never nasty like that. I didn’t know what to say.
She wiped her face with a sweat soaked bandana as she grumbled, “I knew we should have stayed on the pavement. It might have been longer, but at least we wouldn’t have to eat all this god-damn dust.”
Earlier, after looking at the map, we had mutually agreed to take this road. I toyed with the idea of reminding her of that, but thought better of it. The moment was too volatile. I simply said, “Well, we’ve gone too far to turn back.”
With a smart-ass expression she quipped, “Ya think?”
Suddenly, behind us was the roar of an engine approaching. We both turned to see a sedan racing toward us with a plume of dust behind it. Patricia clinched both fists and growled, “You’d better slow down, Shit-head!”
And it did. Not enough to have no dust at all, but it wasn’t a choker. When the man and his Mercedes slowly cruised past us, Patricia put on her best fake smile and waved as she muttered, “Thanks a lot, Ass-hole.”
The next two miles took an hour and a half to walk–every foot of it was sweat and hot dust. I had grit in my mouth, behind my knees and inside my elbows. Every once in awhile, I had to take my sunglasses off to pick a batch of crud from the corners of my eyes. You can imagine what it was like inside my nose.
We paused at nearly every speck of shade we came to. If it was a wide spot off the road, we stopped to consider it for a campsite–especially if there was water nearby. Like a house with a spigot, or a pond to dip a bucket into, but every one of those places had something wrong with it–usually a sign that told us to keep out.
Ballard Road crossed a creek with a few scummy puddles, then made a sharp left turn and went up a steep slope. At the top of the hill, on the right hand side of the road, sat an abandoned brick house. Some of the windows were broken and the yard was knee high in weeds. Along the front of the property was a line of pine trees that made shade where we needed it, and there were no signs telling us to keep out. So we walked up the overgrown driveway, and stomped through the crackling dry weeds to get to a shady spot where we could tie Della.
We had two big blue plastic water jugs with us. Each held seven gallons, and all the water we had left was about two-thirds of a jug. I filled Spot’s drinking bowl, poured Patricia and me each a tall tumbler and dumped the rest into Della’s bucket. After I took our folding chairs off the back of the cart, my wife and I sat down to a tall drink
of tepid water. It sure felt good to be off my feet. According to the pedometer, I’d walked over sixteen miles that day. And I felt every hot one of them.
With a damp rag across the nape of her neck, Patricia leaned forward in her chair and took a sip of water. Then she smacked her lips, turned to me with a Cheshire-cat grin and said, “Yes sir, after a hard hot day on the road, there ain’t nothing I love more than a big tall glass of piss water. Nope, it don’t get no better than that!” She paused, then asked, “So, is this the great treat up ahead?”
Okay, it wasn’t great. The only shade was from tall thin pines, which is better than nothing. But it’s not as refreshing as a big spreading oak, or maple, or just about any other deciduous tree. And the graze for Della wasn’t good either. Mostly thistles and some tall parched grass. But we had plenty of hay for her.
I said, “Well, it’s better than nothing.”
Patricia grunted. “Not much.”
Catty-corner across the road was a mobile home with porches, decks and wheel chair ramps around it. Earlier, when we walked up the hill toward the abandoned house, I spotted a garden hose in the backyard of that place. So I stood up, grabbed the jugs and said, “I’ll see if I can’t find us some fresh water.” Then I headed toward the mobile home.
On the way there, all I thought about was how ugly Patricia had been earlier. The heat, sweat and dust were bad enough, but now I had to deal with an attitude, too? While I walked up the wheel chair ramp toward the front door, I was thinking, Should have stuck with just having a mule!
The small bent old woman who came to the door said I could use the faucet behind her house. She was standing on the back step watching me fill the jugs, when I asked, “Do you suppose it’d be all right if we camp tonight in the yard across the road?”
Her voice was weak and it shook when she said, “Well, I can’t give you permission ‘cause I don’t own it. But those people haven’t been down here in a couple years. I don’t imagine anybody’s going to say you can’t.”
