Chapter 6 – Fried Squirrels and “Buttermilk” – Transcript

[Listen]

Surf music plays. A male voice says:

Christopher Gronlund presents Hell Comes with Wood Paneled Doors. Read by me, the author, Christopher Gronlund.

CHAPTER SIX

“Fried Squirrels and ‘Buttermilk’”

            In Aunt Margie’s front yard, my cousins, Debbie and Daryl, were sitting in a bed of dandelions.  I have no idea what they were saying to each other as we drove up, but judging by their actions, I’m guessing it went something like this: Daryl popped the head of a dandelion into Debbie’s face and said, “Your Mama had a baby and its head popped off!”  Debbie grabbed a dandelion from the ground and said, “Hey, Daryl.  You can tell if someone is allergic to butter with dandelions.”  Daryl probably said, “How’s that?” and Debbie put the dandelion beneath his chin.

            “If your chin turns yellow, it means you’re allergic.”

            She rubbed a dandelion on Daryl’s chin, staining it yellow.  He laughed.  It looked like a loving situation: two siblings at play, but the truth revealed itself when Debbie grabbed a whole handful of dandelions (dirty roots and all). 

            “Now let’s see if you’re really allergic, you dirty little bastard!”

            She violently ground the mass into poor Daryl’s face—we could hear him screaming for help all the way from the car.  She shut him up with another handful, which she shoved down his throat, choking him.  Had they both been boys, my aunt could have named them Cain and Abel; Debbie was always trying to kill poor Daryl.  Dad beeped the horn to get their attention.

            My aunt burst through the screen door and saw her fighting children.  “Y’all cut that out!” she hollered as she made her way to the car.

            Aunt Margie was the hillbilly version of my Mom.  Both thought beehive hairdos were still all the rage and they didn’t quite understand polka-dotted dresses were not the most flattering thing heavy women could wear.  Aunt Margie didn’t dye her hair; it was starting to gray.  She thought dying hair was a luxury only afforded to “high-class city folk,” like Mom.  They hadn’t seen each other for awhile and the first words from my aunt’s mouth after Mom said, “How are you doing, Marge?” were, “You got a smoke?”

            “Hold Lucky,” Mom said, handed the little beast off to my aunt.  She held him at arm’s length as he struggled to spin around and bite her.  Mom fished her cigarettes from her purse, lit two, and traded one for Lucky.  Both inhaled deeply, exhaled and sighed, then finally hugged.

            “It’s good to see ya, Mary,” my aunt said.

            “Good to see you, too,” Mom said.  “How’ve you been?”

            “We’re holding our own up here—we’re holding our own.”

             Aunt Margie caught sight of the twins and me.  She rushed over for a hug and kiss.  The hugs were never all that bad, but the kisses…the woman had three teeth, and those teeth looked like hardened pieces of caramel.  Her breath smelled like grizzled animal fat and tobacco, and she exhaled smoke in my face as she tried kissing me full on the lips.  I was able to turn my head and give her my cheek, but it was still a horrible experience.

            “My, how you’ve grown!” she said, before making her way to the twins.

            She hugged them both, smothering the pair against her breasts as she squeezed with her burly arms.  “Look at you two!”  Somehow the twins were spared kisses.

            “Hi, Margie,” Dad said.  Before she could hug him, he added, “Otis around?”

            Otis was my uncle—the male version of Aunt Margie, only dumber.  He had given up a career in coal mining to focus on his alcoholism.  Aunt Margie refused to be “hitched to a bum,” and demanded he work, so he tricked her into believing selling crap on the side of a hill was a reputable job. 

            ‘He’s round back working on a fridge,” she said.  Business has been pretty good, lately.  Shoulda seen how many things we had out in the yard a couple weeks ago.”

            I couldn’t imagine the yard being more littered with junk!  Neither could Dad because we both held back laughter when we made eye contact.  I looked away and Dad said, “That’s not surprising, Margie.  I mean this is quite a location; I’m surprised you haven’t sold the whole lot.”  I tried holding my laugh in and ended up snorting, hurting my sinuses and making my eyes water.  Dad lived for making me crack up.  Anticipating more laughter, Mom pointed to Aunt Margie’s kids and said, “Michael, you remember your cousins, Debbie and Daryl, right?” 

            I didn’t remember meeting them before, but said “Yeah.  Hi, guys,” anyway.

            “Howdy,” Debbie said.  Daryl was still spitting dirt and catching his breath.

            Mom turned her attention to the twins.

            “You haven’t met,” she said.  “But these are your cousins, Debbie and Daryl.  They’re twins, just like you guys.”

            “They aren’t like us,” they said, refusing to acknowledge their presence.

            “I better get back in the house before lunch burns,” Margie said.  “I’ll holler at y’all when it’s done.”

            “Think I’ll go see what Otis is up to,” Dad said.  While he wouldn’t want to spend any length of time with my aunt and uncle, I think Dad saw them as a little piece of Americana.  Honest-to-God Appalachia!  He went around back.      

            The twins wanted nothing to do with their relatives in the hills.  “Can we wait in the car, Mom?” they said.

            “No, you can’t wait in the car!  You’re gonna come inside and help me and your aunt.”

            “If we have to…”

            Mom looked at me and said, “Michael, why don’t you hang out with Daryl until then?  Have him show you the woods.”

            I have a hard time to this day describing Daryl.  He looked like the banjo-playing kid in Deliverance, only with two black eyes from being knocked around by Debbie all the time.  He walked with a limp and spoke in a slow, clumsy manner (I later found out he once stuck his tongue out at Debbie, who kicked him in the jaw at the very moment, causing him to bite half his tongue off!).  The thought of venturing into the woods with him scared me, and I wished I had followed Dad around back to see Uncle Otis (safety in numbers).

            As I walked toward the woods, I wondered if Dad was having better luck.  He told me it went something like this:

            He wandered around back, where Uncle Otis was welding a green Kenmore door onto a white Whirlpool refrigerator.  Otis had a little fenced off work area where he toiled the day away, creating Frankenstein appliances.  His fence was constructed of wood scrap and chicken wire, and a sign reading “Git Back!” hung on the gate.  Dad waited as Otis finished his weld and realized he had company.

            “Well, hell!” he said.  “If it ain’t ol’ Jimmy!  How ya doing, boy?”  He called everyone “boy” or “girl” regardless of age.

            “Fine,” Dad said.  “How about you, Otis?”

            “Can’t complain.  You gonna come over and shake my hand, or ya too good for that?”

            Dad pointed at the “Git Back!” sign and said, “I figured you’d want me to stand back and not crowd you.”  

            Otis laughed.  “Aw, hell!  That sign’s fer the boy.  He comes back here and gets in the fridges.  Stupid cuss damn-near done suffocated ‘while back, so I put that sign up and told him I’d whip his ass a good’n if I ever caught him back here again.”

            Dad wandered in and shook Otis’s hand.

            “Wanna beer, Jimmy?”

            “It’s still a little early,” Dad said.

            “Ain’t never too early when it comes to beer!”

            Uncle Otis pulled two beers from a dirty old toilet bowl stuffed with melting ice and tossed one to Dad.  They both popped their tops, but only Otis drank.

            “What are you working on?” Dad said, trying to start a conversation.

            “Just welding an old door on this here fridge so’s I can set it out front to sell.”

            “You make good money doing this?”

            “Enough to keep an old commode fulla beers all the time,” Otis said, flipping down his welding visor.  “Lemme just finish this up right quick.  Don’t go lookin’ at it, or you’ll fry your eyes all to hell.  Stupid son of mine is damn-near blind and it ain’t all from touching himself down below, if you know what I mean?  He’d watch me weld all day long if I didn’t scare him off.”

            Otis finished up, rocked his visor back, and guzzled his beer.  He looked off in the distance, at nothing in particular.  Dad tried seeing what caught his interest, but there was nothing there.  Otis snapped back to attention and said, “So, that cousin of mine, Mary, around?”

            “Yeah,” Dad said.  “She’s in the house with her sister.”

            While Dad was reminded about the creepy twist in my family tree, I was walking the far end of the property with one of its more crooked branches: Daryl.  Their yard gave way to a large cluster of woods climbing up the side of a small mountain.  It would have been neat had Daryl not been there and had I not had the creepy feeling some toothless yokel might appear from behind a tree and begin an introduction with, “You sure got a purty mouth…” 

            “So what do you guys do around here for fun?” I said.

            “Dunno.  Ain’t much to do, ‘cept hunt an’ stuff.”

            I tried showing interest.  “That sounds cool.  I’ve never been hunting.”

            “Wanna go?”

            “Nah, we’re not staying long,” I said.  “We don’t have the time.” 

            I thought I’d be spared the hunt with my excuse, but I was wrong. 

            “Don’t take much time at all,” Daryl said, picking up a rock from a pile at the base of the tiny mountain.  Before I could ask him what he planned to do with it, he hurled it into the top of a tree—down fell a squirrel!  I was horrified and so was the squirrel; the initial hit didn’t kill it, but I could tell Daryl was used to hunting like that because he picked up a larger stone in both hands, ran over to the poor thing, and ended its life with a few savage blows to its head.  He picked it up by the tail and wandered my way.

            “Wanna learn to skin it?”

            “I’ll pass,” I said in horror.  “I think I hear my mom calling.”

            I ran all the way across the backyard—the length of a couple football fields—and  made my way around the side of the house, where I bumped into Debbie.

            “Oh, hi,” I said.

            “Howdy.” 

            She just stared at me, saying nothing.  I was hoping for some kind of ice breaker, even though I didn’t want to speak to her.  A pregnant hound dog wandered by, its breasts leaking milk that trailed behind in the dirt.

            “That your dog?” I said.

            “Yep.”

            It was like she could only speak in single words.

            “What’s her name?”

            “Buttercup,” she said.  “She’s a milkin’ hound.  You can tell by her titties.”

            I didn’t know what to say; I wanted to run all the way back to Jersey.  She wasn’t finished talking, though—perhaps she was proud she finally mastered the fine art of multiple-word sentences.  She was on a roll.

            “Wanna see my titties?” she said.

            I never loved my aunt more than when she yelled, “Y’all get in here if ya wanna eat!”  I ran faster than I’ve ever run in my life…all the way into the house with the tarpaper roof, to a table covered in an Appalachian Feast.

            My aunt set the table with paper plates—they looked used.  In the middle of the table was a green Tupperware bowl older than me, full of chunks of some kind of fried meat.  Having “been huntin’” with Daryl, I had an idea what kind of meat the bowl contained and my appetite fled from my stomach.  Each setting had a glass full of an off-colored milk.  I can only guess it came from Buttercup herself!

            “Damn, girl!” Uncle Otis said, coming in the front door.  “That squirrel sure smells good!”  I was hungry, but I was not about to allow fried squirrel and dog milk to enter my system.  For once, my family all agreed on something—when Aunt Margie looked at us and said, “Dig in!” we all replied, “We’ve eaten!”           

“Suit yerself,” Otis said.  “More chow for us!”  He looked into the living room and shouted, “You gonna eat with us, Paps?”

            I hadn’t noticed, but sitting in a rocking chair in the living room was an old man—Otis’s father. Paps was a frail husk; he looked like a discarded rag doll tossed on an old rocking chair for rustic atmosphere.  He could bathe a million times and never look clean, the result of years underground, working as a drillman in the mines.  His pores were packed with grime that would never let go. 

“You hearin’ me, Paps?” Otis said.  “Gonna eat?”

Paps said something no one but Otis seemed to understand.  When he spoke, it sounded like he was talking through a mouthful of marbles and molasses.  A rumbling rattle emitted from his chest, and he gurgled like a fancy coffee machine.  Every sentence ended in a coughing fit.  Black lung.

            “You sure, ol’ boy?  I’ll bring a plate to ya,” Otis said.  Between the heavy accent and his lung affliction, the only word I could make out from Paps was, “No.”  I guess when you can hardly breathe and it hurts to move, eating is not high on your list of priorities, even if it’s something as appetizing as fried squirrel and hound dog milk. 

I felt bad for Aunt Margie and Uncle Otis; even for Debbie and Daryl.  It’s easy to make fun of people like them, but as easy a target for ridicule as they can be, there was a sadness in that room—everyone waiting for the day Paps’s chest would percolate no more.  I remember the air in West Virginia filling my lungs on that trip; few places in my travels have I ever drawn as fresh a breath.  It seemed criminal that Paps couldn’t. 

I still hadn’t taken a seat and I was glad when Aunt Margie said, “Michael, I forgot to get the butter.  Can you go in the fridge and get it fer me?”  It gave me an excuse to stop thinking about how depressed I was becoming.

“Sure,” I said.

The fridge was one of Uncle Otis’s creations—his masterpiece.  The body was perhaps once an old, brown GE model from the late 60s or early 70s, but Uncle Otis had stripped it down, painted it with chrome spray paint, and worked it over with a steel wool pad, giving it a poorly-rendered brushed steel look.  The reason for such an effort?  The door!

Uncle Otis had found a discarded door to a genuine, honest-to-God, stainless steel gourmet kitchen refrigerator on one of his outings.  Uncle Otis had a talent for being able to fit the door from one brand of refrigerator to the body of another.  It looked like the door had seen better days, but it was clear Uncle Otis put his heart into repairing this one—he had buffed out the scratches as best he could, hammered the dents back out, and polished it, just like restoring an old car body.  That door was their prized possession, and to show their appreciation, they covered it in grease stains and passages from the Bible held in place with tacky magnets.

I opened the door; it was so heavy, it almost tipped the entire fridge over.  The interior of the refrigerator was pretty vacant, except for some raw meat in open Tupperware bowls, an empty bottle of catsup, and a waxy brick of butter I could only assume came from the same source as the milk: an old blue tick hound dog.    

When I closed the refrigerator door, I noticed a yellowed newspaper story from 1968 stuck to the door with a smiling watermelon magnet.  Reading the first two paragraphs, I finally found out how my grandfather had died, and why Mom didn’t like discussing his death.

REOPENING TOMB FOR 78 MEN

WASHINGTON (AP) – Slowly, agonizingly slowly

for the relatives of the 78 men whose bodies lie below,

the seared walls of Mountaineer Coal Co’s No. 9 mine

are cooling off.

And as steel bits chew through the West Virginia

mountain shielding the shafts and tunnels, officials

prepare the plans to enter the mine for the recovery

expedition and the first step in resuming digging.

I don’t know why I did it—perhaps it was a way, in my mind, to have a piece of the grandfather I never knew—but I took the article from the fridge and shoved it deep into my pocket.  I felt like I was stealing a lot more than just a piece of old newsprint, but I also felt I deserved it; after all, Mom and Aunt Margie had known the man—I could only wonder what he was like. 

            I brought the plate of butter to the table and set it down.

            “Y’all gonna at least sit down with us?” Uncle Otis said, taking a seat at the head of the table.  I sat down and looked at hound’s milk in a Dukes of Hazzard glass Dad kept eyeing.  The house was full of little gems in my father’s mind: plastic and glass drinkware from such silver screen classics as Smokey and the Bandit, to small screen classics like Battlestar Galactica.  Daryl, who rushed to the table only after tossing the dead squirrel in the sink (but not washing his hands), drank from a plastic Kool-Aid Man mug I know my father was looking for.  From a tacky lamp made from a conch shell my grandmother gave my aunt after a trip to Florida, to a shellacked frog dressed in tiny overalls and holding a little banjo, I knew my old man was trying to figure out the best way to buy every tacky thing they owned and get it into the Inferno without Mom noticing.

            I watched my aunt, uncle, and two cousins make short work of their lunch.  They maybe had twenty teeth between the four of them, but the teeth they did have seemed made to shred gristly squirrel meat into small enough pieces to swallow when chased to their stomachs with warm dog milk.  Watching them, I never wanted to eat again!  They wolfed everything down as though they hadn’t eaten in weeks (a distinct possibility)—they made my family’s eating habits seem the epitome of civilized behavior.

            When they were finished, Aunt Margie pointed toward the sink and said,“Ya sure y’all ain’t hungry?  It won’t take but a second to skin that critter up an’ fry it fer ya.”

            “We’re sure!” we all said in unison, like the twins.

            “What about your dog?  We have some table scraps?”  Lucky wouldn’t even touch their lunch, and he was known to dig in Mom’s flower garden and eat poop left there by neighborhood cats.

            Uncle Otis wanted us to “sit just a spell,” but Dad insisted we had a schedule to keep.  We packed Aunt Margie’s things into the back of the Inferno and the twins climbed in the back with all our belongings, not even saying goodbye to Uncle Otis or our cousins.  No one seemed to care, though; not many people felt comfortable around Olivia and Elvis. 

            Dad made one more quick trip to the back of the car as Mom said goodbye to Uncle Otis.  I saw him set a box in the back and take a quick peek inside.  He pulled out the Kool-Aid Man mug and smiled.  When Uncle Otis was done giving Mom a hug that was obviously a bit too friendly and bothered her, I saw him slide a wad of bills from his pocket and thumb through them.  Dad amazed me—he was a pro at buying things right under people’s noses, a handy talent to have when you’re married to someone like Mom, who criticized your every purchase, even though her own spending habits were questionable at best, too.  For Uncle Otis, I’m guessing it was a bigger payoff than if he sold every appliance and beat up car in the yard; I’m sure old toilets overflowed with cold beer and ice later that evening.

We piled into the Inferno while Otis shouted, “Y’all take care, now!  An’ don’t go fallin’ in that canyon, ya hear?!”

            We all shouted “Bye!” but Otis wasn’t done. 

            “An’ when you bring my old lady back, be sure to leave some room fer lunch!” Dad waved politely and put carin gear.

* * *

Surf music plays. A male voice says:

Thank you so much for listening to Hell Comes with Wood Paneled Doors–it really means a lot to me.

Theme music is provided by Belgium’s best surf band, Pirato Ketchup.

And if you want to know a little bit more about me and the other things I do, check out ChristopherGronlund.com.