Uncle Vertis had uncommon ability when it came to machines. He made some money at it, fixing people’s broke-down cars and trucks and tractors and selling others he bought cheap and got going again. He’d got hold of a sprayer somewhere and made more money painting those same cars and trucks and tractors.
He’d once driven up to our house in a many-colored automobile he’d put together from scraps from the junkyard. When Grandma asked what kind of car it was, he laughed and said it was a genuine one of a kind Calesmobile, calling it after his own last name. Grandma said she didn’t know that she wanted it tagged with the Cales name, but she was looking it over like she was proud.
We begged and carried on until Grandma let Uncle Vertis take us for a ride, us sitting in the rumble seat and her craning her neck from the front to make sure we weren’t flung to our deaths on the sharp red dog covering the road. When Grandma wasn’t hollering at us to hold on, she was hollering at him to slow down before he got the whole bunch of us killed.
Uncle Vertis looked at her and grinned.
Then he speeded up.
Although it wasn’t much to look at, the two-room house Uncle Vertis and Aunt Nalda lived in was built solid enough. The living-room-bedroom didn’t have room for a couch, but there were a couple of rump-sprung chairs if you had a mind to sit down in there. Most people didn’t. The biggest part of visiting went on around the kitchen table where folks sat on mismatched chairs, each one painted a different color with dregs of paint Uncle Vertis brought home from the dump.
The house didn’t have running water, but there was a well in the yard, one that looked like the wishing wells in story books, with a bucket tied on a rope to lower into the water. A pail of that water sat on the sink, a long-handled dipper hooked over the side. Everybody drank from the same dipper and I never heard of anybody dying from it, but they might not have told me if somebody did.
Butter and milk and eggs were kept cold in a springhouse that straddled the icy creek burbling along at the foot of the mountain. If you’d had good hunting, the meat, kept chilled in the springhouse, was breaded in crumbs or dipped in egg and milk and flour and fried up in a greased iron skillet for supper, and what wasn’t eaten was stored by salting or smoking or canning it.
The outhouse, situated downstream, was wallpapered with pictures of flowers Aunt Nalda cut from seed catalogs. Teasel and jewelweed and lobelia and phlox faded and withered on winter walls, only to be replaced by a new crop of fuchsia, dahlias, forsythia, and begonias from next spring’s catalogs. A bucket of lime with a tin cup sat in the corner, and a cup or two sprinkled into the hole kept the stench down and the flies away. If money and toilet paper ran out at the same time, a page or two of the Sears, Roebuck came in handy.
When Vonnie and I got to stay with Uncle Vertis and Aunt Nalda for a week or so in the summer, we slept on a featherbed pallet on the kitchen floor and took our baths outdoors in a galvanized tub with water heated lukewarm by the sun. Aunt Nalda made picnics for us, serving our breakfast of oatmeal and brown sugar on the bridge that spanned the creek, and our midday dinner of tomato sandwiches and hardboiled eggs in the back of Uncle Vertis’s truck or on the flat rock near the garden—first making us find the eggs she’d hidden in unlikely places in the yard.
And it wasn’t even Easter.
Aunt Nalda helped us make paper dolls that looked like Grandma and Grandpa and Mother and everybody else in our family, with a whole wardrobe for each one. Sometimes she’d do silly things like put Grandpa’s paper pants on the grandma and Grandma’s bonnet on the grandpa.
She cut lengths of an old clothesline to use as jumping ropes and held one end while we learned to jump with first one, then two ropes at a time. She knew where to find teaberries and the first johnnie-jump-ups. She melted slivers of soap and water into a slimy mixture and showed us how to blow giant bubbles through a coat hanger twisted into a circle.
She pinched off pieces of the slippery yellow clay that streaked along the creek bank to make heads for dolls, poking the top of a cross made of sticks up the neck of each grinning skull before lining them up to bake their brainless heads in the sun. We fashioned crepe-paper clothes for the one-legged dolls—shawls and sashes and turbans to wear with gypsy skirts of many layers and colors, stretched to flounce at the hem to hide their infirmities.
Sissy and I sat on the logs that bridged the creek behind Uncle Vertis’s house, dangling our feet above the icy water, fishing with strings and safety pins baited with scraps of fatback rind. There were minnows, of course, and trout if we were lucky, and there were other silvery little fish we called ghosts because we never caught any. We didn’t this time either, nothing but a crawdad or two.
We weren’t catching anything and were bored, so we asked Mother if we could walk up the road to the backside of the mountain, which at least had a chance of leading to something interesting. Mother said we could, but not
