Southern Legitimacy Statement: You might say I was halfway to Dixie the day I was born on account of the Kansas twang I picked up from my parents, who raised me in Chicago shortly after my birth. The twang was sort of like having a jaw harp stuck between my lips whenever I spoke, and growing up I was invariably met with a familiar question by new acquaintances: ‘Are you from the south?’ Except they weren’t asking, just assessing the facts. If you’re already thinking any fool knows Kansas was a Union state, my explanation to the ignorant was met with a familiar rebuff: “Well, it sounds like it’s pretty far south of here.”
When I moved to the deep south of Texas as an adult, that twang almost helped me fit right in. Nobody ever asked if I was from up North, just said I’d be a real Texan if I lived there for ten years. It was like they believed in me. Well sir, after ten years my twang was long gone, buried deep inside a drawl. I was a real Texan – no disputing it. But I wasn’t half done perfecting my drawl. I stayed on in Texas another ten years before I headed back north. And damn it, even if I haven’t stepped foot in the south for over a decade, seems like my drawl never left those parts. You might say it’s sort of like stink on a skunk, meaning no offense to the latter.
Reprise of a Vanishing Act
When I stumbled in at 3 a.m., Dad’s Stetson caught my eye from across the room. The scent of cigarette smoke hung heavy in the air – a telltale sign of the old man’s presence. But the silhouette of the Stetson against the window light was enough to gob-smack the last bit of revelry out of me. A second later I realized he had propped the hat up on the sofa back to make it seem as if he’d waited up.
It was always effective, as Dad was a brutal man – but not without a sense of humor. I was twenty-one then, so he could hardly give me a thrashing. But as Dad lay smoking in bed upstairs, he probably laughed, reveling in his ability to instill fear in others, knowing he’d made his point.
He’d grown up in the country, but after college landed a job teaching French in Chicago, where he was also was known as a tough-as-nails basketball coach. He strut around the sidelines on game days in his Stetson and his cowboy boots polished to a high luster as if he still were a rancher.
If I never stood up to the old man, the pig sure did the summer after Grandpa died. He didn’t approve Dad’s leaving the ranch, so we hadn’t spent much time downstate. Estrangement seemed part and parcel of our lives then. After he died we spent the summer and fall weekends at the old place, fixing up the property and selling off remaining livestock.
When the pig was going to slaughter, Dad slapped its hams one too many times with a rubber hose, trying to force it up a ramp into the pickup truck. It bellowed and reared up on hind legs, taller than he was by a few feet and hundreds heavier. It boxed its trotters toward his face as it came down, determined to crush him. I half hoped it might: the thrashings Dad doled out that afternoon reminded me of the whippings I’d endured at his hand.
Somehow he dodged out from under the massive pig just in time, and the pig retreated inside the barn. We stood outside the corral panting, wondering what to do. Dad smoked a cigarette or two before realizing that pigs are, well, pigs. So he loaded a wooden trough in the truck bed and filled it with corn feed, enticing the pig to walk in on its own – which it did. Dad laughed at his own stupidity as he re-entered the corral and closed the tailgate.
The old man would eat crow again the crisp fall morning we finished moving railroad ties from the far corner of the farm where railroad tracks crossed the land. A work detail had trespassed and left debris piled up. All summer I had jumped in fright as we pried ties loose from the pile – fearing we might unearth a nest of diamondbacks. Dad regaled me of his childhood experiences and insisted that the nearest rattler was five miles to the south and the only copperheads twenty miles west. I’d seen maps marking their range and ruled nothing out. Dad derided me as a city slicker.
Then we pried up a last tie that morning, and we did run across a snake – a small, tightly wound coil of leathery scales. “Poor thing,” Dad mused, bending over it. “Must have got cold,” he said, petting its nose with an affectionate touch.
“It’s a rattler,” I yelled and leapt from harm’s way.
“Is it?” Dad asked, leaning closer. Then the snake reared up, as if the heat from the old man’s touch alone was enough to warm its blood and send it into a sizzling frenzy. No longer small, it danced on its tail, which rattled away like castanets. But Dad was quick – with one swipe of his pickaxe he clobbered the “poor thing” and then heaved it into the back of the truck bed atop the ties.
When we drove back to the farmhouse, the snake had disappeared. Had it slithered under the ties, ready to strike? I saw Dad was unnerved, and I dished out sarcasm from a safe distance: “No worries, it’s halfway to Dixie by now.” Dad sneered and pulled at railroad ties using the axe – until he found it still slithering onward across the truck bed beneath the load.
“Surely it can’t be alive,” Dad said, even as the snake seemed to defy death and crawl forward despite its obvious injury, a misaligned jaw. He lifted the snake up on the axe handle, where it dangled before dropping to the ground and inching forward once more. Dad bent over and looked. “It’s just the muscles – still twitching even after brain death like they didn’t get the memo,” he explained with a laugh while lobbing off the rattle for a keepsake.
Late winter, the old man had a diagnosis: lung cancer. He kept the doctors and nurses laughing as they poked, prodded and administered chemo – believing himself strong enough to beat back death. But the cancer smacked him down a month later.
At the mortuary before the service, I repositioned flowers around the easel holding a photo of Dad wearing the Stetson and took a final glance at him in the open casket – when I noticed a caked layer of makeup between his thumb and forefinger. I dusted it away as gently as I could – when something quick and sharp struck me in the cheek and Dad seized my hand with a firm grip. Or so it seemed until I noticed that a rubber band had landed on his lapel.
Perfectly in character for the old man to try to scare the wits out of me even at his own funeral – perhaps to prove he really was stronger than death. But I didn’t flinch. His antics had worn thin. I laughed as Dad and I shook hands and seemed to make peace while waiting for the mortician to anchor Dad’s thumbs with a fresh rubber band.
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