Chapter 1 ~ Chapter 2 ~ Chapter 3 ~ Chapter 4 ~ Chapter 5 ~ Chapter 6 ~ Chapter 7
Chapter 8 ~ Chapter 9 ~ Chapter 10
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Chapter One
Virginia Talladega Martin, Ginny they call me, was born in nineteen hundred and forty something in the hills of Alabama. Literally in the hills…my mama was shooting squirrels for dinner one day when she felt funny. She thought she might be stuffed up, so she dropped her drawers and she lay down at the root of a big oak tree cause she was really hurting. After some grunting and cursing, surprise, I came squirtin’ out of her bottom instead of what she thought would come out. So she wrapped me in her old hunting jacket (cord still attached), hooked the four or five dead squirrels she had shot that day through her belt and made her way back to the cabin to warn Pa that he had another youngun to feed she reckoned. She told him that she’d thought she was relieving herself, but I came out instead and by the way here are the squirrels she shot…you might start cooking ‘cause mama don’t feel too good. Pa cut the cord with his pocketknife and I became a separate person of my own. And never the twain shall meet. And that’s much to mama and pa’s frustration. Pa had just gotten back from Talladega, AL selling furs. Mama’s parents lived in Virginia. They put the two purty sounding names together and here I am, named and defined for the rest of my born days…Virginia Talladega Martin.
I was a quiet, private type of child in a family of hootin’, hollerin’, shootin’, drinkin’, drunkin’ folks. When I little as two, while mama and pa was off hunting, I would sneak out of the cabin, sit myself down under a tree and watch the leaves pop out in the spring time or watch ‘em fall off when that time comes. Or, I could watch ants struggle through their short, self important lives driven by lord knows what, to do whatever they do and never obviously think or wonder about it.
Now at my age I find myself watching and pondering about the same kind of things only with people, rather than ants, and I’m still asking myself the same question that I did when I was two…why and what for?
I tell you what. I will jump into my mama’s heaven and sit on the right hand of her lord the same day I get answers to my question about peoples’ goings on and I’d do it with joy! For the life of me, I am more puzzled at my age than I was when I was little. After a lifetime of watching our fellows busily going about their lives without question…I can’t see the point even less! I’ve spent ages trying to figure it out. Between then and now, I swear, I’ve felt like a dog that was being raised by house cats. The dog won’t never catch on and neither will the cat parents! Since I was born on that cool mountain day, I never got what they was trying to teach me. I just could never get the hang of living in the same nest with those folks that raised me. They made way too much noise to my way of thinking, so I just kept doing what I did on the outside whether I was hauling water for my mama or skinning squirrels for my pa just so I wouldn’t get a beaten, but on the inside, I was still glancing up in the trees watching the leaves grow. Nobody could hurt me when I was doing that…NOBODY!
I had found me something that was better than a TV hid back in them woods to spend my time on. I had found me a big anthill to watch. I would go there ever chance I got too. I just had my mind made up about the ants in that anthill. In my mind, they always worked real hard. I read somewhere at school, that at the heart of every anthill is the queen and her nursery. The whole bunch of the other ants exist to do nothing but make sure that the queen has enough to eat and that she stays barefoot and pregnant all the time. To make sure that whatever else happens in their world that she would always be making ant babies.
Each ant had different things to do…in fact, they were born to do specific things–jobs. They’d just do those jobs and never did question. They all appeared to work together just doing what they did no matter what. Cold and wet or hot and dry weather, no matter, they just did their jobs and lived their lives. Now I don’t talk the language of ant and I never did hear them actually speak, but I gave those ants voice in my head when I was little. I had a whole ant stories made up. Like this…
Once upon a time there was the town of Antville. The town had a queen…her name was Majesty to some. To some she was Agatha and to others she was Aggy. Her main husband was Roy and he was more or less the mayor of Antville. I could pick out Miss Agatha real easy. She was very, very big and all the little ants just swarmed around her and brought food to her and all. Miss Agatha had a sister named Jackie. She was in charge of the nursery and all of the ants that worked in the nursery taking care of Miss Agatha’s babies. Everybody lived short lives in our time but in their time it was just a normal like lifetime. I mean, they were born, they grew up, they got a job, got babies to raise. They got old and tired. They died. And that’s that. The way I saw it, it was a lot like us humans, in fact, it was just like us humans.
I was able to watch them most days. When mama and pa would yell at me or hit me, why I’d sneak off and go to Antville and create all these stories about them. I remember one of them stories started on the day I dropped a dead beetle ten times the size of Miss Agatha plop into the middle of town.
Just imagine if you were an ant in Antville on that day. You was just walking along doing your job, minding your own business and all of a sudden a strange thing the size of an elephant falls right out of the blue. There were three of the ants in the same space the beetle took up when he fell. They were squashed. Can’t you see the press headlines that day ( my ants had a newspaper). “UFO Falls From the Sky on Main & 10th & 11th & 12th. Kills Three!” The story would be as follows…A Unidentified Flying Object fell from the sky and destroyed businesses within a three block area of Main Street at about three o’clock yesterday.
I tell you, I watched and watched and made up a whole lot of stuff about my anthill. Pa swore he would beat my butt if I didn’t stop daydreaming and “hop to when he said jump”. I hid after that. Pa never beat me for watching my ants either. Mama took a different turn than Pa. She worried that I was slow. I mean…she didn’t know any children who just sat around all the time watching leaves grow or ants live when there’s so much work to do. To her, I must have been one of those babies like the Temsom’s kids down the mountain – a nose picker and ear puller.
Every time Mama looked at me, she’d shake her head with regret for goofin up and birthing me into this world. But really, she and Pa needed a full bodied and minded child to help with the hunting and trapping. I was no help at all. In fact I was just another mouth to feed as far as Mama and Pa were concerned. And I wasn’t even a very good cook. One summer, so they wouldn’t starve to death, Tilly came to stay with us in the hills to do the cooking and cleaning while she was on summer vacation from school. My Aunt Tilly, Mama’s youngest sister, was only less than ten years older than me. She loved me…leaf watching, ant watcher and all. Tilly would see mama take off to the woods with her rifle and pa take off the other way for a day of settin traps. She’d grab hold of me and we would take off. Tilly would play games with me and make-up stories. I would be the sheriff and Tilly would be the local saloon owner – like in the wild west.
Fact is Tilly’s games with me were very much like the games I would play with the ants at my anthill.
She was a lot of help to mama and pa really. But to me she was my best friend and my teacher. I learned from Tilly that I wasn’t the only one in the world who was like me. Oh, we were not like twins or nothing…she just…just…loved stuff and took the time to appreciate everything. Not like mama and pa who just lowered their heads, didn’t look left or right and charged into whatever work they was doing. Tilly and I worked hard but we also took some time in between to look at the seemingly everyday things that make up this glorious world.
For that simple thing, when Mama or Pa caught us at it, we were punished again and again. When Pa found me and Tilly watching the anthill or sitting outside on an old quilt having our lunch, well, Pa would just pull his belt right off his pants where he was standing and whip us both at the same time. He seemed to whip Tilly the hardest cause she was the oldest and should know better that to “fritter” her time away. He’d grab ahold of our long hair with one hand and beat us with the belt. I don’t know which hurt most, the hair pulling, the beating or knowing that Tilly was being hit longer and harder than I was.
Mama, now, she could really punish us. She would whip us, usually with a switch from an oak sapling out in the front yard. She’d make us pick off the switch, but while she was switchin’ us, she was telling us how dumb we were and how ugly we are. She’d yell that only dumb, ugly people are lazy and she sure wasn’t going to raise no dumb, ugly, lazy people. She would tell Tilly that she’d never find no husband as long as she acted like this…what man worth his stuff would have a wife acting like this, dumb, ugly and sloth and all?
When mama switched us, she could have you believing blue was green at those times. That little switch would make red slashes on your bare legs that would end every sentence she yelled and Tilly and I had better damn listen to every word. At that time, mama seemed like the wrath of god walking on two feet…breathin’ fire and spittin’ poison!
One summer we were so bad that I had to wear long pants to school in the fall instead of shorts to cover the marks on my legs. It was still hot and, man oh man, there ain’t nothing like sitting through Mrs. Gabe’s class boiling hot, and that sweat dripping on those raw red slashes. You talk about sting! I squirmed my way through the first two months of third grade. Teacher thought something mental must be wrong with me, I squirmed so much. But I wouldn’t tell what mama did or why I squirmed so. Mama told me she’s have my hide if I told.
Finally, one summer without any warning, Tilly didn’t come to stay with us. Mama didn’t say a word…she just went on doing her thing like nothing was wrong or different. I guess I was about 11 then. I was the one ended up doing Tilly’s work that summer. I really missed her. We had some fun times.
One early summer day when mama didn’t ever say anything, I just puffed up my courage and asked mama where was Tilly? Mama said that Tilly had found her a husband and got married this spring. She was staying with her new husband now.
Then I found the letter from Tilly’s parents to Mama (in the bread basket in the kitchen). In that letter was a envelope addressed to me from Tilly.
It said,
“Gin-Gin, I guess your Mama was wrong and now I am a married woman. I did find me a fine man, no matter what she said. I miss you more that you can know.
His name is Ray and he was in my class at school this winter.
I am now called Mrs. Ray Trout. MyMom and Dad will know my address. I don’t know where we’ll be living…probably with his parents at first, down here in the valley. He seems real nice and he is purty too.
I love you and you keep watching all the things god made no matter what!
Love,
Tilly Trout
Alls I could think of was how silly that sounded…TillyTroutTillyTroutTillyTrout. I was glad for her I guess, but I just could not imagine wanting to marry one of the knee jerks in my class at school. Point was though, I’d miss her.
I copied her parents address from the envelope and decided to write Tilly to keep up with her and what’s going on. Meanwhile it was cook-wash-clean for me. Work, work, work. No excuses allowed cause I was as old as Tilly was when she had first come to live with us. I didn’t find much time to watch god’s creation or my anthill.
I just pretended I was an ant in the anthill and my job was to work-work-work and then die without question or taking time for god’s creations. That’s just what I did. Die. Oh, I didn’t leave my body or nothing. I did leave my soul though. I stayed in my body and worked-worked-worked. My body became a hard, empty shell. If some giant should have stepped on it, it would’ve made a loud crunch like when you step on a cockroach or june bug. Mama and pa’s whippins stopped. I guess I got to looking and acting enough like them to make them happy. So really what I found out that summer was that ma and pa must not have any soul to beat Tilly and me like they did…and when they whipped us so bad, they were trying to kill our souls…like them.
Lordy, lordy. Well I fooled them. I found a big anthill under my window at the cabin and they didn’t guess that I still watched it. At night, tired as I was, I’d imagine that anthill out under my window and imagine what was going on in Antville that day. You might say I put my soul in that anthill for safe keeping before I went to sleep and I kept it in there during the day. I always no matter how hard I worked, knew I still had a soul and it was safe with ants and god’s own creations even though I wasn’t using it right then. I never got to be like my soul-less parents no matter what they thought.
Several summers passed one just like the other. I heard from Tilly maybe one time a year. I wrote to her each spring when the trees began popping leaves like popcorn. From her letters, Tilly sounded like she was going through stuff just like me…I know she kept her soul, but she didn’t say how in her letters. One summer Tilly had a baby of her own and another…and another.
Her Purty Boy Ray turned out to be a lot like pa, it sounded like. Her day was spent pretty much like mine, work-work-work. The babies and Ray took a lot of time and work to take care of. Ray wasn’t a trapper like pa, he was a coal miner and worked just as hard. His clothes was a little harder to clean because of the coal and all but things were pretty much the same with me and Tilly. She always signed her letter off with the same words…take time to love god’s creations! That’s how I knew she still had a soul even though she might be sending it to me in the envelope to keep safe for her while she worked and raised her family.
And just like I was keeping my soul safe for me, I would always put that letter she sent under my bed in a box next to the window above the anthill.
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Chapter 1 ~ Chapter 2 ~ Chapter 3 ~ Chapter 4 ~ Chapter 5 ~ Chapter 6 ~ Chapter 7
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