Flavors (2 page)

“Too,” she would snigger gently, “he thinks you're sickly ‘cause you're not hefty like Ma Melton.” Actually, my beautiful Mama was a bit fluffy herself, a fact that pleased Daddy immensely. He said that when he hugged Mama, he wanted to feel some meat on her bones.

During the seasonal hay fever onslaught, my appetite would wane and I would take to musing. I never did feel fragile. Ever. I just thought it was a figment of fatherly imagination. Fortunately, these ailing episodes came rarely and sporadically, never lasting long.

Anyway, my zeal for pleasure masked those allergic spells as easily as Grandma Melton swatted a fly. I barely noticed them, so engrossed was I with life.

Everybody took me for younger. And I was quite happy with that because nobody I've ever known, before or since, enjoyed being a kid as much as Sadie Ann Melton did. My folks indulged that leaning. But Daddy was strict in another sense. His law of
do-not-get-out-of-the-yard
was nonnegotiable. Mama, being Mama, supported anything Daddy decreed, as long as it was fair. And it always was.

The farthest I slipped from our yard – when my parents were away at work – was dashing across the street to see Maveen, my favorite teenage neighbor who was always glad to see me. Rarely did I mingle with kids my own age outside of school because of Daddy's somewhat obsessive boundaries.

I didn't realize at the time how sheltered I was from mainstream mill-hill street-smarts. Not until that summer.

Fortunately, school summer break began the very week of the babysitter's exodus.

After Clodette's departure, my frantic mama lost a couple of days work before she and Daddy figured out a solution to the babysitting problem. It began with our regular Sunday afternoon visit to Grandma and Grandpa Melton's sprawling farm, where, in the front yard, the older Melton males pulled chairs into a circle and, with guitars and banjos, “made music.” In another section of the country courtyard, conversation flowed undeterred.

“Ma, we'll pay you fifteen dollars a week if you'll tend to the kids for us,” Daddy negotiated on that Sunday visit as we sat outside, in straight-backed, wicker-bottom kitchen chairs, littered across the grassless yard that always sported neat little dirt-grooves made by the big brush-broom. Already, my fingers itched to do the dusty duty of sweeping, a task that usually fell to Nellie Jane, my thirteen-year-old aunt.

Today, knowing my passion for this particular activity, Nellie Jane took me out behind the house to an equally bald backyard and handed me the broom, grinning shyly. Nellie Jane, with her pale blonde looks and quick, able hands with bitten-tothe-quick fingernails, was a contradiction at times. On the one hand, she was Melton through and through, stoical, detached and feisty at once. On the other, she was, at rare times, one of the most compassionate, loving females attached to the Melton name. So I knew giving me the broom was her way of showing how glad she was to see me. I took the handle and commenced sweeping that patch of dirt like it was my divine, life-and-death calling, letting her know how beholden I was for her generosity.

Soon, Nellie Jane tapped me on the shoulder, halting my frenzied labor. I squinted at her through the thick cloud of dust
swirling about us. Hay fever began to itch my eyes and nostrils and I snuffled soundly, then coughed.

“Sadie,” she said, rubbing her watery eyes. “You sure know how to stir up things.”

I grinned and wiped my wet nose with my arm, proud that she noticed my attention to perfection. As the dust settled, I had to admit it was the prettiest sight I'd ever seen, that red clay dirt floor, with every diminutive brush indention flowing in the same direction. Even then, there was a proverbial method to my madness.

That yard was a daggum work of art.

“C'mon,” she said. “Wanna help me slop the hog?”

“Yeah!” I could tell my eagerness pleased her.

We collected the slop bucket outside the back door, half full from breakfast and dinner leftovers and anything liquid to make it soupy. It was covered with a top to keep out the flies. It didn't exactly stink, but the conglomeration of foodstuff was not pleasant to the nose. We ventured down the back slope to the pig sty, wisely distanced from the house.

“Soo-ey...soo-ey,” Nellie Jane called as we approached. I peered over the plank railing of the pen. A tin roof shaded the pen from the hot sun so I didn't immediately see her. I jumped when the creature swiftly arose from her corner bed of leaves and twigs, short legs propelling her bulk to the wooden trough, where Nellie Jane dumped the bucket's slushy contents.

With great ceremony, the hog began feasting noisily, slurping and smacking like no other creature I'd ever seen. This animal's energy and twitching tail and gusto for dining fascinated and engaged me beyond words. When she'd cleaned the trough, she finally looked up into my eyes. Something connected, a tiny thing. But she stood still for long moments engaging me in a wordless communiqué of greeting and good will.

“What's her name?” I asked.

“Name?” Nellie Jane frowned at me, then shrugged, looking a little shy again. “Don't have one.”

“Let's name her,” I suggested.

Nellie Jane shrugged again. “Okay.”

“How about – Frances?”

She grinned then, a genuine amused curve of lips. “Frances? Name a pig Frances?”

“Yeah,” I grinned back. “I like it. Sounds kinda – pretty.”

Nellie Jane gave me a sidelong look. “I can think of lots of things to call Frances,” she drawled, “but ‘pretty's' not one of ‘em, Sadie.”

I hooked my arms over the top rail. “Hey, Frances!” I called and she looked at me again from her foliage divan. “You got a name now! Y'hear, girl?”

Frances snorted in acknowledgment, and we burst into laughter.

We returned to the front yard as, within the musical circle, uncles Gene and Tommy Lee Melton struck up their snappy version of “Dueling Banjos
,”
while other kins' guitars rushed in and braced them up
.
The entire somber-faced execution was quite lively and I have to say well done. Well enough that newly-arrived visitor Cousin Ann, who was my age and just as spontaneous, broke into a little jig, a mix of tap dance and clog steps, delighting me to no end as I tried unsuccessfully to mimic her. When she finished, she and I flew into each other's arms, laughing and wildly celebrating each other. The only time we had together was during rare happenstance encounters at the farm.

I could tell Daddy and Grandma Melton had come to an agreement.

Little Joe's and my fate was sealed for months to come. Grandma couldn't turn down the then-lucrative arrangement, which would enable her to buy, on time, a brand spanking new
wringer-type washing machine. This would free her from the chore of boiling clothing in outdoor wash pots, stirring with a huge wooden paddle, sweltering from open-fire heat. Not to mention back-breaking, slap-scrubbing labor over that rippled old washboard.

The very bottom line, though, was she couldn't gracefully refuse her son's desperate plea for help. After all, the family males held favor in Grandma's heart, which, at that point, troubled me not at all. Come to think of it, not much at all troubled me those early spring days.

Nellie Jane and I looked at each other, grinning, me like a possum and her more demurely tightlipped, over our good fortune. I have to say here that Nellie Jane was not, as a rule, given to any sort of open sentiment. Such display of emotion was frowned upon in the Melton clan as “flighty.”

So her shy smile was, to me, like a burst of festive fireworks.

“Bye, Sadie!” Nellie Jane said, waving as we later drove off. My heart soared knowing that she was just as excited as I was. We were going to spend an entire season together,
by cracky.

From the back seat of the ancient car, Daddy's first, a black Model-A Ford, I overheard Mama say, “I sure am glad that worked out, Joe.”

No, everybody did not drive these old-model automobiles on the cusp of the fifties. It's just that Daddy had just now gotten to the place where he could afford transportation at all, and this on-its-last-leg vehicle was a deal he could not sanely refuse. It was good to have our own wheels, slow as they were, and not have to bum a ride everywhere with Daddy's older married brother Bill.

Mama leaned over to lay her dark head on Daddy's shoulder for a moment, then reached up to kiss his cheek. His head turned and I saw the adoring smile on his face and his gray eyes glimmering pleasure.

Oh, how in love they were. I knew it, felt it like I felt the warmth from our flaming open-grate fireplace at home. It spilled over onto me and Little Joe.

I must say here that my daddy, fifth down in a line of twelve Melton offspring, was not exactly a chip off the proverbial old block. Joe Melton was a handsome William Holden lookalike in those days, and he carried himself with a dignity that was as alien to the Melton clan as caviar to hominy grits.

Daddy never compared himself loftily to his male siblings, but he did rise several notches up from his meager beginnings in the years following WWII by finishing high school under the GI Bill and attending business college. Later on, in the late sixties, he carved out a decent heating and air conditioning business, one that afforded his family a nice home and a few luxuries he had not enjoyed growing up. So even back then, when Daddy was openly, tastefully affectionate with Mama, I saw a beautiful maverick that bore little resemblance to his sometimes less-ambitious male bloodline.

“I'm glad it worked out, too,” he murmured, giving Mama a loving, solid peck on the lips, watching the road with one eye.

My heart leaped with joy as their love reached out and wrapped around me.

I scrooched up my shoulders in ecstasy as the old car chugged toward home.

Grandma Melton's was the perfect place for Mama and Daddy to drop us off for the summer, collecting us only on weekends for a fun-blasting time together. The fifteen dollars Grandma weekly earned in those days for babysitting seemed to give her a sense of autonomy. Grandma always knew exactly
who she was, but that money validated her beyond the rather dismal day-to-day farm drudgery.

In those years, my mama loved a Saturday night drive-in movie better than anything in the whole world. Daddy would buy a giant cup of Pepsi Cola and we would pass it back and forth as we all munched crisp buttery popcorn. Those times in the back seat, with Little Joe and me bug-eyeing the film-of-thenight, are among my happiest.

“Come on,” Daddy would tease Mama about her matinee idol Tyrone Power. “Admit it – I know you think he's handsome.”

Mama would give him a long saucy look and say, “He's almost as good-looking as you, y'know that?”

That would make Daddy laugh and puff up with pride and they'd end up hugging and cuddling together in one corner of the front seat so Little Joe and I could better see the screen. It didn't matter that the windows of the car were sometimes foggy and hard to see through because of damaged, fuzzy places on them. Mama and Daddy wiped them constantly with a towel at such times to clear the view. Time with my family made me feel warm and snuggly.

Happy.

I enjoyed home.

But getting to spend the entire summer with Nellie Jane was a dream come true.

I was ecstatic, convinced that Heaven itself was floating down and settling on the Melton farm. What fun to dive into a passel of kids who looked and behaved remarkably like Ma and Pa Kettle's brood. No kid could have been happier than me at the turn of events. And when I was happy, so was my little brother.

Those first days on the farm were idyllic because I was the new kid perched on the kitchen bench and for a few short days, I received a small dose of preferential treatment. Mostly, it meant getting first dibs on the biscuits, sausage and gravy. On the rare occasions we had fried chicken, I was rewarded a drumstick. That celebration of me didn't last long, however, because those Melton boys had the manners of feral hogs.