Authors: Mark Dunn
IBID (3 page)
GROWING, GROWING…THEN GONE
1.
The fire started in the barn.
All sources agree on this fact. They differ, however, on how the fire reached the house. Brett Benningfield in his excellent
One Hundred Years of Fires in Wilkinson County, Arkansas; a Pyrogenealogical Guide
(Little Rock: Cottontail Press, 1977) writes that cinders from the flaming barn must have been blown to the flammable wooden roof of the farmhouse. Odger insists, however, that the overalls of Blashette’s farmhand Slow Jimjoe McKessick caught fire at about the same time that the hay was ignited by an ill-placed cigarette, and instead of dropping and rolling upon the ground, flaming Jimjoe actually ventured into the kitchen looking for baking soda and immediately ignited a pile of wood-stove-desiccated newspapers stacked by the door, kicked over a bottle of turpentine, its lid left carelessly underscrewed, and knocked off a leaking camp lantern teetering precariously on the edge of the kitchen counter. Miraculously, according to Odger, the dimwitted farmhand not only recovered from his burns, but went on to implication in the
Arkansas Queen
steamboat wreck of 1895 that claimed the life of Hector Hamlen, the doily magnate.
2.
Aunt Renata was not a happy hostess.
Renata Goldpaw pulls no punches in her own assessment of those months in which she boarded her temporarily homeless brother and sister-in-law and their three-legged son. In her diary, Renata calls the time spent in the company of her brother’s family “hell, pure unadorned, unadulterated hell.” One entry offers a particularly insightful look at her harsh feelings for young Jonathan in particular.
“Everyone thinks Jonathan’s such an angel. Ye Gods and Little Fishes, ain’t that a rip-snorter! Ask my little Timmy. He reports that when no one is looking, Cousin Jonny kicks him—not once, not twice, but three times! Each with a different leg. Good God and Jesus Pudding, this unbearable situation had better end soon or Timmy will become a nerve-frayed little quiver-boy whom no one will want to look upon and may even throw stones at. I could not bear that! I volunteered to go with Addicus to that farm and help him rebuild the house to speed up their departure, but he declined. This morning Timmy came to me and said that Jonathan had hidden his toy soldiers and had stolen the little sweet I had tucked beneath his pillow for helping Mommy roll the dough for the lattice pie we had last night. This is while everyone else is singing the demon child’s praises. I cannot wait until the evil is removed from this house!”
Apparently Renata never confronted her brother Addicus with these charges. I am certain they were baseless. Little Timmy’s tendency toward mendacity and self-bruising was widely known, even at the time of the Blashette’s stay.
3.
A fresh coat of paint was all that was needed now.
Odger Blashette, interview.
4.
Memories of a merry Christmas, however, were marred by an unfortunate accident.
According to family historian, Candida Isbell Loring, it is unlikely that the story is true. Given the personality profile she has pieced together of Jonathan’s Great Aunt Harriet, it is doubtful that the old woman would have simply lain without complaint beneath the fallen Christmas tree and waited patiently for her presence there to be detected. She would, in all likelihood, have bellowed without recess until rescue became assured. One can only subscribe to the truth of the prevailing account by accepting the theory that the ornament lodged
in her mouth made the broadcasting of her whereabouts a futile endeavor.
Incidentally, Jonathan was blessed with eleven aunts and twenty-one great-aunts from both sides of the family, almost all still alive at this point in his life. I have made no effort to catalog them or to gauge the degree to which he was close to each. Some, Harriet Blashette being a good representative, were nearly daily fixtures. Others he hardly had the chance to meet. For example, Jonathan did not see his mother’s sister Nydia for nearly thirty years, the result of her banishment to the wilds of Alaska for bearing a child out of wedlock and for attempting to assign paternity to successful local confectioner Henry Bellamy when it was clearly his deficient twin brother Benry whom the baby favored.
5. “
Your pomade has soiled my antimacassar.”
Jonathan was fond of Aunt Lindy in spite of her eccentricities. However, this particular trait—the tendency to assail houseguests upon their leave-taking with charges of having done damage to her furniture and other household items—even Jonathan found a little irritating. Jonathan Blashette,
Early Memories
, JBP.
6. “
You put sticky wicky on my stereopticon.”
Jonathan had been eating jam and bread but his hands had been tidily wiped, so the accusation was unfounded. Ibid.
7. “
That smelly stethoscope has been up someone’s ass.”
Even Aunt Lindy’s last days were colored by baseless allegations against her doctor and the hospital nursing staff. Ibid.
8.
Spring brought a number of visitors.
Others who visited the boy during his sixth spring was Opton Van der Schoop, an itinerant “purveyor of wares exotic,” who taught Jonathan
to play the spoons; Lucy Smythe, a suffragist with whom Emmaline had been corresponding for many months and who angered Addicus in one particular heated dinner table exchange by insisting that women not only had the God-given right to vote but should do so wearing men’s work clothes and theatrical beards; and Anne Maye Powell, a beautiful teacher of the blind and deaf whom Emmaline had offered to put up for the night when the young woman missed her connecting train. Anne Maye, convinced that Jonathan was not only deformed but a blind and deaf mute when he knocked a glass of water from the dinner table and didn’t respond quickly enough to a request by his mother to help her clean it up, snatched the boy from the table, delivered him to the farmyard well pump and began spelling the word “water” in his hand. As Jonathan stared blankly at her, uncomprehending, his brain slightly fuzzed from having sneaked several potent swallows of Addicus’s stash of corn liquor thirty minutes earlier, Anne Maye tired of teaching the boy the word for water and instead delivered into his hand all five verses of Sidney Lanier’s “Song of the Chattahoochee.” Odger Blashette, interview
9.
Jonathan spent part of his summer at the home of his Aunt Gracelyn in Clume.
The towns of Clume and Pettiville were as different as two communities could be. I wanted to find out more about the former, which is located fifteen miles north of the town of Jonathan’s birth. Early attempts were unfruitful. The official town website is composed of a single unlinked page offering a picture of a little pigtailed girl with two missing front teeth who tells us to “come to Clume. There’s lots of room!” I wrote to the town historian and chief librarian of the Clume Library and Discovery Center, Ada Demion, and received the following letter—a disturbing whitewash of the town’s dark and controversial past.
Dear Mr. Dunn,
Thank you so much for your kind letter. Historical information on Clume is rather hard to come by, you are right. There has been no town history written (although I am in the process of gathering material for one). Generally, genealogists come here and proceed to pull their hair out.
I will give you a thumbnail sketch of Clume. First I should say that Jonathan Blashette was one of our most illustrious residents even though we have been obligated to share him with Pettiville. It has been said that he got his idea for male deodorants while living with his Aunt Gracelyn Boosier whose third husband Cully was a real stinker! Ha ha!
Clume was founded in 1837 by retired beggars. During the
War of Northern Aggression
, some of our slaves did not want to be free. They were happy right where they were and made up a little song that schoolchildren sing to this day: “Lincoln Sminken. Rinky Dinken. Fudgin’ Mudgin’. We Ain’t Budgin’!” Meaning they had no desire to join the ranks of their northern cousins who were “free” but hungry and destitute as you know most Negroes are.
Some say that during the
Years of Carpetbagging Pillage
which followed the
War of Northern Aggression,
we held the world record for lynchings. Now, this simply is not true. There were only a handful of lynchings and the rest were trick lynchings in which the rope would break in just the nick of time and everybody would go home chuckling at the cleverness of it all. The real lynchings were not funny, of course, and I am not defending them, but remember also that the intendees weren’t always Negroes, to be sure. There
were two Chinamen, an Italian who was mistaken for a Negro, a parrot who wouldn’t stop saying the dirty words no matter what anyone did, and a Romanist (which is different from an Italian in that Romanists display Catholic arrogance), and then after a while we started to lynch the ones who had done all the lynching because we began to feel that the whole thing was wrong and the wrongdoers needed to be appropriately punished. And in so doing, the town of Clume demonstrated that it had a conscience after all and this truly warms me as you can imagine. So that there would not be an endless spiral of lynching, the sheriff decided that the guilty parties should lynch each other and this pretty much cleared up the problem. By 1891 when a law was passed by the Arkansas Legislature outlawing lynching except in exceptional cases, we had already put an end to it in this town, even though people still said our record was a formidable one to beat.
In the 1930s, Mr. Ripley wanted to put us in his newspaper feature, but the townspeople squeezed their eyes into little slits and said, “
You better not
.”
The Twentieth Century was generally uneventful except that Main Street burned down in 1918 caused by an incident of self-combustion that was recently featured on the television program, “Fire From Within.” In 1924, Babe Ruth came to town and played some sandlot baseball with some of our boys until he found out that the uncle of one of his Yankee teammates had been lynched here when some of the townspeople thought that he was an anarchist. There isn’t a lot of evidence that he was an anarchist, but he did look like one of those Italian Negroes who had always given us so much trouble.
When the hostages were taken in Iran, we held a young
Iranian man against his will in the basement of the hardware store to show him what it was like. It was a lesson he would never forget!
I hope this information has been of some use to you. Let me know if you ever decide to spend some time in Clume. There’s lot’s of room!
Yours sincerely,
Ada Demion
10.
Jonathan had his heroes. Buffalo Bill was not one of them.
The following letter speaks for itself.
April 4, 1899
Dear Buffalo Bill,
What do you do each day? I can guess. I’ll bet you get up in the morning and stretch and yawn and then reach for your rifle and point it out the window and kill a grazing buffalo that has come a little too close to your cabin for his own good. And then you make yourself a big breakfast of scrambled eggs and hot cakes and sausage and while you are chowing down, you look up and there is another buffalo all tangled up in your clothesline and you shoot him in the head because, why, he’s all tangled up the clothesline, will you lookit! And you go down the lane to visit with your friends Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane and’Ol Doc Grubbs and along the way you just happen to kill a buffalo or two, because they were getting just a little too close, if you want the truth of it. And when you finally reach your friends you all go prancing about together in fancy plumey hats and you decide to have a picnic—a buffalo-killing picnic. And you eat a devil egg and blam! blam! Did you see him topple? Tasty egg, Jane. Blam! Blam! And then later you
play some baseball and you slide into home plate and everybody is still cheering while you get up and run over with your baseball bat and beat a nearby buffalo into a motionless fur mound. And that night you go to the theatre to see a hootchie kootchie show and a buffalo comes out on stage. And you jump to your feet. “What’s that buffalo doing up on that stage!” you say. “This is no buffalo show! This is a hootchie kootchie show!” And you shoot the buffalo right between the eyes. And it falls over dead and you sit back down and say, “Somebody get that dead buffalo off the stage! On with the show!” And on the way home that night, you guessed it. A buffalo comes out of nowhere. And then another and another. It is a whole herd that is crossing the road and you wish that you had more ammunition because you can’t kill as many of them as you’d like, and you are gnashing your teeth and saying to your friends, “Why it’s too danged dark! I’m only crippling them, Gawd-darnit! Oh well. A crippled buffalo is better than a happy, healthy frisky one.” And when you get home and go to sleep, I think I know what you dream of. Do I have to say?
When they are all gone, Mr. Bill, what will you do? What will you do then, I wonder?
Your friend,
Jonathan Blashette.
(PS. I am eleven and I have three legs. And I wish that you would go to Florida and kill alligators for a change.) JBP.
11.
Jonathan knew the moment he met Mr. Grund that his life was about to change forever.
In Cordell Glover’s monumentally flawed, indolently under-researched,
and offensively over-embroidered biography of Blashette,
Three Legs, One Heart: The Story of Jonathan Blashette,
(Fairhope, Alabama: Hollon House, 1989)—from which I have drawn sparingly and only when other sources are in full corroboration—the biographeraster provides us with a ludicrously contrived, yet too deliciously accoutered description of the arrival of Thaddeus Grund to the town of Pettiville that pivotal autumn afternoon of 1900 for me not to include at least a paragraph or two for your amusement:
“The train was late. Oh it was late all right, and everybody knew it. The crowd that had gathered at the station shifted from leg to leg, in one great concerted sway of impatience, like an enormous beast with many heads and twice as many legs hungry—hungry for what?—the beast only knew this: that a banquet awaited one of their number. The young twelve-year-old, the one they called “Jonathan” or “Triple Threat” or “Spare Shoe.” And the beast sniffed. Sniffed and snorted loud and without apology. They could all smell it; the pungent odor of fate, of a destiny materializing. Grund was Pettiville-bound and bearing a wheelbarrow full of cash. And they smelled the cash, the people did, with nostrils opened and stretched clean and wide by the sweet perfume of fame and fortune. The boy was brought to the edge of the platform, held aloft, as a distant whistle announced the iron horse’s arrival. As the steam folded back like a great wet curtain and the locomotive pushed through, chug-a-chugging into the Pettiville station, the crowd itself whistled and tooted and tossed the boy high into the air, ready to deliver him to a future of assured acclaim. The tracks sang out and the men and the women and the little ones with two legs, each sang out as well. The train slowed and stopped, and the man who would mold young Jonathan’s future like a potter of brash fate, with
muscular, knowing hands, stepped down from the train and smiled and tousled the boy’s dusty brown hair. And a cheer went up. And tears flowed down the excitement-rubied cheeks of Addicus and Emmaline Blashette. Tears of loss, for, yes, the child would be taken from them within hours, but tears, yes, also of joy for what the future might hold for this most special child. And the crowd parted and made way for Addicus and Emmaline and Jonathan and their evening guest, the spangled showman Thaddeus Grund, to climb into the festooned barouche that would transport the foursome to the Blashette farm. To talk of a future bright, of a destiny held in the hand and grasped firmly and kissed and sniffed and stroked with tender anticipation
.
It was a night the boy would always remember.”
