This place don’t seem the same without yo daddy around. I hate that I missed his funeral. I was in the hospital with my heart. They say it’s about done. They won’t let me eat nothing but brim and branch water, not that I think it’s gonna do any good at this point. Lou was always the best cook around and now she can’t make a damned thing I really like. I guess my old ticker is just about worn out.
Like I said, yo daddy sure did love hunting. We started hunting deer together about the time you were born. There wasn’t no deer around back then to amount to nothing. Most folks we grew up with around here hunted rabbits the way folks down south Georgia hunted quail. They say you ain’t supposed to eat ‘em except in months with an “r” in it, but my Mama said that Herbert Hoover made rabbits edible year round, Hoover’s chickens she called ‘em.
That’s how he lost his eye. I was shooting at a rabbit running along a hedgerow out in front of the beagles along the edge of a stock pond. There was snow on the ground and the water was frozen and some of them shot hit the ice and ricocheted off and hit him in the face, two in the forehead and two in the eye. I know he told you that story but you outta seen him holding his eye in with one hand while I took him to the hospital in Bowden. He never once made a noise or moaned or nothing. He didn’t feel pain like normal folks.
I saw him hold his hand on a stem heating pipe till his skin sizzled on a wager. He held hissun’ there twice as long as any of them other men did. Yo daddy loved to fight and I’ve seen him beat men, grown men, big men, about to death. He beat a guy in a bar one night who had bought brass knucks just to fight him. I’ll be damned if he didn’t beat all that mother fuker’s teeth outta his mouth and then stomp his fingers and take those knucks and throw them out in the blackberry briars and dogfennel.
Ain’t nobody ever liked pussy the way yo daddy did neither. He liked ‘em all, white, black, skinny, fat. He even liked some that didn’t have no hair on ‘em yet if you know what I’m sayin’. I think he roofed three or four days a week just soes he could chase tail the rest. He’s got kids out there you aint never heard tale of.
He even ran a group of whores he made a lot of money from. I hear tell he even sold girls for some important folks, a couple of shierrifs, and state senators, and maybe even the governor. I know he did some other stuff for those guys too. Broke a few noses and fingers, hell, even cut a guy’s ring offen his finger that owed summa them money down at that big poker game they had in Mableton way before you was born.
He would be funny as hell to hang around with one minute and then threatening to cut someone’s throat the next. I know he killed at least three folks. One offem he brought by my place in the middle of the goddamn night in the bed of his truck to see if I had a painter’s tarp to roll him up in. He tried to get me to go with him to find a well to throw him down. I gave him the tarp. I wuz a scared not to, but I told him that Lou wouldn’t let me go out that late. I don’t even know who the man was or why your daddy kilt him. I remember his throat was cut from ear to ear. He cut plumb through his windpipe. I can still see it, and that was fifty years ago.
Another time, one of them state senators hired him as a night watchman to see over his properties. Sure as hell, your daddy shot a man, a white man, climbing a ladder to look in the upstairs office. He shot that sunuvabitch right between the goddamn eyes and he fell offen that ladder and landed on a pointed fence post. Your daddy left him hanging there till everyone got there for work the next morning. That senator had had some of his Ni—er workers throw him in the Chattahoochee river down near the shoals.
You daddy kilt of of them too, a big bluegum one, hit him right upside the head with a big 28 ounce framing hammer, said he was pissing in the corner or a room in the building he was forman over. He said that the boy had a carpet knife but I didn’t see one on him. He was still twitching and kicking when I got there. You daddy said, “just look at him, just like them boys, always dancing even when they’ve been kilt.”
The Atlanta police came and got that one, put him in the trunk of their car, and took him to the river themselves. That was in 1950 or 51.
Like I said, I hate that I missed your daddy’s funeral. He was crazy as hell but I’m gonna miss him. I know you will too. He sure did care about you even if he didn’t care about nothing nor nobody else.
[Image Credit : Photo by Nik on Unsplash ]
by 
Alan Caldwell
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