By JOE COBB CRAWFORD
There he is, Cecil of long ago, a strange little man from my childhood. His image is burnt on my brain—sharp nose, beaming eyes, sparkling white teeth and a stiff, army green Fidel Castro hat. Clear as day I can see it perched atop his balding head like a king’s crown.
Some sixty-odd years have passed—some more odd than others— since I last saw Cecil. In my senior years it’s peculiar he’s stuck there in my memory. When I was a kid he worked on our North Georgia farm. He was almost an adopted black sheep member of our family.
He’d sometimes join us for breakfast before we all went to work in the fields. Some days he’d ax down creekside alder bushes, mend pasture fences or split firewood. He worked hard and he liked to eat. He especially loved my mom’s cooking.
At breakfast one morning I played a prank on Cecil. I asked him if he’d like some blackberry jelly to go with his biscuits. He flashed those bright white teeth and nodded yes. I handed him a jar of mustard. He took the jar in hand, rattled a knife inside it and slathered gobs of mustard on his biscuit. Like a starving man, he gobbled it down. Then he glanced up, squinted happy eyes and flashed yellow-streaked teeth at me.
Cecil wasn’t fat, lazy or slow – far from it. With the body frame of a stout leprechaun, his oversized laced-up brogans were always fast walking somewhere. To keep up with him I’d have to trot. Leaning into his pace, he’d march from his house to work each day. Like the mailman, neither rain, sleet nor snow kept him from a day’s work. After laboring all day, he’d walk four miles back home to Stafford Town, Tennessee. The man truly loved to walk.
I learned of his preference for walking from a chicken catcher buddy, one of the guys I worked with as a teen loading live poultry onto chicken trucks. He told me a story about an encounter he’d had with Cecil.
While driving Highway 68, a road connecting McCaysville, Georgia and Ducktown, Tennessee, he’d seen Cecil walking near the top of a red barren hill. He’d stopped his car to offer Cecil a ride. Cecil was short with him; he wanted no part of the offered car ride. He’d flashed a sideways, condescending smile, and given a surly response: “No. I can’t ride with you! I’m in a hurry.” He’d then turned and fast-footed away down the hill toward Ducktown.
Cecil loved to tell stories. His jaded perspective made his stories and sense of humor uniquely amusing. He’d laugh out loud at things that really held no humor, like tales of tragedy for instance.
He’d tell stories to my brother and me. Sometimes the neighbor kids would listen in. His stories often included scenes of horror with gory details of human carnage and suffering. We boys would listen—often in disbelief—and would ooh and ah or cringe and shoulder punch one another. After finishing his story, Cecil would pause and flash his pearly teeth. Then he’d break into hysterical laughter—the laugh of an asylum inmate waiting for his next shock treatment.
I recall vividly one story he told. The setting was central Florida in the 1950s. A hurricane had passed through. Cecil said he’d lived in Florida for a short while but had skedaddled just days before the hurricane blew in. He said his job was picking oranges and that he really liked it because he could eat all the oranges he cared to on that job.
He said after the hurricane came calling, he went back and the place looked like a desert. Almost everything had blown away. But he said dead people, farm animals and critters were everywhere scattered and half-buried in the sand. Down in the swamp, fish and alligators were stuck high in treetops.
Cecil ended this story differently. He didn’t laugh out loud after finishing. He was graveyard quiet for two eternities. He then raised his voice and like a shout-out street preacher delivered a cautionary ending: “God kilt ‘em all ’cause ’ey’s sinful and wouldn’t repent. ’At’s why He done it. ’Ey weren’t gonna repent.”
We wide-eyed boys didn’t know what to say after he concluded his story/sermon. We dared not ask him how he knew the reason for the hurricane. But we all believed Cecil believed what he’d told us to be the Gospel truth.
I’ve often pondered the moral and conclusion of Cecil’s story. Maybe he was right. Who knows why horrible things sometimes happen? I’m certain I don’t know.
Today, the only thing for certain I know is that I still feel guilty about that mustard biscuit prank I played on him some 60-odd years ago. I wonder whatever happened to Cecil.