potato chips. Every afternoon at four he would come home smelling of potatoes, and would fetch from his old leather satchel two big bags of chips for Skip and me, crisp and hot. Sometimes he would take the two of us to work with him, and we would watch while he put on his white apron, carry the great sacks of peeled potatoes to a machine that cut them into thin slices, and then transfer them to the prodigious black oven that heated up the finished product. We munched on potato chips all day, from nine to four, and came home so full of salt and potato grease that we had to drink half a gallon of ice water at supper.
Maggie and Susie, my grandmother's eccentric old-maid sisters, were challenges, I could tell, to Skip, and he always observed them quizzically in their ceaseless and directionless peregrinations. They had been born long ago during the Civil War, and neither of them could hear or see very well, getting me confused with a brother of theirs who died in 1908 and Skip with a dog named Beauregard they had owned as girls in 1879; once they even confused Skip with a
cousin
of theirs who had passed on during World War I. They perambulated inside the house and around the yard all day long in their fantastic flowing dresses, running into doors and trees, knocking things off tables; sometimes they bumped into each other in these interminable explorations, and said “Excuse me,” and then pushed off again in opposite directions. Several times a day they tripped over Skip, and once when I saw Maggie trying to strike up a conversation with the garbage can in the backyard, Skip was sitting there moving his head back and forth, and when he saw me he seemed to be asking, “What's going on here?”
We took long walks, my grandparents and great-aunts and Skip and I, down streets shaded by crepe myrtles, where old ladies on decaying verandas would sometimes ask us in for iced tea; and on to the State Capitol with its fine air of permanence, to search for envelopes with foreign stamps on them in the big refuse bin; and on to the cemetery down the way in the hot, glowing dusks; and then thelong walks home, Skip leading the procession because the varied topography of the big town had long since been amply planted in his brain.
If the years of World War II, in Skip's and my childhood, were glorious beyond measure in our own town, they were equally stimulating in the capital city Jackson was crowded with soldiers of all ranks and origins, and one could hear the clipped Yankee accents all along East Capitol Street, and on several occasions my grandfather and Skip and I walked out to the German prisoner-of-war camp to gaze at the captured soldiers behind the high fences; on one of these afternoons a sergeant of the Afrika Korps bent down and tried to pet Skip through the barbed wire, insisting in his halting English that he reminded him of his own dog in Germany
In addition to the northern accents that filled the downtown, you heard the Dutch tongue all around you, because hundreds of pilots from Holland were training at the air base, and exiled Dutch leaders were living here also. One morning my grandmother took Skip and me to the Jitney Jungle across the street, which she used for all practical purposes as her personal pantry, visiting it several times a day to buy a tomato, or a head of lettuce, or a cucumber, but mainly to gossip with the other ladies of the neighborhood, and at the vegetable counter with two other perfectly dressed women, she pointed out to me, was the Queen of the Netherlands: I told Skip this, but I doubt that it registered, and if it did, that he believed it.
At night, as Percy and Skip and I lay half-awake in our beds, I could hear their voices—Mamie's and my great-aunts”—from the parlor. My great-aunts’ world was unexpectedly clearer at this hour, and I loved to lie in the next room, in that lulled awareness just before sleep, and hear the tick-tock of the old clock and the quiet, eclectic talk: about
Maggie and Susie, my grandmother's eccentric old-maid sisters, were challenges, I could tell, to Skip, and he always observed them quizzically in their ceaseless and directionless peregrinations. They had been born long ago during the Civil War, and neither of them could hear or see very well, getting me confused with a brother of theirs who died in 1908 and Skip with a dog named Beauregard they had owned as girls in 1879; once they even confused Skip with a
cousin
of theirs who had passed on during World War I. They perambulated inside the house and around the yard all day long in their fantastic flowing dresses, running into doors and trees, knocking things off tables; sometimes they bumped into each other in these interminable explorations, and said “Excuse me,” and then pushed off again in opposite directions. Several times a day they tripped over Skip, and once when I saw Maggie trying to strike up a conversation with the garbage can in the backyard, Skip was sitting there moving his head back and forth, and when he saw me he seemed to be asking, “What's going on here?”
We took long walks, my grandparents and great-aunts and Skip and I, down streets shaded by crepe myrtles, where old ladies on decaying verandas would sometimes ask us in for iced tea; and on to the State Capitol with its fine air of permanence, to search for envelopes with foreign stamps on them in the big refuse bin; and on to the cemetery down the way in the hot, glowing dusks; and then thelong walks home, Skip leading the procession because the varied topography of the big town had long since been amply planted in his brain.
If the years of World War II, in Skip's and my childhood, were glorious beyond measure in our own town, they were equally stimulating in the capital city Jackson was crowded with soldiers of all ranks and origins, and one could hear the clipped Yankee accents all along East Capitol Street, and on several occasions my grandfather and Skip and I walked out to the German prisoner-of-war camp to gaze at the captured soldiers behind the high fences; on one of these afternoons a sergeant of the Afrika Korps bent down and tried to pet Skip through the barbed wire, insisting in his halting English that he reminded him of his own dog in Germany
In addition to the northern accents that filled the downtown, you heard the Dutch tongue all around you, because hundreds of pilots from Holland were training at the air base, and exiled Dutch leaders were living here also. One morning my grandmother took Skip and me to the Jitney Jungle across the street, which she used for all practical purposes as her personal pantry, visiting it several times a day to buy a tomato, or a head of lettuce, or a cucumber, but mainly to gossip with the other ladies of the neighborhood, and at the vegetable counter with two other perfectly dressed women, she pointed out to me, was the Queen of the Netherlands: I told Skip this, but I doubt that it registered, and if it did, that he believed it.
At night, as Percy and Skip and I lay half-awake in our beds, I could hear their voices—Mamie's and my great-aunts”—from the parlor. My great-aunts’ world was unexpectedly clearer at this hour, and I loved to lie in the next room, in that lulled awareness just before sleep, and hear the tick-tock of the old clock and the quiet, eclectic talk: about
Similar Books
