The Fire-Ant Firing Squad

Well, folks, it’s Southern Miss week, and we still don’t seem to know much more about this Alabama Crimson Tide football team than we did week 1. I guess our Hoodoo last week was enough to get us past a scrub like FAU (still love saying that).

Now to quote Our Dark Lord, I’d like to say that I was not disappointed in last week’s Hoodoo submissions. However, we still have a lot to prove. So despite the relative weakness of this particular out of conference cannon fodder, I am going to strive to treat every Hoodoo as though it has a life of its own. I’m going to Hoodoo to a standard…after all, if ODL has taught us nothing, it’s that the opponent doesn’t matter because the opponent is always your own personal best.

Looking back through Hoodoos past (you folks know I don’t want to double-dip you and taunt the football gods with a Hoodoo re-run), I decided that there is another, non-ghetto phase of my life that provides a mine of shameful resources, a veritable fountain of Hoodoo.

Though, as I’ve revealed in Hoodoo’s past, I spent much of my childhood in a working-class, rather rough neighborhood, I did have an occasion respite that taught me about another way of life, the life that my forefathers had lived before me deep in the Alabama interior. From time to time, whether during the summer months or later on in the year after the leaves began to turn in a flash of autumn color, I’d get the hankerin’ for some good ole fashioned country livin’. And for me, the country was personified by my Great-Uncle Ellard, a lifelong resident of Vance, AL, just down the road a purt-piece from our Mecca there on Hwy. 11, Tuscaloosa.

Now y’all have heard me talk about my dear old Uncle Ellard before in these parts, but to my mind, it hasn’t been nearly enough. You see, Uncle Ellard told me a good bit of what I know about life, with the spanning wisdom of time filling in the rest for me over the years. There was not a time that I didn’t know him as an old man in his 80s, though I’d seen sepia-tone pictures of his younger incarnation, a dapper-lookin’ cat-daddy in a three-piece suit, with his then-dark hair oiled down slick against his head with pomade, knee raised and foot resting on the running board of a gloss-black 1932 Ford sedan. In that picture, he’d have passed for one of Clyde Barrow’s familiars, and by God, he could be mean enough to match company with the likes of that infamous bunch.

No, most of the time I was around him, I reckon I could count on two or three fingers the times I saw him out of his standard-issue uniform: overalls or jeans, a button down shirt, boots ad an old mesh-backed, trucker-style ball cap with the “CAT” logo across the front of it. It was school bus yella, he’d say it’s the closest he’d ever get to wearin’ orange. Even as an old man, he kept a good bit of his hair in that yellowed-ivory shade common in many octogenarians of Scotch-Irish decent.

Uncle Ellard was just pure, unadulterated Alabama: all rust and grit and dirt and Hell. He was tougher than old ball-glove leather, rough as a rawhide boar. He didn’t drink or cuss, but if you don’t believe he’d be quick to put you in your place for speaking out of line...well, you’re just foolin’ yourself, boy. I remember the first (and subsequently last) time I walked into his domicile wearing a cap on my head. After I picked up my hat from the floor (to whence he had swatted it from atop my head), the only explanation I received was, “Man don’t wear a cap indoors.” Duly noted, never wore a cap indoors around the man again. Ever.

That’s how he’d teach us, not by talking, but rather by doing. Many parents of this generation would do well to take that lesson away from his life, as he modeled what he wanted you to be, and then held you to that standard. He did that for generations of men in my family…we’d all have our time in Hell with Uncle Ellard.

For me, it came when I was 12. As I’ve told you folks as recently as last week, I was raised by my mama. Now she was a tough lady in her own right, but she was also wise enough to know that no matter how hard she tried, she’d never be able to do much from behind the mother’s apron to heal that hole in our hearts left when our daddy went to seek his jollies elsewhere. The only thing she knew to do was send us “up the country” to Vance for “man lessons." 

So as a 12-year-old, the time had come for my own personal backwoods bar mitzvah. I remember riding north to Tuscaloosa that summer in the passenger seat of my grandma-ma’s old Caprice. Ridin’ with Grandma-ma was slow going, to be sure, as she kept her hands at 10-2 and kept to five miles below the speed limit, just to be safe. Over the years, I’d learned the mental markers that I’d keep stored in the internal clock of my mind: first we’d fork off onto Hwy. 5 in Thomasville, up through Pine Hill, through Heiberger, past the appropriately named former eatery and hotel known as “The Spot,” where we’d turn left at the phone tower and continue north past the catfish farms until the hills started rolling like an alligator’s back and the grass bled verdant green as we zipped by.

We arrived in Vance at the old home, an old white clap-board house that sat a piece from the road on a gravel and churt driveway of its own, wedged between two lush pastures. We peeled up, leading plumes of fine pinkish dust that rose quickly in our wake in a swirl before settling back to the dry ground. A gnarled pig-nut hickory tree stood like a centurion over the mailbox, and Uncle Ellard’s border collies were the first signs of life we saw as they flowed out to the car, barking, to greet us.

I’d been to Uncle Ellard’s plenty of times before, but this summer would be special because it would be altogether free from the influence of womanhood, I’d told myself. My Aunt Gerta, Uncle Ellard’s wife, had gone to visit family in her homeland of Germany, and would be gone for the duration of the summer. It would literally be me and Uncle Ellard, from dawn ‘til dusk, for a month. My grandma-ma had simply been my boatman across the Styx, as she’d be heading back the following day.

The next day, when I saw my grandma-ma back that Caprice down the driveway and out onto the highway to head home, I began to feel the strings of homesickness pulling at me, already creeping into my mind. But I decided to make the best of it and soldier forth, as I wanted to make Uncle Ellard proud and enjoy the country life while I could. I thought we’d ride the tractor, spend some time fishin’…maybe visit Donny’s Country Store down on the highway for a Mountain Dew occasionally.

Uncle Ellard, however, had different plans for my summer sojourn. For him. This was an opportunity to catch up on some work with the free labor his sister had just conveniently dropped in his front parlor. He gave me the first night in peace, I’ll grant him that. But what followed was a litany of chores and tasks the likes of which I had never been forced to endure.

Take for example our day 1 schedule. Rise at 5. That’s a.m. When I asked him why we were getting started so early, the response was, “Early? This ain’t early, boy. I let you sleep in.” Sure as hell felt early. Maybe Vance was in a different time zone, I thought…maybe I was suffering from some sort of Caprice-induced jet-lag.

He had me go into the holler to pick a fresh cantaloupe while he fried salty home-cured bacon and eggs. That was an odyssey in itself, as I had to plod down through the briar-patch in the dark-soiled bottom, through the dew and thorns, to find a suitable melon for the morning breakfast. I was worn out before we ever even sat down to eat.

From there, we engaged in a myriad of activities that sane city folk would most undoubtedly have labeled homicidal insanity. Worked in the Alabama sun for six hours without breaking for water, unless of course your count the few cupped-handful of water one could draw up from the artesian spring that bubbled up at the far end of the west pasture. We strung barbed wire fence. We moved cattle, watered them and later, put corn in the trough to “beef ‘em up,” Uncle Ellard told me.

“I thought they were already cattle, how much more beef can they be?” I quipped. Certainly this man would appreciate my elegant humor amidst our current toil. He stared at me like he was looking past me, a little off-kilter. Didn’t say a word, yea or nay. Then he looked back down at the come-along he was cranking, putting tension on the coil of rusty, age-old barbed wire he insisted upon using rather than a new roll. After all, you just can’t enjoy the country without a tetanus shot, and he sure didn’t want to rob me of the experience.

After 13 hours of labor, my young body was ready to crumble. I was beat, beat up, cut, scarred and otherwise raked over the coals. And I’d never felt more alone in all my life. Uncle Ellard would talk when talkin’ was called for, but in his handbook, it wasn’t called for very often. When we worked, we needed to be quiet. “A man starts talkin’ while he’s workin’, he’s gonna end up hurt. Hurt out here getchu killed.” When we fished, silence reigned. “You can’t talk out here, fish got good ears, they can hear you comin’ 50 foot from the bank.” At night, I’d try to strike up a conversation, but before I’d know it, he would dose off, mid-conversation.

So after a few days, I was beginning to feel the burn. Homesickness. I wanted my bed. I wanted my schedule. I wanted more than three channels on the cotdang tv. And if I had to eat another piece of that damn sickeningly salty bacon, I was going to leap headfirst out of the kitchen window, hoping to sever my jugular in the process.

One morning began as the others, to the smell of ham on hot cast iron and Uncle Ellard yellin’ into my room. “Com’on, boy, work to do.”

We ate breakfast and I hit the head before we took to the field. When I stepped out on the back porch, Uncle Ellard thrust a mattock ax into my hand. I didn’t know what to do with it…hell, at that time, I didn’t even know to call the damn thing a mattock ax.

“Uh, okay, what you want me to do with this…dig up some rocks or somethin’?” I was once again greeted by the thousand mile stare.

“You goan dig a trench, city is puttin’ in water line and we have to dig the trench for the line.”

I was excited. That sounded like something I could get into, something rhythmic, something that would make me stronger. I eye-balled the distance from the house to the nearest spot of road, and figured it to be about 30 yards, 35 at the most. I seized that mattock, enthusiastic about my opportunity to show Uncle Ellard that I wasn’t worth less after all. I started digging, got about five feet into it when I felt the firm crab-claw grip of Uncle Ellard’ arthritic hand on my shoulder.

“Boy, you goin’ the wrong way.” He slowly raised his hand like the cotdang Reaper and pointed in the opposite direction, across the expanse of his yard, a distance that was about 100 yards away. “The tie-in is down there, you gotta dig that direction.”

I stared across the expanse, raising my hand to my eyes to block out the glare. “Holy shit,” I thought. “I can’t dig all THAT way.”

The old man read my mind. “Looks pretty far, don’t it…HAHAHAHA.”  First time I’d heard him laugh since I’d been there.

I had already noticed in the five feet of digging I had done that central Alabama soil isn’t like the soft, lush, fertile Delta dark we have down here in Mobile. God no. It was heavy red clay, interspersed with a rock they called churt (but is not true churt) and hunks of iron ore. There were these ferrous geodes in the soil as well, known to the locals as “pop rocks.” They were hollow like most geodes, but instead of crystals inside, they were filled with a fine, purplish powder that would explode like a grenade when the rocks were tossed in a campfire. I may as well have been excavating through the middle of Red Mountain. The chore was tough, to say the least, and I didn’t see any light at the end of the tunnel.

 I followed my marching orders. Two hours later, I had a trench about 10 yards long cut into that god-awful earth. “Surely I am on the surface of hell.” The sun was broiling. I was grimy. Yella flies were feasting on my lowland flesh as if it were a Chinese buffet.

And then it happened.

You see, I am from hearty stock overall, but I have a few allergies. Those allergies seem to revolve around stinging insects, and unbeknownst to me, during my Dig-Dug impersonation, I had cleft directly through a good-sized mound of fire ants. Fire ants are the bane of my existence. They hurt, they make me sick, even to the point of puking at times. Especially when combined with dehydration.

Needless to say, the collective horde of the nest was on me before I knew it, and as if part of some symphony of pain, they seemed to all bite me at the same time. Before I could brush my calves clean, my skin was on fire. I was yelping and swatting, to no avail for the large part. Fire ants are devious, wicked creatures, you see. For once the first bite is lodged, on many occasions, you are already done for. Those ants have a way of climbing into nooks and crannies that haven’t seen the sun in years…they crawl in there, and then they bite you. Bite the hell out of you. I’m tellin’ you, it’s bad enough to make a grown-man cry, like someone scraping a red-hot cheese grater over your flesh.

The slapping wasn’t getting the job done, so I figured I’d do what one is taught to do when on fire…stop, drop and roll. I followed suit as I had been instructed by city folk. Important note here: When stopping and dropping, make sure your ass doesn’t do so while standing over a bed of fire ants. I was covered from head to toe.

Thinking I was alone, I flailed and wailed like a banshee on fire, slapping at myself and yelping like a whupped dog. Uncle Ellard stepped out of his shed to see what the fuss was about, and he must have thought I had clean lost my mind. He hobbled over to me from across the yard, pulling my shirt off of me and swatting at me with it like he was working a bellows on the ole blacksmith shop in the northern pasture.

He pulled me by the arm to the house, and I was wigglin’ like a jitterbug. I was itching and on fire, so he did what any logical country feller does when confronted with such circumstances…he put the hose on me. To his surprise, this didn’t cure my affliction, as I was still lit up from head to toe.

And then the puking began in earnest. I threw up breakfast, and I threw up lunch. Cantaloupe doesn’t taste good coming up, regardless of how well-received it may be going down. When I threw up everything I had, I dry-heaved. For hours. It was horrible. He called my grandma-ma at home, and she instructed him to put me in the bathtub with a bunch of ice and put in half a box of baking soda. Then he made me wipe myself down with a witch hazel-soaked rag, as instructed by Grandma-ma. Despite their combined efforts, I was still miserable.

In all earnestness, I think he thought he had killed me. Or damn near it. I could sense the remorse in the softening of his attitude, but only for a few hours. I got a day of shore leave out of it, but the next day, still covered with rising white legions where each ant had sunken it’s mandibles, the light flipped on at 5 a.m. It was like cotdang “Bridge on the River Kwai” or something.

“Com’on boy, work to do.”

Is he kidding? Is he EVEN kidding? Certainly I had been mistaken, lost in the ethereal dream state induced by exotic fire ant venom. I just looked at him, still riddled with shivers and shakes from the ant-fever I was trying to sweat out. And, to be honest, I had taken my unfortunate incident as a ticket out of a few days of work. That kind of thing would have passed for me at home, where I could have milked a heinous incident like this one for at least one chore-free week, if not two.

“Uh, Uncle Ellard, I’m allergic to ants.”

“Allergic? Huh?”

“I’m allergic to ants…as in, I can’t go back out in the heat after taking so many stings.”

He did the 1000 mile stare at a point somewhere about six inches above my head. He paused, as if parsing his next words carefully so as to assure to leave the proper impression. I thought surely he understood modern medicine, that allergies were dangerous and not to be toyed with. Surely these were the things he was rolling about in his mind as he selected his next command to an impressionable youth.

“Man’ll make himself sick if he wants to be sick.” He turned and walked towards the kitchen, and I heard him make his way through the back door first, then the screen door on the back porch. It slammed behind him, the way it always did.

What the hell did that mean? Was that supposed to be inspirational? I mean, I JUST GOT BIT BY 1000 ANTS, MAN! He couldn’t expect someone to put himself in jeopardy just to get a trench dug…could he? The look of disapproval that had flashed over his face had “soft” written all over it, as if he was sickened by my womanly subscription to some sissy medical terminology and practice. Is he trying to kill me…for the love of God what is wrong with this man?

As the conundrum turned in my mind, I started to get mad. Mad turned to motivation. I’d show that sumbitch…I pulled on my jeans (because “Men don’t wear short-pants”), over the bumpled turkey-skin texture of my ant-bit lower legs. Put my citified tennis shoes on. Pulled my cap down off the hat rack and decided I’d show him who could work.

I burst out of the back door like a jack-rabbit from his burrow. And there Uncle Ellard stood, leaning on the handle of that mattock ax, waiting for me.

You see, this wily ole cat knew what he was doing, and he knew I had been working those fire-ant bites like the con man I was. That shit can pass in a woman’s household, but up on the farm, things were a little different. I reached my hand out towards him, and he put that mattock ax in my grip.

“Figured maybe you wasn’t as bad off as you thought you were,” he said, chuckling up under his breath ever so slightly.

I went to work like John Henry on that trench line in a flurry of anger and explosive energy. I was a machine, an excavator, a mad man with a job to do, a mission to accomplish. I cut the remainder of that trench over two days, working as though the Pharoah himself was cracking a whip over my back.

When all was said and done, that trench was cut, ready for the pipe to be laid. While he didn’t so much as offer a word of approval, I could tell his demeanor changed, as though he found something in this city boy worth cultivating, the way he cultivated that stand of melon vines in the bottom of the holler, the way he had cultivated the lives of many young men like me for years before.

Weeks passed, and I got into the country swing of things. Work hard, play hard. String some fence, and catch a stringer of fish. That was the life. And when my grandma-ma came to get me at the end of the month, I was actually sad to see that old homestead disappearing in the rearview as we wound back down Bama Rock Garden Road on the way back home.

As we drove and crossed he railroad track that run parallel to Hwy. 11 like two sides of a zipper, my grandma-ma, in her Yankee-inflected (she married a Canadian) Southern drawl, said “Huh, your Uncle Ellard said this was for you.” She slipped me something under the cover of her cupped hand, something I could immediately detect was money just from the crinkly feel. I unfurled it and found a $50 bill, the first one I’d ever held in my own hands.

She smiled, and added, “He wanted me to ask you if you were allergic to that, too.”

“No ma’am, no ma’am I am not.”

It was that summer that I learned the value of hard work, not just in what it does for the wallet, but what it does for the soul. He didn’t have to preach to me about the value of a job well-done, but I learned it nonetheless. Such was Uncle Ellard…that’s how he rolled until the day he died at the ripe old age of 91.

When the bell tolled for him, I was working in the newspaper business. When I heard the news, I broke down. I’ve never lost a grandparent or close family member, at least not yet (knock on wood). He was the closest thing I had to either. So when my Aunt Gerta asked if I would give the eulogy, I buckled at first. I remembered thinking “how in the world will I pull this off?...I’ll never make it through without getting overcome.” And the last thing Uncle Ellard would want at his funeral was a bunch of womanly cryin’ and carryin’ on. He’d rise from the dead just to put his boot in my ass for that.

Then I remembered that summer, and how he wouldn’t let me out of doing the hard thing, even if I had an excuse to give up. I agreed to do the eulogy, and even while making that familiar drive up the country for his service, I wasn’t entirely sure how I was going to get through it.

But in Uncle Ellard’s own way, I bowed up. At the small funeral in the church where generations of my family had attended services, I stood over his open casket and delivered a virtuoso performance. I told three stories from my years with Uncle Ellard, one of them being this very one I’ve told you folk here today. Brought down the house. People laughed, they cried.

A passel of old-timers shook my hand in the cemetery yard afterwards, telling me I had hit Uncle Ellard the man right on the dime. Some shared stories of their own under the old hickory tree where Uncle Ellard and I would sit on Memorial Days at the church, collecting money for the upkeep of the cemetery from the dwindling number of Vance expatriates who returned to the spot year after year. We covered the whole spectrum that day, such was the vacuum left in all of our lives by that man who, finally, lay still in that pine box before me.

It was one of my greatest moments, not as an orator or a great-nephew, but as a man. My training had come full circle…no more was I the padawan. Rather, I had become the master.

Now I know some of y’all who came here today expecting some off-the-wall yarn may be taken aback by this particular tale. Sure there’s humor in it, but this one also contains a little more heart. I get this way every year when football season rolls around, as it was one of the few things Uncle Ellard and I ever discussed in detail. It’s why I first came to love the Crimson Tide, and why I share this love with all of you each week. This game of football over which we obsess would be nothing without those people who obsess about it alongside of us. It’s the common fodder for conversations across this state, a bridge between us all, this time of year and beyond.

Yet and still, there’s a game to be played this week, and while we can reminisce until the cows come home, there is ass to be kicked. I propose that our beloved Crimson Tide score a point for every ten words I’ve written here. If they can do that, well now, we should be just fine.

Roll Tide.