Shooing The Dark Away

Who is that codger I saw in the bathroom mirror this morning — the one with the white meandering hair and his ears in need of a shave?

Could that be me who sneaked up on me while it was dark and I wasn’t looking?

I scratch my head and wonder if I should shoo him away.

“Look at his hands,” I thought. “Years of holding onto chainsaws, spike mauls and knee-slapping guffaws has his knuckles so swelled that it’s going to be hard for him to make a simple C chord on a guitar anymore, much less play ‘Wildwood Flower’.”

I scratch my head and wonder if that is me.

“It is,” I say to myself as I realize that there’s nothing more honest than a bathroom mirror at 4 AM — long before the sunrise has shooed the darkness away.

It’s interesting how a fogged-up mirror and your drowsy eyes can gang up on you and play tricks on your mind.

As I look in the mirror, it’s like watching a re-run movie.

Walking in the ditch along State Road 71 in Wewahitchka, Florida (Wewa for short), I see a young me. I’m picking up drink bottles and watching out for snakes and broken Spearman Ale bottles. Once I have an arm full, I will sell the soda bottles for 3 cents each to Mr. White, who owned a store between my house and my cousin’s house.

After he pays me, I’ll walk to town and cash in my fortune at the drugstore. That one stop had all the medicine I needed: Coke floats and Black Diamond guitar strings.

To me, this seems like an old movie, while at the same time not so old.

It seems it was just last Thursday that I was out in the washhouse before school. I was busy catching up water in tubs, sitting next to an almost new ringer washing machine. Mama would soon be out to scrub the “good life” out of daddy’s clothes. I remember that prosperity smelling like the paper mill in Port St Joe.

That ringer washing machine reminded me of Dr. Smith’s robot on “Lost In Space,” except it didn’t talk. It just squeaked and danced as it churned the past life out of work pants and sweaty shirts, making them almost new again.

If you weren’t paying attention, the machine’s ringer attachment could grab and snatch your arm with the determination of an underfed Maytag monster with a taste for shirt sleeves and children.

That was the first electric washing machine my folks made payments on. By today’s standards, it wasn’t much of a luxury. But to a transplanted south Alabama tenant farmer and his wife, it was a step in the right direction in an emerging world where people no longer had to ring out wet clothes by hand and biscuits now came in a can.

Times back then were neither good nor bad, but somewhere in between, on the outskirts of a small, North Florida town, that was a wonderful place to grow up.

I guess every small town was that way — a place where men could sniff the air and tell you if the brim were bedding, young’uns picked up drink bottles and went barefooted after May 1st, except to church and school.

But there was one man who went shoeless during the winter, too — Barefoot Charlie.

Mr. Charlie was one of Wewa’s great mysteries who sported a white handlebar mustache and meandering hair that looked like snow on the roof of an old shanty. I don’t remember if his ears needed shaving, but I would imagine they did.

He was a mystery because no one knew why 12 months out of the year he wore overalls, a long-sleeve shirt, denim coat, black felt hat, and went barefooted. He was always sober too, so that was no excuse!

As for as his barefootedness, one consistent rumor was that he could no longer tolerate shoes because a house fire had scalded and scarred his feet. That made sense to me because the first time I saw him, his feet were red. But that could have been because it was 25 degrees outside. A good frost will turn your feet red, just like a house fire will.

Charlie was old, and except for my grandpa Martin, the oldest person I knew.

The sight of Mr. Charlie walking past the barbershop would cause someone to ask, “How old is he now?”

“I don’t know,” someone else would answer. “All I know is he ain’t dead yet… but he gotta be get’n a little nervous.”

No one knew for sure how old Charlie was, or why he dressed in winter clothes on the Fourth of July and went barefooted on Christmas Day.

For a while, he lived next door to us, but I never got to ask because mama didn’t want me hanging around him. Charlie didn’t go to church, so as far as Mama was concerned, well, that was reason enough for me to keep my distance. To her, he was a philistine, even if he did look like Mark Twain dressed up like Johnny Cash with red feet.

He liked to sit out front of his house, leaning against the wall in a straight-back chair, watching the sunrise shoo the dark away.

Seems like I remember someone once asking him, since he didn’t appear to have much to do, why he got up so early every morning.

“Every dead man I ever seed was lyin’ down,” he said. “So I don’t like to waller in bed for too long… it might confuse folks who might be walk’n by tote’n a shovel.”

I regret not spending more time with Mr. Charlie.

Looking back now, he’s a footnote at the bottom of my wish list of “Beer I wish I hadn’t drunk and cars that wouldn’t crank. Guitar chords I can no longer make, and old men whose encounters I wish I could retake.”

But second chances are as rare as encounters with shoeless old men with frost between their toes.

I regret I didn’t get up early, sneak out of the house without slamming the screen door so Mama wouldn’t know, and go help Barefoot Charlie shoo the dark away.