The Great Mysteries
Published in
5 min readJul 11, 2024
“You be back here before dark!”
Those were the last words I’d hear as the spring holding the screen door shut stretched open and squeaked like it was made of rusty rats and cranky cats.
“And don’t slam that….!”
Too late! The flimsy door sounded like a small gun going off as it banged shut behind me.
It was mid-May, the time of year when pants were getting shorter and days were getting longer. The 9-month sentence imposed on me by my parents and the Gulf County Board of Education was being whittled down by long, dull school days—except for Saturdays. Saturdays were different. Saturdays seemed half as long but twice the fun.
School would soon be out for the summer. After that, the exploits would be daily, not just on Saturdays, and I’d be like a blind possum in a coop of chickens. I wouldn’t know where to start.
I would fill the long summer days with expeditions down old logging trails flanked by blackberry brambles.
“Don’t you be late for supper, or I’ll throw it to the dog,” Mama hollered from the kitchen window as I loafered out of sight. I didn’t know for sure, but she probably crumbled cornbread into a glass of cold buttermilk. Then she walked out to the porch, sat in the swing, and prayed for my safe return. You would have thought I was going off to war instead of going to look for Tarzan’s tree house.
If I got hungry when my shadow shortened, I’d come home long enough to eat a little dinner. It usually consisted of fried bologna scorched around the edges, two slices of bread, and mayonnaise to stick it together. But what I liked most was that no naps were required when I finished eating.
It was time for round two. The air was thick with the smell of burnt bologna and the sound of unheeded orders to not slam the screen door as I darted out again.
It was the un-scorched time between Korea and Vietnam, a time when the heat index and the stock market index were as foreign to me as Indochina and New York City.
An uncomplicated time when the only cell phone was screwed to the damp cinder block wall at the county jail. And it cost you a dime to get anyone on the other end to talk with you.
A 3-speed-window-fan time when the closest thing to an air conditioner in the house was a can of Glade “Spring Flower Collection” sitting on the back of the commode. Two passes, and the room smelled like a bouquet of slop jars.
But it was also a painful time of angry red wasps shooting from under the eave and relief in the form of a wet snuff poultice from our neighbor’s bottom lip. It was a Dental Sweet antidote to make the stings feel better, as long as it was your mama doing the daubing.
Summer had not even officially started, and that screen door and I were already coming unhinged.
Daddy would have to re-tighten the hinges at least once before school started back in September. Maybe twice, if the screen door was overworked because there were more clear outside days than rainy inside ones.
But for right now, it was just May. But it was finally Saturday. There was no school, and it would be a year before my music career would arrive in a box from Sears, so there was no stage to be on, no requests to play “Under the Double Eagle” again.
I had to take advantage of this one day to myself because tomorrow would be Sunday, and we all knew what that meant: Sunday School. After that, we’d have to sit through an eternity sermon where a sweaty, screaming, long-winded preacher with fire in his eyes and Deuteronomy on his breath would try to scare the hell out of us boys. And he was pretty good at it, too!
But the day was not always a total loss.
Sometimes after Sunday supper, we played outside under the light of a Rural Electric Cooperative moon that was always full unless a thunderstorm shorted it out with a limb or a squirrel suicided itself on a transformer.
Boys haven’t changed a lot since those days. The adventures have, but not the boys.
Many of my adventures stem from the old ways that drifted south from the Appalachia, down the Chattahoochee River, into mighty Apalachicola, and into Gulf County.
Daddy told me if I heard the leaves rustle, it might be that elusive coachwhip snake we’d all heard about. I never saw one, but had heard his stories of how the snake would grab his own tail, form a wheel out of his body, then run you down and whip you to death. I never saw this happen. But just like his-and-her cook pots on the devil’s stove, I didn’t have to see it to know that it was real, especially if the one telling about it really knew how to tell it while using his poker face.
Sometimes my cousins and I would pick up rocks to put them in an old sock, one rock for each wart we had. Then back up to a clump of bushes, throw the back over our left shoulder and into the weeds, then walk away without looking back because our kin said that was how you cast off warts. I never saw any warts disappear, but saw several socks and rocks go missing.
Our kin to us to made sure all the dead snakes had their bellies turn down toward the ground and not up toward the sky, because a snake belly pointed up was a good way to get your Saturday rained down on.
And if we happened upon a dead frog, we drew a circle around him, leaned over the circled corpse and spit’n’wish. If your spit landed inside the circle and hit the dead frog, well, that was a surefire way to make your wish come true. Our kin swore that this method doubled your chances when compared to blowing out birthday candles. It just didn’t taste as good.
We never questioned if these notions worked because our kin never questioned it. They just passed it on to us like we might need it one day, like a sock full of extra rocks in case your cousin had been handling frogs again.
It was all just a mystery, and some mysteries in this universe will never be understood and were never meant to be.
Mysteries like why fried bologna tastes better when the edges are scorched or how a daub of anything applied by your mama can make it all better. You know, mysteries like that.
Click here to buy Billy’s book, Seasons in Beulah Land
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