The Adventures of Flash Jackson (3 page)

I don't go to church anymore, and never got much out of it when I did, but my grandmother was the opposite of me—she was what you'd call Old Order Mennonite, and was about as religious as a person could get without floating straight up to heaven. She wore long, plain dresses with a shawl, and a kind of starched lace handkerchief on her head, and she lived in a tiny shack in the woods, without electricity or a telephone, or anything that might be considered a distraction from a life of Godly goodness—whatever
that
might consist of.

Now, you may have already realized that my mother and I were
not
Old Order. The reason for that is a long story, and I suppose I'll get around to telling it soon enough, but for now it's enough to say that Mother and I lived at the end of the twentieth century, and Grandma lived somewhere in the middle of the eighteenth. That's considerably bigger than your
average
generation gap, I believe.

And my grandmother was odd even for Old Order. I may not be the churchgoing type, but one thing I do like about Mennonites is that they believe in the importance of a community—everyone sticks together and helps each other out, which is a way of life that a lot of the world has lost now. You don't usually find Mennonites living off by themselves. But my grandmother did, kind of like a lady hermit—a witch, in other words. Now, even though she gave me the creeps, here is one point I get a little touchy on. It's a case of antiwomanism, plain and simple. It's always been fine and dandy with everyone if a
man
wants to take off by himself and live in the woods or something. That seems to make him automatically smarter, or wiser, or more holy, or something—people assume he must know something the rest of us don't, and sooner or later they trek out to his tree or to the top of his mountain or wherever to ask him some deep and important question, such as
What the hell's wrong with the Buffalo Bills these days, anyway?
But when a woman does the same thing, she's suspected of witchcraft. Folks think she's up to no good out there all by herself, cooking up
evil potions and eating any children who might happen to wander into her strawberry patch. Oh, the world is a stupid place sometimes. I heard no end of cruel comments from folks about my grandmother, the same folks who thought old Frankie should be locked up somewhere, the same folks who made fun of me for not acting like a girl. People love to romanticize small-town life, how folks sit around the general store and chew tobacco and talk on and on about things, just taking life easy. They seem to forget that what those folks do mostly is
gossip
—and there never was a bit of gossip that did anyone any good.

To fetch my grandmother, Mother had to drive our old pickup about fifteen miles down County Road, due south, and park next to a big old birch tree that had been standing there since God was in short pants. There were no towns for many miles in any direction from that point—you were smack in the middle of nowhere, and praying you didn't spring a leak in one of your tires or run out of gas. Then she had to strike out along a path through the woods. It was a path my mother knew well, since she'd grown up at the other end of it. After about a mile, she would come to the little clearing where my grandmother had her shack. Likely as not she wouldn't be home right then—even though Grandma was old, she was in pretty good shape, and she spent a lot of time wandering around in the forest gathering herbs and berries and roots, and grubs and snakes too, if you believed the stories people told about her—which I didn't. She used these things in making her homemade medicines, which could cure just about anything: fever, ague, flu, the vapors, colds, menstrual cramps, menopause, skin rashes, snakebite, cross-eyedness, you name it. Grandma lived off what she grew in her garden, which was considerable in size, and also whatever supplies my mother or others would bring her every once in a while. She used her own waste as fertilizer (don't get me going on the specifics of
that
—it was quite an involved process, and not very pleasant to talk about, even for me) and got her water from a stream that ran nearby. In short, she preferred to do things her own way.

You might be wondering to yourself, now, why didn't that foolish girl see what an interesting grandmother she had, and why didn't she go out there and spend more time with her? There are two answers to that. One, it was a god-awful pain in the ass to get to my grandmother's place, and that was the way she liked it. She wasn't crazy about having visitors, not even her own relations. Two, my grandmother and I never did have much to say to each other. She didn't approve of girls who wore shorts, for example. In her opinion, a woman ought to wear a long plain dress, and not let any part of her show except for her hands and face. Ankles were out of the question. So you can imagine her reaction whenever she saw me in cutoffs and a halter top. There are other examples I could give, but you get the picture.

Once in a while, some curious soul would go out there to see if they could strike up an acquaintance with my grandmother. This was usually a graduate student, or some religious type, or somebody like that. I have read a bit of Henry David Thoreau's
Walden
, and I see how folks living a modern life could be interested in someone who was living “deliberately,” as Mr. Thoreau said—which I took to mean living like you meant it, doing everything for yourself and not relying on anybody else to help you. Grandma was nothing if not deliberate, and she never wanted anything to do with anybody from the outside world. It was hard enough just to get her to talk to my mother and to me.

She had reason to be careful of outsiders, too. Another thing about my grandmother that I don't mention much, for obvious reasons, is that she had a big old patch of marijuana growing out there in the woods. She'd been using it medicinally for decades. I don't think she even knew it was illegal. She smoked it herself once in a while in an old pipe, but mostly she burned it over her patients, whoever they might happen to be, and chanted the little “spells” that she'd learned when she was a girl—I don't know if they were really spells or not, but they sure sounded like it, and stuff like that didn't help her reputation any.

There was another kind of person who went out to see my grandmother: those who had someone sick at home, and who needed her to
come take care of them. You'd be surprised how many people still have more faith in the old ways than they do in the new. Grandma didn't trust many people, but if there was somebody in a bad way somewhere she'd always agree to go out and see them, after hearing a description of their symptoms and bringing along the things that sounded right. Often as not that included a little box full of dope. She'd smoked me up good a few times before, when I was sick—though I was rarely ill as a child, except the one winter when I got pneumonia, and the odd cold.

My grandmother, the pothead. I don't know how many plants she had out there, maybe ten or twelve. The law had never given her any trouble, but sometimes high school kids snuck out there and tried to help themselves to her stash. I guess it probably would have been the kind of thing boys dared each other to do. I know some boys who were likely to do such a thing, and to tear up her garden besides, just out of plain meanness. It had happened before.

So I knew what was in store for me when Mother got back with the old lady. I'd have to drink some nasty brew that made your tongue want to curl up and die, she'd burn a little of the green stuff, and that would be that. Strange thing was, it always worked. She'd put her hands on me to find out exactly where the problem was—not the leg, for sure, that being the obvious one. No, it was more likely she'd say there was something out of whack with my liver, or my kidneys, or my humors weren't in the right balance. She'd have been laughed right out of every hospital in the western hemisphere, but every time she put her hands on me I felt better right away. You could feel something coming out of her and into you, and when it stopped it was like she'd reached into your guts and shifted things around just a little bit, just enough to set things right again.

 

I was asleep when they came back. I could hear Grandma mumbling to herself like she always did, clomping across the floor in her big black shoes. Ma whispered something to her and dragged a chair over to my bed. I heard the old lady wheeze as she set herself down in it,
and I got a whiff of her breath, and then of the rest of her. That woke me up, I can tell you. Jesus H. Wilson, but she was rank. I guess bathing is a trial when your only source of water is a creek. Grandma probably washed herself once a year, if that.

I just laid there with my eyes shut. I wasn't faking being asleep—it was dark now, but what little light there was in the room hurt my eyes, and I kind of felt like I was dreaming. I felt her run her hands over me to see where the problem was. That woman wasn't shy, either. She gave my hooters a good squeeze and rummaged around my personal area for a moment or two, probably trying to sense whether or not I was still pure down there and when my monthly visitor was coming, waving his little red flag. That was all part of the cure, and you just had to lay there and take it. Then she kept her hands on my abdomen for a long while, and I could tell she'd found whatever it was she was looking for.

“Blocked,” she said to my mother—only she said it in German. I can never remember German words off the top of my head, but when I hear them I know what they mean.

Mother said something back to her, and then they left the bedroom and went out into the kitchen, where they talked a while longer. I guess they were arguing about where she would sleep that night—Grandma would want to go back home, and Ma wouldn't want to drive her until morning, since it was already dark out. Finally they settled it, which means Mother won, and Grandma thumped her way up the stairs to the spare bedroom. Mother came in again to see how I was doing.

“Haley?”

“Yes, Mother.”

“How are you?”

“I feel as chipper as a corpse.”

“Don't joke about things like that,” said Mother.

“Sorry. Did she say what it was?”

“Yes. You're constipated, that's all.”

I knew it. Seven times out of ten, there's nothing wrong with you that a good crapola won't cure.

“What'd she say to take?”

“Just eat a big salad. That should get things moving again. All that medication they gave you in the hospital slowed your system down. She said she could smell it coming out of your skin.”

I breathed a sigh of relief.

“Thanks for getting her, anyway,” I said. I still had my eyes shut.

“A cup of coffee might help, too.”

“All righty.”

“You want me to fix it for you now?”

“Won't it keep me up?”

“You slept all afternoon, didn't you?”

So I sat up and Mother made me a cup of coffee and brought me a bowl of greens from our garden, and sure enough about an hour later things got moving again. I hobbled my way into the bathroom and just let nature take its course, and almost immediately I could feel the fever lifting as all that poison left my body. God bless Thomas Crapper, who perfected the indoor toilet. I would have hated to be using an outhouse at a time like that, what with the snakes that might be crawling around under there.

Not that I'm afraid of snakes, you understand. You just have to be in a certain kind of mood to appreciate them.

 

Next morning, early, Mother got up and drove Grandma back out to her place. Soon after that I got up and levered myself into the kitchen, where I made some toast and another cup of coffee. I set the little pond frog out on the back step—“The pond is thataway,” I told him, but I figured he already knew that, being an animal. Animals are born knowing what's most important for them, and they don't bother with anything else, which is something about them I've always respected.

I was feeling about ten times better by then, and was even starting to feel like a busted leg didn't necessarily have to mean that my entire life was ruined. It's hard to be gloomy on a morning such as that, with the sky a bright blue and the first rays of the sun poking their
way into the kitchen. Our house is a cheerful place, I must say. Ma had it fixed up very nicely, with hand-sewn curtains in all the windows and the whole place always in a dust-free state. A number of my dear departed dad's creations could be found throughout the place, too: furniture, lamps, a clock. Dad was very handy with a set of tools. He'd built the addition on our house, in fact, and also Brother's shed, as well as his own workshop, which used to stand where the pond is now. That workshop was where he came up with his inventions. Most of his gadgets weren't useful for anyone except us, but there were a few things he managed to patent. That was partly how we lived, in fact. Royalties were still coming in from one of his widgets. It wasn't millions, but since we owned the house and land, that and his life insurance was plenty to keep us going, as long as we didn't suddenly develop a taste for designer clothes.

Mother came back around ten. I could see right away she was in one of her snits—something Grandma'd said to her about the way she was raising me, no doubt. The two of them got along like dogs and cats most of the time. I just let her be. She went upstairs to her bedroom and closed the door. I knew sooner or later she'd get worked up enough to the point where she'd have to come down and give me a lecture, and then it would be out of her. It always came down to something I'd done wrong, somehow. In this case it was climbing the barn. All right, I admit that was one of my more boneheaded moves. Every little escapade of mine was like a miniature nuclear explosion: There was always fallout, sometimes lasting months. And this was definitely the biggest bomb yet.

When, oh when, are you going to learn? she'd wail. I tried so hard to turn you into a lady, not a man. If only your poor father were still alive—it's too much for one person to take on by herself, this child-raising business. And I would point out to her that it was mostly Dad's fault I turned out the way I did, if fault was even the right word, which I didn't think it was. He was the one who taught me how to ride, how to climb, how to fish and hunt and swim. If I didn't know better
I'd think Dad would have preferred a boy instead of a girl. Matter of fact, he
would
have been more suited to a son, but we never held our personal shortcomings against each other, and they never slowed us down any. He'd been my best friend up until the day he died—we did everything together. I know he'd been looking forward to having a kid, period. Even if he was disappointed on the day I popped out, he never showed it. He just went ahead and did all the things with me he would have done with a boy, and we had high old times. That was a long time ago, but there wasn't a day that went by when I didn't remember some little thing he'd done or said, or for that matter that I didn't use something he'd made with his own two hands. Poor old Dad. Poor old Mother. Poor old everyone except me. I don't waste time on self-pity, thank you very much. I do what I want. Life is too short to while away sitting around in parlors with your legs pressed neatly together so no one can see your coochie, like some kind of lady-in-waiting, fretting about what's happened to you. There's too much to
do
.