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|  | SpearGate | | Rated:
13+ | | If hadn't seen it with my own two eyes, I would not believe it. | | by: JayRIngram ![View jayngram's Portfolio. [Offline / Private]](http://imgs.Writing.Com/imgs/writing.com/writers/costumicons/ps-icon-regular-40.gif "View jayngram's Portfolio. [Offline / Private]") ![Email User: jayngram [Offline / Private]](http://imgs.Writing.Com/imgs/writing.com/writers/mail-off.gif "Email User: jayngram [Offline / Private]") | Avg Rating:   (4) |
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Created: 1:39am on 12-06-2007
Modified: 12:36pm on 03-03-2008 | |
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My Mom and Dad divorced when I was thirteen. She uprooted my brothers and me from Delaware and moved us to a trailer park in Franklin, a small town outside of Nashville, Tennessee.
Moving to the South was a culture shock for me, and living in a trailer made it even worse. You can feel the entire trailer shake while walking around in them. Anytime high winds come through, the butt cheeks definitely tighten up and you wonder if this will be the day you ride the funnel to Kansas. The people typically living in these aluminum habitats are the poorer white people, or as they are called so called educated people- White Trash.
It’s not the place we expected our Mom to line up a husband, but much to our dismay, she did just that.
Her choice was a guy named Bill that lived across the street from us. He was the typical trailer park Southerner: gut jutting over top a huge belt buckle that lets everyone know his name is Bill, dingy wrangler jeans, a buttoned up cowboy shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows and windswept hair sprinkled with a salt and pepper. One of my lasting memories of him was the way he always smelled like a wood fireplace.
We never knew our Mom and Bill were dating. They kept it hidden from us until the day we were driving to the church so a preacher could unite them in holy matrimony. My brothers and I were not thrilled about this idea at all; Mom didn’t seem to be thrilled either. The drive to the church felt more like a drive to the supermarket.
The summer, after the wedding, they moved us to the country with our trailer home in tow. When you are a teenage boy, who would like to get laid one day, the last thing you want is for a cute girl to see your home being towed down the street. We moved to a town called Arrington, with no traffic lights, one gas station and a rundown building called The General Store. This place was about 45 minutes from Nashville but it felt like the other side of the earth.
They bought five acres of dehydrated land full of weeds, rocks and damaged trees. I wondered if this was his plan, wine and dine a single mother with Pabst Blue Ribbon and a Big Mac. Then con her into moving her and the offspring out to the middle of nowhere and kill us.
We found out right away that Mom’s new husband was odd. He was a pasty white redneck with a peculiar infatuation for African spears and mask. This was how he liked to decorate, by posting spears and masks all over our tiny trailer. Walking to the bathroom meant passing by one of his creepy African mask. Holding my bladder at night became a necessary skill, I was afraid it was going to bite me if I walked by it in the dark. We complained about those things scaring the hell out of us, but to no avail.
I remember the first morning in the old new place started out good. “Wake up boys,” mom gently called out. I could smell the food before I opened my door. She never cooked us breakfast at the old place so it appeared Mom might give us a grace period and maybe spoil us a little.
“I made breakfast,” she said in a Betty Crocker voice. The angelic aroma of blueberry pancakes drowned my common sense. Looking back on it now, I should have known something was fishy. The excitement of ripping into a good home cooked breakfast caused me to be the first to reach the kitchen.
Before I reached the table though, something caught my eye. There were three of them, neatly placed against the wall, a rake, shovel and a sickle just glaring at me. I found them to be very peculiar and out of place, but my mission was to fill my belly, so common sense lost again as my butt hit the chair. My younger brother Brandon was the next to sit down; he didn’t even notice them. I was too busy eating to tell him. Wes was the last one to sit down; he was still half asleep so he didn’t even say a word.
How does the saying go? The quickest way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. Well it’s true for naive little boys too. Those damn, evil blueberry pancakes walked us right into the trap.
While we were eating our last meal Bill saunters up to the table holding three pairs of gardening gloves in his hand.
“You kids will need these today,” he says, turning his palms up and showing us the gloves. He acted like he was modeling some diamond bracelets. Brandon and Wes froze, their forks stuck to their plates like they weighed fifty pounds. They just stared at Bill and the gloves with mouths agape. I wasn’t as shocked because I noticed the barbaric items leaning on the wall already. Bill put the gloves on the table and walked out the front door.
“Dammit, I knew this was too good to be true,” Wes mumbles.
“You tricked us Mom,” Brandon whines.
Mom never even looked at us; she just kept washing the dishes. “Come on boys, finish up, he’s waiting on you.”
Dejectedly we get up from the table, walk over to the door and grab our weapon of choice (mine was the sickle because of its menacing look) and drag them outside. We shuffle around back to find Bill standing there with a cigarette in his right hand and his left hand on his hip. He is staring out in the vast space of overgrown weeds and dead trees. This yard looks terrible. Most of the property is full of decrepit trees that are struggling to hold on. They barely have leaves on them, and they’re leaning towards the ground like they are pleading to die. The rest of the property is full of tall, thick weeds with an occasional sapling standing meekly amongst them.
Bill turns around, looks at us and flips his cigarette into the weeds. “Okay, let’s get started.” He points to Wes, who picked the shovel.
Bill points over at some tall weeds intermingled with dead trees. “Okay, I want you to start digging the stumps out of the ground.”
He looks at Brandon. “Okay, you rake the ground down after he digs the stumps; I need ya to loosen the hard dirt up.”
He motions to me to follow him over to this section of tall weeds. “I hear you’re a baseball player.”
“I need you to swing away with that sickle and chop all these weeds down. It will help you practice that swing.”
This sadistic routine went on for about three weeks. We worked every day but Sunday. Of course the breakfast part stopped after the third day, we were fending for ourselves again. We found out we were clearing this so Bill could construct a garden. He was so excited about starting a garden, most days we were working until dark.
He was obsessed about working in his garden; we would see him working in it late at night, just a broken white patch of flashlight drifting across greenery. He’d wake up in the morning and water his green, square patched mistress.
One Sunday morning, Brandon and I were sitting in front of the television playing Atari, when the loud noises of battleships were interrupted by Bill yelling sonofabitch several times louder.
We look up to see him running out the front door. He was moving quickly around the side of the house.
Mom was coming out of her bedroom with her hair in curlers. “What’s up his butt?”
“Not sure,” Brandon says, his face pressed against the window.
“He just took off running like a bat out of hell,” was my contribution to the conversation.
About five minutes later, he comes stomping back in the door muttering goddamn cows over and over again.
This went on for about a week, at least a couple times a day he would storm out the door. A few minutes later he’s coming back muttering goddamn cows over and over again. We despised him so much that we enjoyed watching the misery splattered on his face.
One morning, Bill finally lost it. We were still in our bedrooms when he starts yelling, “I’ve had it with these goddamn cows.”
“Just calm down,” Mom says. “They aren’t going to mess with your damn garden.”
“You bet your ass they won’t,” he responds.
“What the hell are you doing?” I hear Mom ask.
“Goddamn it, get back here you psycho,” Mom is yelling at him. The door slams and I hear him running around back. I jump out of bed and head to the living room window. Obviously it got Wes and Brandon’s attention too, because they are scampering out of their rooms at the same time.
“What’s going on Mom?”Wes asks.
“He’s an idiot,” Mom replies as she is running out the door.
“Oh my God,” Brandon blurts. “What the hell is he doing?”
Bill is running towards his precious garden wearing nothing but baggy Fruit of the Loom underwear, black socks and he is carrying a long African spear. He’s carrying it like a soldier would carry an M-16 through the jungle. He was running towards a cow lumbering in his garden. My Mom was standing at the back of the trailer yelling something at him; I couldn’t tell what she was yelling, but whatever it was did not faze him at all.
“Is he about to do what I think he is going to do?” I asked.
“He can’t be,” Wes responds. “Do you think?”
He is only about twenty feet away when the cow finally notices him, but he doesn’t move; maybe the poor thing is too stunned or confused. He raises the spear in front of him and points it at the evil cow. I couldn’t believe what I was watching a flabby white man in his baggy fruit of loom underwear, trying to kill a dumbfounded cow with a spear. I didn’t know whether to laugh or feel bad for the cow.
Impact. The spear rams into the cow’s rib but it doesn’t stick. It did scare the hell out of it though, causing it to leap backwards.
Bill looks shocked that he actually went through with it or that the spear didn’t stick, who knows. He backs off, pausing for a second. Then, craziness overwhelms him again and he lifts the spear to stab the poor, wicked beast again. The cow figured out this sudden, twisted turn of events and takes off running through the back part of his garden before he could get stabbed again. This really pisses Bill off because the cow has trampled half of his garden now. Instead of chasing the animal, he decided to chuck the spear at him.
This is one day that I have never forgotten. My family has told this story to many people and at many functions. Everyone thinks we are just making up a funny story when we tell it. Sometimes I will just start laughing to myself, that image of Bill wearing nothing but baggy underwear and black socks, throwing a spear while his loose skin is flapping around. It was truly disgusting but yet hilarious.
Thinking back on his love for his garden, and the cows that dared to defile his virtuous place, I’ve always wanted to see him again so I could tell him this: “Whatever needs to be maintained through force is doomed.” I laugh out loud every time I imagine what his face would look like after I say that to him. I imagine he wouldn’t find it as funny as I do though.
Bill and my mother divorced about six months after Speargate. I imagine the cow incident had a little something to do with it. How could my mother feel proud being married to a man that would stab a cow (while in his underwear no less)? We also never heard from that cow again.
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