Today's Word Count-- 1542

The phone rang at the town manager’s office early on Wednesday morning.
“Reynolds Town Office,” the secretary said.
“This is Jones,” a woman’s voice said.
“Jones?”
“This is Ellen Jones.”
“Yes,” the secretary sighed. “Hold please. I’ll put you through.”
Nonny never learned that you can’t fight city hall. The stop sign at the corner was obscured by her magnolia tree’s branches, but Nonny was having none of it. She didn’t want some “know-nothing little boys” out there “butchering up” the tree that Pap had planted years before.
That morning she had woken to see the town truck out at the corner unloading three men armed with pruning shears. Leaning on the broken-off golf club that passed for her walking stick, she had hobbled across the yard to stop them from the heinous act. She had argued with them, pointing the hook at the end of the golf club toward their chests, telling them that she was going to call their bosses at town hall and not to dare touch her tree in the meantime. She brandished the golf club with menace and hobbled back to her telephone, growling and muttering to herself.
This morning marked the fifth day of the siege.
“Mrs. Jones, I’ve told you, your tree represents a hazard to cars in the neighborhood. If people can’t see the stop sign….”
“That tree is older than you are, Pam, and you will not touch it.”
“Mrs. Jones…”
“Pam, you just get on that radio and tell those boys to go someplace else. They ort to cut down those pyracantha bushes in front of Mabel Rose’s place. Now those are an eyesore and the kids eat the berries. My grandson had to have his stomach pumped…”
She was talking about my cousin Ben, who had indeed eaten some of the red berries on Mrs. Rose’s bushes and been rushed to the hospital when he was 8 years old. While Nonny was on the phone with city hall, though, Ben was doodling pictures of his Camaro in the back of his senior English class.
“Mrs. Rose’s bushes aren’t blocking traffic signs, Mrs. Jones.”
Nonny told the story again. How Pap planted the magnolia tree after he came back from The War. “He lost his right arm in the Pacific, Pam. And when he came back, he planted that tree anyway, because he said he wanted to have something pretty to look at after all the death he’d seen.”
Everybody in town knew that the closest Pap had ever gotten to losing an arm was that one time he’d almost cut off his finger trying out the new meat slicing machine in the grocery store-- and he had been stationed in France, driving a jeep for one of the generals-- but Nonny never let truth get in the way of getting her way.
In the end, the town had to call in Bob Thomas from Catawba Nurseries to trim the tree to Nonny’s exact specifications. She supervised the entire operation, waving her golf club and yelling “Not that one! Don’t you have good sense?” at poor Bob. She poked him twice with the hook on the end of the club, and he got so flustered that he lost his footing and fell out of the tree twice.


While Nan fought her war, Pap was in the kitchen, trying to use both of his arms, and maybe one of his feet to cook an egg for his own breakfast. With Nonny so busy threatening Bob Thomas with her hook, he was left to his own devices to get his own breakfast. Pap found a shallow poaching pan and filled it about halfway with water. He placed the egg in the little pan and waited for the water to boil.
Burning eggshell smells a lot like burning hair.
Bob was grateful because Nonny went running back across the yard to her kitchen when she heard the fire alarm go off, which meant he could finish his job and get the hell out of there. He didn’t want that old bat poking him in the ass with that hook again.

Uncle Ricky, Nonny’s younger brother, had found the headless golf club in a dumpster a few years before. Nonny never had any trouble walking, but she liked to walk around in her yard and survey the surroundings every morning, and Uncle Ricky worried she might slip on the wet grass. He thought the golf club, with the metal hook where the wood had once been, would allow her to dig into the ground and keep from falling.
Uncle Ricky had lived, off and on, in the wooden utility shed out behind Nonny and Pap’s house since he came back from Korea. He’d developed a liking for beer during his army days and spent most days parked under the trees in front of his shed working his way through a case of Budweiser and a carton of Winstons. He took breaks a few times a week, though, to take the old truck out with his friend James, who lived down the street. They drove all over the county to the garbage dumpsters out in the country, where they found useful items like coffee makers that didn’t work, old television picture tubes, and headless golf clubs.
This assortment of items was what Uncle Ricky used to make his “critters.” All around the little shed was a menagerie of creatures great and small. My favorite was a tiger with wings made out of golf clubs and a tarp and a body that was an old table piled with pyramids of Bud cans. The head was made out of a barrel, and the teeth were soup cans and shampoo bottles. The wings were rigged up on springs so they moved in the breeze.
He’d work on them at night mostly, by the light of a bug zapper and a floodlight bulb that he rigged up on an extension cord that plugged into the side of the main house and didn’t reach far enough to shed much light on the work area. Neighbors stopped complaining about the noise and the flickering lights of the blowtorch when the first critter, a unicorn made out of an old box spring, appeared in the side yard. They stopped complaining about the unicorn when a man from up north got sidetracked through Reynolds and took a wrong turn onto Oak Avenue. Turned out he was some kind of art dealer and he bought that unicorn for a thousand dollars.
He tried to get Uncle Ricky to sell him some other critters for his gallery, but Uncle Ricky threw away the letters, and eventually they stopped coming. He gave the thousand dollars to my mama.
Uncle Ricky loved Mama best of his sister’s children. There’s a picture in our house of him teaching her how to walk in Nonny and Pap’s front yard, years before he went off to the war and got broken. He gave her a diamond ring set in platinum that he’d gotten at the pawn shop where he worked sometimes. And when Daddy took off, he gave her a revolver and took her out in the woods to teach her how to use it.
He hung a paper target with a black outline of a man on it from a tree and handed her the gun. “Now, remember, Annie, just aim low.”
Mama aimed low. At first she was surprised at the force of the gun pushing her back on her feet when she fired. The first shot went wild. She got used to it quick, though and then she hit the target five times in the crotch.
“Good enough,” Uncle Ricky said, and they got back in the truck and came home.
The Dumpster diving was a source of embarrassment for my cousin Daniel, Ben’s younger brother. One morning he was getting a ride to school from one of his friends and they passed the old blue truck parked by one of trash drop sites outside of town. “Well, there’s the Dumpster King,” the friend had commented. Daniel slumped down in the passenger seat and pulled his Braves cap down, even though Uncle Ricky wasn’t anywhere in sight. He never claimed to be part of the royal lineage, until Uncle Ricky finally died and he had to be seen at the funeral.
A few weeks after Daddy took off, we were sitting on the screen porch at Nonny’s house enjoying the last few nights of warm weather. The sun had just disappeared behind the mountains when a county sheriff’s car pulled up.
The deputy walked over to the porch door, knocked, and said, “Mrs. Anne Bradley? I need to ask you a few questions about your husband.”
Mama got up out of her rocking chair and followed the deputy out into the yard.
I couldn’t hear what they were saying, of course, and Nonny headed me off every time I tried to make my way over to the door. “Who’s that? Does he know Daddy?” Nonny distracted me with a sock monkey, but I saw Uncle Ricky emerge around the corner of the house and walk over to Mama and the deputy.
“Evenin’, Bill,” Uncle Ricky said.
“Evenin’, Rick.”
Uncle Ricky took the deputy aside while my mother stood next to the magnolia tree.
“We’re looking for Zebediah Wells,” the deputy said.
“Zed?” Uncle Ricky said. “What for?”
They lowered their voices for the next part, so I couldn’t hear what they were saying.
“Look, Bill, Annie don’t know anything about where Zed is. He just left her and her little girl a couple days ago. Little One’s on the porch over there.” Uncle Ricky cocked his head in my direction, and I turned my full attention back to the sock monkey. I didn’t want to talk to the man with the big car. “Why don’t you just leave them be, Bill?”
Bill looked at my mother then, and she shook her head at him, to confirm what Uncle Ricky was saying, though it was hard to tell the difference between her head and the rest of her that was shaking too.
They talked for a little while longer, but by that time, Nonny had discovered me looking out the screen door again and took me off to the kitchen to feed me a cookie.
When we came back to the porch, Mama was sitting in her rocking chair puffing hard on a cigarette. For once, Pap didn’t lecture her about it.