Hometown News

This week my hometown newspaper, The Cairo Messenger, announced a rattlesnake roundup in a nearby town. A photograph of a rattlesnake ready to strike accompanied the article. Reading, I remembered times my mother wrote me about rattlesnake roundups in Cairo, and how men hunting them had come into her backyard wearing stove pipes on their legs because rattlesnake fangs could penetrate their leather boots. The rattlesnake roundups at that time were sponsored by Ross Allen, for whom the men captured rattlesnakes alive to take back to Florida, where they were milked for their venom for the production of antivenin to treat people who had been bitten.

Once the Cairo rattlesnake roundup was written up in The London Times (I still have the article someplace among my papers). And once my brother Mercer went to a cookout at the Farmers’ Market at the end of a roundup and ate a rattlesnake steak, which he said tasted like chicken. These things happened before people realized that even rattlesnakes are important to the environment. Perhaps that part of Georgia has an overabundance of rattlesnakes. I really don’t know. I do know that even one was too many for me when I was a child.

When my brothers and I were children, Mother used to warn us: “If the ball goes in the bushes get it out with a stick.” The warning also went for the thick bamboo hedges that bordered one side of the yard and stretched across the backyard. But my brother Wyman—I called and still call him Bubba—cut a thick piece of bamboo from the backyard hedge to make a fishing pole. I stood at a distance and admired his bravery.

Mother and Mercer left long ago to continue their journeys beyond this earth, and I’ve not lived in the South for half a century. But Bubba still lives in Cairo. In the same issue of The Cairo Messenger that announced the rattlesnake roundup, I saw the announcement of a new bank in town. There was a picture of Bubba as bank director, together with the chairman, and a customer. The address of the bank is the same address on North Broad Street as that of our family home. Memories flooded back as I looked at the picture of my brother looking out at me.

I knew that our house had been sold to a family who moved it someplace near Thomasville, and I also knew that Bubba planned on building a bank in its place. But until reading the announcement and seeing the picture of Bubba, knowing the facts hadn’t been enough to make me accept the reality of it in my heart: a bank now stands where the house we grew up in once stood—the living room where Bubba and I sat on the wool rug and played Chinese checkers, checkers, Slap Jack or Go Fishing. Or played with our little plastic World War II soldiers with their rifles and machine guns.

Later there was Mercer, the loving little boy so filled with laughter; the man who came home from Vietnam to spend the rest of his life living in the same room he was born in, struggling with the depression that darkened so many of his days. And still later there was Harriet who was born with cerebral palsy, unable to speak, and paralyzed from head to toe. Harriet sitting in her wheelchair at the dining table, or in Bubba’s room after school when he brought friends home to practice their band instruments together. Harriet smiling at the mellow notes from Bubba’s saxophone, or perhaps just smiling because she loved Bubba most of all. Harriet who, when nine years old, passed on to claim a welcome freedom that she never had here on earth.

There was our parents’ bedroom with its fireplace in which coal burned in winter and in front of which Mother hung our clothes to warm them before we children dressed for school. I think of Mother frying eggs at the kitchen stove, and Daddy spilling catsup on his tie while eating them in the breakfast room. Or Daddy playing the piano in the living room while he sang, and Mother arranging flowers in a brass bowl on the mantelpiece. Memories of our family in that house rush back to me like the countless pecans that dropped to the ground year after year in the backyard. Is the pecan grove gone now along with the bamboo hedges, the blueberry bushes, the tangerine trees, the grape arbor, and the long-leafed pines that soared magnificently above the house? Perhaps.

Yet my memories remain. Surely there was sadness and grief in that house, and anger, too. But memories of these grow dim as memories of the love we shared grow ever brighter in my mind. Love is after all the one thing that endures—not houses, trees, or blueberry bushes; not grapes ripening in the sun; not the bodies we inhabit while here, but the eternal love that fills this earth, the universe, and everything that lies beyond it.