How to Catch a Snapping Turtle on Your Finger

On a trip to New York back in the late sixties, one of my first, I encountered a Nigerian cab driver who I noticed had four slanting scars on each cheek and one or two on his forehead just above the eyes. I’d noticed these things before and was curious what they might signify. So in full-throttle provincial innocence I ask the guy if he’d explain the meaning of his scars to me. He said nothing. I asked again thinking he’d not heard me.

We stopped for a light and he wheeled around on the seat to say said, “Sir, you must not call them scars. It is an insult. They are not scars. They are marks. They are my proud marks telling of my family and my village. Wherever I go I am me to all the world. Can you say that? You must not call them “scars” they are marks.”

The Trapper In The Trap

Although the two rooms of his little house were wired for electricity he rarely switched on the light, preferring the intimacy of his kerosene lamps. There was one on his table and another by his bed. He used one wooden matchstick to light them both when the sunlight went and later after he’d cooked he would open the wood stove so the flames inside cast their even more comforting glow on walls and ceiling. Then he would sit in his cane seat rocker and sharpen his beaver knives, or clean his single-barrel twelve-gauge, patch a pair of trousers or simply stare into the stove flames. He would hardly move at all for a long time. When he did get up he liked seeing his own shadow follow along a wall, duck into a corner and come out on the other wall. It was like a quiet friend in the room. Once he said, “Look’n in the fire gives me plain thinking. I can jus’ see what is best to do, and to not do. Its in the flames. Cain’t everbody see it, though. But I can see it.” That was a lot of words for him to string together, for he did not have much to say. So at home, in the fire shadows, he was attuned to the silence and thankful for it. People’s talking, especially white people’s talking, confused him, annoyed him. He was not an angry man, neither was he shy, although folks thought he was both, and strange or simple. His name was Lillart Jones but for as long as he could remember everyone he knew called him Lillian. He didn’t know why or when this had begun. The names were close enough anyway, so it made no difference. Whatever his name, he had come to understand that whenever he was called by it he would not like what followed.

Redbird, Deadbird

There was a fence behind his house topped with two strands of barbed wire stretched tight between cedar fence posts. His mother’s azalea bushes partially hid the fence, their leaves dark green and blossoms white. He liked looking out over the fence and thinking, “I could walk eight miles straight out and not see another soul or even a house until I got to the Bluff Port road.”

His family didn’t own all that land, but some of it, and uncles and cousins owned some of it, and he knew the other landowners and they were his father’s friends, so he felt a great security in the thought of the eight miles. In his lone wanderings over the pastures he carried his father’s Winchester .22 rifle, a semi-automatic with a long barrel that shot true as any he would ever aim. Out there alone for hours, he shot every day and everything, tin cans set on fence posts, rocks, the tops of dried weeds, knots on trees, pieces of wood launched in the currant of the creek, the little balls high up in a cottonwood that would burst into white clouds when hit. Usually he did hit.

Once an uncle had said, “Boy, you could shoot the tits off a bat.” But he had little urge yet to kill any living thing.

How Pa Pa Got Shot in the Face

Pa Pa was my step-grandfather. He was a holdover from Southern plantation days, six-foot-three, dressed every day in khaki and a Stetson “cattlemans” hat, walked in a sort of elegant slow motion, didn’t speak much but was at his loquacious best telling tall tails from his boyhood to wide-eyed grandchildren gathered around his feet. As a teenager he’d been sent to Arizona in the hopes that the dry air might help with severe asthma that had plagued him since early childhood. He worked as a cowhand on a large ranch and later spun whoppers about pistol skirmishes with wild Indians. He told us about sleeping out under the stars using his saddle for a pillow, about how he would circle himself with his rope at night as a guard against diamond-back rattlesnakes that didn’t like the grass rope scratching their bellies.

What’s Inside a Woodpecker’s Head?

My cousin Louis and I were playing cowboys in my backyard one summer day and decided to spruce things up a little by staging a hanging. We saw Jimmy Blount standing across the street watching us run around with our cap pistols — pow – pow! I got you. No you didn’t! You missed! – or that old feint – yeah, but before I died, pow,pow! I got you back - and we knew he’d do just about anything to join us.

So we said he could come over and play with us if he’d agree to be the outlaw we would capture and hang. Jimmy wasn’t the brightest light bulb on the porch. He was a couple of years older than we were but had been “put back” several grades, so we were equals, sort of. I suppose Louis and I were seven or eight that summer. Jimmy was solid and strong. He had a face full of freckles and looked down as his feet a lot. He said “awe shucks ya’ll” a lot too. One of God’s harmless but sad creations. His daddy drove the oil truck for the Larkin brothers.

The Cowbirds in the Cornfield

On occasion he and his father would hunt dove together, joining in with a gathering of men to surround a large corn field where many birds would be killed, where much bullshit would be slung and much bourbon drunk.

His father was not like the other men, not a particularly good shot with his somewhat unmanly 20-gauge pump, although he could raise a laugh with his quick wit and easy way. His father was somehow apart from the other men. He could sense this about his father and it caused him a soft discomfort, yet another example of the mild feeling of shame that went with him on all such outings, when he and his father were around the local men, farmers, cattlemen, shop owners, and do-nothings.

He did not feel a part of the crowd either. But he learned early how to hide the feeling and act as if he were one of the boys. He shot well, wore the right get-up, chewed and spit tobacco, cussed, and drank straight from the bottle. And so, all at the same moment, he could feel accepted, well liked, and false.