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Dear Caelan,
At the time of this writing, Uncle Jack Pou is still active both as a doctor and a teacher at Louisiana State University's Shreveport campus. An ear, nose and throat specialist, he long ago came up with a way to use a tiny piece of skin removed from the buttocks to make a new eardrum, thus restoring hearing to many people over the years. Jack converted to Catholicism upon marrying Patsy, and his charitable contributions have always been focused on Catholic causes, such as helping the Hispanic and mestizo poor of Central and South America. Each year, he finds some deaf kid in Guatemala or some place by way of the Catholic Church, flies the kid and his whole family to Shreveport and restores the kid's hearing at no cost. In another charitable yet wholly Catholic act, Jack bought a bus for Shreveport's Catholic school when his eldest child, John, began first grade. Planning a large family, the deal he made was that he would pay for the bus and the first five years of its maintenance and insurance in return for free tuition and school bus rides for his children during their elementary school years. With five kids, this was a great bargain for Jack.
Before becoming a doctor, Jack played semi-pro baseball, and each of his children excelled in some sport. John was the state amateur golf champion, Anne was the state amateur tennis queen, David(baseball), Robert (football) and Bill (basketball) followed in the same line. I was close to these cousins as a child and attended some of their games, though I never had any interest in participating. On Sunday afternoons, it was Uncle Jack's habit to bring his whole family over to 1030 E. Kings Highway, and they would generally bring baseballs, gloves, bats, and/or similar athletic gear along. I always thought that they were being a nuisance, and wondered why they didn't just come with me to Johnette's swimming pool if they wanted activity.
They wondered about me, too. I remember spending the night at their house once and having some situation comedy in which a child with a single parent had some dilemma (Opie Taylor has no Mom for the school bake off, or Ricky Ricardo, Senor Senior is on the road with his band and little Ricky, Senor Junior is warped for life by his idiot mother's unfortunate horse shoe mishap at the father-son picnic or something) come on television, and noticing these children of the ideal American household all looking at me curiously. I have no idea what, if anything, they thought of some of my other habits that were so radically different from theirs, such as reading Gone With the Wind during the summer after second grade. That's when I learned that babies come from kissing. Somehow, I also figured out multiplication by myself that summer and determined during a tornado that wind was created by trees fanning the air.
Tornadoes were a common occurrence in Shreveport, which is close enough to the Texas plains to experience many weather patterns generally associated with the West as well as the trends common to the Deep South. We used to get in cars and follow tornadoes from a few blocks distance to see the damage they were causing. If the tornado passed over a swampy area before coming to town, it would rain various things it had picked up there down on us as we drove along. It was not uncommon to have large frogs and snakes hit the car, and they played merry hell with the windshield wipers, I guarantee. I remember seeing a huge bullfrog with an amazingly white belly smash flat against the windshield as we were following a tornado through a poor, black district by the Red River (the "bottoms") just before the windspout lifted a shotgun house we recognized as being the home of Della, Uncle Pete's maid except in cotton picking season, when she preferred to work outdoors even if it meant sacrificing the five o'clock "glink," as she called it, that she always had with our family, into the air and fling it into the middle of the River.
That was the end of Della, and it changed the way I watched The Wizard of Oz. Death in a large family in the Deep South in those days was a frequent, casual and public thing. My father took me downtown one day when I was six or seven to see a shooting, which all of Shreveport knew was going to happen, and we sat at a little wrought iron table on the raised, wooden sidewalk known as a planchette and had a good view of the event. The victim, Commissioner of Public Safety (police chief or sheriff would be the equivalent title in the country outside of Louisiana) D'Artois, lived, but later died in jail after an embezzlement scandal that earned Shreveport one of its rare mentions in Time Magazine.
Your great-grandmother Mary Willis Shuey, who wrote the book of poetry your mother will misplace if you don't watch her carefully, died in late 1964, and hers was the first funeral I attended. She was for many years English Department Chair at Centenary College in Shreveport and used books as children use teddy bears. Her bed was always full of books. All of the guest speakers and visitors to the English Department stayed at 902 Prospect with Mary Willis and Arthur, Sr., and I can remember serving wine to Tennessee Williams there when I was very young.
Shuey family dinners were lengthy, ornate events that kept us at the table for hours of rare roast beef, highminded discussion, Paisano wine, readings of everything from poems to scientific tracts, Paisano wine, and more discussion. Under the ancient Oriental rug were buttons for each diner, and a tap from the foot would turn on a light on a kitchen panel, letting Suzie Mae (who was the person who decided that I should be called "Trey" by the family) know who wanted something, and she would come out and deal with requests. This quiet, specific system was much better than the tasseled, golden rope that alerted servants that someone wanted something in the living room.
In 1912, Mr. Wilhelmi, who owned 902 Prospect at that time, knocked two upstairs rooms that had been over part of the living room completely out, floors, walls and all, in order to have a double height section in the living room and to install a long staircase landing for his daughter's dramatic and lovely entrance at her wedding. It made a grand living room, with two marble columns supporting the ceiling where the great exposed height came in and two rococo ceiling fans from the 1920s dissipating the thick smoke from all of the Shuey men's pipes, for generations a family vice.
These pages describe the delusions, fantasies &