|
|
Then there was Uncle Pete Young.
Actually, he was an uncle by marriage only (to your great-aunt, Johnette, elder
sister of your grandmother, Helen) and so you can't have inherited any of his
traits whatsoever, besides which his name wasn't really Pete. That was just
what he told people to call him, because his real name was Colquitt ... Colquitt
Fleetwood Young. After he became a little older and started wearing jumpsuits
that had lots of pockets for his El Trelles cigars and gardening implements,
some cousins and I went through a brief phase of referring to him as "Fleet
Pete," but not to his face. That was about the same time we started calling
my cousin Andy Snelling "Football," because he had fallen out of a
tree and injured himself seriously and had a row of stitches all down his chest
and stomach.
Uncle Pete had the second highest
IQ test score in Texas when he was in college, and took seven courses every
semester while at the same time teaching courses to underclassmen. He became
a veterinarian and kept many animals the owners of which had asked to have destroyed(such
as albino German shepherd puppies, which were in those days regarded as a sign
of genetic weakness). Personally, I have always hated German shepherds even
more than I hate most other dogs, and wish that they could all be drowned about
this time yesterday. When I was a child, I sometimes walked to Uncle Pete's
animal hospital and rode the sick horses. His children, Suzanne and Peter Gray,
are as inordiately fond of all creatures as Darwin said God was about beetles.
Peter Gray along with his wife, Pat(maiden
name Siboux(sp?), pronounced See-bow) and his three sons, Gray, Chris and Patrick,
kept tropical birds, turtles, lizards, dogs, cats, and at least one raccoon.
The resourceful and frequently wine-besotted raccoon forced Pete and Pat first
to put a combination lock on their refrigerator, then to change to key locks
because raccoon figured out and remembered the combination. The three boys figure
in several family sagas as resourceful demons. In one legend, they set
traps for Santa so that he would, while walking across a hall rug, step on an
air pump connected by surgical tubing to drinking straws loaded with needle-tipped
darts that had been dipped in a cat litter box and require a tetanus shot in
the wee hours of Xmas morning. While Santa was waiting in the emergency room,
so the story goes, they'd make off with the toys and reindeer.
Suzanne married Randy Towry when she
was very young, right before he went on the famous "Randy Towry Eat-athon"
intending to become too fat to be drafted and sent to Viet Nam. It worked so
well that not only did he keep himself out of Viet Nam, but also out of most
restaurant booths and foreign economy cars, but he and Suzanne stayed married
until the day that he said, "Look, it's either me or those 40 cats,"
at which point Suzanne wordlessly dragged Randy's bags out from under the bed.
Yes, Suzanne had 40 cats, some of which were toilet trained, as well as three
goats, four horses, a family of tame possums and various other examples of four-legged
flotsam. She finally became frantic about having run out of names for these
animals and resorted to just sticking a pin in the phone book and naming the
new kittens, pups, etc. after whatever the pin punctured. This occurred at about
the same time that her neighbors became frantic over all of the noise, smell
and hell generated by Jones Plumbing & Heating, A-1 Chimney Sweep, the other
38 cats, the goats, etc. and all signed a petition asking Suzanne to take all
of her animals and go live someplace else, so she bought a mobile home and put
it on the back lot of her father's animal hospital.
Uncle Pete's favorite childhood story
was about walking eight miles from his father's ranch near Nachitoches with
a nickel he had earned by doing a great deal of work around the ol' homestead
to buy a Baby Ruth bar, then walking six of the eight miles back down that red
clay road through the tick-ridden pines, whistling in the gathering dusk to
keep the ghosts away and looking forward to sharing the chocolate bar with his
baby sister, Ruth. Ruth grew up to have a son named Jerry who changed his name
to Father Elias when he became a Greek Orthodox priest because he liked wearing
those robes so much, was thrown out of his parish in Alaska for something involving
Eskimo boys in an orphanage, then transferred to a South Louisiana parish where
he was beaten up by a group of oyster fishermen, then moved back to his mother's
house and lived with her until she got upset about him constantly encouraging
the aforementioned Gray, Chris and Patrick to climb under his cassock and changed
the locks on her doors, at which time, or so the story went by the time it reached
me, he cut the heads off of her cats and lined them up along the driveway, then
left and never came back. The last Father Elias siting I heard reported was
in 1982, when your great-grandmother Gertrude Pou spotted him in her backyard
trying to walk across the fishpond.
After all of those hours of hard work
on the ranch to earn the nickel, after all those miles of walking and all those
ticks and all that anticipation, young Uncle Pete Young unwrapped the Baby Ruth
just as an eagle flying far above decided to go to the bathroom. "Splat"
went the giant bird doo, right on Uncle Pete's candy bar! So, if you ever have
a baby sister or brother, don't try to save anything to share with her or him,
because it might end up covered with bird doo before you get it home!
My own favorite story from Uncle Pete's
childhood is a different one. One day, Uncle Pete's mother, who was from New
Orleans or someplace civilized and never quite adjusted to the ranch and the
dust and the boots and big hats and stuff, just dropped her hoe in the middle
of the cornfield and took off running toward the highway, flagged down a truck
and started riding toward the horizon. Young Uncle Pete Young's father wanted
her to stay, so he dropped his hoe in the yard, jumped on a bicycle belonging
to one of the kids and took off down the road.
A few hours later, Pete, so young
that he hadn't even figured out at that point how to get out of being called
Colquitt Fleetwood, his brother, whose name I don't recall but who also became
a veterinarian, and his baby sister Ruth, who probably wanted to change her
name just as much as Pete did, not because her name was as ludicrous as his,
but because of the sad memories of the candy bar that could have been half hers
if not for an incontinent eagle, heard the creaking of the rusty bike coming
back. Expecting their father, they were certainly surprised to see the town
ne'er-do-well, a man locally known as "Uncle Trash."
He told them that he had loaned his
Model T Ford to their father and come to take care of them until their parents
got back, then asked them if they owned anything other than the bicycle, especially
anything valuable, and whether or not they knew how to play poker. A few hours
later, he took off on the bicycle again with all of the boys' fishing equipment
and arrowheads and his niece's dolls and Sunday bonnet, which represented his
poker winnings. Two days later, he returned without any of these items or the
bicycle but with a big, half-empty jug of whiskey and a carton of Lucky Strikes.
During this same two days, Pete and his brother, whose name I still can't recall,
had captured a wild dog and were trying to clean him up in a zinc tub under
the chinaberry tree in the side yard.
You see, Pete's mother and father
didn't want any pets, because they thought that if their children had animals
in the house to love, they might not be good at slaughtering and selling the
livestock, which was how the ranch made most of its money, but the kids wanted
a dog. For several weeks, they had been calling, talking baby talk, and otherwise
trying to be friendly to a pack of wild dogs that roamed around the ranch at
night. The first night they were left alone, while their mother and father were
playing hide-and-go-seek all over East Texas and Uncle Trash was selling all
of their worldly goods to buy liquor and cigarettes, they got the pack close
enough to the house to drop a net over a particularly unpromising mutt. Covered
with ticks, scrawny, disturbingly hairless in festering patches over his body,
crusty and milky white around the eyes, shaking, the dog had been caught in
large part because its will to escape and live was weak.
Young Uncle Pete Young walked several
miles down the pine-and-tick lined dirt road to ask a neighbor for advice about
the dog. Apprised of the canine's condition, the neighbor said, "I had
a mule with those same symptoms once, and what I did was give that mule a pint
of turpentine."
"A pint of turpentine?!"
queried the startled young Young boy, but, figuring that grownups knew what
they were talking about, he went home and dosed the captured wild dog as the
neighbor had suggested. The next day, that neighbor was awakened early by Uncle
Pete, knocking on his door and crying most pitiably. "I did what you said
and the dog died," cried the distraught future veterinarian.
"Funny thing," said the cowboy, scratching his chin, "the same thing happened to that mule of mine." Luckily for the children, they had netted a second dog during the night, not quite as revolting as the first specimen, but still mangy and covered in ticks. Farm boys, and, by minor extension, ranch boys know how to deal with ticks and mange. A bath of kerosene will treat both conditions, and that's just what Pete and his brother were treating the dog to when Uncle Trash came back.
As he wove his way through a whiskey
fog toward the boys to see what they were doing, Uncle Trash tripped over the
hoe that Uncle Pete's father had dropped in the yard when he'd started off after
his wife. Distracted by his arrival, odd gait and fall, the boys lost control
of the wild dog, who leapt out of the zinc tub. As he dashed past Uncle Trash,
who was still lurching and trying to regain his balance on his way to presumed
safety under the house, the dog was struck by the flame that had just fallen
from Trash's Lucky Strike.
A few hours later, Uncle Pete's mother and father, reunited, returned to find the ashes of their home, burned completely to the ground by a burning wild dog. Uncle Trash jumped in his Model T and took off without a word, and all of that probably has something to do with Uncle Pete and his brother later becoming veterinarians ...
... Okay, so the part from "My own favorite story..." on is made up, but the previous narrative seemed to set the stage for it so well that I couldn't resist.