Daddy

He was very quiet on Wednesday August 13, 1989. My son Larkin and I came by the house at 342 Poplar Street to pick him up. He cracked the screen door at the back stoop and told us to hold our horses—he'd be ready in a minute. He was never ready. He always had to tie his boots, find his cap, finish eating, or as he often said, "I'm almost ready, I just have to pee and count my money!" But when he got in the car, he didn't say much. Usually we talked about our antique tool collection, or books, or poetry, or people, or he just told old stories we'd heard a hundred times. But Daddy by James B. Goode 17 this time he just stared out the window as we drove up the Cumberland River Road and toward the Pine Mountain. Of course, there were landmarks we passed that always got a rise from him. None of these seemed to be interesting that day, except for the small cemetery atop Pine Mountain that sits right on the roadside. There were just six graves there— marked by some half-buried sandstones sticking from the grass like a row of groundhogs. For a long time we casually speculated about who might be buried there. He'd always say, "I'm 'a goin' over to the Whitesburg Courthouse someday and see if anybody knows who those people are!" That day he had noticed something different about the graveyard. Someone had fenced it with chain link. The sun glinted from the newly stretched wire and silver poles. "Now, dad-gum-it, I told you somebody bound to know who them pioneers were!" he said as I cast a glance over my shoulder and maneuvered the car through a steep curve. We were on a hunting trip, not with guns and not for animals. We were going to see Bristol Morris, who lived at Mayking. A few months before I had found a 1948 Plymouth Custom Deluxe four door in Whitesburg and he had insisted on my wrestling it from the hands of the lawyer who "owned it"—I say that because his wife had threatened him because of it, so he really didn't own it from then on. "If you spend one more damn dime on that car, you'll have to make a choice between me or it!" she had declared as she tossed her pretty head to the side and stormed back into the house. Now she was a looker and exactly at that moment he decided that he liked her a hell of a lot more than the car. I got it for $1,000.00 along with the information that the original owner had been Bristol Morris of Mayking. Bristol had two junk 1948 Plymouths parked in his mother's backyard and we were set to dicker. We sat in silence while we descended the north slope of Pine Mountain. We had the car windows rolled up because of the air conditioner and the trees floated by in the hot August air. We couldn't hear the grasshoppers or jarflies . He stared through the glass with his face turned away. I wondered what he was thinking. We met Bristol in the A&P parking lot. He was a skinny man and he wore black rimmed glasses which looked like miniature picture frames. The thick lenses made his eyes look small and expressionless . His greying hair had a yellow tint and I wondered if he had used some of that Grecian Formula I'd seen advertised. He came toward me carrying some metal rings in one hand. "I'm Bristol," he said as he extended his other hand. "I'm Abe Patterson; this is my son Larkin and my daddy James," I said as we all exchanged handshakes. We stood around the lot and talked. "These are the original beauty rings that came on your car," he explained as he handed them to me. "How did you happen to still have these?" I asked as I rubbed the flawless chrome. The red Plymouth ships on the hubcaps would look graceful surrounded by the wide...