Gust: Poems

The Magic of Song

98 The Magic of Song When Grandpa Brownderville was eight years old, a fellow schoolboy made a rhyme about him: Herbert Brownderville Went up a hill, Eat a pill, And sound like a bloomin’ wheenwhaw. (As for what a wheenwhaw is or what one sounds like, your guess is as good as mine.) Whenever this kid saw Grandpa, he would say the rhyme and snicker. One day on the playground, Grandpa tackled him and whipped a knife out, but classmates broke it up. Fast-forward thirty years—Grandpa got crossways with the kids of Menzo Littlejohn, a man who lived about a half mile down the road. Menzo had a litter of fourteen children, and they were constantly at Grandpa’s house, asking for this or that—some bread, some milk, a jar of jelly, or some butter beans. For a while Grandpa gave them all they wanted, but being poor himself, eventually he learned his alphabet between m and p. After that a passel of Menzo’s children would gather nightly in the gravel road in front of Grandpa’s house and sing a taunt they came up with about the Browndervilles. They’d sing, giggle a little, then sing some more. 99 Grandpa endured these devilish carolers for two weeks straight, but then one night at supper, he blew up like a dynamited stump. While fourteen Littlejohns twanged in the moonlight, Grandpa clanged a fork down on his plate of dog bread, crowder peas, and wilted lettuce and left the table. In a couple minutes, returning with a twelve-gauge long-tongue shotgun, he kicked the screen door open, aimed two feet or so above his serenaders’ heads, and peppered them with bird shot, man-made hail. They sprinted homeward, loud across the rocks, and so our band of country bards was beaten. Well, sort of. Gunfire ran the singers off, but what about the song? That was better than forty years ago and to this day, at nearly all our cookouts, a grinning uncle rips open a watermelon, say, or scoops a hissing patty off the grill and leads us in that raucous backwoods classic: Get a box of poison pills For them crazy Browndervilles. Kill ’em all! Kill ’em all! Kill ’em all! ...