Aiming for the Head

Grandma gave me Dad's birth certificate before she died. I assumed she figured no one else would want it.

It's a yellowed piece of paper, tri-folded, surprisingly intact since it's nearly sixty years old. Eldridge "Tommy" Thomas Jr. was born in Bad Cannstatt, Germany, November 5, 1945, during the Occupation. If he had come a year or so before, if he were a German, a Jew or not, he wouldn't have made it. The Nazis killed mentally deficient children, an estimated five thousand. Schizophrenics, manic-depressives, alcoholics, and epileptics were simply sterilized, but the racially valueless retards had to go.

So, if my dad had been born in Bad Cannstatt a year earlier, I never would've been born at all.

I was five and a half when Daddy added a porch onto our trailer in Patterson, Georgia. My uncles, some older cousins, and Grandpa all volunteered to come by the following Saturday to help. Daddy told everyone he knew how to build a porch, so he didn't need anyone telling him how to do anything. He would be giving the orders, but he guessed they could pound nails into two-by-fours if they really wanted to.

Uncle Kriss had designed his own house, and he oversaw the laborers when his house was built six years earlier. If Uncle Kriss could design a whole house by himself, then Daddy could put a mere porch together. It didn't occur to Daddy how Uncle Kriss's house was so cumbersome, that it was too expensive to keep cool in the summer and warm in the winter, that it already leaned away from the wind, that an architect had to be called in at the last minute when the house was going up.

Grandma warned everyone to leave Daddy and his porch alone. She told them to find something else to do on Saturday. She couldn't even be there to make sure things didn't get out of hand. Grandma would be leaving Georgia the next day, driving all the way to Virginia. Her son, Uncle Robert, Daddy's oldest brother, had been admitted to a hospital for clinical depression.

Even at five and a half, I knew people should listen to Grandma. But no one else did; cars started pulling up to the trailer at eight on that hot summer morning. Daddy and I were already out with the Stanley tape measure and chalk line. Daddy could make really precise measurements. When he had each board measured to just the right size, he'd hold the chalk line taut and let me snap it.

After an hour of standing around and watching me and Daddy measure things, it soon became apparent to my uncles that Daddy's idea of designing a porch was knowing how big he wanted it to be. Without saying a word, Uncle Kriss and Uncle Dick left to buy more lumber. They came back and started work, putting up the legs of the porch that Daddy realized he would need—and also the braces that he didn't think to need.

There weren't any problems most of the day because my uncles, older cousins, and Grandpa nodded their heads when Daddy gave them orders and went on constructing the porch that my uncles knew how to build.

Things didn't become dangerous until dusk. My sister, Shana, and I were in the trailer. We were pounding plastic hammers and screwdrivers on the living room floor. The sweat was making my blue and white number 22 T-shirt stick to my back.

Momma was in the kitchen, cooking a slew of Ballpark hotdogs, mixing three pitchers of Louisiana Iced Tea. Stacks of Dixie plates and Solo cups were arranged perfectly on the table. Through the doorway into the kitchen, I could see Momma prancing about, exhilarated over a job well done.

But there was a problem: no one was hungry.

"Come and get it!" Momma called out from the trailer door, on the edge of her new, nearly completed porch. Only a few boards were left to be nailed...