Pure Devilment

BERT Gage was terrified of snakes and nearly everyone knew it. His was not your ordinary, garden-variety fear of being bitten. That had happened in his youth—a copperhead strike on his ankle. Now the very word snake made Bert shiver. A picture of a snake stopped him dead in his tracks. I could only imagine with childish glee a meeting between Bert and a real live snake.

All his adult life Bert had worked for my grandfather at his wholesale grocery business in the Old South river town of Demopolis, Alabama. The Merchants Grocery Company, it was called, an impressive collection of red brick warehouses on both sides of Walnut Street where it crossed the Southern Railroad tracks. Since the early 1900s Merchants Grocery had supplied the general stores and independent groceries of our area—north to Tuscaloosa, east to Selma, south to Monroeville and as far west as Meridian, Mississippi.

Grandfather, a man of strong opinions generally, considered himself an especially keen judge of human character, and he had about five favorite people in the world: the late President Franklin D. Roosevelt was one; my sweet mother, Sadie Louise, his only child, was another; the great baseball player Ty Cobb, “the Georgia Peach,” was a third; Bert Gage; and I, his seven-year-old only grandchild, completed his pantheon, and more or less in that order.

Bert returned my grandfather’s affection with total devotion and tireless work. A handsome black giant, he was even taller than my six foot one grandfather. Bert’s hair, which he kept clipped short, was just beginning to show a little gray. More than thirty years of wrestling heavy cases and bales of groceries had made Bert’s body hard as granite. He moved with power and a natural grace. According to Grandfather, who had been a semiprofessional baseball player and later player/coach of his cousin’s copper-mine team in Clifton, Arizona, Bert could have played in the majors, except for the times and his pigmentation.

He took orders only from Grandfather, and nobody, black or white, gave Bert any trouble. A gentler, kinder man never lived. Whenever I came to visit Grandfather, which was as often as possible, Bert would greet me with a wide grin, swoop me up with one huge hand, and place me reverently on his broad shoulders. We would begin with a tour to greet all the employees—my loyal subjects—starting with Miss Geneva, Grandfather’s secretary, who smelled like the stick of peppermint candy she always gave me. Then Bert and I would explore some fascinating part of what seemed to me the infinite labyrinth of warehouses, loading docks, and storerooms that constituted Merchants Grocery.

Like everyone else I had heard about Bert’s snake phobia, though I found it hard to believe that he was afraid of anything in the world. And then one day, as I was riding his shoulders along the Southern Railway siding by one of the warehouses, I guess Satan entered into me. Pointing to a piece of rope between the tracks ahead, I yelled in his ear, “Bert, watch out for that snake!” His reaction was immediate and highly gratifying. He reversed direction in midstride and, with me bouncing along like a jockey on a thoroughbred, raced the one-hundred yards or so back down the tracks in ten seconds flat. When we were safely in the warehouse, I said, “Bert, I think that was just a piece of old plow line.”

He looked at me, still wide-eyed and breathing hard. “Maybe it was, Honey,” he said, “and maybe it wasn’t.”

This was a temptation too strong for me to resist. So, in spite of my admiration and deep love for Bert, for the next few months I tortured him with numerous false snake sightings, and he would react every time.

One spring Saturday, as I was shopping with my twenty-five cent weekly allowance at what we called the dime store, I saw something irresistible. In the glass cubicle next to the lead World War ii soldiers I had come to buy, there lay...