Tales from a Free-Range Childhood Read online

  One day, Mama had dragged me to The Toggery for a semester of shopping. I was by now about five or six years old. She had made several trips into the dressing room already and was headed back for an additional term. By now, I had crawled over into the bottom of one of the open closets that seemed to be filled with a long row of skirts. This gave me more room to explore than did the dresses.

  As I was crawling along under the skirts, hoping to come upon some old lady to startle, I felt, then saw, an unusual skirt. The first, to me, odd thing about it was that it was made out of the same material I had only before seen used to make blue jeans. I had no idea that other clothes could be made of denim. I stood up to study this strange piece of apparel.

  The skirt was straight, about knee length, and at the top it had an unusual belt that was partly made into the top edge of the skirt. The belt was of a woven material, and it went in and out of the wide top hem of the skirt as it went around it.

  Then I saw the most interesting thing of all. On either side of the front of the skirt, at two of the places where the belt disappeared into the hem, there were three little leather loops that had three red golf tees stuck in them—three on each side of the skirt, right where you could reach them if you were playing golf. I knew that this was a skirt for women who played golf and that the tees were a wonderful and appropriate decoration.

  I reached out and touched the golf tees. An amazing thing then happened. Without my even thinking about it, the six golf tees, three from each side, came right out in my hands and ended up in the pocket of my pants. I did not have to think about or decide to do this. My own independent hands themselves took care of it on their own.

  Just at that moment, Mama was finished in the dressing room. She returned all of the dresses she had been trying on and began to call for me. I eased out of the bottom of the skirt rack and fetched up for her.

  Mama told the store ladies she would be back later, and we headed out the door and went home. Since I was about six years old, I forgot all about the golf tees in no more than five minutes.

  We went by Aunt Esther’s house to get my brother, Joe, where Mama had left him while we went shopping. This involved a good thirty-minute visit. Aunt Esther could not tell anyone her name in less than twenty minutes to start with.

  Back in the car, there was a stop at Ralph’s Cash Grocery on the way home. By the time we arrived home at Plott Creek, the golf tees were deeply gone from any usable memory. I played in the floor with Joe, Mama cooked supper, Daddy came home, we ate supper, and it was time to go to bed.

  “When you get your pajamas on,” Mama instructed, “throw your dirty clothes out the door of your bedroom. I am going to start a load of wash before we go to bed.” And it was done.

  Mama had a very bad habit when it came to washing children’s clothes. Instead of minding her own business and simply throwing things into the washing machine, she insisted on emptying the pockets of everything we wore before washing anything.

  I was almost asleep when the door of the bedroom abruptly opened.

  “Where did you get these?” she asked without explaining what she was talking about.

  I opened and rubbed my sleep eyes and then saw, there in her open palm, six red golf tees.

  “Where did I get what?” I asked dumbly.

  “Don’t you start acting like that. You can see what I am talking about. Where did you get these golf tees?”

  “I can’t remember right now. I was asleep.”

  Mama did not stop. In no time, I was out of bed and sitting at the kitchen table. The six red golf tees were arrayed on the kitchen table like witnesses for the prosecution. I was on trial.

  It was a Thursday night. I know that now because Daddy was not at home. That meant it had to be Thursday night, since Thursday night was Lion’s Club night and the only regular night he was ever out for supper during the week. So there was no hope of rescue.

  Eventually, the truth came out. I whimpered and wailed and finally told Mama that I had taken the golf tees out of the loops on the skirt at The Toggery. She was red-faced and furious. What was worst of all was my deep sense of her disappointment in me. I could not stop crying.

  Mama told me that the next day we were going to go back to town. We were going to take the golf tees with us. We were going to go straight to The Toggery. I was then going to go upstairs to Mr. Hugh Massie’s office and tell Mr. Massie what I had done. After I confessed, I was going to beg for forgiveness and promise Mr. Massie that I would never in my life do anything like that again. Mama and I were both crying by now.

  She sent me back to bed. I could not for anything in the world manage to fall asleep. Now, I had Mr. Massie to worry about. The next day played itself out visually in my mind over and over again in slightly different ways. Most of the differences were simple differences in the ways Mr. Massie would probably execute me after the confession was made. I cried myself to the edge of dehydration and, exhausted, fell asleep.

  By morning, my mind had, all on its own, come up with an idea. I waited patiently until after Daddy had left for work before approaching Mama. She was sitting at the kitchen table, nursing a cup of coffee. Her face did not look good.

  “Mama.” I softly approached her. “I have an idea I want to talk about with you. Is this a good time . . . before we go to town?”

  “What is it?” She sounded very tired. “I could use almost any kind of good idea. So, what is it?”

  “Well, I was just thinking. If the golf tees got put back into the belt of the skirt, it would be just like nothing had ever happened. So why don’t we just go up there to The Toggery, and, while you try on a dress, I will put the golf tees back where they came from, and it will be like we skipped over yesterday and it never did happen. Nobody really wants to talk about golf tees. That’s my idea.”

  She almost smiled. “That’s a wonderful idea. Let’s get ready and go do that. You can put them back, and we don’t need to ever say anything else ever again.”

  We started out. The Toggery was fairly busy in the middle of the morning on a Friday when we got there. Mama, without even looking at the size or anything else about them, grabbed three dresses from the first long, open closet and headed to the dressing room to try them on.

  One of the salesladies trailed her. “Lucille, I think you tried that yellow dress on yesterday.”

  “I know I did.” Mama did not even look at the dress. “I’m not sure I gave it a good chance, so I’m going to try it again. I don’t need any help with it.”

  By then, I was under the skirts. In no time, the denim skirt was located. In less time than you can imagine, the six red golf tees were at home back in the little loops on the belt of the skirt.

  I walked back to the dressing room and softly knocked on the door.

  “I said I didn’t need any help.” Mama thought the saleslady was knocking.

  “I know, Mama.” I spoke through the door quietly. “And now I don’t need any more help either.”

  Out the door she came, and we went home.

  Mama never spoke to me again about what happened on those two days. But that night, I did overhear an interesting conversation she had with my daddy. I realized at the outset that they must have talked the night before, as he asked her for a report on the trip to The Toggery.

  Mama started, “It turned out better than I thought. He got a good idea. He offered to put the tees back where he got them if we would just go up there quietly and not bother anybody. We did it, and now it is all over.”

  “I thought you had a different plan. I thought you were going to make him confess to Hugh,” Daddy wondered.

  “Oh, Joe.” Mama’s voice sounded so strained. “I got too mad when I made that threat. I worried myself to death over it. You see, I realized that if he actually did that, I would be the one to be embarrassed.”

  “I don’t understand,” Daddy still wondered.

  “Let me tell you.” Mama was sounding more relieved now. “If he had done what I first
had in mind, then Mr. Hugh Massie would have known that I raised my child to be a thief. I would have been so embarrassed that I might not be able to look at him in church again, let alone go back in The Toggery. That idea saved me. Now, the damage is repaired, and Mr. Massie still knows that I am a good mother after all. It is over.”

  That night, I slept easily. There was now nothing about which to worry. But I did wonder whether I would ever come to understand the deep and weird reasoning of some adults.

  Chapter 4

  GO LOOK IT UP!

  When I was growing up, there were a lot of things that had not been invented. One of those things was called “self-esteem.” Since self-esteem had not been invented, it did not need to be taken care of. It was a different world.

  When we got in trouble, no one was put in “timeout.” Timeout would simply have been a nice, quiet opportunity to think up more troublesome stuff to do. There was no such thing as “grounded.” No, here is the way it went: if you got into trouble at home, you got a flat-out, uncaged, free-range whipping.

  But at school, it was different. If you got into trouble at school, you got a paddling. The difference was legal. If you got spanked with a paddle, the teacher could later stand up in court and truthfully swear, “I did not touch him!” Every teacher I ever had in school taught with a paddle. It was standard equipment.

  In the first grade, Mrs. Annie Ledbetter used a red Fli-Back paddle. The Fli-Back paddles were manufactured for the teaching industry by the Fli-Back Toy Company in High Point, North Carolina, and they came disguised as toys. The new paddles arrived as gifts on birthdays and Christmas. They were wooden paddles with a long rubber band stapled right in the center. On the other end of the rubber band, there was a small red rubber ball. The deception was that if you practiced long enough at trying to hit the rubber ball with the paddle, eventually you would be able to intercept the ball when the rubber band returned it faster than you had hit it, and again knock it with the paddle before it hit you square in the eye.

  That first-grade year, it was William Birchfield who got one of these Fli-Back paddles on his birthday. William brought it to school. We could see it sticking out of his back pocket. While Mrs. Ledbetter was not looking, William pulled out the paddle and was practicing, Whackety, whackety, whackety . . . Mrs. Ledbetter recognized the sound, turned around, and, before William could take a quick breath, lifted the red paddle from his hand, popped the rubber band off of it, and recycled it on the spot! William yelped as the paddle found Mrs. Ledbetter’s target on his first-grade rear end.

  For the rest of that year, and for the rest of her teaching career, the red paddle dozed on the corner of her desk, ready to sit up and go into action whenever it heard the right tone in her voice.

  Even in the first grade, however, I soon discovered that most of us did not have much to worry about. It seemed that in every class of little kids, there was installed in the room two or three designated “paddle-ees,” whose role in life was to get paddled for the rest of us. It was the reason they had been placed on the face of the earth.

  In Mrs. Ledbetter’s class, which was basically the A’s through the Gr’s (Charlotte Abernethy through Lady Ruth Green), the designated paddling recipients were Tommy Conard, his cousin, Aldean (they were already genetically related), and a tall, faded-looking boy named Lynn Fowle.

  Lynn Fowle was the youngest of seven brothers. Every year, year after year, all seven of the Fowle brothers started the year at Hazelwood School, even though there were only six grades. As the year progressed, the Fowle boys, one at a time and every few weeks, disappeared from school. Gradually, we heard the whispered tales: they were being gradually transported to a mythical land known as “the Stonewall Jackson Training School.” It was a faraway place where evil boys would be gathered from all over North Carolina. There, they were all joined together so that they could exchange evil information with one another and each one be a lot worse when returning home than he had ever been to start with.

  Every day of the week, Mrs. Ledbetter paddled one of these three boys. On Monday, for example, she paddled Tommy. On Tuesday, it was Aldean. On Wednesday, it was Lynn. On Thursday, back to Aldean. On Friday, she paddled all three of them. She knew that she was going to have to miss paddling them for two days over the weekend, and that they all three needed it anyway. The next week, she would start the paddlings in a different order for fairness.

  Finally, we finished the first grade, and all of the A ’s through the Gr ’s moved up to Old (that was her first name) Miss Lois Harrell’s class.

  Old Miss Lois Harrell was profoundly old. She once told us that she had been teaching second grade for one hundred and eighty-three years, and that was after she had taught in all the other grades to find out for sure where she really belonged.

  Old Miss Lois Harrell was so ancient that she existed on the outer fringes of total dehydration. The only thing that kept her on the face of the earth was a giant bottle of Jergens Lotion that she rubbed into herself all the time to try to keep herself puffed up so that the wind would not simply blow her away.

  Old Miss Lois Harrell had an electric paddle!

  The electric paddle had been invented by her boyfriend, Harry. In a previous eon, Harry had been slated to marry Old Miss Lois Harrell. But before the wedding time came, the world war came along, and Harry was sent off to fight the Germans. In a short time, he discovered that fighting the Germans was a better prospect than getting married to Old Miss Lois Harrell. So Harry just kept signing up to stay in the army.

  After two and a half wars, he finally came home. Now, it was too late to make any point at all by getting married. So he simply eroded into being Old Miss Lois Harrell’s boyfriend for life.

  Every afternoon, he came over to her house and stayed through suppertime, after which he went home to his own house. But in the middle of all this, he invented the electric paddle.

  Years later, I thought back and figured out how he had done it. Harry had taken a board and cut it out into the shape of an elongated paddle. He had then painted it red, except that on one side there was a sort of explosive logo like that which later popped up on television if you were watching Batman. Near the end of the handle, Harry had drilled a hole into the wood. Deep into this hole, he had glued one end of an electric wire, on the other end of which was a big plug. Now, the electric paddle was complete.

  It lay on top of Old Miss Lois Harrell’s desk, tail curled like a sleeping snake, waiting to be called into service.

  When she got all wound up, Old Miss Lois Harrell would pick up the paddle. Its long electric tail would unroll and dangle to the floor. Then she would proclaim, “I am going to do you a favor today, boys and girls. I am going to use the paddle by hand. But you listen to me! If you keep on acting like this, I am going to be forced to plug it in! I cannot even begin to tell you what happens when I plug it in. It might get out of control and use itself on every one of you!”

  We were paralyzed with fear, especially after the fifth- and sixth-graders told us about how she had actually plugged it in when they were back in the second grade. They told us that a little boy totally melted through the floor of the classroom—so totally, in fact, that they could not remember his name and his own family could not remember that they had ever had him. It was terrifying.

  The same three victims—Aldean, Tommy, and Lynn—were in Old Miss Lois Harrell’s room. Just like in the first grade, one or more of them got the paddle almost every day. It was routine.

  One afternoon after lunch, Old Miss Lois decided that it was time to give a dose to Tommy. She had him bent over a desk and was warming up her paddling arm. When she started paddling, Old Miss Lois did not take into account that she had just been rubbing a whole gob of Jergens Lotion into her hands and the lotion had not yet soaked in.

  Tommy was hanging on to the desk. The paddle was singing its song. About the time it got up to seventy-eight RPMs, the paddle slipped out of Old Miss Lois Harrell’s hand and flew in an arc throu
gh the air, dragging its electric tail behind it. The paddle struck the upper pane of the big, tall schoolhouse window, the glass shattered into hundreds of pieces, and we watched the paddle go out the window and fall toward the sidewalk below.

  Just as the window shattered, Mr. Buck Bowles, the superintendent, was coming up the walk to visit Mr. Leatherwood, our principal. That may be what changed the course of the afternoon.

  In only a moment, Mr. Leatherwood and Mr. Bowles both arrived at our classroom door. We students had already taken the initiative and were, on our own, cleaning up the broken glass, as Old Miss Lois seemed to be paralyzed by the turn of events. Suddenly, Miss Lois left the room with Mr. Leatherwood and Mr. Bowles, and we had an instant substitute: Haskel Davis, our janitor.

  It was a great afternoon. Haskel got a stepladder and let us help him cut cardboard and fill in the broken window. Then he spent the last hour of the day telling us stories about fire, blood, and throw-up!

  We went home.

  The next morning when we got to school, there was a new pane of glass in the window. As soon as the morning roll was called and lunch money was taken up, we lined up to go to the auditorium for an unannounced all-school assembly. When we got there, we saw that both Mr. Leatherwood and Mr. Bowles were up on the stage. It was going to be a long and serious meeting.

  Mr. Bowles did the talking. “Boys and girls,” he started. (Mr. Bowles had a habit of rattling the change in his pocket while he talked. It was like the bell on the cat, and we were the mice.) “Yesterday afternoon after school, we had a special teacher workshop on discipline,” he went on. “Things are changing here at Hazelwood Elementary School. We decided yesterday that there will be no more paddling in school.”

  About three boys out of every thirty students applauded.

  “Now, listen to me.” He was not finished. “I did not say that there would be no punishment. No, because many of you are still evil. It is just going to be different. There is a new kind of punishment that has been invented. They are doing it at schools all over the country, and we are going to try it here at Hazelwood Elementary School. It is called ‘getting suspended.’”