Long Upon The Land

My maternal grandmother was named Lily Jane Perkins Adams. We called her Mee Maw most of the time, but when we (or she) felt feisty, we’d call her Lily Jane. She was, in that wonderfully descriptive Southern colloquialism, a pistol. Her husband, our Paw Paw, was named Olive Grover Adams. That’s probably why everybody in Buford called him O.G. Back then, it seems, all the men went by their initials. Calling people to the table at family reunions sounded like a spelling bee. O.G. was a pistol, too. They were a high caliber couple.

Lily Jane used to pick at Paw Paw, I suspected, just to try and make him mad. As far as I know, she never succeeded. He was 5′ 6″ tall and a hundred-fifty pounds on heavy days. I think he knew she could take him. Lily Jane, in her younger years, was a substantial woman.

Which isn’t to say Paw Paw didn’t have his ways. Just after my mom and dad married, my father was riding in the passenger seat of Paw Paw’s  ’52 Ford when they came to a railroad crossing. Paw Paw didn’t bother to stop, look or listen. He didn’t slow down or speed up. He eased across the tracks like a man with all the time in the world despite the fact that a freight train, horn blaring, was approaching at that very moment. My father, sitting on the side of the car with the best view of the oncoming catastrophe, had what we might call an existential moment. When Paw Paw saw the train lumbering by in his rear view mirror he said, “Did you see that? Why, that darn fool nearly hit me.”

Neither ornery women nor powerful locomotives had much of an effect on Paw Paw. Emphysema did, though. It took him at Thanksgiving, 1969.

After Paw Paw’s death, my parents, three siblings and I moved in with Lily Jane. She needed someone to fuss with. We needed a place to live. It was a mutually beneficial arrangement.

Lily Jane had two great passions; flowers and fire. Flowers grew everywhere, which made mowing the grass an event. What looked like a weed to my brother or me was a potential center piece to her.

Her other passion was fire. Leaves, trash, scrap lumber, tree limbs, dry grass — didn’t matter what it was, if it would burn, she wanted to burn it. She’d tie on her apron, don an old straw hat and say, “Come on — let’s go start us a fire,” pronounced far. Off we’d go to rake up into a heap whatever was scattered about the yard. She’d stuff a wad of crumpled news paper into the pile, pull a wooden match from the apron pocket, and watch with rapture as the fire slowly ate its way through the rubble. Lily Jane either smelled of smoke or Este Lauder. Sometimes both.

Early on in our stay with her I began to suspect Mee Maw was a witch. Her back hunched like the witches I’d seen in story books, and she could predict the weather with amazing accuracy. “East wind,” she’d say in a worried tone. “Gonna be a storm tonight.” Sure enough, the night would blaze with lightning and the pines would dance in the wind.

My suspicions about my grandmother’s dark side were confirmed one evening when she and I were sitting in rockers on the screen porch. The full moon cast eerie, blue shafts of light into the pine woods that flanked the house on three sides. It was warm, but sitting out on the porch, in the dark with her, I felt an inexplicable chill. That’s when a screech owl’s cry pierced the night’s silence.

“What was that?” I asked, jumping up from my rocker.

“Screech owl,” she whispered. “Third night in a row he’s come calling. Somebody’s gonna die soon.”

With Paw Paw’s death still fresh in my memory, the thought of another funeral was more than I wanted to consider. “Make it stop,” I said.

Lily Jane got up from her rocker and disappeared into the house. When she returned, she carried with her a black shoe and a dish rag.

“I’m gonna hush up that screech owl, now.”

She turned the shoe upside down and tied a tight knot in the dish rag. Immediately, the owl stopped screeching.

“How’d you do that?” I asked her.

“A black shoe turned upside down smothers them screech owls. The knot in the rag chokes ’em. Can’t do nothin’ for the one he’s cryin’ for, though.”

A few weeks later, my other grandfather, Granddaddy Vickery, died. The bell tolls for some. The owl cried for Granddaddy. So did I. So did Lily Jane.

“Honor thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.” That’s one of the commands God told Moses to tell the Children of Israel in Exodus 20:12. Though neither God nor Moses expanded on it, I’m sure they intended for grandparents to receive honor, as well. We lived with Lily Jane nearly six years. For a child of ten, that’s long upon the land.

It was a good land, too; a land splashed with flowers of every color and crowned by smoke-kissed pines. Memories were made there out of waking and sleeping and all that goes on between the two. And a boy was shaped by a substantial woman who loved flowers and fire and knew how to silence screech owls with black shoes and dish rags.