Days of Uncle Ernest -

Chesapeake City and the World – Lizzie, Chapter 4

“Yeah, Moose,” Uncle Ernest said—pausing to raise his glass, as I watched his Adam’s apple rise and fall with the swallow— “she was a beauty despite the strange get-up and the weirdest English accent I’d ever heard. Her talk was precise, educated but hard for me to understand. The closest thing I can compare her accent to is the speech of the older folks on Smith Island, off Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

“Her vowel sounds were drawn out and emphasized—really funny, and I couldn’t help giggling a bit when I first heard her. And when she saw me laugh she gave me a dark look that would have killed a lesser man. ‘What are you doing here, on my island, dressed like some fool?’ she fumed. ‘Don’t you remember that death is the penalty for setting foot on this island?’ Her ‘can’t,’ Moose, came out as ‘cauln’t.’

“ ‘Well, Miss,’ I said, surprised at her anger, ‘I just dropped in to take a look at all of those pretty flowers and shrubbery that you have all fixed up here, and I thought they looked gorgeous until you walked out; now they just look kind of dull.’ She then looked at me and, believe it or not, I saw her melt right before my eyes.”

“Geez, Unk, I hope I’ll be able to think like that if I ever need to in the future.”

“Uh Huh,” Uncle Ernest said with a quick wink, “but the strange thing is that I don’t usually think that quickly; something told me that she was very special. ‘Please pardon my rudeness kind sir,’ she said in a soft, gentle voice, and, Moose, she then took my hand and led me through that exquisite garden, pointing out which flowers and bushes were her favorites. Believe me, the place would put any of the botanical gardens in the world to shame.

“Then we sat in an elaborately-decorated double chair, under a huge chestnut tree, and I was surprised to see that she was still holding my hand. I took hold of both of her hands, pulled her closer to me, and whispered in her ear that she was prettier than a frog’s ear. She drew her head away to look me seriously in the eyes and, seeing a twinkle there, her face lit up with the prettiest smile I had ever seen. Always remember, Moose, that next to a compliment, the thing a woman likes best is humor.”

“Right, Unk,” I sneered. “What do I care about that?”

“Oh, you will,” Uncle Ernest said, smiling as he rose to go through that screen door again.

Shaking my head over such a dumb uncle, I leapt off the chair, and ran over towards a young rabbit that was nibbling the clover near our lilac bush. As I approached, he raised his head and hopped off towards our dirt lane. When I ran faster after him he zigzagged frantically across the lane into the weeds of our South Field.

That guy was too quick to catch so I walked back and sat on our steep hill—the hill that I had sledded down so many times that winter—and  looked down towards the woods where Dave-the-Colored-Man lived in his run-down, gray house in the clearing. He lived alone and, when I climbed his steps and tapped on the glass pane of his door, he was always glad to see me and treated me wonderfully.

The best things about visiting Dave were hearing him play his guitar and shooting his .22 rifle. I would say, “Can you play your guitar for me, Dave?”

“Sho thing, ah kin, Sonny,” he would say, and get it from another room, sit down heavily on the old couch (he was a big man), and pluck out boogie-woogie tunes for about a half hour. I loved it and can hear still the deep, rich tones of that marvelous guitar.

I kept asking for more until he completed his repertoire, and then he would chuckle deeply, put the instrument away, and say, “We kin shoot the gun ef you want to, Sonny.”

“All right,” I’d say. “Great!” Then Dave would get the rifle and a small box of .22 shorts. Dave would walk over to his wooden well top to set up six or seven tin cans while I sat on his back steps holding the gun with the barrel pointing towards the sky. When he came back he’d load a round into the chamber—it was a single shot rifle—and let me shoot first.

If I missed, his large moon-brown face would light up and his deep, booming laugh would echo across the clearing in the woods. He would shoot next and we’d take turns until most of the bullets were gone. Then I’d run on up the path toward home and he’d wave and call out in his resonant basso, “Come see me agin, Sonny.”  [To be continued Friday, 8/03/2012]