Tales of Uncle Ernest – (Continued) - Section 3, “The Pig” – Chapter 1

Tales of Uncle Ernest – (Continued)

Section 3, “The Pig” – Chapter 1

The following summer, Nina, Uncle Ernest came to stay with us on our farm to give us a hand with the chores. One lazy afternoon he strolled out of the house, and, as the old screen door slammed behind him, rubbed me on the head with his hard knuckles as I was sitting on the cement part of our well, with its erect, wooden pump and its long wooden handle, and said, “So long, Moose the Goose.”

I was seven that summer and a sorry sight. Just recovering from whooping cough, my sun-browned body was skinny; it was so skinny that the sides of my chest looked like the rippled washboard that my Granny used to labor over in those past days of glory.

“Oh, by the way Moose,” he said, turning back to me with his hands on his hips. “Do you know what’s worse than finding a worm in your apple?” I was sitting, bare except for my shorts, with my back up against the wooden trough used to catch the well water, eating a large apple that I had snatched from the top of one of the ancient trees in our orchard. The trees were never sprayed, so the apples, although delicious, had worm holes, and I was, naturally, eating around them.

“Nope,” I answered. “How?”

“Finding half a worm,” he said, chuckling as he headed off.

With swaying strides Uncle Ernest made his way down the long, dirt lane of our farm. The dust from his tread rose behind him in little puffs of smoke. To see him depart I had to turn my head, like an owl, around to the far right. I had been sitting, maneuvering around the worm holes in my apple, looking off in the distance between the corn crib and the stable at the mysterious woods—the deep woods where thoughts of deer, rabbits, quail, hawks, squirrels, and owls stimulated my young mind, making me eager for the days when I would be old enough to hunt.

Images of other creatures, in those ancient times, stimulated my brain, especially the eerie whippoorwills, whose night songs shaped me for life on those evenings before the deep sleep that clears so effortlessly the apprehensions of youth.

Uncle Ernest had been gone for quite a while that day, long enough for me to climb monkey-like into the top branches of our gnarled maple tree that stood ten feet from the front porch of our house. He had been gone long enough for me to eventually descend and lie with dangling feet and arms in our cloth hammock that hung between the maple and a small cedar tree. With uneasy boredom I lay and gazed up into the clear-blue August sky. The texture and odor of that mildew-scented, cotton hammock linger still in my memory, centuries after that lonely, unforgettable summer.

Our farm was about a half mile from the canal town of Chesapeake City. The canal connected the Chesapeake Bay with the Delaware Bay—a canal of two towns you might say, because the waterway divided the town into a south side and a north side. Connecting the two sides was a vertical lift bridge constructed of black steel. It was managed by the Army Corps of Engineers, which employed men in the area to raise and lower the span to allow ships and large boats to steam through.

From our farm we could see the bridge outlined jet black against the clear sky. That summer morning, I remember flipping from the hammock to gather stones from the lane to throw at the telephone pole. As I returned to the shade, cradling the stones in hands and arms against my chest, I heard a muffled, metallic clank in the distance. Looking north towards the sound, I saw that the bridge—my bridge that I had peered at all my life—had disappeared.

Pop, who came home from work a short time later, was upset, but not as much as my mother, because Uncle Ernest, her older and only brother, was known to walk across that bridge often to visit the North Side bars. Well, all hail broke loose. “Ralph!” she screeched. “We have to go in there to find out where he is and maybe identify his body when they drag it out of the crick.” Consoling her, Pop said that it was unlikely that Ernest would be walking across that bridge at the precise time it was smashed into. We found out later that a German tanker veered out of control and plowed into it.

That evening we took off for town in our blue Ford, with my mother sobbing and moaning in an awful way, in search of Uncle Ernest or his remains. This was in fact the same sorry ‘41 Ford that Pop, after a new, huge, overhead bridge was build years later, would have to drive a mile away from town in order to get a running start to be able to slowly ascend, belching more and more billowing clouds of blue smoke as it got closer and closer and slower and slower to the top. Then it would zip down, happily, as if it were the noblest vehicle on the road.

To our relief, Nina, Uncle Ernest was just fine. We found him dead drunk, oblivious to the sirens, outcries, and mayhem surrounding him. One local said that Uncle Ernest had made it from the Hole-in-the-Wall bar to the drug store singing “♪ Oh, doo da, doo da, day ♪” before collapsing in the drainage ditch that ran along the store.

The next morning he was in high spirits. Years ahead of his time, he knew the value of eating roughage, because I remember that he showed me at breakfast how to eat a banana, skin and all, and how to save time and trouble by eating peanuts without shelling them.  [To be continued Tuesday, 2/7/2012]