Chapter 6: A Weekend at Mamaw’s Part 1: Riding the Grapette Doddlebug, Technicolored Vomit and the Firey Finger of God

                OK, folks, I try to hold my chapters to about 1,000 words.  In order to keep this one from being too long, I am going to break it into two parts.

                The first car I can remember was a 1940 Willys-Overland.  It was a miserable little doddlebug of a car, the color of Grapette Soda.

                What’s that?  You don’t know Grapette?  Well, let me tell you about Grapette Sodas.  They were the finest soft drink ever.  They still make them but they are not the same.  Someone (I think Nesbett) bought out Grapette, put them in the wrong bottle, weakened the flavor and over-carbonated them.  They are now no different than Nehi.

                REAL Grapettes were my favorite soft drink when I was a child.  In the first place, they were in a small bottle – four or five ounces –  just my size.  At my house, we did not waste anything.  When we opened a soft drink, we were expected to drink all but the last half sip.  To completely drain the bottle was ban manners, and a sure sign of poor raising.  I could drink all of a Grapette without feeling bloated.  It had a rich grape flavor – think Welches Concord Grape Juice -- and was lightly carbonated.  I did not like highly carbonated beverages like Coca Cola, because all that carbonation burned my mouth.

                After my mother died and we had cleaned out the house, Paula was rummaging through the storage room beside the garage, looking for canning jars.  In the box, along with the jars, was an honest-to-God Grapette bottle and, wonder of wonders, It still had the lid with a hole punched in it.  That was one I had drunk, probably about 1950!  I had a problem drinking out of a bottle:  If I put the entire neck in my mouth, my mother would holler at me, and if I just put my mouth across the bottom half, when I turned up the bottle, more went onto my face than into my mouth.  We compromised by punching a whole in the lid so I could suck the drink out of the bottle.

                Back to the Willys:  It was mostly radiator.  What a magnificent radiator it had!  It was a huge affair that stood in front of the hood (the hood opened from the side), protected by a chrome grille with horizontal bars, and crowned by a big brass cap with a heroic figure atop.  For years, I thought it was a Greek God, but while researching for this article, I found that the radiator figurine for a 1940 Willys-Overland was Saint Jude, the Patron Saint of Lost Causes.  Appropriate.  Daddy constantly tinkered with the Willys to keep it going -- but it never ran hot.  About once a week, he would remove all four spark plugs, lay them on the burner of the kitchen range and heat them up to burn off the accumulated un-burned oil, adjusted the gap and reinstall them.

                When I was just a tyke, my grandmother Emmons (“Mamaw”) lived alone in the old house near the Leaf River.  We would spend weekends with her and visit my Anderson grandparents on Sunday afternoon before returning home.  Jitney Jungle was on the way so we would stop and pick up her week’s supply of groceries.  I don’t know how mother knew what to buy, since there was no telephone service to her neck of the woods and they could not communicate during the week.  I guess mother just bought what she figured she would need.  If Mamaw ran out of an essential item, she would buy it from the rolling store.

What’s that?  You don’t know about rolling stores?  Well, let me explain: Some enterprising individual would buy an old school bus, remove the seats, replace them with shelves and load it down with such essentials as needles and thread, a couple of bolts of cloth, Mrs. Pinkerton’s, 666 tonic, Black Draught, Clover Salve and groceries.  He would stop at houses along his route, peddling his wares.  About this time, the county had a mobile library.  Such services were a God-send to people like my Mamaw.  She did not have a car and I don’t remember any horse-drawn conveyance.  I guess she just walked or bummed a ride from a neighbor.  In the early ‘50’s there were a lot of people like her.

Sometimes, I could talk my folks into buying me a treat, like the bag of colored marshmallows I saw and just had to have.

Daddy drove the Willys and mother sat in the front seat; I sat in the back, with the groceries – and that bag of colored marshmallows.

I had (and still have, to some extent) a propensity to car sickness, but I could usually make it to Mamaw’s, feeling just a little queasy – unless I ate a whole bag of colored marshmallows, which I did. My folks did not know it because Daddy was busy driving the Willis.  He had to fight to hold ‘er on the road, as the slipstream of every truck he passed threatened to blow him into the ditch and downshifted to second gear to make it over the hills on highway 11.  Mother just sat there stony-faced and white knuckled as she held onto the armrest for dear life.

By the time we made it, all the colored marshmallows were gone, and they were not the only thing that was green.

The old house sat high on pillars to put it above flood waters of the Leaf River.  I just made it up the eight steps to the front porch when I could not hold it any longer. I leaned over the railing and – urp, splat, splat – the entire bag of just-consumed colored marshmallows was spread on the ground before me in all their technicolored glory.  It was the prettiest vomit I have ever seen. Every time I have vomited since then I have been disappointed.  It is a feat I will never duplicate.

One of my favorite play-things was bubble juice.  I would run into the house and blow bubbles into the fireplace, then run outside to watch them float out the chimney.  I thought that was the neatest thing!

Mamaw’s bedroom doubled as the living room, and it was the only room in the house that was heated. It had a fireplace, in which Mamaw kept a fire simmering anytime the outside temperature fell below 90. She never had an actual flame, just a couple of smoldering green logs.   We spent Christmas of 1951 at my Mamaws.  I still remember what I got for Christmas that year – a blackboard and a box of colored chalk – the same pastel hues as the marshmallows.  I got a bit nauseous every time I used them. Daddy had to work until noon of Christmas Eve, and by the time we got the car loaded, stopped by Jitney Jungle and got to Mamaw’s, it was about dark.  It was cold – inside and out, so Daddy decided he would build a roaring fire to warm up the living room.  He piled on some fat lighterd splinters, brush wood and an armload or real, honest-to-goodness cured firewood. At first the flames caught with a merry crackle, then engulfed the logs, and he had a real roaring fire – in the fireplace AND chimney. The pitch of the roar changed to that of a jet engine at take-off and created such an indraft that lose papers in the room were drawn to the fireplace.  Daddy had set 20 year’s worth of accumulated soot and creosote in the chimney afire!

“Quick,” everybody get out of the house!”  He shouted.  And we did.

Oh, what a glorious sight it was!  Flames were shooting out of the chimney like a Christmas sky rocket and chunks of flaming embers burst forth! It looked like the smokestack of the steamboat “Prairie Bell”

As she came tearing along that night,

The oldest craft on her line,

A feller squat on her safety valve,

And her furnace crammed,

Rosin and pine!

                I expected Jim Bludso to stick his head out the window and yell “I’ll hold her nozzle again’ the bank till the last galoot’s a ashore! *

                But it wasn’t the steamboat engineer and panicked steamboat passengers that gathered in the yard. It was Mamaw’s cousin, Ezekiel Byrum, and a bunch of neighbors.

                Zeke said, “I seed this here flame a-standing up in the sky, and I figured it was the firey finger of God, and he was about to write gedgem’nt in the air.  I cum a-running cause I knowed cousin Dallie cud read.” Likewise, the other neighbors, having heard the roar and seen the fire in the sky, had come to investigate.

                Thank God the old wood-shingle roof had been replaced by tin, which shed the flaming embers harmlessly, otherwise, the house would have surely burned.  There was no telephone service in this part of the county, so no one could call the fire department, and besides, there was no fire department. There was not even a garden hose available to fight the fire, because there was no faucet, because there was no running water.

                Everyone just looked on as the fire burned itself out, then stood around awhile chatting for a while, until they returned home to finish eating supper.

                Everything turned out all right.  The world did not come to an end, the house did not burn down, all the neighbors had a good visit and Mamaw got her chimney cleaned out.

                Oh, well: “All’s well that ends well.”

                “Good night, sweet prince.”

*Google the poem “Jim Bludo of the Prairie Bell.”  It is one of my favorites, and I think you will enjoy it, too.