Chapter 7:  A Weekend at Mamaw’s, Part Two: Cliff Fishing; Daddy Challenges the Dark, Swirling Waters; and I Find out Why a Man’s Britches Has Two Back Pockets.

The old house sat back off the road behind two big water oaks that provided fine shade in the summer – and an endless supply of acorns.  The things a three-year-old boy can do with acorns!  He can throw them, step on them to hear them pop, line them up and pretend they are soldiers marching in a parade – or make a pipe from them. 

My Daddy was a Prince Albert Pipe and Cigarette Tobacco Man. (Can you find the “nine” on the Prince Albert can?  Sure, it is his ear! Or a child, on the telephone, to the neighborhood store owner, talking in his lowest, grown-up voice:  “Do you have Prince Albert in a Can?” Then a pause as the naïve store owner replied that she did. “Well, lady, you had better let him out before he smothers to death!”) And oh the things you could do with those cans: fill them with acorns to hear them rattle, use them to hold your pennies, or when you were older, your marbles, or still older, your .22 rifle bullets. America lost a great natural resource when they stopped putting Prince Albert Tobacco in a can.  I guess all those boys finally convinced them he really was going to smother.

Lucky Strikes were Daddy’s Sunday Cigarettes.  He bought a pack once a week and smoked them on Sunday.  Between Sunday School and Preaching, when the women and we children were in Sunday School Assembly, the men would stand outside and smoke their Sunday Cigarettes. But during the week he either smoked a pipe or rolled his own cigarettes.  With one hand he would form a cigarette paper  trough and with his other thumb, flip open the Prince Albert can lid, pour tobacco into the paper trough, then bring the two edges together to complete the tube and lick it to seal the seam.  He would fish a match from his pocket, stand on one leg while he bent the other one to expose the sole of the shoe upon which he struck the match, which he cupped in his hand and brought to the tip of his cigarette as he inhaled deeply.

I once asked him why a man’s britches had two back pockets.  He replied, “One is for your billfold and one is for your Prince Albert.” Of course.  What a dumb question.

With his ever-present Case pocket knife, Daddy would cut off the top of an acorn, scoop out the nutmeat and drill a hole in it.  I would insert a hollow reed, stuff it with dead grass, light up with a pretend match and take a deep drag. Ah, yes.  There was nothing like a good smoke after that long drive to Mamaw’s.

The old house had never seen a drop of paint – inside or out.  After climbing the eight steps to the lofty porch, one entered through the front door into a central hallway. On the right side were two rooms: a bedroom where we usually slept then Mamaw’s room.  On the other side was another bedroom, where My Uncle Currie, Aunt Mollie and Cousin Jeanie slept when they visited.  Behind that was the kitchen/dining room, which opened out onto a side porch.  They had an Australian-style bathroom – it was “out back.” (How about that pun, huh?”).

The room where we slept had a bedside table with two large sea shells on it – one for use as an ashtray and the other to hold up to your ear to hear the ocean roar.  Uncle Currie had been in the Navy Seabees in World War II and had brought them back from the South Pacific.

Behind the house, were two huge blueberry bushes that held about an equal amount of blueberries and redbugs.  After picking berries, we took turns bathing in Clorox water in a number 3 washtub. Just beyond the blueberry bushes was a low wet spot where flowing rainwater deposited leaves.  It was a great spot for digging worms.

We fished in the little creek that ran behind the house (while doing research for a forestry project at Mississippi State University, I came across a 1910 Jones County Map.  It showed the location of Anderson’s Watermill, and the little creek, named, aptly “Emmons’ Creek.” Prior to that time, I did not know it even had a name.

The portion of the creek behind the house wasn’t good for fishing: it was too shallow.  To get to the fishing hole, one had to walk down the Sanford road to the Rainey Road, turn right, and cross the creek then take a path upstream to a high bluff that overlooked a deep hole. It was a marvelous walk, like something from a Winslow Homer painting – the man with a fishing pole and the boy with a Snowdrift Shortening can full of fat worms and a head full of dreams of the big one he would catch, walking along the gravel road through the cool green tunnel formed by the limbs of trees that grew right down to the roadside. 

When we reached the bridge, Daddy would stop for a smoke.  He would roll a Prince Albert cigarette, light up and – horror of horrors -- sit on the handrail of the bridge!  With fright, I looked on as he balanced precariously high above the deep, murky creek water and wondered if I could find my way back to the house if he fell in and drowned.  But he never did.  What a man!

The cliff we fished from was enormously high.  It is a wonder that the fishing line could reach the water.  It must have been extremely long, but it did, and sometimes the cork (we used real corks in those days, not plastic bobbers) would dive under, and, together, we would pull a fat red-belly bream from the creek.  The poor fish must have suffered the bends, being pulled from such depths, to the top of that astonishingly high cliff!

Once Daddy made a fish trap.  He formed a cylinder of screen wire, then inserted a screen-wire funnel into it, baited it with cornmeal tied a string to it, threw it into the creek and secured the other end to a tree.  We checked the trap before we went home, but it was empty.  Daddy said we just had to give it time. Every few minutes, throughout the rest of the day, I would ask if it was time to check the fish trap, and he would say, “No, we will have to wait until tomorrow.” 

Early the next morning, I pestered him until he agreed to check the fish trap. I could just envision it overflowing with fat, flopping red-bellies, but alas and alack, it came up empty – nary even a minnow.  Such are the disappointments of childhood.

Once, we saw a tree that had had much of the bark chewed off near ground level.  “Look at that,” Daddy said, “I’ll bet a beaver did that.  I have never seen one, but when I was a child, I remember the old folks talk about ‘the old beaver dam,’” but there have not been any here in my lifetime.  I heard that the Game and Fish People had turned some loose.”  Talk about a roaring success!

Well, soon afterward, Mamaw “broke up housekeeping,” they sold the place to a Holiness preacher and she came to live with us.

Not long after her death, the old house burned, and “bagging jars,” as Daddy called them, appeared in country stores all over the community, with a sign, “Bro. Jones lost his fine home to fire, and had no insurance.  It was valued at $6,000.  Please donate to help him.  Daddy was incised, because the preacher had not paid $6,000 for the entire property.  He never had much regard for Holiness preachers after that.

Mamaw got the last laugh.  She always thought there was oil on the property, because she would sometimes see an oily sheen on the swamp waters, and just knew that crude was seeping up from thousands of feet below.  When she sold the property, she retained the mineral rights. Bro. Jones did not care, because no one had ever heard of oil in that part of the country.  What did the old woman think this was, Texas?

In about 1980, a wildcatter drilled a well just across the line from the old place, and struck oil! The State Oil and Gas Control Board determined that about two acres of the oil pool was under the old Emmons’ property, and Mother and Daddy were entitled to royalty payments.  For about twenty years, they drew a small monthly check.  It wasn’t much, but, hey, free money is free money!

I was married and in my thirties when they were drilling the well.  My folks were so excited.  Paula and I were visiting one weekend, and they wanted us to see the oil well.  I had not been back since they sold the place.  My, how it had changed. The old gravel roads had been paved and all the trees had been cut from the right-of-way; nary a limb overhung all that blazing hot asphalt. It would melt the soles off a three-year-old boy’s sandals.  The old wooden bridge had been replaced by a modern concrete one, and it did not even have handrails where a fellow could sit and have a smoke and scare the daylights out of his son.  And that deep water that had once swirled so ominously far below was only a few inches deep, and the bridge was about six feet above it.  The old path to the fishing hole was still there.  I got out of the car and walked to that ominously high cliff, but someone, probably the county, had cut it down.  It too, was about six feet from the creek.

Progress is good, except when it is not.

“You will ne’er bring back the hour

Of splendor in the grass, or wonder in the flower.”