A MONTH OF SUNDAYS Chapter One

The pecan groves, until today, seemed an ancient childhood memory of sweet south Georgia Sundays. The bone-soaking warmth of the familiar summer stillness had been suspended for these many decades, transcending the meanwhiles and maybes. Sweeping fragrances wafted through the open window of my old Chevy Belair agreeing in my spirit and stirring melancholy at the same time. My reverance of this journey's expectations was interrupted by an immediate concern over my wilting coif and sweaty back. I caught my pensive smirk in the rear view mirror as I recalled Dickie Workpants. He was a sharecropper nicknamed by an outlet store clerk for the purchase of seven ill fitting coverhauls, one for each day of the week. Ample room to carry tools although Texie Pete said it was "so's he had room to fix hisseff".

The first red-headed black girl in proximity to YMCA Street, Texie came up with her own new persona by changing her name from big ole Texas Petty to the hot firebrand label Texas Pete. She got the idea from the sauce that sat in the middle of every formica table in the Five Points Diner. She worked there and her fascination with Richard Workman began the day he put his big dusty brogans under the red and white checked oilcloth. Boredom changes the course of personalities and reputations and Texie kept pace with the attempt to escape what she considered the dullest place on earth, not that she had been anywhere else. She bowed close to rumor's slumbering breath and shattered resting ears with the loud voice of wicked imaginations.

"Dickie" exuded an earthy charm and smelled like dirt. Not stinky, Texie would explain, but "fresh, fresh, fresh, like turned under soil." Texie began to live up to her colorful name with surmisings fanned with a convenient breeze sparked from coals of envy and agony. An amusement to some, Texie was mostly an object of ridicule, a failed exercise in trying to "live above her station". Rescue may never come for her but she never stopped believing that the day would come when she would be raptured from this place. She would lean in the doorway of the diner, propping open the screen while she smoked and just shake her head at this scene - where fat men and fatter dogs vie for a place in the sun.

Texie lived as much through the pages of Glamour and Photoplay as anyone else in Dougherty County could have in a lifetime. In Cousin Ma'Rie, a piquant contemporary, Texie discovered an engineer of small town survival, as well as a supplier of endless catalogs, travel brochures, and movie magazines. Most days, after work, Texie would step over General Sherman, one non-conformist hound who slept on the stoop in front of the diner. A misnomer for this dog as his owner loved him and Robert E. Lee equally. Texie would walk to Ma'Rie's by way of Callaham's peanut field. Dickie would often be there and if he saw her he would hold up a clump of bounty as a hello. He stayed curiously distant at times but Texie could bring him near enough to observe the simplicity in an intriguing but stifling lifestyle, according to her. She was never able to approach him casually, having seen him take more interest in things than in people. Cracking pecans on a rock and picking out the meat with his hawkbill knife prevented him from taking notice of her more than once, for whatever reasons. Only when she delivered him a Mason jar full of sweet iced tea did Texas "Texie Pete" Petty become an impressionist figure in Richard "Dickie Workpants" Workman's still life.

Ma'Rie's converted Airstream trailer reflected across the expansive groves and guided visitors to plastic pinwheels, ceramic statuary, and animal cemetery. The Florida room that Bud had added collected more stares than sun because of the banana tree that died and was left standing in a corner. The room looked like a giant garage sale dish garden but came in handy when Ma'Rie needed a place to hang her record breaking chain of pop-tops. She had stretched her latest work of excellence across the blond bedroom suite until Bud tripped over it one night. He retaliated when the shag covered toilet lid kept falling in the middle of his morning pee. No more theme decorating. Ma'Rie wanted to use the sunroom as a beauty parlor ever since her success with Texie's hair. If nothing else, the space could be used to store the personal cleansing products that she sold. Stacks of newspapers and magazines shredded by scissors gave the appearance of another prosperous venture. Article clipping gave Ma'Rie the corner on this cottage industry. She enlisted Texie to help but lost her to "Life's Year in Pictures" and the Atlanta Constitution.

In between the mess and instructions the women would talk. While they clipped and skimmed, thoughts of Aunt Vashti prompted them to play "name the presidents". As girls, Vassie would serenade them to sleep with her rendition, starting all over if she missed one name, then doing the same with the fifty states, and Washington DC Texie reminded. Vassie never asked how they wanted their morning eggs, so she fixed them the way Uncle Dowd always ate them - fried and runny. Sugar and cream were not offered with coffee and the girls were too bass-ackwards to ask. Breakfast there was nothing like Granny Queen would fix. Vassie did not inherit that thing so innate in most southern women, black or white. However, there was an ever present delight and mystery at the Dowd clapboard homeplace. Every room was divided by curtained doorways, and shroudlike lampshades cast a macabre dimness throughout the house, especially into Vassie's bedroom. Her dusting powder mixed aroma with the mustiness to create a disturbing sense of deja vu - portending an apparition's eminent presence. The antique vanity with a large oval mirror held her cosmetics placed precisely on lace doilies. Their handmade history surely a point of contact for a conjured ghost. The imagined blended with reality when Old Annie came to live and help with the house after Dicey Dahdalia Elzira Ophelia Bell Dowd died. Never asked how they got Vashti out of that. Old Annie, who she was, what she was remained to speculation. Black, white, mulatto, family, friend, foe, murderess, temptress, eccentric, they never saw her in the light as she never entered a room with people in it. Ma'Rie's and Texie's glimpses of Annie's hand and face peeking around a velvet portal were their last remembrances of the Dowds.

The tacky cheeriness of the trailer comforted them out of this chilly memory. Ma'Rie rolled out of her work area while Texie picked over the reading material oohing and aahing over this in that. They parted at the door laughing, as usual, and Texie started home down the Sylvester Road. The county road was unpaved but well traveled when school was open. The road, hers in the evening and weekends, was hard red clay, dried and bleached, bouncing the sun's rays horizontally before her. Southern summer insects in the ditch and weeds beside her broke the stillness but their droning was hypnotic, perfect for this dreamer. Texie walked with her one true friend, lonesomeness, speaking to her loudly and preaching hallelujah sermons in a hail of passion. Deaf ears and heavy eyes of everyone else around her rebuke the call for adventure and vision. They trip over stone and root wincing at the stride and andrenalin required to exist. Texie was jarred back to the present with an aged voice of responsibility, echoing with the pulse of retreat and abandon, but the easy, difficult, known, unknown present, just a skirmish to the front where solitude lies, the destiny of spirit and this sojourner woman.