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I got ‘cha Chuck, I got ‘cha
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I got ‘cha Chuck, I got ‘cha |
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1slick_lady Member Ascendant
since 2000-12-22
Posts 6088standing on a shadow's lace 
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I got ‘cha Chuck, I got ‘cha Today something stirred me. It wasn’t that I had forgotten it, but a drip became a flood in my mind. I was writing on my porch, on the glass top wrought iron table, engrossed in poetry. When the skies broke and begin to pour. And there he was again, out of nowhere, Charles William Thornton Martin the third. A big name for someone so simple, but CWTM the third was someone pretty impressive. But to me, he was just Chuck. Chuck was my best friend and at one time my whole world. He taught me to play hard ball and beat up all the boys to let me play. Weaved and tied honeysuckle in my hair and called me an angel. Played house and school when no one else would, listened to all my dreams and high wishes about writing, never laughing once. He taught me how men operated. But the best thing I learned from Chuck… was the truth. Growing up in a small town you learn some things quickly while some are well hidden and when you understand them, you wished you didn’t. Here we were, in this place, this place with minds with such small ideas. One of the things I learned early as a girl was there are two sides to everything, even towns. There was the one to be from and one to never be in. and there are some lines you can never cross. Chuck and I were alike in so many ways; we had both been born on the right side of town to the wrong people. We had both been born to names, names as old as Mississippi money. And that old stuff that can be tainted with things you don’t want to touch with clean hands. Curses go along with these things too and it is a haunting evil that possess you. And such is this, as ancient as time and changes as it touches hands and blood lines, unless you get away from it. This is the way it was with my family. And this is the legacy Chuck had too. At nine, Chuck knew amazing things and places, and took me with him. Once he took me to where the creek ran into the Tombigbee River, running smooth and clear so we could swim. We took off our clothes and swam in our white cotton underwear, drying and talking on the mossy bank. Today reminded me of the time we were lying in the thicket next to the wild ferns and bleeding hearts talking and watching the sky fly by, as it started pouring. Chuck said, “Grab your junk and come on.” I grabbed my keds, dress and mud washed Sunday anklets and behind him I tore. We ran for some time, me following his steps as closely to the edge of him as I could till we were in the middle of his grandfather’s property. He stopped in front of a row of small thin grey houses, empty from way back where all that was left of them was broken things, creaks in the wood, and the spirits of what once occupied them. I stood at the doorway purple in my underwear, teeth chattering, and crying. He looked at me and said, “Are you scared?” I told him, “No, just cold.” Chuck kicked hard at a pile of wood things in the corner with anger well past his years, and much to my surprise, they splintered. He started a fire in the stone fireplace with what use to be a table. I told him we might burn down the place and he said, “No great loss.” We talked in front of that fire warming and drying our clothes. And he did the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me then or since, he rubbed my frozen feet and hands. We then sat side by side there and he put his arm around me. He was my best friend in the world. To him I was just like him and with me he shared everything. I didn’t know it then but, when he had his arm around me, I was being caressed by a wing. I loved to be with and talk to Chuck. He understood me. I could ask him anything and he knew. Chuck knew things at nine I didn’t figure out till I was twenty. Yes he knew things, I mean – knew. He never minded my questions either, and explained in ways I understood and didn’t make me feel foolish. He was smart and told me I was smart too and just loved sharing. That day as we sat watching the fire dance he told me about these houses with stone fireplaces in the middle and red tin roofs. These thin wood grey ghosts that stood close together like matches in a book and would go up as quick tender if struck. These houses had been built and lived in by slaves at one time, which Chuck’s family had owned to work the cotton, then later, when slavery was over by share croppers. Chuck’s people were cotton people-big BIG money people. There was a time when cotton, sugar and slaves were the real way to make money here, and they had done it, made big money. Whenever Chuck said cotton he had a look on his face like he bitten into a raw persimmon. Chuck hated the lines drawn, even at nine, I wasn’t to understand the division till later, but he did. My great-great, well somewhere back there, grandfather was a cotton man and the banker of the town and Chuck’s great–great was a cotton man and slaver and both were hard fast friends. They both were the kind of men that would stick you in the back but you stayed with them ‘cause you knew where they were coming from and you knew them. These two men sat talking one night after dinner smoking fine Kentucky leaves of how to make even more money and make the town larger so they hatched a plan of bringing the rail road through the town. Little did they know how much it would change them, their future generations, and the town. They would bring in the Frisco railways, making a quicker and more profitable way to auction than wagons. This in turn would bring in more jobs as workers would be needed to do a large range of things. They didn’t know it then but that idea would make this town bloom like a desert in the night. Just keep in mind weeds and flowers grow next to each other. Over night these men became cotton, slave, money and railroad men. And being bitten by the true evil of money they were true Mississippi vampires. There are things in you that when you have tasted blood, you hunger for more of it. Chuck was an only child, the true gift of his father and mother. He tolerated his father and adored his mother. His father saw him as the true heir to the throne, yet Chuck was a bitter disappointment to him, being a real thinker. He saw him as weak. Chuck found acceptance in me and in his mother, love unconditionally. I was the closest thing to a sibling that Chuck had, and he showered me with everything. His mother was an angel who doted on him and loved the fact of who he was, as she had been a bride from the north transplanted out of season in the south. There was none closer then or now than Chuck and his mother, a bond for all time. Summers come and summers go, and things grow as they do unless stunted. Such was us, me and Chuck in the year of our fifteenth summer, and the town we lived in. Hate and jealousy has a way of growing too, undeserving as it is. That winter Chuck’s mother had become pregnant, everyone was overjoyed, especially Chuck. And by the end of summer Chuck would be a brother. Dreams come true, too soon to become, the worst nightmares ever. Good things were happening to Chuck’s family, his father had added 1000 head of cattle to the fields and a new baby was on the way. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer, and they don’t forget it. That summer was the hottest sun on record, and the place was sighing for a relief from the heat. There was a silence around, the kind that is just before a bad storm is about to hit. And a big storm did hit in the form of a rumor. The whispers started quietly till they grew to a full roar, the talk in town started by who knows who, was that Chuck’s mother had had an affair and the baby wasn’t Chuck’s fathers. It was all a lie but talk is so much fun, true or not. And who care whose heart you are breaking, if it isn’t yours, right? I think it was the worst summer of my life looking back. I can hardly speak of it now without crying. That summer changed my life forever. Chuck had become sullen and I had at times, become a taffy pull with him to talk about what was going on at home, and how he felt. His father had bought him a red ford pickup and he tore up the roads in that thing not to listen to the silence or fighting going on under his roof. He said his dad was drinking heavy and saying mean things to his mother and he would fight with his dad then leave sleeping in his grandfathers grey ghost to escape it all. Sitting on the tailgate, I cried right along with Chuck, for when he did, my salt would fall too, with my heart breaking. I didn’t know how to make it better at fifteen for him, he was the wise one, and I was the tag along. I told him we should run away, go to Memphis, break away from all of this and make a clean start where no one knew us. He said,”No” and without saying it, I knew why, he couldn’t leave his mother. I woke up early as I always did to meet with my father in the kitchen as I had done since childhood, and I could hear him talking to someone in a low excited voice but I couldn’t see who it was he was speaking to. I moved closer to the door but stood behind it for I knew how my father was with the “seen and not heard from rule”. And I wanted to find out what they were talking about. It was old Dr. Wilson. He was talking about the workers finding a woman in the cotton field with a bloody baby, both were dead. I was thinking it was Charlotte, Lucy and Roosters pregnant daughter whose husband was known to get drunk and hit and she would hide in the fields till he sobered up, until Dr. Wilson told my father no one knew where Chuck was. He had said as soon as Chuck found out he had jumped in the truck and ran off, and they thought he would be here. Chuck? Why did he want to know where Chuck was? Then fear hit me like a hard slap. It was Chuck’s mother. I tried to move from that spot but my legs were frozen there, in the heat of my tears. Dr. Wilson went on to say that she had gone into labor and it was a breech and apparently Chuck’s dad was on a bad moonshine drunk and was no help to her and she had tried to go across the field to get help and hemorrhaged there. They had found her and the baby there in the dirt in the rows of cotton. They went to the main house to find Chuck asleep and his father passed out in a chair. And now Chuck was gone and no one knew where. My feet unthawed and I ran through that kitchen without touching the floor, slamming the screen door behind me without a thought, even though my father saw it, as bad a sin as lying. I knew where Chuck was, he was at his hiding place. He was at the grey ghost. I never once stopped running till I got to the grey ghost. And there was his truck. Today there was no knocking I just burst in. Chuck was there, smashing everything in sight. Years of hurt had come to this, this breaking point and he had to let it all go. I went over and tried to help him break things but there were no words he just put his arm across me like bracing a child unrestrained in a car. I stood there crying watching this wreck until he had had enough and slid to the floor in a puddle. I bent close to him and lay on him sobbing with him, he had just lost 2 of the 3 people in the world he actually loved, and in front of my eyes I was watching Chuck slowly die. As time went on, Chuck became arms distant to everyone in town blaming them all, but he blamed his father the most. He quit school and had moved all of his stuff out of the main house and moved into one the grey ghost, by that time, his father thought he had lost his mind anyway, and was happy he wasn’t there. I think he couldn’t stand the truth looking him in the eye every day. Lucy and Rooster brought Chuck food and things he needed from time to time, he ate with us a lot, and his father sent money trying to buying his way out of hell. Chuck and I never lost each other and I still begged him to move to Memphis with me. He would always say, “No, I can’t leave Momma and Hanna.” Hanna was what he had named his sister. Chuck was never able to hold a real job, so he became everyone’s go get it man. If someone needed something or something moved he would say, “I got ‘cha, I got ‘cha.” I would see his truck flying down the road while I was in school, missing him all the while there, but he was different now. He was different. One day as we sat on his tailgate I told him I was leaving, I was going to Memphis, and I meant it. I couldn’t take any more, the town, the mold that had been cast for me, the truth. I was walking away from it all and not coming back. I wanted him to go with me, I even begged him. This is what he said, “you can go anywhere and never leave it, but there is place where you look into yourself and see how low you can or can not go. And it is like these grey ghosts, someone can own all you have, but no one can own your soul.” Then he kissed me on the forehead, it was to be the last time Chuck and I were ever together. I moved to Memphis in the next few days. Years later my sister called me and told me Chuck had been hit by a train, he had had a stroke or something and it happened when he was on the tracks in his old red pick up taking something somewhere for someone. She said he was gone before the train hit him. I think what she was trying to do was save me the pain, little did she know…I already knew the truth. Chuck had died when we were fifteen his heart just kept beating and still lungs filled but he was gone. Today as the sky pours he was here again and I hear his words and he is in my heart now and always, “I got ‘cha Chuck. I got ‘cha” "i am out of estrogen and i have a gun" [This message has been edited by 1slick_lady (07-04-2003 04:02 PM).] |
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| © Copyright 2003 Helen Chambers - All Rights Reserved | |||
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S Arthur Grey Senior Member
since 2001-03-19
Posts 719woven by a poet's loom |
I love "listening" to a story from you! I trust there will be many more? s.a.g. |
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Susan Caldwell Member Rara Avis
since 2002-12-27
Posts 8348Florida |
This was beyond words. You are a gifted story teller and writer. Susan C. |
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Edder Senior Member
since 2003-04-02
Posts 671 |
helen, i don't have words for this...it's incredible. it sit here reading and re-reading it trying to take it all in. you really should go ahead with that book... |
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Skyfire 
since 2000-12-27
Posts 3381Riding |
Wow... this is just... wow... It is said the Creator has taken a handful of South Wind and given each newborn Arabian the power of flight without wings |
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Janette
since 2001-07-20
Posts 2843Chicagoland for now |
Well written ... enjoyed. |
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Larry C
since 2001-09-10
Posts 10286United States |
Helen, It is so incredible to learn where someone gets their wisdom and their tender heart. I truly am sorry for the pain. But Chuck would be so proud of the legacy that lives on. I'd buy the book in a heart beat. But I'd rather read the manuscript! You just keep writing and I'll keep cheering...  AND  And for Chuck and others I say... If tears could build a stairway and memories a lane, I'd walk right up to heaven and bring you home again. |
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Larry C
since 2001-09-10
Posts 10286United States |
 If tears could build a stairway and memories a lane, I'd walk right up to heaven and bring you home again. |
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