The northeast Texas town of Paris entered the cultural lexicon in 1984 with the award-winning film “Paris, Texas” by German filmmaker Wim Wenders. The film’s story is not about the town. The town was merely a fixture in the imaginative life of the protagonist, Travis, who purchased a vacant lot there while passing through.
1984 was when the seventy-seven- year-old widow, Ruby Pearl, left California to return to her native Texas. When she arrived, she didn’t pitch a tent on Travis’ vacant lot but settled into a brick cottage in Blossom, a small rural hamlet ten miles to the east, where she soon became “Miss Ruby.”
1992, eight years later, I’m coming to Blossom. Mom’s friend who can still drive picks me up at the country airport. We approach town as twilight droops into darkness. I observe details of the passing landscape: collapsing barns capped with rusted tin roofs, houses stitched with weeds up to the rafters, loose shingles and peeling paint, sagging front porches and shell back metal chairs set in talking circles in front yards shaded by umbrellas of ancient trees, and porch swings suspended by rusty chains fixed to the ceilings of wrap-around galleries, some screened against bugs.
Miss Ruby has finished fixing a homecoming supper for her prodigal son. She scurries about the kitchen. After reminding me that my last visit was eight years ago, she becomes the serving lady, moving into the dining room in her sleeveless worn and faded flower print house dress. Her frame is sparer now due to a strict diet to control her diabetes. Large folds of skin hang from her arms like atrophied bat wings. Supper is roast chicken, “light” salad (made entirely of ice-berg lettuce), toasted homemade bread, sweet tea, and lemon meringue pie, all served with smiles and happy energy.
“Try my Chow-Chow,” Miss Ruby commands, and plops a heaping tablespoon onto my plate. The blob consists of finely diced bits of cabbage, onions, green tomatoes, red and green peppers in a vinegar marinade. With a teaspoon, I tip some onto my tongue. It’s bitter-sweet. “Yum.”
“Tell me about Chris (her grandson). He hasn’t come back to see me since he was sixteen.”
“I don’t think there’s much attraction for Chris in Blossom, grandma -- other than you,” I amend. Guess not,” she says. I think Chris was shocked by his first time in a little town.”
“Indeed, it is a little town,” I reply. “That sign out on the highway still says, ‘population 1,400.’ That number hasn’t changed since I first saw it eight years ago. Can’t be right. The town has withered and shrunk since then.”
“Maybe they just don’t subtract the old folks who pass on, son. The number didn’t go down when Millie’s husband Frank died, and it didn’t go up when Aunt Polly came back here.”
Millie and Polly are Miss Ruby’s younger sisters. She had other sisters before she herself was born in 1907, but she never knew them; they died soon after birth.
Millie was the first sister to return to Blossom after Frank’s knees gave out and he could no longer work. Polly, the baby sister, had worked in Tucson at a Christian bookstore for a very friendly pastor who hired her after her older husband died. When the friendly pastor went to his reward, Polly moved back to Blossom.
“Polly moved into Neil Hardy’s old crumbling-down house,”
“Remind me who Neil Hardy was.”
“He was my stepmother’s brother. He’s been long gone now, buried with all the Moores out at Knights of Honor Cemetery. Nobody had lived in it for years – the house, not the cemetery. Polly moved in and folks said it’s getting even more run down. She’s got the housekeeping sense of a hippie. Have some more Chow-Chow,” Mom orders. “It’ll grow on you.”
“If I keep eating this, I’m sure something will grow on me.” I inhale my pie to kill the astringent aftertaste of the Chow-Chow. “I’m sorry I didn’t get back sooner, to see Uncle Frank before he died.”
“You wouldn’t have known him. He went downhill fast the last few
years.”
“Like the town.” Miss Ruby ignores my sarcasm.
“He couldn’t read any more, his eyesight was going. He loved to read. Winter, he’d sit by the fireplace; good weather he was reading out on the porch. Mildred tried to get him out of the house, encouraged him to talk to the old-timers over breakfast at the KKK – that’s the Kountry Kitchen Kafe. Frank said ‘Hell, I get to talking to those old guys and my whole day is shot. They go on forever.’ He didn’t fit in here. He was Irish-Catholic. He called folks here chicken eatin’ Baptists and common-as-gnats holy rollers who shunned papists like him; said his books were more interesting. By the end, he was sitting on the porch watching cars and trucks, passing on the frontage road. Frank just faded away and died -- from boredom most say.”
I slurp the last of my sweet tea and tell Miss Ruby how much I appreciate her home-cooking, and how it evokes fond memories of the good parts of my childhood. Mom understands what that means. Silently, she turns away from me and starts clearing up the supper dishes.
I step outside to avoid kitchen clean up. Before the door closes behind me, I’m enveloped in a cloud of thick hot air and gasp for breath. I relax, exhale, and slowly begin to breathe again.
I sit on the porch, eager to savor a fine cigar. Moist air and cigar smoke coalesce to bathe me in a convalescent analgesic.
The porch steps descend to lawn bounded at the street by crepe myrtle trees.
I sit in shadow-less slumber immersed in twilight's blue balm. The night is heavy and liquid. Womb-warmth and sticky darkness envelop me in a milky placental cocoon. Cigar vapors encapsulate my face. My sinews loosen and unravel. My mind slips, unhinged. Fireflies! The air is filled with flickering incandescence as fireflies float from the grass. Crickets chirp in the shrubbery. Frogs belch from the drainage ditch. Cicadas emit a chorus of steady, rhythmic buzzing. Honeysuckle and Confederate jasmine climb entwined, conspiring to embrace the leaning wood tool shed, their cloying fragrance seeks and finds my senses –nearly nauseating. Dogs bark down the road.
I’m suspended in foliage, heavy at its verdant August zenith. Trees in varying sizes and shapes spread garden-like over a carpet of lush grass: live oaks, sweet gum, crepe myrtle, dogwood, red bud, billowing weeping willows.
The edges of things – of trees, houses, fences, are softened by embracing vines and bathed in a luminous, soft gray light, soon gone. Eyes adjusted to the thickening darkness; I’m startled by an electric light snapping on across the way. It’s out of place here, in this moment, in this feeling. Into my fractured reverie steps Bubba! The neighbor across the road emerges through a screened door and walks his potbelly, protruding bare from a worn and dirty “wife-beater” undershirt to the half-cut oil drum rib smoker where he bastes and turns pork ribs by porch light. Moths circle. Smoke - venting from the rib smoker - disperses, crosses the gravel and heat bubbled tar of the road to where I sit. Sweet barbeque fragrance embraces me, complementing the soft nutty, woody buzz of the cigar that lingers on my tongue. The night is tantalizing, intoxicating, a soft hallucinogenic, inducing a feverish, languid repose.
Breakfast is on the table when I wake. Bacon, eggs, and hot biscuits, strong coffee, home-made jam, Miss Ruby’s way of telling me to get up early so she can spend as much time with me as possible. I come to the table in my bathrobe. The ceiling fans are spinning.
“The day is fixin’ to be a scorcher,” Miss Ruby announces. She scurries about making sure I have everything I want for breakfast. At eighty-five, Miss Ruby remains spry, lively, curious, and voluble -- more voluble than me, so soon after rising and before breakfast and lots of coffee.
Miss Ruby has a cat. Actually, four cats that depend on her, fittingly, for sustenance and survival. Miss Ruby claims only one of these cats as kin: Samantha, a sleek Siamese, friendly yet characteristically independent.
“I feed all the others, too,” she says, “because I went hungry so often as a child, I can't stand to see anyone or anything go hungry. These old hard country people here would just take these little extras out and kill ‘em, like they would a snake or a mosquito, because they’re not useful.”
“How do you like my ‘permanent?” Mom asks, pointing to her hair. Her tone tells me she’s hurt that I haven’t noticed or volunteered a compliment without having to be prompted. Her thinning hair has been professionally brushed and set to give it greater body. She had the good sense to talk the beautician out of coloring it, but had it rinsed with a “highlighter” to achieve a light, mousy brown.
“Looks real nice, Mom.” Miss Ruby smiles.
“Can’t wait to show it off at the yard sale.”
“What yard sale?”
“Pauline Whittle is having one of her big yard sales. We’re goin’.”
I groan.
“Don’t be giving me any of that, now. We’re goin’. That’s all there is to do here -- yard sales and funerals. Letha will be here in a minute, so hurry up with your breakfast. I want to be there when it starts. I get bargains that way.”
There’s a quick rapping at the front door and it opens directly. Letha pokes only her face and silver curls through the small opening in the door. “Ruby?!” She is announcing her arrival more than she’s asking if it’s okay to come in, because she enters immediately afterward. “I’m hee-er. Y’all ready to go? “Whew-eee, already a scorcher. I put out a wash this mornin’ before it got hot. Little yellow butterflies dancing all around me. Think I pinned a couple on the line. Oh, Polly told me about the big snake.” Miss Ruby shivers at mention of the snake, but that doesn’t stop Letha.
“Polly told me it was at your back door, Ruby.”
“Thank God I didn’t see it. Polly saw it when she was coming to visit and warned me off. She knows how I feel about snakes ever since that Jasper boy in Hope, Arkansas put one down inside of my shirt when I was a girl.”
“Polly told me,” Letha continues, oblivious to Miss Ruby’s discomfort, “that Butch came runnin’ right over and killed the critter.”
Miss Ruby signals with her hands that she wants the snake talk to stop. Letha veers off in a new direction.
“Ruby, did you hear about the little Meyers girl? Kaylynn.” Without waiting for Ruby to say ‘yes,’ she had heard about Kaylynn already from her neighbors, Elbie, Euna, Irene, and from both Paulines.
Letha pushes on. “Dead from a spider bite. Only nine years old, poor thing. Only child, too. And they can’t have no more children. Poor things. I’ve cried and prayed ever since I heard.”
Now that her news delivery is spent, Letha begins to fidget, signaling her eagerness to get on over to the yard sale.
“Come on, now, let’s make like the wind and blow.” Letha sees me staring vacantly at Letha over my eyeglasses. Without missing a step, she moves up real close to me and declares loudly, “Okay, then, mister city slicker, let’s make like a cow patty and hit the road!”
I’m speechless. Letha senses my lack of appreciation for her self-parody, and yells in her broadest country accent, “Betcha ya’ don’t hear talkin’ like that back in Berkeley.”
“No ma’am.”
The yard sale sits on a treeless lot fronting the highway. Used clothing hangs from discarded department store racks that totter precariously on the grass. Rusted tools cover rough-hewn benches. Worn out saddles and tack gear hang from sawhorses.
As they emerge from the car, Mom and Letha become twenty years younger. The place energizes them. Letha entwines her arm in mine.
“Now you stick real close to me, like a cicada to a pecan tree.”
It’s clear that yard sales here are not merely shopping opportunities but social events for ladies, much as some old men go to bars. Pauline Whittle walks over and tells me to pay for all of Miss Ruby’s bargains.
While escorting me around the sale site, Letha explains, “As a proper Christian lady, I must act discreetly and take pains to avoid any suspicion about my character and propriety.”
After making polite introductions to almost everyone she and I encounter, Letha approaches a particularly dour and sour faced cluster of older ladies who’ve been watching our cozy promenade, and announces loudly, “Oh, ladies, we’re not lovers, just sweethearts.” She turns and walks away, holding me even tighter and closer. Miss Letha is in her seventies. I am twenty-five years her junior.
Suddenly, we are surrounded by “church ladies,” middle to late-aged women who don't waste any time inviting me to their respective assemblies. Letha tells me straight away what denomination she is, which is her way of telling me who she is. “I’m Baptist,” adding, “That's First Baptist. Burgie Thompson's the pastor.”
The Methodists and the Baptists, compulsive proselytizers, are competing for my attention and a possible visit to a devotional service Sunday morning or Wednesday evening. The lady recruiting for the Methodists is named "Pug." Her husband's name is Buck. Pug warns me off the Baptists, saying, "You don't want to be goin' to the Baptists. The things that go on there. Terrible!" (I learn later that Pug is alluding to a scandal about a preacher and a parishioner. (Not Reverend Thompson).
Seizing the opportunity to seed an unfavorable impression, I declare to the assembled church ladies, "That sounds like the place for me!"
Side-stepping my remark, Pug says, “Oh, it’s so nice of you to be visiting your mother. Bless your heart.”
Another lady asks, “How long you going to be staying with Ruby? You’re going to be here for a while, aren’t you?”
I know where this is leading. I feel wanted and needed in a way I neither want nor need. Next I’ll be invited to a devotional for aging singles. I feel the urge to inoculate myself from further importuning, so I announce, “Years ago I took a solemn vow to stay out of churches.” My blasphemy falls on the ladies like a smothering quilt and brings up belly laughs from the good old boys standing nearby.
Letha quickly changes the subject. “Nathan, Pug and I have a dark secret that we need to share with you. I have to confess that we were responsible for the deaths of two famous singers; country-western singer Marty Robbins, and -- Elvis!” Pug and Letha pause and wait for the desired effect.
“Really?!” I exclaim, playing along.
“Oh, yes,” Letha continues. “You see, Pug and I were at those boys’ last concerts – the very last ones just before they died. And the way we know we were responsible, and that it wasn’t just by chance they died after we were there, was that singer Tom Jones didn’t die. You see, we had tickets to Tom Jones’ concert, but we gave our tickets to someone else. We didn’t go. And he didn’t die.”
Mom is scowling. “I’m disgusted. I can’t find a thing here worth buying. I’ve a mind to have my own yard sale. Let’s go.”
We pile back into Letha’s car and drive to her house. She escorts me into her modest white wood country home. She gestures broadly to the abundant clutter strewn and piled throughout the house and declares,
“Honey, I just look rich, but I’m really not!”
The following day, Miss Ruby and Aunt Polly sit at the kitchen table, working-up a large box of sun-spotted apples. By day’s end they have put up several jars of apple sauce and apple butter, the latter for winter biscuits. Aunt Polly is the “hippie” in the family. Unkempt frizzy hair and, most of the time, weather permitting, barefoot – indoors and out.
Mom points with the peeler in her hand to the mounting pile of skin shavings and corings, "The hogs would sure love to have this."
“Yessir,” Aunt Polly replies, "We got everything out of these apples but the squeal."
“Where is Aunt Millie?” I ask.
“Mildred is not talking to us,” Polly says. She prefers “Mildred”),
“She thinks she’s too good for us,” Mom says.
“Snooty is what she is,” adds Polly. “We’re just too small town for her.”
Mom says, “Mildred hasn’t come calling since she came over one day –and saw the changes I was making to the house. She let me know that she didn’t approve. Too ‘country’ for her. You’da thought I was living in The Ozarks. She got me so upset I had to take a relaxin’ pill.”
Aunt Polly screws up her face in mock pretentiousness. “Ruby, if you want to put tin cans on your chandelier, you can do it!"
Bird sounds come in from beyond the window, loud, clear, distinct, emphatic.
“I can hear those birds speaking,” asserts Aunt Polly. "Jee-um, Jee-um." "Sweee-ut. Sweee-ut."
“What?” I ask. Aunt Polly is making no sense.
“’Jee-um,’ like your brother. ‘Sweee-ut,’ like tea.”
Next day is shopping day. Letha and I cross the Wal-Mart tarmac through withering heat and take refuge in the air-conditioned store. Letha discovers a display of decorative rub on transfers. Letha tosses a handful back on the pile, sniffing, "I wouldn’t buy something I couldn’t do more with than just rub on.”
Over the store’s public address system, Willie Nelson's whisky baritone speaks of "Angels flying too close to the ground." The mood is shattered by a woman’s high-pitched, reedy twang announcing, "Little girls to lay away; little girls to lay away." I am not making this up.
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