Peter Pan and Captain Hook...

He was Peter Pan and Captain Hook dressed in worn overalls and a baseball cap. Children were drawn to him like moths to light. Gentle work roughened hands held babies tenderly and his face would crinkle in pure joy. Little children would stand in fascinated fear as he told stories of the Booger Man. As the oldest brother to five other children, he became a babysitter as a young child himself. He helped raise my father and they were brothers in spirit as well as the flesh.
His whole life was lived in one state, in one county, on the farm where he was born. Forced to drop out of school to be a farmhand for his father, he spent his work life farming shares with that same father. He married while in his teens to escape an abusive home. He and Burma Lou lived on the edge of the family farm in a small board and batten house, four rooms, an outhouse and a well. The front yard was packed earth, swept weekly with homemade yard brooms. A garden in the back supplied a year’s worth of vegetables for canning and freezing. Burma Lou, his wife, sewed clothes, cooked like a southern chef and triumphed over their hardscrabble times. They raised four children in that modest home, two who went to college.
I remember watching him hold a thin paper bent between two fingers as he poured Prince Albert tobacco into the crease, licked the edge of the paper and rolled his own cigarette. My first work in tobacco was with Uncle Harold. After hard days cropping, handing, stringing and hanging the tobacco in the tall barns, he would spend the nights keeping the fire at a constant temperature to cure the golden leaves. The wood fire had to be tended constantly to ensure the barn heated evenly and maintained the proper heat. I can see him in my memory hunkered down on his haunches, poking the fire, a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, working through the long nights to bring the crop in. It was a matter of the family’s economic life or death. Mistakes were very costly.
In his youth, he was a rounder. Hard drinking, hard cussing, hard hands and voice often raised in anger, he was also soft spoken and hard working. The only job he ever had off the farm, a night watchman in his later years, provided a small Social Security check. He was never rich in money but always rich in other ways. He loved to laugh and especially loved to laugh at his practical jokes. One of his cousins lived nearby on a farm. It was his custom to check the rain gauge every morning. For two weeks, Uncle Harold would sneak over to his house at night and put a little water in the gauge. He delighted in describing his cousin Jaymond’s amazement at all the rain they were getting. Jaymond died and never knew what Uncle Harold had done. The rest of the county knew but Jaymond didn’t. In spite of hardship and pain, Uncle Harold knew life was to be enjoyed and he did.
His children and grandchildren, now his great-grandchildren, love him. He is rich in family ties. As he has stayed with Burma Lou through her long, slow descent into the darkness of Alzheimer’s, his family has gathered around helping the two of them to continue to live at home. This last time of travail has been the hardest work he has done but he has remained faithful. With the support of his children, he has been able to live the ending of his days on the same piece of ground that saw the beginning of his days.
And now, ninety years old, he is slipping away, spending his days suspended between the land of the living and glory land. He sleeps and wakes and sleeps again on the couch in the front room, slowly fading, his life ebbing as the new life of spring explodes around him. This is the old farmer’s last planting season and he won’t live to see the crop come in. But as long as I live I will remember his steadfastness, his laughter, his kindness to children and I will give thanks for his tough tender heart. Tell Daddy hello for me Uncle Harold when you see him. I love you both.