In the summer of my seventh year, a hundred, inch long shiny silver minnows fell from the sky, they flopped and gasped for air and soon died. I gathered a few in my hands and carried them to Pallie at the cookstove. "Grandma it's raining fish." Without looking at me or my tiny cargo she forced a sad smile and continued to push at the biscuit dough...
“Sometimes that happens”
Archie got the breast, Pallie got the thigh and I got the leg. This was a system that worked. Worked extremely well unless company came and my chicken leg got to be a little drumette from the wing.
Still there was always food. Not much by todays standards but enough to make sure Pallie was always having to make bigger dresses.. That flap of angel skin below her forearm that sloshed back and forth like milk in a pail as she pushed biscuit dough.
Butter beans were my favorite. I don't like the big silver dollar beans today ..I don't know if I liked them then. But I planted them and I picked them and I liked to see a big pile on my plate. Tomatoes, cabbage, corn. And we had grapes. Some of them were turning now.
The picking would be soon enough but for now they were just in bunches with an occasional purple prize for the youngster small enough to see them from below. The only other interested party being the black and yellow wasps that one at a time were not such a threat but in mass could set the strongest man a'weeping.
That summer the rain fell so straight and cool that you could walk into the dirt road and stand, one arm in the rain and the other foot kicking dust in the unpaved road that overflowed with six inch long black Texas grasshoppers. They were Japanese Ebony black with a blood red band below their wings that flashed like fire in the summer sun. They were so big that when they messed with the occasional automobile on our dirt road they left a goo that might have been unfortunate roadkill but for the telltale green insides.
Pallie said the grasshoppers came in a casket from Texas after the great war when one of the local confederate boys shipped home.-“ When they opened the casket they had eaten every stitch of clothes and crawled out of every hole in his body.” she said in deadpan.
Hogs will eat you too you know, At least they ate uncle john, Celie's husband over at lost John's grocery. Cellie was Pallies sister, so John technically was my great uncle. Cellie's story was that John went to the spring and the Indians got him.. Pallie just snorted “there t'wern't no Indians.. The hogs ate him”..
I think maybe he just ran away.
She also said the racers, black snakes with cool black bodies like fresh asphalt, could take their tails in their mouth and roll after a boy faster than he could run. When they caught 'em they would wrap around them and whip stripes on their legs. I often saw bigger boys who had stripes on their legs so I knew this was true.
We read the Bible at night and with it open in her lap she said “I knew of a boy once who stole a cantaloupe and hid from his grandmother and ate the whole thing. Ate it all at one time.” She closed the bible and turned it in her hands “But he couldn't go squat for three weeks and died in the outhouse”. A little grin slid across her eyes, but she managed to bring the point home with a faraway look of feigned sadness. I never stole another cantaloupe.
Rainbows formed in the east as sunsets in the west painted gold and orange over a dozen shades of green. Nights so dark that I often got out of bed and felt my way to the window to see a tiny red lamp on the radio tower ten miles away to reassure myself that I had not gone blind in the night. In the daytime butterbean hulls dried and curled around bits of leaves from the pecan tree. Ants pushed inside the hulls and carried out a treasure much larger than themselves. On this day a raindrop the size of a silver dollar plopped in the dust at my feet then another and another... Big cold drops from a cloud so high that it didn't’ cast a shadow on the house or fields around. Then the fish. Falling among the curled butterbean hulls like little silver winged angels one here and there. Hundreds of tiny Angels .
The fish fell on a summer day at the exact moment when I realized that I could not remember my fathers face. I squinted hard my memory and tried to remember any detail. The stubble of his face in the afternoon. The smell of his aftershave.. The deep brown of his eyes or the thin hair of his ever widening forehead. I could describe it in words but I could not see it. How many months had it been. I was near panic when I remembered that I had a small picture in the house. I ran inside and pried open the round tin box that held my worldly treasure. As I fingered the two inch square I tried again to remember his face. I could see the picture clearly but I knew the images that I held of him were gone forever. Even today my memory of my dad is not my dad but the face on that two inch photograph. That summer I saw lots of grasshoppers, cantaloupes, lots of hungry hogs, lots of black racers. Although I never saw one with its tail in its mouth. I am sure it was all true.
Forty years later, at the exact moment I was recalling the the picture of my father, those days on that farm, my own seven year old came running into the house as excited as a child on Christmas morning...
“Dad its raining fish”...
I smiled and tried as hard as I could to keep him from seeing me cry.
“Yeah -sometimes that happens”
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