Daily Archives: August 4, 2020

An ancient Japanese philosopher once said that, “One look is worth a thousand words.”

I recently saw a picture in the July 21, 2020 edition of the Texas Tribune. It accompanied an article about how crematoriums in the state’s Rio Grande Valley are running overtime dealing with bodies of deceased Covid-19 victims.

The picture, which is actually a collection of three photos, shows two men rolling a body into a crematorium in Donna, Texas; a second photo shows a man standing by an incinerator; and the last photo shows smoke billowing out of one of the two smoke stacks at the facility.

The smoke billowing out of the smokestack reflected an image of “black death” body collectors hauling infected bodies to mass “plague pits” where they were dumped; and when the land ran out, the Pope ordered them thrown in the nearest river.

Body disposal in pandemics has never been a pretty business, although well-paying.

There have been more than 150,000 bodies which have already been disposed of during the current Covid-19 pandemic in the United States—more than in any other nation. Bodies have lined the hallways in intensive care units before being hauled away to freezer trucks for storage until claimed by a loved one or until a county decision was made as to how to dispose of it.

The smoke billowing from that crematorium smokestack was once a human being who walked into the local post office without a mask; or who once attended a large family gathering without a mask; or who once sang at the top of their pre-infected lungs during a church service without a mask; or who once sat on a bar stool in a crowded Texas salon tapping his foot to “there’s no place I’d rather be than right here with my red neck, white socks and blue ribbon beer” without a mask; or who once left behind hospitalized grandparents they infected with the virus by not wearing a mask.

The smoke billowing from that crematorium smokestack was the residue of, most probably, a life well-spent but wasted in its final moments by not taking precautions to avoid the horrible, life-sapping little Covid virus.

The smoke billowing from that crematorium smokestack mirrors the tears of children left behind; the grief of a wife that will never heal; the hug from a brother that will never again be felt; the face of a sister that will never again light up; and the sorrow ridden eyes of parents who in the dusk of their lives pray only that the end will come sweet and peaceful.

The smoke billowing from that crematorium smokestack is from the shallow, skin-thin bodies of those elderly people trapped in nursing home facilities who never understood the calls from politicians in the early stages of the pandemic suggesting that they should be willing to accept the high risk of death posed by the Covid virus for the sake of the economy.

That second smokestack at the crematorium from which no smoke billows is waiting to spread the smoke-dust ashes from the small, defenseless bodies of school children forced back into dangerous classroom settings—sent there by parents under government pressure to get back into a Covid infected chicken n’ sausage producing plant needed to boost the economy.

Those three crematorium photos represent the heartbreak of a nation caused by so many unnecessary deaths—so many of which could have easily been avoided or prevented.

That billowing gut-wrenching, heartbreaking smoke will forever, and ever, be a stain—no, a blight—on the soul of this nation, and will bear witness throughout history of all those stupid motherf..kers who let it happen.

There I sat – no more than 10 or 11 years old – on the dock of a cotton warehouse. Cotton was indeed the “King” of the South in the mid-to-late 1950s. That was especially so in the small northeast Louisiana town of Rayville—just 80 miles west of Vicksburg, Mississippi.

My mother, with the help of her two gun-toting brothers, had just packed up all the belongings in our New Orleans home and relocated us away from our abusive father to the “green house” in Rayville—a dilapidated shack in the poorest part of town.

But at only $35 a month to rent, who could complain.

Mother had taken a job at the local Morgan and Lindsey for $18 a week.

In the afternoon my Uncle George, who worked for the State Highway Department, would stop by the green house, load me, my three brothers, and little sister in the back of his pickup truck and haul us to his house deep in the countryside for the night. We got a good hot meal for supper (fried chicken, real mash potatoes, and other good stuff), cooked all afternoon by my Aunt Marie on a wood-burning cast iron stove.

And the next morning there was stomach filling hot breakfast waiting for us the next morning. Aunt Marie had already milked the two cows, gathered the eggs, fed the mule, and wrung the neck of the chicken that would be served with dumplings for supper before breakfast.

Looking forward to those hot scrambled eggs, thick slices of bacon freshly cut from a recently butchered hog, and big white biscuits with maple syrup, made sleeping for me on the cold wooden floor, listening to the patter of rain hitting a leaking tin roof, so much easier.

Then back to the green house with a broken bath tub and plywood over the windows to keep out the winter cold and summer mosquitoes.

And back to my favorite place of sitting on the dock of one of those dozen cotton warehouses located just beyond our backyard.

Sitting there, I waited for the trains to pass—all loaded with timber, cotton, farm equipment and all sorts of other goods headed for only God and the Engineer knew where. Dressed in my size-too-large Happy Jack jeans or faded overalls and a scraggily t-shirt more often than not, I would jump up and start waving when I heard the train approaching as it was leaving town. The Engineer would sit down on his whistle and wave his thick work gloved hand back at me from his open window.

Life was so good, so simple.

Those moments were the best of my childhood as I thought of one day being able to go where the trains went. I dreamed of all those great, wonderful places that awaited me beyond youth and just before the edge of adulthood, where experiences of love, adventure, and money beckoned.

“Billy Wayne, get on back in this house and eat these hot white beans and hocks,” the raspy, nicotine-stained voice called out to me.

That voice belonged to the old “widow lady,” as we called her, who lived across the street from us. Each day on the front side of eleven o’clock she brought a steaming pot of big white lima beans and ham hocks to our house for lunch. I initially hated those damn white beans, but after awhile the stomach, which had long since done away with Aunt’s Marie’s eggs and biscuits, grew kind of fond of those “baby lima beans,” as the widow lady called them.

Our penitence for the beans was having to listen to widow lady tell us about a hard life of too much drinking, too many hard-partying men, and enough broken hearts to fill one of those cotton warehouses.

“I pray you boys never grow up and see what these eyes have seen,” widow lady would say every day.

Almost invariably, each day as widow lady got to that juncture in life’s terrible woes, my younger brother Pat would pass gas in a noticeable way.

“Boy, git yore ass out there on that front porch,” widow lady would say, grabbing her almost empty pot of white beans.  “I done tole you that you don’t do that boy stuff in front of a lady.”

As soon as widow lady left through the front screen door, I was out the back door, leaping down the five-step stairs, and running down a beaten path with my bare feet touching hard brown dirt headed for my place on the warehouse dock just in time to catch the 1:30 train barreling out of town toward Vicksburg.

Trains and dreams.

Never got to ride a train, and too many of those dreams turned into nightmarish realities.

However, looking back over the landscape of my life, I realize things could have always been worse – and here I sit today on my front porch with glass of ice tea in my hands trying to come to terms with the brutal uncertainty a pandemic has inflicted on all our lives.

As the breeze of approaching dusk passes through the air and as the birds gobble down their fill of bird seed before heading off to roost and as the deer graze on the grass of a nearby hillside under the watchful eyes of my three dogs, I do have one absolute certainly—there will always be trains and dreams, and, yes, those goddamn white lima beans.