Blog

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.