A memoir of springtime in Exurbia
I think about this every spring when some stubbornly remaining daylilies come up in my neighbor’s yard.
My young neighbor, Owen, didn’t plant the daylilies. In fact, he is rooting them out clump by clump as if they were a nuisance.
Mister Brock planted them long before Owen bought Brock’s trailer. The flowers with their bright stellae of yellows, reds, purples, oranges and mutant combinations, are rowed like the stripes on a rainbow flag spread out on a postage stamp yard where Mister Brock had tried to nurture some transient beauty. Hundreds of individual specimens of hemerocallis, budding out overnight so productively that if you didn’t know any better, you’d think they were the same blossoms, instead of new ones every day. But in his spare time, Owen, a hardheaded, pragmatic head of a new family, digs them out and tosses the tuberous rootstock into the brambles.
Out here in the exurbs—what used to be “the country” but which is now the semi-rural dependency surrounding a metropolitan area—you always wave and holler at people. Even if you don’t know them. Which you don’t, mostly.
Over the years, we've gradually gotten to know some of our neighbors’ names. But I think we just prefer calling them “Miz Brown Dog,” “the Double-Wides,” “Cell Phone Guy,” “Weed-Eater Man” and “Golf Playing Farmer.” And then there are families signified by where they live, such as, “the Murder House.” Or “the House Where They Burned That Cross Last Year.” These and the households indicated by the “Trampoline on a Hillside” and “Half-court Basketball in the Middle of the Road” say something about us and our occasionally enlightened bleatings.
Owen I met rather quickly when he moved in with his brood. He had the audacity to open my gate, come down my driveway and make me have a get-acquainted beer with him. We’re comfortable enough with our neighbor Miz Clabough for her to come around taking up money every time somebody's dead or dying. “For flowers,” always: “It’d be a shame for someone to be laid out without enough flowers!” she’d say.
That Easter weekend, Miz Clabough brought us some spare cherry pie from the Kay wake. The crust was all on the bottom, about a half-inch of sugar, butter and flour. Never seen an open-faced cherry pie. I didn’t get to eat it until much later that day. Man, it was good.
So Miz Kay, contemporary and next-door neighbor to Miz Clabough, had died. That’s what all the uproar with the emergency vehicles was about down the road. Miz Kay was the ailing matriarch of the clan whose assorted habitations, barns and sheds spread like a smoke plume up the ridgeside from the old lady’s red shingled house by the road.
I told you about Miz Clabough. She’s the one we asked to come read that healing passage from the Bible when it wouldn't work for me, back when our dog was dying from that godawful bleeding from the nose. These particular verses are supposed to stop bleeding. I tried it myself but I guess you have to believe it or something. But I loved that dog and would have turned cartwheels for my sweet elephant-faced lord Ganesh if it would of helped old Blackie. Or just stopped the bleeding. It was like a murder scene every time that dog sneezed.
The day Miz Clabough dropped by, I needed to haul off some junk. On the way to the dump, I decided to do a little extra picking up along my road frontage. To do this, I needed to park close by. Therefore, I needed to borrow Mister Brock's driveway for a few minutes. Mister Brock was a nice, quiet man who brought a little charm to the rough-hewn Geehaw Valley community by turning his tiny yard into a flowerbed. That’s why he was “Daylily Man” until we learned his name.
Mister Brock’s trailer was directly across Geehaw road from the Kay clan’s ancestral acre. So, that day, after Miz Clabough had left and I was on my town run, I pulled into his driveway. I took some notice of the large gathering in the Kay yard—it was filled with a used car lot’s worth of vehicles and several generations of kin milling around the driveway and porch—and knocked on Mister Brock’s screen door. I had left my motor running as an indicator that this wasn’t intended to be a social visit.
As I should know from my own rural orientation and lifelong empathy with old country folk, there is no such thing as a quick conversation out here. I understand the compulsion to recite the minutiae of weather, tomatoes and whatever bugs are biting. The potholes in the roads. The curious governance of it all—that’s the matrix in which we all exist. Beats me where I ever got the idea I was in a hurry that day.
Within seconds of cautiously peering out and recognizing me, Mister Brock had me inspecting the other source of joy in his life besides flowers: the chicken coops he had improvised out of wire and packing crates for his flock of little, roadrunner-like bantam chickens. For nests, he had filled milk delivery crates with straw. As hinted at, I didn’t have time for any of this. But, you just have to take the tour the first time you visit. And I had a soft spot for “banties,” as my father called them when I was a kid. “You can see where them polecats is gittin' under the wire,” he said, scuffing with his boot at the obvious burrowing marks.
Then, as I was trying to edge back around to the front of his trailer to get my gloves and a trash bag from the still-running truck, I brought up the Kay matter. Disingenuously, at that: “Do you know anything about that ambulance that pulled up the other day across the road?” I guess I just wanted his take. Downshifting his voice to a guilty whisper, Mister Brock said they had come for old Miz Kay.
I did not expect what came next: “I’m afraid I might be responsible.”
He told me about a trap he had set for the skunks preying on his chickens. How he took a veterinary syringe and withdrew about half the fluid from an egg and replaced it with antifreeze and then planted the egg back into the coop being targeted by the skunk.
Mister Brock said he heard a commotion that night—a couple of nights back, at this point, prior to the ambulance being called. The tricked egg had mortally stricken the varmint robbing the banty nests of their little brown eggs. By the time he got out the door to check it out, the poisoned skunk had dashed across the road and gone to ground at the nearest safe place. That being the crawlspace under Miz Kay’s house. By daybreak, the skunk was dying of renal failure, which is what kills animals that mistake the sweet taste of ethylene glycol for food. This terminal distress apparently caused the critter to spew out all its abominations, making the Kay homestead uninhabitable. Literally, since, at least in Mister Brock’s worried mind, the unbearable stench had triggered a fatal relapse of Miz Kay’s heart problem.
Mister Brock was at wit’s end fearing he would be linked to the tragedy. Out here, that kind of thing requires retribution, and there were lots of big, surly Kay menfolk just across the road who looked capable of appreciating that part of the chivalric code.
And soon enough, Mister Brock would be among them, nibbling potato salad and a fried chicken leg, cold bullets of sweat flinging off his forehead, telltale heart pounding louder by the minute.
My very nervous neighbor was so proud of this devious stratagem that he described the technique all over again. “Now, I didn't take all the egg,” he told me like I should start taking notes. “I just took half of it, then replaced that with antifreeze.” As he knew we were dog people, Mister Brock was also anxious to let me know that no dogs were endangered. He pantomimed with his hands how he tucked the tainted egg safely out of reach of dogs, perched in a straw nest on the far side of the ramshackle coop’s framed chicken wire. “That way, no dog'll git it,” he said, as if an eggsucking dog had ever been turned away by chicken wire.
For Mister Brock, the triumph over the skunk was the only relief to be had from any of this. So he gleefully related again how he had surprised the skunk supping on the toxic bait in the middle of the night, and chased the rascal across the road into the glare of the security light atop the Kay’s utility pole. A little voice had told him to hang back from the chase, staying out of the circular spread of bluish mercury vapor light that guards so many of the compounds along our valley. So he just watched from the corner of his trailer in the dark as the doomed skunk scampered up the washboarded Kay driveway and slipped through a crack in the fieldstone foundation of the family homestead.
We re-enacted the path of the dying animal like a couple of bumpkin forensic scientists. Thankfully, that put us back out front by my truck, poised at last to finish my chore and leave. But, not before hearing again how the old boss skunk had sure enough sheltered under the old lady's house and, dying, evacuated all its fluids. How Mister Brock watched as the family was forced out into the yard that morning; how they yelled at him to call 911 because they couldn’t get to the phone because of the smell.
My old bachelor neighbor cringed at the thought of responsibility for what happened. I was amazed at how much of this drama I had missed, listening and watching from a couple of hundred yards away, unable to tell much at all from the flashing lights and sirens.
I had heard the Rural Metro ambulance making its long, slow approach that morning. Took it half an hour to cover the distance from the highway, it seemed, considering the way sound bounces around in our valley. It's an education in the topography of this part of the world, trying to guess the origin of machine and animal sounds. The ambulance had sped up and braked, sped up and braked, curve by curve, all the way to where our narrow, winding, little county road rolls by the foot of Kay Hill. Seems they always send a fire truck, too, no matter what the call. The canary yellow truck had idled behind the ambulance, radio buzzing with static, motor rumbling heavily in the moist air of the spring-ripening valley.
Mister Brock and I bullshitted a little more out there among his daylilies, the littlest observations of the usual things managing somehow to turn into lengthy dialogues. “By the way, where’s all that gunfire coming from?” I complained, hoping my neighbor’s position in the holler could help pinpoint that location of the every-other-afternoon-or-so shooting activity. Sounded to me like there was an M-60 light machine gun nearby. Something that whipped the air like a sheriff’s department chopper when they come around every year wasting taxpayer money and annoying everyone. Whatever it was, it didn’t impress my neighbor that much. Maybe because some days, there’s enough gunfire around here for a low-intensity border conflict. Which doesn’t seem to interest lawmen at all.
My truck motor was running the whole time, hillbilly notice that I hadn’t planned to be there much longer than it took to get permission to use his driveway. Like most hillbilly conventions, it didn’t work very well. And you know how it is—folks have to catch up on community business and local politics and the weather. And besides, Mister Brock and I had never had a real talk. Never had really said much more than yell “Hey!” as I drove by.
At the tail end of the day, after Miz Clabough had left, after I had called on Mister Brock, and after I came back from the closed dump with the same truckload of trash I left with, I needed that pie. I wolfed it down, scanning the paper for Miz Kay’s obituary. There it was—a long one, ripe with Christian nursery rhymes and references to resurrection. Easter weekend made that especially poignant to the survivors whose begattings, as well as those gone before, were arrayed rank upon rank in the death notice. And, look: Old-ladykiller Brock’s going to be an honorary pallbearer.
Not long afterwards, Mister Brock, whom we always suspected of being in witness protection or on the lam for some reason, was further unnerved by a concatenation of subsequent incidents typical of life out here. Or anywhere, for that matter. He sold his trailer to a colored man who also soon departed for whereabouts unknown. The current neighbor, the one who is gradually rooting out the remaining daylilies, eyes me suspiciously ever since I recommended leaving the flowers in place. “You can eat’em, too, you know,” I assured Owen, as if that would convince him of their value.
Owen hee-hawed in my face at the prospect of him and his tubby little wife and toddler out there in the yard on all fours grazing on the tutti-frutti colored forage.
After the at-home funeral service at the Kays’ place, I saw a hearse one other time out here in Geehaw Valley. It was that one time Godfather’s Pizza, unaware Geehaw Valley was far beyond their profitability zone, dispatched their big canary-yellow Cadillac promotional hearse/delivery wagon out here. It was followed by a convoy of rubberneckers wanting to know who’d died. Miz Clabough came hobbling over shortly afterwards, taking up money for flowers.
= Dismal.
= Beats having diarrhea. Barely.
= Meh.
= Highly Recommended.
= Super Awesome.
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