“Hey Jeff, Daddy passed away at 3:30 this morning.”
The text comes from Kim Harland Hawthorne, my oldest friend in this life. Our mothers, Wanda and Judy, were pregnant together and our fathers were high school best buddies. The two dads, as boys, had played for the Parrish High School Purple Tornadoes and both probably thought of those as some of the very best years of their lives.
I knew that text would be coming soon. George had been sick for a while now. From my own experience I know that even if you know it’s coming, even if you know to expect it, nothing quite prepares you for the loss of a parent. My thoughts are with my “sis,” Kim and with my second mom Wanda today. I know their hearts are hurting.
I moved back to Walker County from Brooklyn when my parents were in decline, and it became apparent that if they were going to die at home when the time came (which was what we all wanted), it was going to mean that I would have to abandon my New York City life and do what I thought I’d never do — move back to Alabama. I took care of dad in his death bed and a year and three months after he died, Mom joined him.
When I was growing up, there were 30 people living in the cluster of five houses on that hill in America Junction, the small community which was once a stop on the railroad track and thereby merited a name and a place on the map. You can still find America Junction on a map of Alabama, although the post office closed in 1973 for lack of interest and we got our mail from the next booming metropolis of Parrish, Alabama, the population of which ballooned to its highest, 1,742 citizens, in 1980 before gradually deflating to its 1930s numbers in the low 900 range by 2020.
America Junction had one time had America’s oldest living Post Mistress, Ms. Short who died at 103!
When I was a kid, we all said we were from Parrish, although, technically, we were a mile outside the city limits. The people of Parrish sure loved their town though; those who remain still do and my dad and George Harland carried their loyalty to the grave. Dad’s favorite color was purple (the school colors being purple and white) and he kept his high school cleats and football helmet until age and decay destroyed them.
George went on to be the varsity football coach at Parrish and until the time of his death, many people in town still called him “Coach Harland” or simply “Coach” even though he hadn’t coached in years and spent the rest of his career as the principal of the high school.
By the time Kim and I came along, me in October 1965 and her in January 1966, Arnold and Judy, George and Wanda had made beautiful homes for their young families, and looking back, I still marvel at how “grown up” young people were back then. I can still barely take care of just me and a couple of cats at 57, but our young parents were definitely adults. When I’d go over to the Harlands, Wanda was always quick to offer a glass of the best sweet tea on earth and George was ready with some teasing; he was quite the character. When he’d see me, he’d greet me with a cheesy grin as if he’d just been waiting for me to show up and had something funny to tell me. He pronounced my name “Cheff.” “Well, Cheff! I’z hoping we’d see you today!” I was as nervous around him as I was around my own father and any of the grown men around Parrish. It would be years later until I could unpack all that, but I understand it now. There was at least one track of my young mind that was always running on the idea that I was not measuring up as a boy should because I was clearly failing at most things that gave young boys worth and merit like football or deer hunting, and I just imagined I’d grow up to be an inadequate man as I had been an inadequate boy. I never doubted that Kim’s parents loved me as much as if I was their own son and my parents felt the same about Kim. For years, on the last day of school, Kim and I would pose in the front yard of their house or ours for the traditional “Last Day Picture.” I wish I knew where those pictures got to. Maybe Kim knows.
When my father was born, my grandparents didn’t give him a middle name. He was simply “Arnold Key.” The story goes that the doctor who delivered him felt sorry for him about this and wrote in on his birth certificate “C.” in the blank for the middle name. I guess he didn’t feel like it was his place to give an actual name to someone else’s baby, but since he apparently couldn’t abide the thought of this poor kid being so poor that he couldn’t afford at least an initial, so in came the C.. George had always called his best friend, my father, “Chester,” and it wasn’t until much later in life that it was discovered that he really did think that was Dad’s real middle name. I guess as boys George had been trying to guess what the C stood for and wouldn’t believe my dad when he said it stood for nothing and that his middle name was really just the letter C. George wouldn’t believe him and thought that it was just a middle name that my dad didn’t like and set out to guess it. When he guessed “Chester,” I reckon my dad thought it was a funny enough guess that he must have blushed or something leading George to think he’d hit his mark so for the rest of their lives it was “Chester.” My family was to George, “Chester, Chudy, Cheff, and Chad!”
Dad called George, “Wheel.” No explanation of how he got the nickname in fact on the few times I asked them why they seemed to skirt the question as if it came with a story they didn’t care to tell. In fact, it usually wasn’t just “Wheel,” but most often carried the obligatory preface of “Ole” as in “Ole Wheel” as if you could just hear the silent “well, well, well” after. I wished I’d asked George again after Daddy died about how the nickname came to be. I bet he would have come clean.
George did come by after my parents were gone. In fact, everyone was gone by then. The 30 people who lived on that hill were all gone except for me and Mr. Carmichael, 89, who lived across the street until he married an old woman he’d met at the nursing home when his wife was dying there, and then he too moved away. He left his two dogs chained in his back yard and would come by and feed them every couple of days. The sound of them baying back there chilled me to the bone, and I sat on that front porch day after day considering how I could free them and me from this kudzu-choked purgatory I’d found myself back in.
After 18 years of sobriety, I was back to Jack Daniel’s and PBR and soon discovered that weed in 2016 was a helluva lot more powerful than the weed I’d last smoked in 1997. “Dear God, what have you kids done to weed?!” I remember asking the young folk I scored it from.
I sat on that porch and rocked and drank, rocked and smoked, and thought about everything that had happened to me on that hill from when I arrived there in 1965. It was a hard time, grieving the loss of my parents. And I needed it. I grieved a lot of other things too, a life that might have been without the very hard things that happened to me growing up. And I also made my peace with it all, more or less. If there’s one thing you can’t change, it’s the past, but you can change the relationship you have to it. Those who’d hurt me were no longer there. It was just me and those baying dogs and my own faithful Labrador Sydney still at my side. I realized that those who had hurt me, even unwittingly, were not there hurting me anymore, and it was up to me whether or not I was going to let myself stay chained to the past like those old dogs across the street were chained to that tree.
I don’t know if George and Wanda knew I’d returned the drink, and I don’t think it’s the reason they stopped by to look in on me anyway. They did it because they love me, and they did it because they loved my parents. George would think up some excuse to drop by to see me, not that he needed one. For a while, he was helping me get Dad’s old bass boat in working order so I could go fishing in it (which I never did). Then he helped me sell it. Then when I regretted that he helped me buy it back.
One day, after the fallout from one of those famous Alabama tornadoes had taken some limbs from the old walnut tree, I was out with the chainsaw cutting them up for firewood. George passed by in his old truck and soon was out there helping me drag limbs and stack wood. George was a hardworking man as was my father, as are most folks from where I grew up. After the work was done, I got us a glass of tea and George regaled me with stories of when he and dad were young, stories I’d not heard before. Among them, stories of my own dad’s drunken antics as a teen. I’d never seen my dad take a drink. Church of Christ folks don’t drink (or at least they’re not supposed to) and my dad was a faithful deacon. Mom once told me that as a toddler I’d discovered a beer in the “sand room” refrigerator and brought it inside. (The sand room was an outdoor room off the garage where my sandbox was) The beer drinking stopped then. I don’t know if that’s the full true story but it’s the version I got.
From all I know about my dad’s home life as a boy, he probably needed a drink from an early age as I did. Without sharing too much of the gory details, George let me know the stories were true. I appreciated these few visits with George before I would eventually load up a UHaul with all I couldn’t part with and point it towards New Orleans. By the time I left, I had the sense that if I didn’t leave then I was going to die on that hill. I was glad to have escaped again but I’ll treasure those visits with George for what they meant to me getting to know him better man to man rather than man to boy, which had always been the dynamic.
It was also a way to have a little coda on my relationship with my dad in that the love that they bore for one another lived on in George, and it was a sweet connection to familial love and male bonding when I was feeling pretty lonely.
I’m not sure what happens after death, because if I’ve ever died before I don’t remember it. The religion and story we grew up with says that George went straight to heaven yesterday morning and there he got to be with my parents. I hope that’s true because that surely would be a joyous reunion. My dad, “Chester,” would have greeted “Wheel” fondly, and I’m sure he thanked his old friend for looking in on me, his boy in his absence. I know I’m very grateful for it. Grateful indeed.
Jeff Key is Walker County native who now travels the world as a writer, activist and veterans’ advocate. He credits his upbringing in Walker County for his Southern Gothic, Magical Realism, Dark Comedy take on life. “I am made of stories and Alabama clay. The water of the Black Warrior River flows through my veins and cicadas are the soundtrack to my life.”
