By David Rutter
The Boy was 8 when he first met Earl. The Boy was entirely normal in his appearance. Dark eyes, dark hair, skinny, fair skin baked from summers outside. Unremarkable.
Earl was 75, African-American, large bib overalls stretched horizontally at his wide midriff. He wore a red sweat-darkened baseball cap and sported a gray beard that had not been shaved regularly to its base for some years.
Their first encounter came in late June.
The Boy had embarked on his daily summer tour of the downtown in 1954 when he spied Earl and three companions. They were arrayed on the front benches at the ancient red brick Victorian courthouse in Danville, Kentucky.
The pathway past the Courthouse cut through the surrounding park to reach Main Street.
Fate and chance had assembled the cast, and the three old men sat unawares, waiting for the curtain to rise. But mostly, they were basking and sweating the way old men do even when they are happily idle. There were no female relatives in attendance to make them more presentable. They were men in their natural state.
The Boy entered the scene, stopped and plopped down without invitation. He is curious. He listened because that’s what 8-year-old ignorant boys do if they wish to become smarter. Earl asks The Boy who he is.
“David.”
“Good morning, Mister David. And welcome. I am Earl.”
And then with hardly a breath he resumed talking, though to no one in particular. It was as if he were talking to the universe at large.
“Do you know the best thing in your favorite foods is the exact same thing?” Earl tells his friends and the universe. He turns briefly to include The Boy in the conversation. “You cannot make grits, cornbread, corn on the cob, fried chicken or chocolate cake without it. And what is it, friends? It is big spoonfuls, big shovels of sweet yellow BUTTER!”
“You crazy,” Cletus says.
“You and the Good Lord know I’m not,” Earl replies with a smile as big as the summer sun.
They eventually all nod in agreement. Even The Boy who is abruptly part of the conversation even without trying.
It would be the first of 300 such days of accidental, but educational friendship on topics you’d hope would be covered in school, or home, or church but aren’t. The education and comradeship lasted three summers, but The Boy could not track the time with any precision, even if he wanted precision which he didn’t. Time went by too fast to count days or seconds.
But it left an imprint that lasted a lifetime. Every adult with any sense of cultural proportion first learns about fairness, justice and dignity outside of school. And Butter! And lard, if you’re lucky. This was Mister David’s first summer of that education.
Mister Earl eventually would share the lessons of heartache and hope. The yearnings of fatherhood and the anguish of lost children. But mostly he taught about happiness, because he was a joyful man.
But The Boy taught some lessons, too. One arrived on a day when a hometown cop spied The Boy and his courthouse coterie. The heavy-set man ambled up stiff, erect and menacing. All the while he tapped the night stick holstered to his belt, and talked down both literally and metaphorically to The Boy. “You got somewhere to be, boy?” he said. “You shouldn’t be a wastin’ your time with the likes of these.” He didn’t look at the three men. His sneer made the point about their irrelevance.
Of course, he didn’t say “these” to describe them, not when “the word” was so easily available to his custom. He said the one word The Boy had decided never to repeat. The “N word.” He’d heard various members of his extended family use the word when they spoke in low, hushed tones among themselves, supposedly outside the hearing range of children. But attending children heard them clearly enough to either adopt the word or reject it. The Boy said no in his mind, and would never relent.
Even without knowing the full texture of its history, he knew the officer’s word was meant to hurt and demean. To put black people in their place, even without black people being present. Most children understand that dynamic well enough without it being explained.
Children would adopt the code word as a way of sealing themselves to their family’s values. The Boy was not a joiner. He never learned to get along that way or felt the need. He was often a separated soul.
He also was often more comforted that he was not comfortable with such submissiveness. He picked his own teams. He knew where he stood, even then. He needed no referee on such matters.
Hearing a police officer use the word only hardened The Boy’s resolve. The officer was wielding the word like a club to demean and dismiss The Boy’s friends. It was a casual threat backed up by generations of sullenness.
The Boy was only 9, but he knew the power of words and threats well enough.
“I understand, Sergeant,” The Boy said as he counted the chevrons on the cop’s uniform sleeves to make sure of the rank. “I just stopped for a spell on my way to meet my uncle down at the men’s store where he works.”
The Boy pointed down the Main Street to a faded overhanging sign at the entrance to the Medaris Men’s Store. The Boy’s story was plausible enough to almost be true, though it was baldly false.
“But I’ll be going soon. Lots to do today. But it’s very nice to meet you, officer,” The Boy added with the big toothy smile he never used when he meant to be honestly jovial. The Boy hardly ever was jovial.
The Sergeant nodded, turned on his heel and strolled toward the courthouse all the while feeling slightly uneasy that he’d never been in charge of the encounter, though he wasn’t quite sure why.
The Boy allowed himself a brief smile and looked sideways with his eyes at Earl without ever moving his head. Earl and his friends had been listening, but without seeming to pay attention.
“Lord a mercy, Boy,” Earl eventually said as he mopped his wide forehead with a folded red and white handkerchief. “I have never heard anyone talk to the PO-lice that way. Did you know him?”
“Nah,” The Boy said with a deep sigh. “I just have lots of old relatives.”
Some skills needed little explanation. The Boy already had found navigational skills in his young life.
To his experience, school often was a tawdry repository of dim and useless rules. Dim inhabitants, too, intent on rules. He vowed not to be one of those dim people if he ever grew up, and sat today on the courthouse bench investing in his deeper education.
He didn’t know that’s what he was doing. But he was. His school experience only sharpened his attraction to the Courthouse gatherings. Some lads would get Harvard. The Boy had Earl, and was glad of the transaction.
He was a young man of doubts, facts and skepticism. Every day was another step on the path to….where? He did not know. But he was drawn to the road to find better answers than adults gave him. One fact, one conversation, one inspiration at a time. One confirmed doubt to counteract his already darkened view of the universe. One plausible answer and better questions. Given the right inspiration, he would be The Boy of ideas. Earl gave root to his better instincts.
Earl had answers. He was a prophet of sorts. When the Socrates of Kentucky spoke, The Boy listened as they all sat and sizzled under blue summer skies. The sun rose unblinkingly even higher, and they all sweated even though shaded by massive maples that lined the path to the Courthouse. It was a perfect day at the pinnacle of a perfect summer.
Yes, the old man said, people can be bad on purpose, even if they are not aware that’s what they are doing. They can even hate you for reasons you can’t understand. And the hate hurts. Always. Why do they spread the evilness? Who knows? The Boy knew this revelation to be true, though his life had not been hard or harsh up to now. “Nobody know my burdens ’cept God hisself …” Earl would repeat often. “Only a merciful God makes it OK on some hard days.”
And if you could, you would swear Earl said those precise words. Maybe he did. History must be real, though how does history become real if only your memory validates its accuracy? It was another mystery. But Earl’s words eventually all ran together in Mister David’s mind years later like drops of rain that swell into a river. The words might fear being swallowed up in time, but memories defy dissection when they join the torrent. The words become your soul if you listen.
Where do the ideas come from when they are constructing who you are? Maybe you know, and maybe only the residue of memories remains. Maybe you are only a puddle left from a rain storm.
But Earl and his similarly aged friends, Cletus and William, always sat together on the benches outside the ancient courthouse of Mister David’s summer hometown and served as magisterial interpreters. Danville, Kentucky, was a mint-julep Southern kind of place, and they all were Southern men. Southern men all know their identity.
That was not an incidental event to The Boy. He cherished the days, just as he dismissed the many dreary days of his official schooling.
They were Mister David’s unofficial life instructors because no one else had stood forth to claim the role. He called Earl by the “Mister Earl” title because Mister Earl had called him Mister, too. It seemed to Mister David that such respectful courtliness was a practice that gentlemen would favor. So he adopted manners.
Mister David did not realize that older black men in the 1950s often lapsed into this gentility automatically out of cultural deference to white children. It was a kind of mannerly, deferential racism though Mister David would have been shocked to know that. Jim Crow was gentle on white children, but a harsh companion if you were black.
Mister Earl would be Mister David’s best friend. He never had many. Or wanted many.
The Boy had no friends then, and would have no peers until he was a teen-ager. Mister Earl was a new, unique relationship. `Every one of their encyclopedic conversations ratified that unannounced bond. How strangely tolerant and gentle. How unanticipated that internship was in that time and that place.
Earl was a gentle man in a hard time.
As for their talks, who can swear to reconstructed perfect dialogue said at the perfect moment? Life would be more tolerable if apocryphal benchmarks all could be true. Symmetry on demand would explain a lot about life, if such perfect balance only existed.
But there were many such conversations on that courthouse bench although the precise details of each one are jumbled, just as real life is. But you should remember the particulars of your first real kiss with a girl, but you don’t, except that it was real and Carla Neidermeier in Mister David’s life most certainly was real, too.
Mister David recalled how he and Mister Earl’s friends talked about being men in a difficult world; how to deal with skunks both animal and human; how to avoid deep anger when it would do no good except as revenge. Even how and why to do right when no one but God was watching. Was God watching? Mister Earl said so. He was a believer and man sure of his conscience. Only The Boy had doubts about deities.
But The Boy’s memories of the old man were real and specific. His deep, round face was fixed in The Boy’s mind, even as The Boy became The Man.
The Boy might have been real, or perhaps just a character to enliven a story. Even The Boy did not always believe in his own reality other than as an observer. You cannot always prove that your life is real except as reflected light in a mirror. Decide that for yourself.
He and the old man sat through many days of three summers. And they talked. Often. Mister Earl and his friends were threads that would run eternally through the lad’s perceptions.
As far as The Boy could tell, Mister Earl was the smartest person he knew, though the roster of smart people in The Boy’s life was limited. Earl seemed a close enough replica of the real Socrates, if The Boy had known who Socrates was.
For 65 years, Earl had worked Kentucky’s fields of corn and tobacco for other men’s gain. He never succumbed to a noon-time heat stroke in the fields or let a team of plow-pulling mules get the better of him though they tried. He knew every variety of dirt and creature in the ground and pond. He knew everything that took wing. He knew rain that never stopped and fearsome lightning that shredded the sky. He knew the medicinal power of Bourbon. He knew souls. He seemed to have a clear view of himself.
He and his wife bore six children, though they lost two of them as infants. Mister Earl talked low and sad in rare moments about how he missed the two he could not save from unknown fevers. Mister Earl’s parents had been slaves as children. Earl and his wife were slaves to no man.
In fact, the old man knew rural philosophy, the verities of mamma’s corn bread and how hot the summer would unfold by looking at morning clouds. He knew right and wrong. How much more knowledge does any man need?
He, his friends and The Boy were men together, celebrating being men. They held a righteous place in the world. No one needs more. Not really.
Manhood is an acquired art; so they spat thick spittle a lot, as The Boy would recall much later, because spitting lubricates education, or so it seemed. The Boy knew his prescribed schoolhouse education as a Catholic son was not of much value because nuns would allow no spit in any of seven parochial schools he would attend.
Even when he became more ancient than the Old Man was then, he still could spit passably well. He ascribed that enduring skill to those summers when no potential rebuke of adults stood in the way of mastering the long range pah-TOO–ee.
Real spitters know that pah-Too-ee is a cartoon description that has never been real. Spitting skills involve liquid oral torque and muscle control. But it’s usually quiet if you do it the right way.
Southern gentlemen spit quietly in apprehension that a woman might be nearby and pass harsh judgment. Women do not customarily spit or understand its value.
And Great Expectorations are precise. Southern men always pursue precision, in their words as much as their spitting. Both need be targeted to be effective among Southern friends. Even if one friend is an 8-year-old white boy and the other is a 75-year-old black man.
Spitting well is a sign of good planning and a manly upbringing. And self control. Eventually Southern men try to chew tobacco, and managing your chaw is complex enough for even expert spitters.
So there they settled contentedly, a gaggle of old Southern men, spitting and whittling. No one told The Boy that he was not one of the old black men, and so he believed he was no less an equal colleague. No evidence suggested otherwise. The union provided a deep sense of comfort and belonging.
The gaggle allowed The Boy to whittle after a probationary spell because he had seemed well-possessed of his faculties and appeared moderately trustworthy. They even loaned him a multi-bladed, folding knife to gnaw at the maple twigs. He assaulted the twigs vigorously and had designs in mind, but never came close to an artful result as Mister Earl always did. The Boy’s outcome was always just a chewed-up twig.
The Boy would always have the ability to appear trustworthy and reliable even when evidence suggested such trust was misplaced. You learn to make people comfortable with your existence in their world, and then they tolerate your existence. It’s a form of rudimentary civilization. And social navigation.
Lucky is the person who can simply sit and whittle and spit and be among friends. They were equals. They and he took up summer residence on the park benches that lined the walkway lead ing from the street to the old, red courthouse. Summers were long and slow. And always Southern “2 dollar pistol” hot.
Southern hot is a special breed of hot, like Sahara hot, but drippy and wetter. Even the chrysanthemums and hydrangeas dripped from their resplendent flower beds. As for humans, sweat drenches the light hair on your arms and glistens the forehead; so it drips perpetually.
Breezes would lift the gentle bath of briny residue, and cool all your exposed skin if you were lucky.
It was lucky to be a young man of Danville, Kentucky, in June 1954.
The courthouse arose on the spacious corner campus adjacent to the federal building and shortly up the street from the A&P grocery beloved by The Boy.
The sidewalk-side portal to the A&P nearest the street unleashed a concoction of aromas Mister David would never experience exactly as he did in those summers. The automatic A&P front doors would swoosh open and admit or release a shopper and, in return, expel a belch of cool, moist, fragrant air. For just a second, a young visitor could see his breath hover, and would be blessed with coolness. Precious coolness scented with fresh vegetables stacked in open coolers.
The Victorian Renaissance courthouse, the second to sit on the corner of Main and Broadway, arose in 1862 after the first one was engorged by fire. There the citizens of Boyle County administered rudimentary justice behind its four columns.
Mister David was born down the street at the Danville General Hospital though his family quickly set up residence in wild and unkempt Florida. The hospital is still there, too.
As for human interaction, you must think and rethink about the events of your youngest summers of wonder. Test them. Put them in context. Mister David became comfortable that all he remembered was not the dubious fantasy of doppelganger memory. It was as he remembered because he returned to those streets and porches 50 years later and the streets endured, as did his memories of them.
Those summers caused The Boy to be who he would become, because he learned both subtle and grand insights in those years that he had never known. And not only that, he had been ignorant of his ignorance. That’s the original canvas of a child’s natural state.
So the old men set quietly in his memory, as they often sat on the benches in 1954. And ’55, and ’56 and then, he could not remember after that.
The men were old because they had to be old. Too old to work the tobacco fields. So circumstance gave them time and inspiration at last to do absolutely nothing as they chose. The Boy was 8 and then 9 and 10 and everybody looked ancient to him. His parents were old even though they must have been barely 30 or so.
When you are 8, the world is cranky and old.
But the truth is that many white men of a certain age — which is to say The Boy’s eventual age — grew up in the South that predated the Civil Rights Law and are tempted to believe they had some false enlightenment provided to them early on. Exposure to elderly black people offered that leavening, and explain why they have lived lives of presumed higher dignity. At least they think so.
The three elderly black men were the only African-Americans he would know until he was fully grown. People lived permanently apart and did not mix then, even white people of different cultural heritages. The Boy’s family would never have had servants of any race, even had they been moneyed. The McGlones were genteel “lace curtain” Irish, and servitude was an intolerable stain on the world. It was a condition the British would employ. The British were abominations in his family and beneath Irish contempt, but not so isolated from that contempt to express it regularly.
The Boy adopted none of his family’s disdain for people of different backgrounds because he knew his kin to be strong-willed but wrong on most things that mattered.
So that explanation for The Boy’s lifelong view of relationships was closed and settled, and he was glad. People were either good or bad, either worth your time or not. The three old men were his friends.The fact they were black was never a consideration even worth the discussion.
Friends were friends. Enough said.
His family would not have consented to such a relationship had he asked them. So he didn’t ask.
Even at 8, he was an independent man on the loose in his original hometown, and he knew every block of the downtown from the Southern Railway yards, past Centre College to the prim antebellum main streets. Dispatched free and unmanaged, he prowled solo and unfettered every summer as a visitor to a beloved but otherwise childless great aunt and uncle.
He was not in any sort of official summer school. But wisdom is a tricky, elusive critter. You never know when some stray insight sneaks up on you, as it did for him on that park bench.
As a sort of unannounced mascot to the old black men, he mostly listened as they talked. He did not chat. What of life did he know that was worth sharing? Nothing, he figured. Boys sitting among real men do not chat with their betters, as that would be silly and unmanly. And were you to speak, the men might recognize you had nothing to offer. So he listened , and nodded agreeably when appropriate.
He seldom trusted anyone else in his life because he had already learned to be cagey around dim people who populated much of his life. These men were anything but dim.
As much as he could tell later, The Boy was burdened with no profound thoughts. He was growing up. He was The Boy.
But he did learn by absorbing. The first important lessons of life are usually the most meaningful, even if you don’t know that distinction until much later.
He learned he was just a guy who spent lovely, lazy afternoons with other guys. It was his ambition to be good at doing nothing much. He earned his dignity by returning their respect. It was horse trading. That’s how respect works.
Men together, doing as little as possible under the searing Southern sun
The men once had young families and jobs and troubles that Mister David only vaguely comprehended when they spoke of them. They all were just guys, even less complicated than he seemed. But Mister David knew they did not trust in life’s goodness and fairness as he generally did. The world had done nothing to hurt The Boy as yet.
Their bond as odd contemporaries was the utter plainness of them. Noble plainness.
The Boy understood from the beginning he was more unadorned and unaccomplished than any of them, for they had raised children and earned money to feed them. The Boy had thought that a splendid achievement. They had worked hard. Their sweat had deep meaning. They had sweated in labor made noble for why they did it.
They were feeding their families.
And their children. Often feeding many kin. They shared their lives and good fortune.
The old men thus became his first real friends. They needed no rules or boundaries. They laughed and often made gentle fun of each other as friends do.
And when the end-of-the-business-day moment arrived for Mister David to connect with Uncle Dewey Huff at his Men’s Store encampment farther down Main, they always took their leave with exaggerated grace and flourishes. Partings between Southern men are to be announced graciously. Courtly manners are to be observed.
Then the daily interlude near the courthouse would end. Mister David’s time with the men ended almost every afternoon about the same time. Four, or so. That gave him time to dawdle in his final leg of travel to the store. “Not a store,” his Great Uncle Dewey had corrected him. “It’s a haberdashery.”
“Difference between chicken salad, and chicken somethin’ else,” Mister Earl noted. Earl and his friends had never stepped inside the haberdashery. They were not welcome there.
And then came the last day and those summers ended forever.
Life inevitably changed forever, as it always does. Mister David was 11 when he raced to the courthouse for the first day of summer. The group was assembled, though Mister David looked and could not see Earl.
”Where’s Mister Earl? ” he asked .
Mister Cletus lowered his face and spoke softly.
“Earl is gone. He passed this winter, just after Christmas. We all went to visit him in the hospital. He seemed peaceful.”
The Boy was overtaken with choking grief, but he did not cry, at least on the outside. On the inside, he sobbed. A deep forlorn sadness grabbed his breath and soul, and would not let go for minutes. His best friend was gone, and neither had a chance to say goodbye. That was wrong. It was undignified. Unmanly. Partings demand ritual, else there is only loss and heartache.
He was tempted not to return the next day, or ever again, because Mister Earl was gone. He could punish the universe for its cruelty. But that was not his way, because that was not Mister Earl’s way. “Don’t pout,” he remembered Mister Earl saying. “Men don’t pout. There is no use in it. Get up and move because that’s all life is. Moving from here to yonder and somewhere’s else.”
So The Boy came back to the benches the next morning only to find a stranger sitting in Earl’s customary spot.
He rose to meet The Boy. “Good morning. Are you Mister David?”
“Yes, sir, I am.”
“I am George Smith. Mister Earl was my father. He hoped to say goodbye to you, but time would not allow it. But he wanted me to visit you here, and let you and all his old friends know how important you were to him.”
The Boy was almost speechless. “Yes, Mister Earl was important to me, too. He was my best friend in the entire world.” He did not wish to embarrass himself or Mister Earl’s son with tears. He held them back with all the strength he had.
Earl’s son paused to consider his father’s friend. What a strange white boy he is. His mind returned to the moment. “Before I leave,” Earl’s son said, “I’d like to give you something. He wanted you to have something to remember him.”
With that he pulled Earl’s folded red and white handkerchief from his pocket. Unwrapping its corners carefully, Earl’s son revealed the handsome, multi-bladed folding knife that had been Mister Earl’s whittling pride. “This is yours now,” Earl’s son said as he placed it in The Boy’s palm.
It was a man’s knife, a man’s implement. It was not for children to own. And to The Boy, it was a treasure.
With that moment, The Boy shook the 60-year old man’s hand earnestly, opened an invisible door and strode metaphysically into manhood. It was as if he stood before the A&P’s magic doorway to another world.
He stepped forever into a different universe. Having gone there, he would never return to childhood, even if he had tried. It was gone.
He would not return to the courthouse sojourn again. Families move; homes shift; life changes and evolves. He saw the green refuge from the street when he drove past it every few years as an adult lured back by Kentucky memories. But he never stopped because what made it special was lost in the wind.
But The Boy knew he would never be alone in that life. Memories are building blocks that rise from your childhood if you are lucky. Mister Earl and his friends on the courthouse benches would be with him always.
He did not seek out the courthouse again for 50 years. No need. Go and live your life, Earl had once told him. And I did.
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