MUST BE THURSDAY

Richie ran to the screened door when he heard the car pull up into the driveway; it was what he expected—the blue and white Pontiac that his Aunt Ora Belle drove.  She always came once a week to see her mother, Rose Anna, who lived with Richie’s family.  Richie’s daddy, Russ, was the baby brother of Ora Belle and had agreed to take care of his mother in exchange for his siblings signing a quitclaim deed on the old house and the thirty-five acres that went with it.  All that had happened quite some time ago and Russ and his wife Sarah had built a new house across the road from the old one up in the broom straw field.  Of course, little six-year-old Richie was oblivious to all these facts; however, he did know that his Aunt Ora Belle came to see them once a week and that in addition to a big hug she always brought him a little something, some kind of a trinket or toy.  When she hugged him he always noticed the perfume she wore; it was always the same scent, a kind of gardenia smell.  What with her visits being so methodical and the perfume never changing little Richie had come to believe that was what Thursdays smelled like.  His mother had laughed out loud when the chubby little boy had divulged his theory to her but she had lauded him on his creativity.

“That’s a pretty clever way to put things together Richie, but Ora Belle’s perfume ain’t got nothing to do with the fact that it is Thursday; if she changed up and came on Friday instead she would still smell the same and it would still be Friday,” she had explained to the six-year-old.  Richie had looked at her dubiously, not quite ready to have his revelation refuted, but he had eventually agreed that his mother might have a valid point.

Ora Belle got out of the Pontiac and stepped up onto the side porch.  Sarah opened the screened door for her sister-in-law, Richie right on her heels.  Ora Belle’s mother, Rose Anna, pushed herself up from her old rocking chair and stood grinning at her daughter as she came into the living room.  Granny, as Sarah and all the kids called her, had no teeth and wore her hair all skinned back from the front and tied in a bun in the back.  She had a piece of a twig hanging from her snuff-stained mouth; the twig was a piece of red oak, what Granny referred to as her “toothbrush”.  Ever so often Richie was told to go to the red oak tree behind the woodshed and collect several pieces of the red oak about the size of a pencil.  He was instructed to cut them so that they were about six inches long; then he was told to get a hammer and pulverize the end of the twigs about an inch and a half up, which left about four and a half inches for a handle.  The whole idea was to create a method of conveyance to get the snuff into Granny’s mouth.  Once she had the “toothbrushes” she would put the pulverized end in her mouth to moisten it and then dip it into the tin of Railroad Mills she had and then put it into her mouth.  Richie had watched her in her own method of snuff dipping countless times and sometimes would giggle when he thought about her calling the twigs “toothbrushes” when Granny didn’t have a tooth in her head.

When Ora Belle got inside she grinned real big and gave her mother a big hug and then bent down and hugged her little nephew.  Sarah and Ora Belle smiled and nodded to each other.

“Why don’t you have a seat in that little rocker next to your mama Ora Belle,” Sarah said, and Ora Belle took a seat.  Granny was glad to see her sit; getting up and down was pretty difficult for the old woman, her having turned eighty-five on her birthday in November.  Once she got going she could move around, although it was a slow go.  Her left leg had bad arthritis and stayed pretty stiff so she sort of pulled it along after her good right leg; the condition gave the appearance of a kind of lurching forward.  Her frailty did not stop her from her activities however, one of her favorites was tending to her flowers.  She would don one of her homemade cloth bonnets and get her walking stick and go out and “scratch around” in her flower beds whenever the weather was good.  Little Richie’s job was to carry chicken manure from the chicken house and shovel it around the flowers wherever Granny told him to deposit it.  Then she would get a small short-handled rake and distribute the chicken manure the way she wanted it around the flowers.

“You can’t pile this chicken manure up too thick on these flowers, ‘cause if you do it will burn them clean up,” she had explained to the little boy.  “Chicken manure is the best fertilizer in the world but you gotta be careful with it.”

Granny had a lot of flowers and bushes, quince and spirea out on the front bank at the road and then rose bushes and irises down toward the chicken house, but her pride and joy was her group of red hot pokers.  She had them clustered together near the roses and she paid very special attention to them.  The plants would send up spires four to five tall topped off with the flower, a long conical situation with orangey-red at the top and then fading to a yellow color at the bottom of the six to eight-inch long bloom.  The blossom was made up of individual pieces about an inch and a half long attached to the spire, sort of in the fashion of a round hairbrush, except tapered.  Richie’s other job in Granny’s flower garden was carrying water to the plants; she had to kind of get after him pretty good to keep everything in order, Richie having a little bit of a lazy streak in him.  One thing she never had to remind him of was taking care of his favorite flowers, the two pink hibiscus bushes that flanked the front porch.  Richie loved the big pink blossoms and the long white pistils that emanated from the throat of the blossom.  He was fascinated with the way they opened early in the morning and then closed a few hours later.  Richie remembered that he had been very disappointed one summer morning when he had slept kind of late and when he had rushed to look at the hibiscus they had already closed up.

Ora Belle sat down in the little rocker and put her pocketbook down beside her.

“Well let’s see what I have in here”, she mused, scratching in the purse and pulling out a little top.  Richie’s eyes lit up when he saw the present and he took it and thanked his aunt.

“If you get you a piece of string and wrap around it and give it a twirl it will spin real good”, Ora Belle said and the little boy went off in search of string. 

“Well how have you been mama?” she asked Granny, reaching again into her purse and pulling out a tin of Sweet Peach snuff.  Ora Belle pulled her lower lip out and filled it with the powdered mixture; when she finished with the application her bottom lip bulged out a good three-eighths of an inch.  Sarah watched as Ora Belle took her snuff and then went over to where Granny’s spit can was and took it from the right side of Granny’s chair and placed it in between the two rockers.  The “spit can” was a Luzianne coffee can with toilet tissue placed in the bottom.  After a few minutes of dipping, the mother and daughter would occasionally pick up the “spit can” and let a brown stream emit from their mouth.

“I guess purty good, although that arthritis in my leg has been givin’ me a fit, as usual,” Granny said, peering at her daughter over her coke bottle glasses.  Granny had undergone cataract surgery ten years in the past and ever since had worn the very thick glasses set in the silver-colored frames.  Sarah remembered how careful the old woman was required to be subsequent to the surgery.

“It is imperative that she move around very little,” Dr. Tyner had told her and Russ.  “She should stay in bed as much as possible and be flat on her back; course you all will need to feed her and administer to her with a bedpan,” the doctor had told them.  Sarah recalled that she had thought that Dr. Tyner had sounded a little high falutin’ talking ‘bout “administering” the bedpan.

“Doubt he would be using such a big ol’ fifty-cent word if he was having to wipe her rear end,” she had thought to herself after hearing the doctor’s orders.  Sarah typically stayed in the background during these weekly visits, going about her household duties like ironing and mending clothes, coming back into the living room once in a while and sitting down to take a rest and be sociable.

“How ‘bout that Dr. Riddle?’ Ora Belle said, looking over at Sarah.  Sarah, like everybody else in Gaston County, was familiar with what had happened just a few days before.  Dr. Riddle had a very thriving practice over in South Gastonia, where the hospital was.  Like in most towns the Southside housed a large percentage of the colored population, and that group made up the vast majority of Dr. Riddle’s patients.  The Doctor had gone out on a house call late one Saturday evening; the patient was in the back room of a “shot house”, a little house where men would come to play cards and drink moonshine, furnished for a fee by the proprietor.  Additionally, the man running the show would “pinch the pot” of the card game, which meant that ten percent of the ante would be set aside for him each hand.  When Dr. Riddle got the call and determined the address he knew exactly where it was; he even knew the old lady and her son who ran the “shot house” by name.  The old lady was a woman in her late seventies by the name of Alma Gillespie and her entrepreneurial son went by the name of “Hitch” due to a limp he had acquired from being shot in the left quadriceps with a small gauge shotgun.  His given name was Beauregard.  According to eyewitness accounts on the scene, mostly from the card players, Dr. Riddle had arrived and gone into the backroom to take care of the ailing Alma.  After the doctor had been in there for about ten minutes an argument erupted at the card table; Dr. Riddle had come into the kitchen where the game was and asked the men if they could keep the noise down;  It was at that moment the trouble maker, who claimed that someone was dealing off the bottom of the deck, glared at Dr. Riddle and came toward him with a kitchen knife that he had grabbed up from the counter.  Dr. Riddle, according to the witnesses, quickly reached into his pocket and withdrew a six-inch switchblade knife, hitting the blade release button as it exited his pocket.  The trouble maker, a brick mason from nearby Bessemer City by the name of Henry Neeley, lunged at Dr. Riddle; Dr. Riddle had dodged the thrust of the mason and had slashed at the man’s abdomen several times, back and forth horizontally.  Henry Neeley dropped his weapon at this point and fell to the floor; that was when Dr. Riddle had hurried back to the room where his patient was and brought his black bag in and started to work on Henry.  The card players had torn up an old sheet and handed the pieces to the doctor in his attempt to stop the bleeding but the cuts were too numerous and too deep.  In a few minutes Dr. Riddle, after checking Henry Neeley’s pulse several times, stood up from the bloody scene and went over to the kitchen sink and washed his hands, using the tin of Boraxo powder that was sitting on the counter.  He then explained to the card players what had happened.

“Belly wounds like that are tough, especially when they are so numerous and deep.  If the wounds had been on an extremity such as an arm or leg I could have put a tourniquet on the affected area and he more than likely would have survived, but the midsection was what I could get to and he was really coming after me,” the doctor explained.   “I am very sorry fellas”.

“We saw it all Dr. Riddle and we know you didn’t have no choice.  Just like that damned dumbass Henry Neeley to screw up a good card game.  You know we will all stand behind you.  How’s momma?” Beauregard had reportedly said in the aftermath. 

“I reckon he is still over there in the jail,” Sarah said, looking over at Ora Belle as she deposited a long brown stream into the coffee can. 

“Sure nuff is, and charged with murder.  But I have heard that they are gonna dismiss the charges as soon as there is a hearing, what with all the support Dr. Riddle has in colored town.  They say all them card players is gonna testify on the doctor’s behalf.  You know they say that Dr. Riddle was in the backroom taking care of Alma Gillespie when the police came and arrested him,” Ora Belle explained.  Sarah nodded and looked at the two spit can-sharing women.  Granny kept snuff in her mouth almost all the time and when Ora Belle came to visit she did the same but it had come to be understood that no one must know about the daughter’s dipping involvement.  Sarah remembered several years ago when Ora Belle had begun the weekly visits; Sarah had noticed that Ora Belle had looked at her kind of funny when she had taken that first dip.  When her visit had concluded and the goodbyes were said Ora Belle had discreetly motioned for Sarah to follow her out to the Pontiac. 

“I hope you don’t mind not mentioning me dipping snuff when I come to see mom; you see, I don’t do it at home, not one lick, and Chris would have a fit if he knew about it,” Ora Belle had confided, and Sarah swore that her husband Chris would never hear the first word about snuff dipping from her.  Afterward Sarah had chuckled when she thought back about Ora Belle’s “secret snuff dipping life”.  Sarah understood the whole idea about Chris, him being a pretty strict minded man who would have nothing to do with playing cards on Sunday, and she thought she had figured the other aspect of the secret snuffing; Ora Belle ran with a pretty well to do social crowd in Dallas and they might look a little askance at their bridge partner if they found out she was a dipper.

After a while Richie grew tired of playing with the top and decided to go in the house and see if he could get something to eat.  He found his mother in the kitchen.

“Momma, can I have a butter and sugar biscuit?” he asked, peering through the cased opening between the kitchen and the living room.  Ora Belle and Granny were still talking about Dr. Riddle and how they figgered he would get off.

“Sure honey”, Sarah said and reached into the container on the oven where she kept day old biscuits.  Sarah made biscuits at every meal; “once you start doing that they all expect it”, she thought to herself as she took a knife and cut the biscuit open.  Then she got the cake of butter out of the Leonard refrigerator and sliced a thin piece off it and placed it on the open biscuit, topping off the butter with a sprinkling of sugar.  She put the biscuit back together and handed it to the little boy, who took it from her and went into the living room to listen to the conversation.  Sarah thought about how it wouldn’t be too long before she would need to start fixing dinner which would include another round of biscuits; she really didn’t mind all the biscuit making for they never went to waste.  In addition to butter and sugar biscuits for Richie a lot of the day old biscuits went to make coffee soup.  Coffee soup was a concoction that Granny had introduced to her new daughter in law years in the past; it was a time honored supplement to the standard fare of ham and eggs and red eye gravy that was the norm in the Hoffman home.  Granny had explained to Sarah that “all young’uns need coffee soup, and of course everybody else too.  To make coffee soup you got a tall glass and filled it about two thirds with coffee; then you put in several spoonfuls of sugar, and finally crumbled day old biscuits into the mixture.  Sarah had to admit that it was a quite tasty concoction and it certainly was a practical solution to getting rid of the biscuit bounty.

Richie walked into the living room and sat down on the worn yellow plastic covered sofa.  He felt very at ease being around Granny and Ora Belle because they always went out of their way to include him in the conversation somehow and both of them got a kick out of Richie’s boundless curiosity and imagination. 

Richie waited patiently while the two women finished up with the exploits of the now famous Dr. Riddle and then finished the last bite of the butter and sugar biscuit. 

“Granny, will you tell the story about Grampa Hoffman’s oldest brother and what happened to him way back in the olden days”, Richie asked.  The two women grinned at the little boy; they were accustomed to this kind of request from Richie.  Hardly a Thursday visit came and went without a request to tell some story from antiquity.

“Sure son, just let me get a fresh dip of snuff”, Granny told Richie, and both she and her daughter loaded up once again, Granny plunging her “toothbrush” into the Railroad Mills and Ora Belle pulling out her lower lip and filling it up with Sweet Peach.

“Well son, way back in the 1800s after the Civil War they wuz a bunch of people called the Ku Klux Klan, and they were awful secret about things; in fact, they would ride around on horses at night when they were doing their business and they would be dressed up in white sheets and white hats that came to a point at the top”, the old woman explained.

Richie had heard his sisters talk about this group but they either didn’t want to give out details or they didn’t know them; either way it left a void in his brain about the Klansmen, and he had a compelling need to know.

“Why were they so secret about what they were doing; was it illegal or something?” he asked.

“During this time after the war they wuz a lot of strong feelins between the colored and the whites; a lot of the whites resented the fact that the colored weren’t slaves anymore, and some of the whites felt like the colored were bein’ mighty uppity and all and sometimes at night they would dress up like I told you and go off and get some colored men and whip them.  They wore them costumes so that nobody would recognize them”, Granny said, pausing to minister to the spit can.

Richie’s eyes were bright as he listened to the story. 

“So they would beat up them poor colored people, just for nothing? Richie asked, his face getting kind of screwed up like it always did when he didn’t understand something.

“Naw, there wuz more to it than that; them Kluxers also did a lot of good.  Like if they wuz somebody in the community that wuddn’t takin’ care of their family they would pay them a visit and get everything all straightened out”, Granny said, and Ora Belle nodded her head.

“What do you mean pay them a visit and straighten them out?”  Richie asked, his face getting more contorted by the second.

“Well they would give them a whipping and tell them why they were doing it”, Ora Belle offered with Granny nodding in agreement.  “Then hopefully they would straighten up and take care of their family like they are sposed to”.

“So I reckon they done some good along the way, even though I don’t reckon them colored men that got whipped were so awful happy”, Richie surmised.  The women chuckled at this comment and told him that he “purty much had the idea”.

“So what happened to Grampa’s brother and what was his name”, Richie asked.

“His name was Kelly, but everybody just called him Kell.  See he wuz one of the Kluxers, but since they wore them sheets and all nobody knew he wuz in with them.  So one night they were over next to Oodley Creek taking care of a colored man who had been actin’ up and the story goes that somehow or other the sheet got pulled off Kell and them black people saw who it wuz.  See, they had pulled the colored man out of his little ramshackle house and had whipped him in his own front yard.  Well when that colored man’s whole family saw Kell, and they knew him, he knew that he wuz in big trouble”, the old woman said.

“Yep, Uncle Kell knew very well that the sheriff of Gaston County would be coming for him the next day”, Ora Belle added.

“So what did he do? Richie asked, his green eyes wide with wonder.

“We don’t know for sure, but we do know that his horse came back to the house late that night and nobody ever saw Kell or heard from him ever again”, Granny said.

“Wow, so he could be anywhere”, Richie stated, his mind in a whir wondering if he had kin people in Tennessee or Florida, or even California.

“That’s is most assuredly right, young man”, Ora Belle told Richie.  “But I reckon we will never know”.

Richie went quiet for several minutes and Granny and Ora Belle started talking about the Hoffman reunion that was coming up and how it was gonna be up at Russell Payseur’s house because he had a real shady yard and there was a pond if any of the people wanted to go fishing after they had lunch.  Russell was married to Bertie Brite, Ora Belle’s sister and Granny’s oldest daughter.

After a while Richie spoke up. 

“So I reckon the colored and the whites get along a lot better than they did in them olden days, right? Richie asked the two women. 

“Probably true, but what makes you ask that? Ora Belle queried.

“Cause if that wasn’t the case them colored card players would have done something turble to Dr. Riddle instead of telling the doctor that they would testify for him” Richie replied, a look of self assurance on his little face. 

Both the women nodded and looked at each other.  Richie left the living room and went outside.  Granny and Ora Belle had just about talked out; Sarah had finished preparations for dinner and came into the living room.

“Why don’t you stay for dinner Ora Belle”, Sarah said, knowing that Ora Belle would decline; she always stayed for about the same amount of time and then would head back to Dallas. 

“Thanks Sarah, but Chris will be waiting for me when I get home; Thursdays we always go down to the Shamrock Diner to eat dinner.  It’s a nice little tradition”, Ora Belle added.  “Can I rinch my mouth out in the kitchen?” Ora Belle asked.  Sarah assured her she could. 

Richie was standing on the back porch when he saw his aunt go in the kitchen.  When she went over to the sink he knew that she was getting ready to depart. 

“No snuff evidence will be left on that woman”, he said out loud before he went into the kitchen.  Ora Belle had gone back into the living room and was saying her goodbyes when he came in the room and stood beside his mother.  Ora Belle looked at the little boy and said “come here and give me my goodbye hug”.  Richie could smell the gardenia perfume when his aunt hugged.  He thought how the two hugs were different, the one when she arrived and the other when she departed.  The first hug was just pure Thursday smell, but the second was a little different; it was the Thursday smell with a hint of Sweet Peach snuff.