Boys Life

gotten past the fourth grade. Sometimes I wondered how my dad had turned out as he had, having lived seventeen years in the Jaybird’s strange shadow. As I’ve said, though, my grandfather didn’t really start going crazy until after I was born, and I guess there were sensible genes on my grandmother’s side of the family. I never knew what might happen during that week of suffering, but I knew it would be an experience.
    The house was comfortable, but really nothing special. The land around it was, except for the stunted corn field, a garden and a small plot of grass, mostly forest; it was where the Jaybird stalked his prey. Grandmomma Sarah was genuinely glad to see us when we arrived, and she ushered us all into the front room, where electric fans stirred the heat. Then the Jaybird made his appearance, clad in overalls, and he carried with him a big glass jar full of golden liquid that he announced to be honeysuckle tea. “Been brewin’ it for two weeks,” he said. “Lettin’ it mellow, ya see.” He had mason jars all ready for us. “Have a sip!”
    I have to say it was very good. Everybody but the Jaybird had a second glass of it. Maybe he knew how potent the stuff was. Within twelve hours, I would be sitting on the pot feeling as if my insides were flooding out, and at home Dad and Mom would be just as bad off. Grandmomma Sarah, who was surely used to such concoctions by now, would sleep like a log through the whole disgusting episode, except in the dead of night she was liable to make a high, banshee keening noise in her sleep that was guaranteed to lift the hair right off your scalp.
    Anyway, the time came when Dad and Mom had to be getting back to Zephyr. I felt my face sag, and I must’ve looked like a wounded puppy because Mom put her arm around me on the porch and said, “You’ll be all right. Call me tonight, okay?”
    “I will,” I vowed, and I watched them as they drove away. The dust settled over the brown cornstalks. Just one week, I thought. One week wouldn’t be so bad.
    “Hey, Cory!” the Jaybird said from his rocking chair. He was grinning, which was a bad sign. “Got a joke for ya! Three strings walk into a bar. First string says, ‘Gimme a drink!’ Bartender looks at him, says, ‘We don’t serve strings in here, so get out!’ Second string tries his luck. ‘Gimme a drink!’ Bartender says, Told you we don’t serve strings in here, so you hit the trail!’ Then the third string’s just as thirsty as the devil, so he’s got to try, too. ‘Gimme a drink!’ he says. Bartender looks at him squinty-eyed, says, ‘You’re a danged-gone string, too, ain’t ya?’ And the string, he puffs out his chest and says, ‘’Fraid not!’” The Jaybird hooted with laughter, while I just stood there staring at him. “Get it, boy? Get it? ‘‘Fraid not’?” He frowned, the joke over. “Hell!” he growled. “You got a sense of humor as bad as your daddy’s!”
    One week. Oh, Lord.
    There were two subjects the Jaybird could talk about for hours on end: his survival through the Depression, when he held such jobs as coffin polisher, railroad brakeman, and carnival roustabout, and his success as a young man with women, which according to him was enough to turn Valentino green. I would have thought that was a big deal if I’d known who Valentino was. Anytime the Jaybird and I were away from the reach of my grandmother’s ear, he might launch into a tale about “Edith the preacher’s daughter from Tupelo” or “Nancy the conductor’s niece from Nashville” or “that buck-toothed girl used to hang around eatin’ candy apples.” He rambled on about his “jimbob” and how the girls got all fired up about it. Said there used to be jealous boyfriends and husbands after him by the dozens, but he always escaped whatever trap was closing around him. Once, he said, he’d hung on to the bottom of a railroad trestle above a hundred-foot gorge while two men with shotguns stood right above him, talking about how they were going to skin him alive and nail his hide to a tree. “Thing was,” the Jaybird said to me as he chewed lustily on a weed, “I spoiled them girls for every other fella. Yeah, me and my jimbob, we had us a time.” Then, inevitably, his eyes would take on a sad cast, and the young man with the flaming jimbob would start slipping away. “I bet you I wouldn’t know one of them girls today if I passed her on the street. No sir. They’d be old women, and I