Crabapple: A True Story of Hope & Miracles

By Anthony Dallmann-Jones

CRABAPPLE, a charming, entertaining, funny, meaningful, near-magical yet non-fiction book, honors the ninth year of boyhood as a magical time when boys who believe themselves to be invincible sit on the brink of realizing their mortality. It is a time of passion and serious dedication to whatever adventure is at hand. It is a time when boys believe they will be able to fly from a rooftop with the right formula of tablecloth, wind speed and a large umbrella. This book is intended to reawaken the reader's own memories of that thrilling year when all things were possible.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jul 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781483531908

Book preview

COTTAGE

∼ Chapter 1 ∼

CRABAPPLE

The accepted mainstream American belief is that life starts at birth. Some Asian cultures believe that it begins at conception. I maintain that neither is true for a lot of us. It wasn't for me. In retrospect I know that my life actually started with a second birth much later, and it was a crabapple that finally enticed me belatedly from the birth canal. Call me a slow bloomer because, according to my Alabama birth certificate from the Mobile Infirmary, I was actually nine years old at the time and in the fourth grade.

My other life – the trance life – began as a conception out of wedlock – a HUGE deal in the South then, let me tell you. I was born to a woman who certainly did not want a child and to a guy who had no money to get me out of the hospital until the last minute thanks to a serendipitous overtime check the weekend I was to go home. He rode to the hospital on his bicycle to pay the final bill as he had no car. It probably didn't happen but I can picture him taking me home on the bike, too, in the basket with my Mom riding on the handlebars. Ouch.

The day before I was to leave the hospital Japan blew the hell out of Pearl Harbor, slightly overshadowing my arrival home and probably just about as welcome.

But I digress: Again, my real introduction into Life started because of a crabapple.

Let me explain.

In 1950, most all my friends and I were poor. Some of my classmates at Longfellow Elementary in Tuscaloosa came to school without shoes. By the end of the school day their feet would be dusty orange from the Alabama red clay that constituted our playground – a natural deodorant, that clay. The only kid I knew who had any money was Moody Snow. His father was a dermatologist. Moody had an electric train on a big board with little buildings and things. The rest of us lusted after that train. It was a treat to get invited to Moody's house. Besides the train his Mom made us snacks. Poor kids are always hungry. Nobody was overweight and many of our legs looked like sticks. We were wiry, tough and usually – well – tousled would be a nice way to put it.

We all lived in rentals except for Moody Snow. My family's apartment was university student housing modified from former ROTC army barracks near the University of Alabama campus. My stepfather went to college on the GI bill at the University of Alabama and worked as a desk clerk for .50 cents an hour at the Moon Winx Motel. My mother worked at the First National Bank as a teller. I don't know what she made salary-wise, but we eked out a living like a lot of people did for years after The Great War. We ate sparsely, and only at mealtime and you better be there to guarantee your portions. I was always home at mealtimes. The word seconds was equivalent to privileged.

I received a dime each weekend to go to the Ritz Theatre to become enraptured by a cowboy double feature along with a serial, a cartoon, previews and the Movietone News. I always went with my best friend, Ira Arnold. Usually we would stay to watch it all twice. If I couldn't wangle an extra dime to buy some popcorn, we were known to eat candy off the floor – if it wasn't sticky. [See what I mean? This is stuff you shouldn't ever tell anyone.]

Up until my second birth, those Saturday matinees were part of my life support system. Without that Saturday oasis of entertainment, I believe I would have jumped off a bridge, because I had that thought a lot. I mean times were hard and I did not know why, there always seemed to be money in my step-dad's wallet. Later I learned it was because 100s of thousands of men left the military after the war, production was down, work was scarce and three workers for every job. Many women became unemployed almost as soon as the war ended. You were lucky to have a job—any job. No one complained about their jobs. No one. There were very few overweight people. Hand me downs were standard in families. The oldest child grew up fast.

I was the only child until I was ten.

∼ Chapter 2 ∼

NEIGHBORS & DANGEROUSNESS

Neighbor kids, Sammy Boshell, along with his little nebbish nameless brother, and Bobby Black, Stevie Dill and I used to walk the trestles beneath the railroad that crossed a gorge outside of town. I would think how quick it could be over if I took a dive into the 3 inches of creek water from 80 feet up. The trestle network was a series of 10 x 10 support stringers. Stevie crawled across them; Bobby the Brave inched across upright; and, I would run them. Sammy Boshell and nameless would just stand at the end and dare and double-dare without their chicken feet ever touching a stringer. Other nine year-old guys who thought they were bulletproof were in awe of my daredevil ways. It wasn't courage on my part. They didn't know I could have cared less whether I fell or not. Life was hard on the inside as well as on the outside then.

I don't remember how many times we did those stringers in the stifling Alabama summer heat. Once we decided to race the train across the gorge by running ahead of it. Stupid, stupid. We barely made it and the engineer probably nearly had a heart attack. After the train passed we all picked ourselves up from the gravel we had been hugging. When we looked at each other our eyes were dancing—only way I know how to say it. We knew why we did it. We felt electrically alive! But we did not need to do it again.

I have learned since then that nine year-old boys are distinctively different from ten year-old boys. Probably girls are, too, but I was too busy being a boy to notice. Up until the tenth year, boys cannot think abstractly. They think concretely, in the here and now, and are not capable of theoretical thought. But around ten, the brain actually gains some extra material, a flap of gray matter; and, from then on, boys can comprehend the abstract, including the realization that they will someday die. Up until then, they are invincible. At the last gasp of the single digit decade boys are, to put it mildly, conflicted. They walk the edge of one of the most profound paradoxical truths: I am eternal, yet I could be snuffed out in a heartbeat.

These young nine year-old rogues spend inordinate amounts of energy testing the truth. They are very serious about it all because to them it IS a matter of life and death. Everything is: Who bats first quickly becomes just as critical a discussion as a nuclear arms treaty debate.

We had real BB gun duels, and conducted mud ball fights with embedded rocks and a mash of smelly wild onions, crushed and soaked overnight and carefully crafted into their core. We were ruthless. Sammy Boshell, for example, shot a beautiful red cardinal – an illegal act – with his BB gun, then stood around and watched it flop on the ground. I committed a quick mercy killing. It ticked me off so much that he had placed me in such a predicament that I then put my gun right up to Sammy's eye and told him he was an idiot. There were many days after that when, as I watched him bully little kids, I wished I would have pulled the trigger. He was a punk (and I hope he reads this someday!).

We crawled around near the Black Warrior River quicksand swamps (one of my shoes is still down there somewhere), which were filled with poison ivy, water moccasins, and the biggest dang mosquitoes you ever saw. One time Stevie got poison ivy and his whole body was swollen so badly that his eyes were sealed shut. He was bed-ridden for several days. When I went over to visit him and saw him lying on the couch all red and swollen like a cadaver in the sun, I reflexively yelped, scaring both me and his Mom. Probably didn't comfort Stevie a whole lot either.

We played mumbly-peg and then, when the eventual boredom would heave into sight, we would double-dare each other to hold our hands palm down on the ground while we would throw the pen knives in an attempt to stick them between each other's fingers from a standing position.

One Christmas Stevie got a super bow and arrow set, with real death-dealing steel-tipped arrows. We all went out in to a university athletic field near the subdivision where we lived, looking like a band of brothers. Some of us had our new BB guns, pistols, hunting knives, and other fun boy toys. Stevie brought his bow but said his mother had instructed him not to let anyone else shoot it. Right.

C'mon, Stevie, ya big baby, Boshell wheedled, let me shoot the damn thing. I ain't gonna hurt it, you selfish turd! After the second shaming Stevie finally relented. I can remember thinking at the time, Why would you let that knucklehead be the first one to shoot your new bow and arrow? He's not even your friend! The next thing that happened defied the laws of physics. The target was 50-75 feet down the field, and Stevie stood off to the right about 15 feet away. He was back from

Reviews for Crabapple

[lisa connolly · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Best read ever! Highly recommend!
Hope this author writes more!