Nobody comes to visit anymore

By Chris Edwards

Nobody comes to visit anymore is a collection of short fiction from East Texas writer Chris Edwards. The stories range from sweet musings on aging ("The Firedancers") and parables on youthful indiscretions ("Reap n' Sow") to situations gone very wrong ("Not a Cull in the Herd"). This is the first book project from Edwards, an award-winn

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pete and Cricket Publishing
• Release date: Dec 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9780578284293

Book preview

The Firedancers

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

–The Gospel of St. Matthew, 5:5 (English Standard Version)

See, that’s where you git that Chipotle pepper, it’s just uh dried jalapeen-er. Ever’body acts like it’s some kinda new thing, but it ain’t nothin’ in the world but dried jalapeen-er.

Midnight drew nearer but Tim Haynes didn’t mind hearing his grandfather rattle on about dried peppers, sorghum syrup, country butter and boyhood pranks resulting in torched outhouses.

"See, all them peppers what’re fresh, well, they all got different names when they fresh, but when they dry, it’s a whole different name. Another’n is the poblano. It’s also called an awn-sho pepper when it’s dry."

Bro. Woodrow Woody Haynes was once sturdy-looking as the mighty old, arrow-straight pin oak that marked the east end corner of his property. Now, Woody could scarcely get through half a sentence without hacking up thick gobs of phlegm, and his arms resembled chicken wings, ending in paper-thin skin covering hands that seemed to bruise with the softest, slightest encounter.

When he spoke about peppers, or any food item with an ethnic connection, he imitated the sort of accents he’d always heard in movies. Ancho became awn-show, and jalapeen-er had a trill on the end with his facetious pronunciation.

Despite his stockpiling infirmities, he was still the same warm, hilarious, salt-of-the-earth icon of family values his grandson had always known.

Gimme some a’ that Vicks salve, he said to Tim in between coughs. Tim could hear a low crackling inside his chest as he coughed.

Tim remembered a time when Woody extolled the virtues of Vicks VapoRub at any chance he had. He would’ve made a bang-up pitchman for the product, too, with his homespun ways and friendly voice.

He would slather it on the bottoms of his feet at night to stave off colds and the flu, and any time he felt the crud coming on, he’d ball up a wee bit and swallow it. It might taste like the dickens, but it’ll sho’ cure what ails you, he would tell the attentive young boy.

Woody loved the way the sun set behind that lone oak tree and illuminated the old dog-trot house on the hill. God’s handwritin’, he’d tell Sister Wanda Haynes with a smile, and his eyes closed, taking in the evening warmth.

A meek-looking woman, Wanda was wont to say That house is his wife. I’m just the support staff, always followed by a gentle chuckle.

She looked somewhat like a bird, and as her beak produced laughter, it sounded how a mockingbird with a case of the giggles might sound. Many of the other parishioners at the church loved Sis. Haynes’s laugh; they loved the Haynes, period.

Bro. Haynes’s back began to go about 10 years before, but there was still a world of work waiting for his dedicated touch. He didn’t so much resemble a pin oak anymore, and Tim Haynes saw a little less of him each time he visited home. He hadn’t baled hay in about 10 years, and it seemed like each time Tim visited, fewer and fewer of the things he loved doing were seen to by his own hands.

As he lay in bed talking about a time when he picked a batch of habaneros in anticipation of a big freeze, Tim watched his grandfather’s once-steady hand tremble, and studied how the skin looked. Illuminated by a night light plugged into the wall opposite the bed and a reading lamp on Wanda’s side of the bed, Bro. Haynes looked almost translucent – wizened, but above and beyond his meek flesh, ultimately.

As his grandfather soon began to snore, Tim looked at the handful of trophies on the top of the cedar chest that held blankets and random ephemera from both grandparents’ lives. He ran his fingers down the curves of the golden pig that Woody had received as a first-place award at the Brush Arbor Volunteer Fire Department annual barbecue cook-off in the ribs category.

He traced a path through the dust on the trophy with his index finger and laughed at the sight of the little golden pig, which stood bipedal, like a man and sported a chef’s hat and apron.

The golden hybrid pig-man wound Tim’s mind back to the barbecues at the fire station and to the apple cook-offs at the RV park located a few miles away. He was always accompanying his grandfather to something fun, and those days didn’t seem too far removed from the here and now, in the grand scheme of time’s transition.

How was life so much different now? He wondered time and time again, often repeating the question aloud as he drove back to the suburban enclave he now called home.

G’night, he said in a low voice, and left the room.

The smell of mothballs and mentholatum converted to a faint aroma of decades’ worth of baked goods when Tim stepped out of his grandfather’s room, which smelled and felt like it had been hermetically sealed from the rest of the house. The old cypress wood that composed the house had absorbed the generations of various smells.

Tim knew his 5 a.m. alarm would sound off just as he was getting into a groove with Morpheus. It never failed. He could not rest his mind, or body, long enough to drift off.

His old bedroom was basically just as he’d left it before venturing off for college, and then on into the corporate world. That wasn’t his life, however. The increasingly frail old man in the next room over, separated by a thick, sturdy wall of cypress logs, was his world.

Tim had long fallen away from the life of regular church attendance, but he would do anything for his grandfather. The Lord and his family, along with that old house, were what Bro. Woody was all about.

His knowledge and wisdom, despite his declining physicality, ran deeper than the rivers of which he often spoke from his catalogue of boyhood adventures. Tim never made mention of his personal life outside of anecdotes from his work.

His grandfather had stopped, some years ago, telling him one day you’ll find you a real sweetie.

Bro. Woody Haynes was cut from a different cloth and of a different generation. The God of all things of whom Woody spoke so often and raised his grandson on, showing of his boundless love to him, did not, in the least, resemble the judgmental, hate-filled version that some of the so-called preachers on the circuit seemed to espouse, and Tim had heard them all, while growing up. Bro. Woody believed in the beauty of all God’s creation. He spoke often of Jesus in terms of everyone’s personal savior, as well as their best friend, and he thanked God frequently for all good things.

Wholesome values were as much synonymous with his name as the old house on the hill of which he was so proud.

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Post Oak Village was home. No matter how long Tim had been an entry on the tax and voter rolls of Collin County. The property was full of memories, all of his good memories were there, pretty much. He was too young to take in much of what happened with his parents and the fatal, head-on collision near Conroe when that tragedy occurred. He never even called Woody and Wanda Grandpa or Grandma, for they were the only parental figures he’d ever known.

Bro. Woody had told the story about the old house enough times to where his grandson could recite it with the same readiness as most could the Pledge of Allegiance. Everything from how the windows were busted out, to the places on the floor where transients and hunters had started fires inside the house on the floor; Woody knew all about it, and board-by-board, it was a shrine to a boyhood he wished he could have known.

There were eight other kids and not much in the way of extras to go around during Woody’s formative years in the Sabine County backwoods. The family farm was sold at auction when he was five or six, and the Haynes clan lived as tenant farmers afterward, farming part of Old Man Walker’s vast expanse on the Sabine River bottoms.

Tim knew those stories of struggle well, and the old ways his grandfather kept in practice were things he wished he could embrace in his day-to-day existence. The city continued to expand at a bewildering pace. From his house in McKinney to Post Oak Village was a four-and-a-half-hour jaunt down south, through the hollows and likely past many haints, but it might as well have been an entire galaxy removed.

The grind and churn of advertising sales was something Tim Haynes could hack. As an associate for Hancock and West, he had more than earned his keep and title with the pre-eminent firm of its kind in the Metroplex. Still, the downsizing that had shaved the numbers down in the bullpen through the last decade of some lean times ensured that Tim still had much more seemingly entry-level work on his plate than the vaunted status of his own office and nameplate would suggest.

The reports and the endless phone calls were part of the gig, but he wished for times when the biggest dangers awaiting were ones he didn’t think twice about, like the evening when he was twelve and a red wasp popped him on the arm.

Ain’t nothin’ a lil’ ‘baccer won’t fix, his grandfather said as the spot on his arm grew redder and the whole limb throbbed.

Bro. Woody grabbed the sting-affected arm and reached in his mouth, pulled out a plug of his moist, brown Levi Garrett chewing tobacco and pressed it on the reddening mark. The pulsating pain was gone almost in an instant, with just a small round red mark as a reminder.

He’d long since jettisoned the tobacco habit, as it did no favors for his blood pressure. Wanda was relieved when he quit, too. She was not much of a fan of his coffee can spittoons lying around the house.

Tim wanted to be just like his grandfather, and even tried to eat some of his favorite things, which didn’t always work out so well. Bro. Woody loved slicing one of his ripe homegrown tomatoes and putting two fat slices on toasted Mrs. Baird’s white bread with plenty of Miracle Whip, black pepper and homemade hot sauce. That combination did not fare well with the inner workings of a seven-year-old Timothy B. Haynes, who’d missed a day of school after wolfing down such a sandwich.

Another time, Tim saw his grandfather bite into a Vidalia onion as if it were an apple. When Tim tried to follow suit with a cold onion out of the crisper, the fate was similar to that of the fat tomato sandwich. He ran to the backyard and heaved so hard that his ears burned, and he swore he saw angels float by his head, after he’d barely made it out the screen door. The incidents were enough to turn him off of tomatoes and onions until well into adulthood, yet his grandfather was still king.

Incidentally, Tim knew better than to try Wanda’s lime green jello salad with cottage cheese, which she made for many a church potluck luncheon.

Before the ministry called Bro. Woody, he put in close to 30 years with Bethlehem Steel. When the Haynes moved back to Texas, where they’d both grown up and met, shortly after Woody got out of the service, they found it a far different place than the one they’d left. For a year, they bunked down in a small rent house in Bridge City, which sat near all of the oil refineries.

Woody’s older brother Tom lived nearby, over in Nederland, with his wife Iradell, and there was no shortage of fishing spots and good Cajun food. More than its creature comforts, though, Woody set about a goal of getting ordained to preach the gospel during that time in Bridge City. It was something he had been meaning to get around to for many years; something he’d said he knew he was meant to do since he was a young boy.

Woody had felt the call of the gospel when he was seven years old. He was baptized in a creek behind the old white church he, along with Papa, Mamma, and eight siblings worshiped every Sunday. He never learned what Bro. J.S. Pratt’s initials stood for, but he surmised they were short form for Jesus Saves. Before Bro. Pratt held Woody down under the frigid water, he asked the boy for his confession of faith, to which he replied Yes! as loud as his tiny lungs would allow.

It was so cold that winter, as Woody would invariably begin the story. So cold, in fact, that in order to baptize him, Bro. Pratt and a couple of the men of the congregation had to break the ice off the creek. The fog had built up that morning, and they had to wade out to get deep enough to immerse the young man. Them folks on the bank couldn’t hardly see us out there, Woody would say when he told the story, which Tim had memorized, essentially, word for word, like so many of his tales.

It would not be long after that country creek baptizing until the youngster was asked to deliver sermonettes while standing atop a milk crate.

The work on the old Haynes homeplace was hard and pleasures were few, but every Saturday night, the family would crowd around the radio and listen to Jack Benny, The Shadow, and Red Skelton, and Papa would often play folk songs on his old Montgomery Ward catalog guitar.

Woody often told the tale of the time he won five dollars and box of Powerhouse candy bars after submitting answers by mail to a series of Bible trivia questions on a gospel hour broadcast. He was so proud of those candy bars and for hearing his name come through the tweed-covered speaker that Saturday night. He shared the delightful and decadent caramel, peanut and fudge delicacies with Papa, Mamma, and his siblings, but held onto that five-dollar bill as long as he could. He gave Mrs. Lula Faye Bell, his Bible teacher at school, a candy bar, as well. It was a sweet gesture of a young man’s gratitude for providing the gift of knowledge that reaped such a reward.

The sandy, acidic loam the Haynes clan tended wasn’t good for raising anything but a few vegetables, but the pines grew tall and sturdy. That timber proved to be the Haynes’ meal-ticket.

Cleveland Haynes saved enough money from the many building jobs and timber-cutting work he’d done to buy some land outside of Hemphill, and build a place of his own, away from Old Man Walker’s reach, and build he would, right down to the last ten-penny nail.

Woody’s parents worked night and day to show him and his siblings that God loved them. The whole family made it a point to get to church on Sundays, and to prayer meetings on Wednesday nights whenever possible, but they did not talk a lot about their faith or the Bible around the house. They lived the faith that was the cornerstone of their home and within their corner of the world.

I’d much rather see me a sermon than hear one, Cleveland once told Woody.

The young man witnessed how God made sure he and his large family were provided for and tried as best he could to live in such a way to honor the faith he attested to as a seven-year-old in that icy creek.

The United States Navy afforded him a two-year opportunity to see parts of the world he’d only read about in National Geographic magazine, and then when he returned home, he learned a trade and worked for a while in a tool and die shop, which led to meeting the love of his life, to whom he was wed within six weeks. Through Wanda’s parents, he was able to snag a good-paying job with Bethlehem Steel and took early retirement at the age of 55.

God had blessed him. Richly. More’n what I ever deserved, as he was fond of telling his flock at the church.

Returning to Texas was a goal that Woody had his mind set on for several years, and the house in Post Oak Village was a steal. Plus, the old church right up the gravel road from the property needed a preacher.

It was all meant to be, on God’s time and by his divine hand, he told his flock. Bethlehem’s generous buyout and a young grandson to raise steered his life into a direction he’d long since forgotten. His older brother’s influence brought him back, too. After all, Tom Haynes had fallen away from the Lord as a young man, but a narrow escape from the tragic explosion at the Texas City refinery back in ‘47 caused him to re-dedicate his life. He’d been sleeping off a drunk, and missed his alarm, as well as his ride to work, when the explosion occurred.

Woody had filled in a few times at the churches he and Wanda had worshiped in throughout the years, but he had never felt a stronger call to minister then he did at the little white church in the woods.

Outside of the church was a monument inscribed with the names of settlers to the area. Woody loved history, and the family he bought the property from knew the story of the land, the house and the village that once flourished around it.

The Alabamas had first set up camp in Post Oak Village sometime in the early 1830s, long before the railroad ever came through. They were a peaceful people and had a trading post already established. When the white settlers began moving in, after receiving land grants from Mexico, the village became a full-fledged town, boasting two saloons, a grist mill, school, church, and a post office.

One of the settlers was a schoolteacher named Paul Catlett. Catlett hailed from Tennessee and was such an astute scholar that the other settlers in the area called him Professor.

Catlett and his sons built the house from cypress logs they’d cut and milled. Catlett left the settlement to join up and fight for independence from Mexico in the volunteer army of Texians. When he returned, he and his family thrived in the village. Up until he died, he was active in the community and even served a term as a Justice in the County Court.

The more the village prospered, the Alabamas still kept friendly relations with the settlers. Although they’d remained neutral while Texas gained its independence, the whites counted the men and women of the tribe as friends. They gradually left the village, for the most part, to settle within a large parcel of land granted them by the Republic of Texas.

It took years of additions and renovations to make the old dog-trot house into a bona-fide showplace. Early on, after acquiring the land, Woody, Wanda, and young Tim lived in a single-wide trailer next to the house.

Tim remembered that trailer, with its rosettes on the ceiling and the prefab walls. When he was either six or seven years old, he got carried away with his marker set, drawing crude renderings of vehicles and near-stick figure people on the wall of his room. When his grandfather caught him in the act, instead of displaying anger, he showed him how to draw the people and the vehicles more true-to-form, complete with shading techniques, and gave him an elementary demonstration on sketching realistic faces.

There was nothing the man couldn’t do, according to young Tim, nor could he imagine him ever saying an unkind word to any living thing. If God put it here, then thar’s a use for it, he’d often hear his grandfather say.

Shortly before Tim had graduated high school, Woody was about to acquire a five-acre spread near the homestead. The land was mostly clear except for one acre or so that was chock-full of paw paw trees and tallow trees, all of which the landowner wanted to cut down before Woody acquired it.

They’re trash trees, the man told Woody.

But the bees love ’em, Woody said.

Nothin’ God makes is trash, he added.

Once the land was acquired, Bro. Woody and Tim put a few beehives on it, and started growing peas, corn and watermelons. Woody even tried his hand at growing some giant pumpkins. The first year, a hurricane wiped-out most of his patch, but he still got one that weighed close to 400 pounds. The second, and last, year he grew them, he reached the goal weight of 600 pounds, and a group of men from church helped him load it up on a flatbed trailer (with the help of Woody’s tractor, some straps and a smaller trailer) and they hauled it into town for the annual county fair, where festival goers paid a photographer to have their pictures made beside the giant gourd.

There was one time when Harold Steffens, an old traveling salesman friend of Woody’s, reconnected with him, and brought several bags of premium coffee, roasted at a place in Washington State. It was, as he insisted, the finest batch of coffee available to any living creature. Woody was most appreciative, but he wound up giving the coffee to the church for the volunteers to enjoy. Folgers, and Seaport, with its strong chicory notes and acrid bite were