vituperation

I spent my childhood in the small town of Decatur, Alabama’s river city. I lived in five different neighborhoods in my fourteen years there, but one persists in my memory more than any other: Hickory Hills, near the backwaters of the Tennessee River. Perhaps it was a special place, perhaps it was a special time; whatever the reason, those years stand out in sharp relief against an otherwise drab childhood.

I lived there with family from my eleventh year until my thirteenth, when my parents divorced and my dad and sister moved to Huntsville. Those two years were magical, the span in my life when I was making the transition from boy to man. The country may have been in poor shape - oil crises, inflation, and other such claptrap - but I had no idea. My world was almost perfect: good school, good friends, and a pretty decent family life.

Sure, I got into trouble from time to time - what boy doesn’t? - but it was always for little things. A spitball tossed into the aquarium at school because that bastard William Sumner dared me to do it and I managed to wait until the exact moment the teacher was looking; getting caught by my mom playing doctor with Ashley Black from across the street; the phone call to my parents the time I was dragged by one leg from the boughs of a chestnut tree by an irate man I’d “nigger-knocked” - ringing his doorbell and running like hell. All those experiences were worth the licks I got from my dad’s belt, and more.

Hickory Hills was nestled between farmlands and water, a blight of sprawl pushing the city into the country. These days the farmlands are almost gone, overtaken by the exodus of yuppies from Decatur and Huntsville, but back then the neighborhood stood alone, isolated from the rest of the city by the river. My friends and I spent our days exploring the surrounding countryside and our nights in one another’s well-lighted homes.

Hickory Hills was an average American neighborhood, but there were certain spots where normality took a vacation and left his jabbering lunatic sibling behind. Out Hickory Hills Road - beyond the stretch of blacktop where there are no streetlights and you could hear something pacing you in the woods when you walked it at night, stopping when you stopped and moving when you moved - there was an old boat launch next to a cotton field. A narrow path led through the cotton to the water’s edge, where a rope swing hung from a crooked tree. Legend had it a boy was murdered near that swing, throat slit and body pitched into the brown water, and my friend’s older brother Larry swore he was out there with a girl one night in his car and someone - something - began to scream in the back seat. The girl was so shaken up, according to Larry, that he had to take her home. He died a few years later in that car, intoxicated and intimate with a telephone pole.

Tucked back in the grazing land adjunct to the neighborhood was a small family cemetery shrouded with barbed wire in an effort to keep wandering cattle out. The cemetery was spooky - as most dwellings of the dead are - and old. The most recent grave we ever found was from 1921; the majority were from the 18th and 19th centuries. The wind never seemed to blow in that cemetery, and the birds outside always fell silent when we pried the strands of barbed wire apart to crawl through. At times we heard a muffled thumpTHUMP in the distance when we grabbed the wire, like a huge heart beating far away. When that happened the sound came every time we lay our hands on the wire, no matter how long or short the time between touches. Once we were inside a palpable silence, almost oppressive, reigned.

Several of the graves were so old they had sunk in, concavities in the grass like hollows in the flare of an ilium. One grave in particular fascinated us because in addition to being sunken it had a small cavelike hole in it right where the head - skull - of the grave’s occupant should be. The opening entered the ground and immediately curved, which prevented us from seeing the bottom. On a dare once, my friend Keith stuck his arm down that hole. He got it all the way in to the shoulder and swore to us his fingers brushed wood at the bottom.

The tiny creek wending through the field beyond Hunterwood Drive was pastoral, burbling in the high grass as it cascaded over smooth stones on its way to the culvert taking it under Upper River Road. Things were completely different on the other side of the asphalt. The water spilled from the culvert into a brackish pool of dark water filled with mutant pollywogs and tiny bream. High embankments curved up and away to either side, and mossy trees grew out over the water. At noontime on a clear day you could see into the depths of the pool, see the life darting among the murky outlines of rotting trees and muck-covered rocks. My friend Mike fell into that pool once and went completely under the surface for one horrifying moment.

Further on lay a wide creek bed; dry for the first summer I lived there and full thereafter. It followed a mostly straight path through the woods, widening into a boggy area as it approached state highway 67. The water in that creek had a perpetual green tinge and a slight rotten odor, and we never pulled any fish from it. Of course, that might be because of the monster that inhabited it.

to be continued…