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By Marie Huston Charlie Dean and the Kudzu Patch By Marie Huston We had a wonderful stand of kudzu in the back yard. Simply magnificent. 'Course, Daddy didn't think it was so wonderful cause he had to keep the grass cut back there or it'd take over the house, but to the neighborhood gang, the kudzu patch was one of our greatest treasures. It was probably a whole acre between our back yard and Charlie Dean's house. You want a privacy fence? Try an acre of kudzu. Kudzu isn't very enticing in the winter time because it becomes a snarl of dead vines, but come warm weather, those huge green leaves cover everything in sight with a lush heaviness. They say it can cover a car in one season and I never had any reason to doubt that it could -- it could certainly climb trees fast and it didn't take long for it to take over o'l Tuffy's trailer after those trashy kids of his just took what they wanted out of it after he died and left it to be an eyesore for self-respectin' folk. The fascinating thing about kudzu growing up and over a tall pine is that it will form a tent at the base of the tree -- almost like an encased private room and big enough to have a tea party in, should you be so inclined. There were magical paths weaving among the trees where the kudzu dipped back to the ground and we figured the Indians had made those paths in the olden days and accepted them as our natural right without question. I'm going to interrupt this story to give you one basic hint about kudzu vines, though -- they are not strong enough for you to play Tarzan with and if you let your little brother try to swing on one, you're going to have to stay at home by yourself while your mama takes him to the hospital and gets his arm set in a cast and then he's going to get all the attention for weeks because everybody wants to sign that cast. That's what great literature is supposed to do, right? Give you valuable lessons in life. Okay, back to the story. Well, the twins and I would stake claim to our kudzu tent as soon as those huge leaves started to come out in the early spring, but the boys in the neighborhood were mean (being mostly our brothers) and they would gang up on us and try to invade our castle and mess up our stuff. There were a few troublesome times and a lot of name-calling, but for the main part, their armies would fight around us and we'd pay them back by eating Oreos in front of them and not sharing. It was called a draw -- we wouldn't tell on them for messing up our playhouse and they couldn't tell us on for not sharing. It was an unwritten law that if you went to the adults in situations like this, there were no winners -- especially since we weren't supposed to play in the kudzu anyway. If you were to take a vote of all the children in my neighborhood back then, there was one thing we'd all agree on about the kudzu patch -- it was the best place to hide and spy on Charlie Dean. You could crawl on your hands and knees up almost to the edge of his yard without being seen and peek through the vines to watch the show. See, if that kudzu had edged onto Mrs. Moss' back yard, it wouldn't have been near as much fun. Who'd take the time to crawl through those vines just to see Mrs. Moss sit in her swing and shell butterbeans? It might have been fun if it'd been close to the Pig Man's yard and we would have dearly loved to find a nice stand of kudzu on Mockingbird Hill so we could see what mysterious doings were happening up there behind that huge boxwood wall, but being right there close to home and watching Charlie Dean was good enough. You wanted to be close to home in case Charlie Dean spotted you cause you needed to be able to run inside and get under the bed right quick-like if you did get caught. I wonder how many times my daddy lectured us about leaving Charlie Dean alone. I never got the feeling he was really worried about Charlie Dean since he always added, "You don't want to cause Miss Lula any problems. She leads a sad life." It never made much sense to us, but we were raised to believe anything a grownup told us and not to ask questions; some things children didn't need to know. So when we hid in the kudzu to spy on Charlie Dean and didn't get caught, we were doing Miss Lula a favor. Go figure. Anyway, we were glad the kudzu patch edged onto Charlie Dean's yard because he was the only person in our whole neighborhood worth spying on. He lived in a big old wood house that I'm sure had been painted back when it was built, but by the time I saw it, the only vestige of paint was under the tin roof of the back porch. He had one of those yards that was solid red clay and Miss Lula would use a broom to sweep up any leaves that fell from the huge oak tree. The front door and windows facing the dirt road were always shut tight against the red dust kicked up by the occasional car, but the back door stood open, leading into creepy darkness, in the summertime. Not far from the back porch was a well with a bucket held by a rope and on past the well, near the edge of the woods, was a little shingled shed that stank to high heaven. Halfway between his house and the kudzu patch was the chicken coop. I never understood why the chickens lived in a big o'l doghouse in the middle of that pen that said "Rover" but that's not important to the story. Charlie Dean spent Monday through Friday working down at the dairy. We'd see him walking up that way as we stood waiting on the bus early mornings and we'd see him going home late in the day as we played roll-hit-the-bat in the side yard. Monday through Friday, we'd speak to him and ask how was Miss Lula doing and did he have tomatoes yet. But come Friday evening, if we saw Charlie Dean coming, we high-tailed it out of there. Cause come Friday evening, Charlie Dean was drunk. Now, we didn't exactly know what being drunk meant. We weren't sure what beer was and we never heard of liquor. The twins' daddy kept beer in their refrigerator but my daddy drank buttermilk. Beer was one of those adult things like steak. Adults drank beer and kids drank Kool-Aid; adults ate steak and kids ate hot dogs. We never wasted any time wondering what beer and steak tasted like. It wouldn't've done us any good to wonder and, anyway, what could be better than Kool-Aid and hot dogs? To us kids, getting drunk meant walking down the road sideways like Charlie Dean did. He'd clutch a brown paper sack in one hand and sorta lean halfways over lopsided-like as he walked down the road with one foot in the ditch and he'd preach and shake his finger at anything that grabbed his attention. I only got caught by Charlie Dean once when he was drunk and that was enough. Mama had sent me down to Miss Savannah's house to see could Emma Lou come give her some help cause we were having company. There were two ways to get to Miss Savannah's house -- the dirt road going down in front of Charlie Dean's house and a path crossing his back yard behind the chicken pen. I knew better than to take the shortcut by the chicken pen even if the dirt road was longer cause you had to be careful of the poison oak that way and I was barefoot. Besides, there were blackberry bushes down along the dirt road and it was almost time for them to start turning and I thought I might sample me a few on my way if they were ready. I took a couple of passes on the Tarzan swing (we had tied an old rope into a tree on the bank edging the dirt road after my little brother's stunt with the kudzu vine). I was thinking it was getting on close to time for Mr. Mose to come home and he could take word to Miss Savannah for me and Emma Lou could stop by and tell Mama could she come next time she passed and I wouldn't have to go at all. Well, I waited a while and since I was getting bored and since it didn't look like Mr. Mose was going to come home any time soon, I headed on down the road. I made it past Charlie Dean's house just fine. Blackberries covered the rusty fence leading to the cow pond and they were dark red, with one or two that had started to turn black, but when I bit into them, they were still bitter. Besides, some car had come along and covered them with red dust. I decided it'd be a day or two or a rainshower before they'd be good. I spent longer than I meant to down at Miss Savannah's house that evening because Mr. Mose had gotten home early from work and had been fishing down at the cow pond. He was coming under the barbed-wire fence right about the time I happened along and I walked on to the house with him -- wishing Mama would let me wear a big straw hat like his -- and he let me carry his bamboo pole, but he was afraid I'd drag the fish in the dirt, so he toted them himself. We got to the back porch and he hollered out for Emma Lou to come here and see what I wanted and then we squatted down on the stoop and started skinning the catfish he'd caught. Well, he skinned and I watched. I decided right then and there that skinning catfish was menfolk's work cause it was an awful job to get through -- too much blood and guts for my likin' and you have to pull like the dickens to get that skin off. It was getting on toward dark when I headed back home and I wasn't even thinking about Charlie Dean until I got to his yard and, lord love a duck, there he was standing in the driveway preaching to his mailbox. Now, I'd seen my daddy get stuck talking to Charlie Dean a time or two. My daddy'd just stand there calm and quiet-like and Charlie Dean would be jumping all over the place and pointing a finger in my daddy's face, quoting the Bible, with that brown paper sack clutched in his other hand. It was enough to scare you to death just knowin' he was gonna miss his aim and poke my daddy's eye out one of these days. Daddy said if we ran into Charlie Dean when he was preaching, we needed to be polite to him just like we would anybody else and try to get away from him as quick as we could and get on home. He was a common enough sight around the neighborhood that nobody paid him much mind. He was generally pretty good about staying down at his house most weekends, but there were enough of his neighborhood rambles that folks would see him weaving his way down the road holding onto that paper sack and nonchalantly say, "Well, Charlie Dean's drunk again," and go on about their business. My daddy and Charlie Dean had reached an understanding the first time Charlie Dean came up on our carport to preach to Shorty, our dog, about the evils of sucking eggs. My daddy shut the back door that day -- I guessed to give him some privacy while he lectured Shorty -- but the next Monday when he came home from work, he went down to Charlie Dean's house and they stood on his back steps talking for a good little while. I know it was a good little while cause I was watching from the kudzu patch. After that, Charlie Dean would use the shortcut across our garden during the week but he never came on our land again when he was drunk. I always wondered what my daddy said to him to make him remember he couldn't come on our land when he was drunk cause you'd'a thought that would be the time he'd be most like to forget. Leaving Miss Savannah's house that afternoon, my mind was on fried catfish and hushpuppies and I wasn't even thinking about Charlie Dean till there he was standing in the middle of the road, preaching to his mailbox. I wasn't the least bit surprised that he was preaching to his mailbox cause I'd seen him preach to our mailbox plenty of times. Heck, he'd saved just about every mailbox on our road at one time or 'nother. It just sorta caught me offguard to see him there and know that I had to get around him somehow and still be polite Now, if you met Charlie Dean during the week, he was a quiet man. Every now and then Mrs. Rucker down at the dairy would send Mama something out of her garden by Charlie Dean. He's stop at our back door and knock real polite. He'd take his hat off when Mama came to the door and tell her Mrs. Rucker had sent her some corn by him. Mama'd thank him and he'd say "yes, ma'am." I didn't understand why he'd say "yes, ma'am" to Mama when he was older than she was, but I thought maybe it was because she was a teacher. Lots of people say "yes, ma'am" to teachers as a matter of course. Anyway, a sober Charlie Dean was fine and wouldn't hurt a fly. But this day he was preaching and I was caught with him right smack dab between me and the house. I kept on going though, hoping I could pass behind him and he wouldn't see me or that Superman would happen by and fly me on over to home. He was standing there, wagging his finger at the mailbox, yelling verses at the top of his voice. He turned and stopped, towering over me, and boomed "Have you been saved?" I squeaked out "not yet" and looked down at the ground to kick some gravel and see could I find me a hole to climb down into. All I'd meant was that Superman hadn't shown up yet to rescue me, but I guess he thought I didn't know who Jesus was cause that got him started yelling at me good. I was entranced. I'd never seen him go to church on Sundays with Miss Lula or Miss Savannah and her girls and one of the biggest unanswered questions of my childhood was how a man who never went to church could know so much scripture. And I sometimes wondered how Miss Lula could sit in church most of the day and then come home and listen to more preaching from her husband but I decided that might be why she was always so nice. You know, listening to a lot of preaching is supposed to make you nice. It sure seemed to work for Miss Lula but I hadn't noticed a big improvement in Shorty. I had spent lots of time peeping through the kudzu and watching this man from a safe distance while he stood in his backyard and preached to the chickens. Every now and then, Shorty would wander down to join the congregation and he'd plop down in front of Charlie Dean and sit there staring up at him without moving a muscle. Charlie Dean would shoo Shorty off if he happened to notice him cause everybody knew Shorty was an egg-sucker and he was just biding his time to sneak into the doghouse. Most of the time, Charlie didn't care who or what he preached to. And the chickens never seemed to care if he preached to them so I always reckoned it was a fair swap. That afternoon I had the 50-yard-line ticket and I knew this was the closest I was ever gonna get and I should have been scared to death. But all I could think was, please, Lord, let me remember what he says so the gang will believe I got this close to Charlie Dean when he was drunk. I gradually inched my way 'round on the yard behind the mailbox and after a bit, he quit looking at me and focussed on the mailbox again. I was writing down every word in my mind, but I could hear my mama calling me for the third time and knew I'd better get home cause three yells was her limit. So I took my first chance, excused myself and skee-dattled on out of there. Daddy told Mama not to let me go down to Miss Savannah's again by myself and I never did. I was the neighborhood hero for a few days until Mack Carson finally conquered the King's Throne in the cemetery and that was naturally more important than being preached to by Charlie Dean. After I was married and left home, but long before it became against the law to pray at football games, they'd pick a player to lead the crowd in prayer before the National Anthem. One Saturday at the Georgia football game, they announced that Charlie Dean was gonna pray and that caught my attention enough to make me drop my peanuts. Turns out it was Charlie Dean's grandson. I figured if I could listen to his granddaddy preach to chickens and mailboxes, I could bow my head as he led the prayer. But I was smiling to myself the whole time and thinking, wouldn't Charlie Dean be proud.
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