is as diverse as it gets. You have to crawl around on your hands and knees to see everything.
Periodic wildfires thwart the encroachment of hardwoods such as oak and sweet gum into the pinelands, so the trees have evolved not only to survive fire but to depend on it. Wiregrass has evolved toward flammability to help push fire quickly through the forest, and it needs burning in order to reproduce well. Some of the forbs that grow with wiregrass won’t even seed unless they have been scored by fire. Afterward, new ground cover springs lush and green from the ashen ground.
Just as longleaf pine is lashed to fire, a marvel of species is tied to longleaf pine, and the pine is laced to the highly diverse understory—the grasses and forbs, such as curtis dropseed and summer-farewell and blazing star—that is also bound to fire. The animal inhabitants are tied to the understory. Amazing the way everything is woven together.
Because most of the ancient forests have been cut, you don’t see red-cockaded woodpeckers or gopher tortoises or indigo snakes or fox squirrels or even diamondback rattlers much anymore. You don’t see wiregrass. But in a ribbon of woods that borders the cotton field, I found a little patch. Imagine my joy, because where a few clumps of wiregrass linger, there’s no telling what else remains.
Uncle Percy
Uncle Percy was sixty-nine when I returned to live next door. He was not a man to take risks, although it was not fear that kept him on the farm, I think, but a blindness to alternatives, having lived so well and been so loved in his birthplace. Here Percy was master of circumstance. He had imprinted on the life of a farm and was never able to ponder another life. He graduated high school at sixteen and joined the Air Force, a four-year stint that was to mark him as much as farming had. Its stories would occupy him all his life and form the lens through which he saw everything. When he was discharged, he went to the city, as all rural folks were being encouraged to do, to help rebuild the country. After six months at a factory in Jacksonville, Percy returned to the farm. I found his valise in the attic, the only relic up there—never to be used again. In that postwar atmosphere, which lured rural people to industrial centers to “be productive,” many would have considered Percy a failure. But not his parents.
Percy became the boy-child, so common in Southern families, who stayed. He moved back into his childhood room at the farm and lived there as a member of his parents’ household for most of his life. He married once, briefly. Uncle Percy was over fifty when he took up with a young divorcee new to town. He moved a doublewide trailer next door to Grandmama and married. During their brief matrimony his wife bore him a son, who after the divorce came on occasional Saturdays to visit. After the divorce, Uncle Percy moved back into the farmhouse with Grandmama; Grandmama’s sister, Aunt Linnie, made the trailer her home for a few years. Neither before nor after his ill-fated marriage had we known Uncle Percy to date, or to socialize in any way independent of church.
Short and slight, he was at all times well shaven and trim, never slovenly. He would have to announce that he’d gotten a haircut because I could not discern any change. He smoked like a winter chimney, constantly. When I first moved into the house, where Uncle Percy had not lived in almost a decade, I washed a yellowish film of nicotine off the ceilings, walls, and furniture. Entering his trailer was like crawling into the attic of a bar. Smoke had permeated and jaundiced the carpet, the curtains, the rugs, the pillows. Although I never liked it, he would light cigarettes in my house when he was visiting, and because he was its owner I couldn’t protest too loudly.
Uncle Percy’s day went like this: when he woke, he opened the doors if it wasn’t winter. He fed the horde of feral cats outside the back door. There were twelve or thirteen of them, skittish, bone skinny, and often with ears or eyes infected. They suffered only Uncle Percy to approach or pet them. “Say you like the cats?” I heard him joke to someone once. “You can take you home a sackful.” Unspayed and untreated, they bred fervently among themselves, introducing a few sickly kittens to the pride every season. Uncle Percy’s only obligation was to feed them.
Next he made himself a breakfast of sorts—usually a slice of toast and a cup of thick, black, instant coffee. He was never a big eater. Then he came out to his front steps, under the water oaks beside the trailer, and sat smoking. When I returned from ferrying Silas to school, he would be there, and I would spend a few minutes with him.
“Anything that grows here, they’s a pest waiting for it,” he would say, and talk about the worms in the peaches. Or cutworms at the pepper starts. Because he sat so much, watching, and because he loved birds, Uncle Percy saw things I never saw. He would tell about a barred owl that had flown last evening onto that very limb there and watched him. Or the fox that had crossed the yard at a run. Mockingbirds fighting. Nighthawks. Blue grosbeaks returned.
What drove me most crazy was how fast my life was—even in the country—and how slow his was. I would pack a day full, top to bottom. Maybe it’s a disease, the great desire I have for this world to be better. I know that faith is the evidence of things hoped for, and that faith without works is dead. Every day had an impossible list, and every item on the list was backed by a dream, a scheme. Uncle Percy would frustrate me with his refusal to lift a hand to make life better. Around him things disintegrated. But every morning, unless I was too busy to feel guilty, I crossed the unraked sand yard that separated our dwellings, sat on the wrought-iron bench outside his door, and talked of the world-changing events that had occurred in twenty-four hours.
“Did you hear about a wreck last night over at the school crossroads?” he asked.
“No. But come to think of it, I heard a siren.”
“’Bout nine o’clock?”
“’Bout then, yes.”
“That was probably it. I haven’t heard who was involved, they said a car and a truck.”
“That makes two accidents over there in the last month. We’re gonna have to get a caution light up.” That was me saying that. Then there was a long silence while we listened to nuthatches pecking in the water oak and watched a male cardinal flaming on the power line. I was thinking about the caution light.
“I read in the paper the Gardners have put up Christmas lights all over the place. They say thousands. They let people drive right through the yard.”
“Let’s ride over there one night. That would be fun. We can ride around a little and look at Christmas lights. I’ve seen some pretty ones other places. I have to remember where.”
“JoNell from church said to me she puts up a lot. She invited me to come by and see them.”
“Okay.”
Uncle Bill, seeing us, stopped to chat. The men talked about the fuss over at the church. Baptists don’t ordain women preachers. The Sunday school superintendent was a woman, and the men wondered if that was too immoderate, too impious, to allow. Some of the church said nothing was wrong with a woman being Sunday school superintendent, but the old-timers didn’t like the idea one bit.
Sometimes my uncles would tell me stories. “People used to think Ten Mile Church was haunted,” Uncle Percy said. “Remember that, Bill?”
“You mean when they kept seeing the ghost there during bad weather?”
“That’s right.”
“I remember hearing that one.” Uncle Bill chuckled.
As Uncle Percy told it, one night one of the Tillman boys was riding his mule home when a bad storm came up. He decided to take refuge in the
