The telling would not be possible without the book. A three-ring binder that serves as a sort of reference manual. Painstakingly assembled by the Redhead, a left-brained mathematical genius who can account for every penny on a balance sheet and has never met an equation she could not solve. Quite a catch for a right-brained word-man who can see the forest from the trees but cannot see the solution for the numbers.
The book is a chronological presentation of every medical visit, every test, every doctor’s summary, over the course of two years. There are spreadsheets she has constructed that compare blood test results by date for every component and how the numbers fluctuate – normal, abnormal, normal, abnormal – clues in search of a crime.
The analysis has been ignored or shrugged off by the medical community, most who seem to be more interested in moving things along so that they can get to the next beef in the slaughterhouse line. Let’s go folks, I have other patients to bill.
I offer this explanation to tell you how I know the order of events. Without the outline, the story is disjointed, the sequence and cadence lost. One of the effects of the illness has been a loss of short-term memory. Names and dates, mostly. I carry a little pocket-journal to help with that. Something a writer should do anyway. Stories and observations are often in the moment, and time blunts the imagery.
It is from this record that I know the exact date that this story began. How I can move from “Once upon a time” to June 5, 2021.
I had spent that week in the office, and a hot, lazy Saturday afternoon was just what the doctor ordered (no pun intended) for a forester and his dog. Just a short walk to a creek through a little patch of woods in Tallapoosa County, Alabama. The dog was protected from fleas and ticks. The forester, not.
The Redhead is calling it “semi-retirement.” A good phrase, but not entirely accurate. I am too young to draw my pennies and not well-off enough to quit work for a life of leisure. My career in forestry has paid the bills, but I did not get rich from it by any stretch of the imagination.
I prefer the term “self-employed,” although I am not entirely sure what that will look like in the days ahead.
There is a story here beyond employment. One I am going to tell only because someone urged me to do so. It will be difficult writing for me because it is about me, and quite frankly there are more interesting things to write about.
It is not a tale to solicit either pity or advice, because I have had plenty of both over these last two years.
Think of it as a cautionary tale, especially if you spend time in the woods and fields of Alabama. It is a story about chronic illness.
I will write this story as a serial, because it is much too long to hold your attention in one sitting.
It starts like this: “Once upon a time, a forester was bitten by a tick.”
The weather is hot here in central Alabama, and lately the Redhead has been hinting (well, nagging really) that it’s time to get my “summer” haircut. The summer haircut is an old southern tradition in which men get their hair cut a little shorter than usual for the summer months. In my case, it’s not going to make a lot of difference, because every passing summer leaves me with a little less hair to worry about.
The summer haircut brings back old memories. I hated haircuts as a child. Funny how the passing of the years turns such memories into soft-edged nostalgia.
My dad always took me to a downtown barbershop in Sylacauga back in the late 1960’s, which I believe was located on one of the side streets between Broadway and Norton. This shop was a real man’s haven: three big leather-clad barber chairs, black and white checkered tile floors, and mirrors on the back wall. Other walls adorned with mounted deer heads and a largemouth bass or two, along with an auto parts store calendar featuring a pin-up girl (scantily clad in the latest one-piece bathing suit). In one corner, an old glass-front cabinet filled with creams and tonics that every man needed to keep his coiffure under control. Metal chairs with vinyl cushions lined the waiting area. One or more conversations taking place at all times, usually about football, problems at the mill, or the latest frustrations rebuilding a small block 350 engine. Plenty to read while you waited: Field and Stream, Popular Mechanics, and the current edition of the local newspaper, The Daily Home. An old AM radio on the counter, playing good country or gospel music. Depending on the time of day, you might even hear old L.R. Ross tell you what great merchandise was available for sale or trade on the “Shop and Swap” segment on W.F.E.B.:
“Neighbors, we have a man who’d like to trade a real nice goat for a single-shot 12 gauge shotgun. If you have a gun you’d like to trade, please call…”
I can still smell the witch hazel and talcum powder.
Although there were three chairs, I only remember one being used. The barber was old Mr. Mallory. As a little boy, it seemed quite possible to me that he had probably given Moses his first hair cut. Mr. Mallory wore glasses that had lenses as thick as the bottom of an old green glass coke bottle, and the end of his nose was always about an inch from your head while he worked his magic.
Mr. Mallory always asked “How you want it?” The answer never mattered. You might “want it” like Elvis, but you “got it” in a style called “flat top.” I believe it was the cut he liked best. But it was the haircut for the small town southern gentleman at that time. I was always just relieved to leave the chair with both ears still attached. If I didn’t squirm too much during the whole ordeal, I’d get a piece of Bazooka bubble gum as a reward.
Times sure have changed.
The place I go these days for a haircut is a “style shop.” The customers are both men and women, although the barbers are all now called stylist and are exclusively female. The walls are pastel and there are flower arrangements. Something soothing and “New Age” plays on the sound system. The place smells of bleaching chemicals and potpourri. There is no Field and Stream, though if you look hard enough you might find a copy of Time or National Review. The last time I went, the receptionist asked me if I wanted a warm cookie.
My stylist is blond and attractive. She tries to engage me with conversation about American Idol or Dancing with the Stars, but it is to no avail. I have never watched either. Confident that my ears will survive intact, I usually have to fight the urge not to doze off while she works. She always asks if I would like a little mousse or styling gel before I leave. I always decline. As Eastwood said, “A man’s got to know his limitations.”
She and her coworkers are trained psychologists. They tell me how good I look–how my gray hair makes me looked “distinguished.” I am aware that I am being worked for return visits, like a young, pretty waitress works a middle-aged man for a bigger tip.
I’ll admit she does a good job with the little bit of hair she has to work with. But for her skills, she charges a fee that would have probably made Mr. Mallory decide to close up early and take the rest of the day off.
Manhood still barely intact, I leave knowing I’ll have to return in a month or so. I feel a strange urge to go rebuild a small block 350 engine or shoot an animal.
Maybe times haven’t changed all that much over the years.
The lunatic sits under the firmament, waiting for the appointed time.
Tonight, both sides of the moon dark. A blood-moon. Blood cries from sky as well as the ground.
In a little patch of pasture grass between stands of pine, darkness falls slowly then all at once. Thunder off to the northwest, air heavy but cool. Sky thick with clouds.
The first lightning-bugs of the year hover along the tree line. A visage that once meant empty pickle jars with hole-poked lids. Remembered days of daisy chains and laughs. Does it mean anything now?
We are refugees from Babel. Once sky-gazers, mumbling in strange tongues. Huddled by fires against the darkness outside animal-skinned shelters. Looking for a sign from the sky. Now screen-gazers huddled inside, forsaking all but strange truths.
The appointed time passes, and the clouds will not part.
The Book says “A wicked and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign.”
Back in my younger days I bought a tract of timber from an old man.
As a side note and for your education in the intricacies of forestry parlance, anyone associated with the timber business refers to a parcel of wooded land as a “tract,” as in “that’s a nice tract of wood.” It is pronounced “track,” and I suspect a good many of them would spell it that way.
But I digress. Reckon I got off tract.
I had just moved a logger onto the tract when the owner drove up. He was an old man dressed in old man work clothes: khaki pants, matching khaki shirt, red and black plaid hunting jacket, and a cap with ear flaps. Looked like he might have just stepped off the cover of a 1957 edition of Outdoor Life. His car was also from the ’50’s, a Rambler I believe, and it was as neat as the creases on those khaki pants. I initially thought “bless his heart, this poor fellow has come today because this land is dear to him. He probably inherited it from his father, who managed to scrape up enough share-cropper dollars to buy it just before the Great Depression. Now he wants to take a last look at the trees he and his poor old daddy planted together right after he got home from the Big War across pond.”
I would later discover that he owned a couple of thousand acres of land and had more money than Carter had little pills (Google it, youngsters). I have more imagination than sense sometimes.
He motioned me over to the passenger window. “Hop in, young fellow, I want to show you some things before you get started.”
Now at this point in the story I should mention that there was a chihuahua in the back seat of the Rambler, who looked to be about as old as the man (in dog years, of course). I should also mention that he was in a rage, barking and snarling and flinging himself against the rear passenger window.
I am not a person who has any fear of dogs. But I do have a healthy respect for a snarling one with a murderous look in his bugged-out eyes, even if he does weigh 15 pounds and barks with a Mexican accent.
I hesitated. “Is your dog going to bite me?”
“No, son, get in. Jasper, hush that up now, you hear.”
Jasper was apparently bilingual, as he did calm down slightly. But as soon as I got in he jumped to the top of the front seat, where he hunkered-down facing me.
We rode around in that Rambler for twenty minutes as the old man pointed to this and that. We bounced down roads and pig-trails that I wouldn’t have attempted in a four-wheel drive pickup.
I said “Yes sir” a lot, but my eyes were straight ahead and I was trying not to flinch. That chihuahua’s nose was one-inch from my cheek, and he was growling the entire time — one of those breathing, inhale/exhale growls. I knew if I made one move my left ear was gone. I was focused.
We eventually made it back, my face still intact.
The next day I called the logger to see how things were going. “This is some good wood” (more forestry parlance), “but I’m afraid we’re going to accidentally kill that old man. He stays out here all the time watching us work. We’ve had several close calls. He just appears out of thin air beside the machines. I almost cut a tree down on him this morning.”
I promised I would come by the next morning and talk to him about the dangers of logging equipment. Make sure he understood.
Let me digress again and tell you a little about this logger. Tony had found Jesus at a Pentecostal tent revival a couple of months before, and he was as excited and sincere about his new-found faith as any man I had ever met. Within a week, his entire crew had joined the flock as a result of his preaching. Tony had invited me to his church, the “West Georgia Assembly of Signs Following,” where the Spirit was working. People were speaking in unknown tongues, being healed of various afflictions, and sometimes were “Slain in the Spirit.” No timber rattlers were being passed around, so I guess all the signs following were not yet on display.*
Once Tony asked me if I had ever been Slain in the Spirit.
I said I didn’t think I had.
“Well, you ought to come to one of our Saturday night services. It happened to me a couple of weeks ago. It was like being hit by a bolt of lightning. Knocked me slam out of my shoes.”
I smiled and nodded. Didn’t say anything. Never had any desire to be struck by lightning. Try to avoid it most days.
Back to the story. The next day I came out to talk to the old man, but he was nowhere to be found.
I stopped Tony and asked if he had been out to the job that morning.
“Oh yes, he left about an hour ago. I asked him if he knew Jesus, and he said ‘No, I don’t want any part of religion,’ so I radioed all my men and got them to come in. We formed a circle around him and prayed for his eyes to be opened by the Spirit, but he just jumped in his car and left.”
Words Not On Paper 
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