Double Mamaw gets in these moods, to where she thinks she might be fixing to die, so she gets lively and wants everybody to gather round while she dips some tobacco (she calls it snuff), and tells us all stories in the living room.

I forgot to tell y’all her name. Her name is Amethyst Hyacinth Waterbury / Hegelund. She likes to say the whole thing in one go, like nobody’s ever heard it a thousand times. Uncle Muddy says she was old when he was little, since she married later in life, even though it IS his mother. She is 91 years old, but “still pretty spry for a little old lady.” That’s her words about how old she is.

Shady thinks she is as old as Methuselah in the Bible. She tells him, “I ain’t that old son, not yet anyway. I am living on borrowed time, so when I go down on my deathbed, y’all don’t try to pray me back.” Anyway, she was married to our late grandfather Beauchamp Alvin Hegelund, who we all called Big Daddy, but we barely got to know him before he died. Double Mamaw often talks like he is still alive, and swears to heaven that he still comes and visits her. But a lot of older folks seem to do that, so we pretend not to notice.

We were all circled round her “knitting chair” in the living room last Sunday after dinner, and she started telling us a story of when her and Big Daddy first got married. I will let her tell it:

Double Mamaw: “When me and Big Daddy first got married, and before we had you two heatherns (motions to Mamaw and Uncle Muddy with a grin), we used to live right on the Hopinatta County Line to the north, in the littlest one room house you ever did see. It was cold in the winter, and they wasn’t enough firewood to stoke that chimney hot enough. The mice didn’t even want to winter there, it was so cold.”

“It was super hot in the summer, but that little one room house had them high ceilings. We used to cook on an old wood potbelly stove. Big Daddy would chop wood, and I cooked for us every day three times a day. Women today won’t do that such a thing no more, but that’s how it was. You toted water, you cooked what you grew and ate it, and if you wanted something special, you made it, borrowed it or did without.”

“Back in them days, Big Daddy would take work most nigh anywhere he could get it. Most times the railroad line would hire stevedores to unload the train cars, and that’s what Big Daddy did a lot of times. He would ride the rails in the caboose, since him and the railroad boss got to be friends, and sometimes he would end up bringing one of the stevedore bums (hobos) home.”

Double Mamaw continued: “This one particular day, Big Daddy had been ‘ridin’ the rails’ for a week and was supposed to be home. He had called the only place in town with a phone – that’s the post office – from the switchyard, and said he would be home tonight, since he had made Winston County. The mailman sent word when he delivered the mail. That’s what he told me. He did come home that night, but what I woke up to was a sight I never want to see again.”

“Turns out Big Daddy had brought himself home a lively boon companion. He never did drink much, but once in awhile he would tie one on. He got stinking drunk and rode home with one of them bums that actually had a car. They slipped in and hid the car around the other side, where he knew our room wasn’t. I fell asleep a-waiting on him to get home, but there he was, passed out in broad daylight, right in front of God Almighty and everybody, on the front lawn with that bum! Whiskey bottles, beer cans were strewed all over the place!”

We laughed and Double Mamaw continued, “Now it weren’t funny at the time, but as I recollect it is a fond memory. You know we was so close to the highway, there wasn’t even a ditch, so everybody could see him and this hobo in the front yard laid out drunk like idiots, right in broad morning daylight too! I had poured a coffee cup for him, and was going to meet him on the porch, thinking he might be in early AM, but I got so mad I dumped it all over him. Good thing it was only warm, and I only scalded him a little.”

We were all laughing as she carried on, “I got so mad I saw red, and I went back to the front porch, and the only thing I could find to hit him with was my broom. So I commenced to wailing and whomping on him with my broom, my brand new broom too. He jumped up hollering, “Oh baby I am sorry, please don’t hit me with the broom.” Then he took off running down the highway like the devil was on his heels.

“I looked over and saw that bum still snoring, sleeping it off. That somehow made me even madder, and I commenced to whomping on him with that broom, until he woke up, his eyes big as saucers. He went to screaming like a girl, all the while wailing and crying, and I didn’t stop. Whap whap whap, I smacked that drunken bum as hard as I could, me crying and could barely see through my own tears. He took off in the opposite direction as Big Daddy, and LEFT HIS CAR behind.

“I calmed down after a spell, and when Big Daddy came back to the house after about an hour or two, he apologized and we made up. But it took that other man three days before he came to retrieve his ol’ car. Even then he slipped in after bedtime when it was dark, like a coward. They never got drunk in my front yard again neither, and that man wouldn’t give Big Daddy the time of day after that.”

I love Double Mamaw’s stories, I really do. I bet she was a she-lion too when somebody crossed her path wrong. I don’t think I want to dip snuff when I get old though, yuck!