Mamaw don’t like the Internet, and she really don’t like cell phones. She will not let me and Shady have the Internet or a cell phone like the other kids do. She says they are “Deceiving antichrist tools of satan himself” and I think she really believes that. She has a cell phone though, a prepaid one she puts on the shelf. She said its right where the old landline used to be, and its only for emergencies. We have seen her use it exactly twice.

We get to use the Internet at school, and sometimes Jasper lets me scroll on his phone at school, or whenever I go to his house. Mamaw don’t say much about it, but she tells us, “You can do whatever the teachers let you do at school, but in my house you ain’t playing on no cell phone, laying up like a lazy sluggard potato all day a-looking into windows straight into hell, gazing at harlots and tomfoolery and what have you. We got too much going on around here to waste all that time!”

Uncle Muddy told us a story about old-fashioned telephones the other day, and it goes something like this:

Back when they first put them ol’ telephones in the houses here, we had what was called a party line. The phone company didn’t put a single number to each house; they took a bunch of houses in a string hooked together, and the first house had one ring and then it paused, and did it again. If the second house got a ring, it was two short rings, same thing for house number three.

Our little house here way back then was number five on the party line, and I ain’t sure if it was five fast rings or not. Point is, I was a teenager when they put that first party line system in, and me and my buddies used to have a lot of fun with it. I remember one time the old lady that lived in the first house, we dialed her number and waited. Once she picked up her receiver, we asked her, “Is your refrigerator running?” She answered yes so we told her, “You better go catch it!” and hung up giggling like crazy.

She used to get so mad too; this one day we asked her, “Do you have Prince Albert in a can?” That is a tobacco can, and of course she had that kind of tobacco, so she told us yes. “Well, you better let him out before he suffocates!” Then we got in trouble with your Double Mamaw there, because she said we “ought not be tormenting people with telephones and acting like a fool on it.”

He laughed and went on, “We used to call people in town we didn’t know, and crunch potato chips in the mouthpiece. Sometimes we would get a mad one, and he or she would start cussing us out so bad! I remember we even got a preacher in another town who didn’t know us, and we pretended to be an angel, or a booger or something I don’t remember what. We thought we had him going, but I think he was just bored and played along with us. He was laughing like a fool when we finally hung up.”

What made the party line so fun, is if someone was talking on the party line to another real person, you could pick up and listen in on them talking. There was this one old woman in house number one on the party line, that we KNEW listened in on everybody, because your Double Mamaw told us so. You would make a call to somebody, and you would hear a faint click in the background and maybe hear a breath, or a tea kettle. Yep, there that old lady was, eavesdropping.

One day I stayed home from school with Lucius Eustace (my brother)for chicken pox or whatever, and we called one of our other friends that day, I think it was Eddie something or other, who was scheduled for a doctor appointment, and was out of school too. I was talking to Eddie, and Lucius was on the other phone listening in the front room, while we were talking to Eddie on the phone; just then we heard the little click that said that lady in house number one was listening in.

I put the phone down after telling Eddie I’d be right back, and I went to Lucius in the other room, and motioned for him to put the phone down and come here to me. I told him we should play like we were fighting, and one of us slam killed the other one, and I would start crying like I killed my brother. Lucius loved the idea, so we commenced to doing just that.

We got back on the phone and told Eddie something like this, ‘Eddie be prepared for everything on this call, you never know what might happen’ – careful like in code speak so he would know we were pulling something – and then we wound that old lady up.

We got real quiet, making sure we could still hear her on the other party line, a-listening to us talk. She was breathing faintly, and then I started acting mad at Lucius. I started hollering and cussing at him, out of the blue and he started playing along. Eddie got the hint, and started playing along, telling us we’d better pipe down, and he didn’t want to be part of no trouble.

We knocked over a chair or two, and we heard that old woman gasp on the party line. Then I told Lucius, “I aim to kill you right now!” I took the fire poker and started hitting the metal firedog in the fireplace, holding the phone to it, and screaming, “take that you sucker!” We both listened for a minute, and you could hear that old woman breathing heavy! We tried hard not to laugh, so I made a big whap with the fire poker, and Lucius started literally screaming as loud as he could, “Don’t kill me Hiram, please don’t kill me!”

I screamed back at him, “Too late! You know too much, and I ain’t telling them where we buried the money, and you won’t be able to, cause you will be dead!” I made a final loud whap with that fire poker in the fireplace, and Lucius made a big noise like he fell on the floor and everything went quiet. I started playing like I was crying, “Oh Lord I have done killed my brother! What am I gonna do?”

I swear that old woman was crying on the other end of the phone, and she finally HUNG UP. Me and Lucius and Eddie had a ball reliving that one at school a couple of days later. We would all three sometimes go walking, and pass by that old lady and wave like fools. She never let on like she was on the phone that day, but she looked funny; you should have seen her face a few days after that, when we all walked by and waved at her. Yeah, it was her.

Reach out and touch someone…just don’t do it with a fire poker on the party line.