Short Stories
Too Late
“Now you mind your manners boy!” “Yes Granny,” I said as we pulled in the yard of what used to be an old school house. “Old folks don’t like gabby young’uns so you keep quiet and let me and your Grandpa do the talking, you hear.” “Yes granny,” I said. “Be quiet unless you’re asked to talk, Okay?” “Okay,” I said as Grandpa’s old pale blue nineteen fifty-five Crown Victoria came to a stop under a big oak tree. I watched as Grandpa got out of the car. He was dressed in his “everyday” clothes, which was a pair of bib overalls and long-sleeved cotton shirt buttoned all the way to the top and old rabbit pelt hat. His good John B. Stetson, he only wore on Sundays to Church. The everyday hat was an “imitation John B. with a small hole in the crown of it and sweat stains around the band. “Don’t that long sleeved shirt make you hot Grandpa,” I asked. “No boy, what ever will keep out the cold will keep out the hot.” “Oh,” I said, anyway it didn’t make much sense to me to button your shirt all the way to the top and not wear a necktie but this was Grandpa. As his big six-foot frame exited the car he said, “Hand me my walking stick out of the back, boy.”
Here we went, Grandpa in front, “My head is swimming again, woman.” Maybe you stood up too quick Jake” granny said. Granny always walked beside Grandpa to steady him when he got “swimmy headed.” So here we went Grandpa, Granny dressed in a little print dress and wearing a split bonnet to keep the sun off of her head, a dip and of Sweet Dental Snuff in her lower lip, and me in a pair of trousers and a tee shirt.
Granny could make a vee out of her fingers and press to her lip and spit a wad of the brown gooey substance ten feet at the least. “Will you teach me to do that Granny?” I said. “No boy,” she replied, you’re too young to dip snuff it’ll make you sicker than all get out. “Grandpa let me smoke you know, ”I said. My smoking consisted of some dried out chewing tobacco rolled up in a paper bag and set ablaze to keep the gnats out of our face in the scorching July heat.
Granny had caught me with the gnat smoke in my mouth and politely “thumped” me on the ear when Grandpa wasn’t looking. My head rang for an hour. She seemed to take real pleasure in “thumping” me when she got the chance or else “wring a plug” out of my leg and make a blue spot as big as a half-dollar. We weren’t even close to being her favorite grand young’uns. We hadn’t lived here and got the home-training that she thought we needed, we had been brought up “off from here.” So she prided herself a little in trying to butt in on my parent’s territory by instilling a little bit of her brand of “home-training.” “Besides if you’ve been called to preach,” she said, “The tobacco use will just be a hindrance to you.” “Folks will think your wishy-washy and got no self control if they see you with a chew of tobacco or dip of snuff.” “Cigarettes and pipe tobacco is the same.” “Keep yourself pure boy.”
“But how about you and Grandpa?” I said, “He smokes a pipe and chews tobacco and you dip that old snuff.” “That’s different boy, and don’t talk short to your Granny!” “We’ve been doing it since we were kids.” “Your Grandpa only smokes the pipe to help his asthma.” Grandpa would dry out Sumac “shoe make” berries and smoke them in his pipe to cure his asthma attacks. This was one of his milder remedies for his ailments. He also would take a big swath of “croup salve” and swallow it to clear his sinuses.
“Lord, Delmar has eat enough croup salve to kill a horse,” Grandpa would say. It was the truth too. Uncle Delmar was always “down” with one ailment or another. Grandpa was about the same way. What ever some body in the family came down with, Grandpa had had it twice and had a worse case both times. Beside his day bed in the living room was a dark brown half-gallon bottle filled with Grandpa’s homemade liniment. This was an ungodly concoction of alcohol, mothballs and kerosene. It would either kill or cure you, one of the two.
As we got nearer to the house Granny reminded me to mind my manners. I thought about what she said about the tobacco use and the call to preach. She didn’t know it but I had already tried a dip of snuff. When I tried to spit I inhaled instead of exhaled and had swallowed a good size dose of tobacco spit. I still remember feeling it burn as it went down and I got that awful feeling in my throat, that, you get when you are fixing’ to lose your dinner and I did just that. She sure was right about it making you ‘sicker than all get out”. However sick that was I decided right then that me and snuff and spit didn’t mix and I had taken my last dip of snuff.
Granny said, “Boy this is your uncle Bennett. Say hello to him.” “Hello uncle Bennett I said, I am pleased to meet you.” He stuck out a hand that looked like a catcher’s mitt, calloused from years of hard farm work. I placed my tender hand into his. His big sinewy hand seemed to swallow mine whole, like a pig in a blanket. As he gripped my hand I could feel the strength that came from holding the “check lines” through countless miles of furrows dug in the deep sod of “The Garden State.”
They had migrated to New Jersey from their scraggly hillside farm in Tennessee to make a living “tilling the land.” The soil was richer in Jersey. The flat rich soil offered better hopes of a crop than the red clay soil of Cocke County Tennessee. So, several families had gone there to work the large farms and “plow out a living” for their families. Uncle Bennett was such a man. He left Tennessee for Jersey and never returned for other than a visit or a funeral, which were too frequent now in their advancing age.
“This one’s a preacher too, Bennett,” granny said. My older brother had answered the call to preach at the age of fifteen about three months prior to me “announcing my calling.” “That’s fine,” uncle Bennett seemed to say in a voice that seemed indifferent to the pride that granny felt when she announced that two of her grandsons were gospel preachers. “He’s a fine looking boy Arie,” uncle Bennett said. “He’ll do I guess,” Granny said in her usual sarcastic voice, which I never grew quite accustom to. “How old are you boy,” uncle Bennett asked. “Going on thirteen,” I said as I looked into his eyes, which were dark as a chinquapin. That came from his Cherokee mother who had died when Granny was only four years old. Uncle Bennett was next then Arthur Lee who came down with typhoid fever and died at fourteen. Last of all was aunt Virgie, who was the oldest of the four. She was the sweetest woman that ever lived, just the opposite of Granny, who most of the time looked like she had been baptized in vinegar. ‘Your Granny tells me that you have made your call to preach,” uncle Bennett said. “Yes sir,” I said, back in January of this year. “You’re awful young,” he said. “I know but the Lord called me to the job and I want to do my best,” I retorted back.
The age of twelve was very young to preach. Most folks had never heard of anyone preaching that wasn’t at least sixteen or seventeen years old. God had different plans for our family though. I had felt the call to preach and didn’t know what to make of it. For three nights lying in the loft of our old Toby Hollow home, which was an old log home that someone had weather boarded, the words kept going through my mind go preach, go preach. I felt like the child Samuel who had heard the Lord calling but “did not yet know the voice of the Lord.” These words rang in my ears for three days and nights ‘till one morning standing in the barnyard; I surrendered, and told God I’d go if He would go with me. Trusting in his promise, I preached my first message on the second Sunday in January nineteen seventy two. I had had a few “appointments” outside of my home Church by the time summer rolled around and was filled with excitement at the prospect of winning lost souls to the Lord.
Nothing could have prepared me for the experience that I was about to have with uncle Bennett Dover. “Uncle Bennett, is everything well with your soul,” I asked? “No son, I am sorry to say that it is not, I’ve never been saved.” “Why uncle, all you have to do is pray to receive Christ in you heart.” “Don’t you want to be saved and go to Heaven when you die?”
“Yes child, I do.” “May I pray with you for you to receive salvation” I pleaded in my young tenor voice, some folks said I sounded like a girl, “please?” “Yes, honey you can pray all that you would like but it won’t do any good.” “Why,” I asked. “I have waited too late”, he said, “Child, I’ve sinned away my days of grace.” “ The Holy Spirit no longer deals with my heart, I haven’t felt the call to be saved in many a year,” he said, woefully. “There’s nothing in this world that I wouldn’t give to be saved but, it is too late.” While he was speaking I noticed a look in his eye that I had never seen, in my tender years. It was a look of hollowness, empty like the deep recesses of an underground cavern. I could picture in my mind his empty soul void of natural affection and love. It is impossible for the human heart to have true love with out God, for God is love. I could only imagine the emptiness inside of him. No longer did the Spirit of God echo through the cavern of his empty heart pleading with him to answer the call to be saved. His heart was just an empty shell with nothing inside, no hope, no God, no assurance of eternal life, just the fear and dread of eternal death and damnation.
I wondered how many times the Holy Spirit had bid uncle Bennett to be saved and he had turned it away. Did it start when he was a boy? Did the Holy Spirit trouble him as a young man plowing the Jersey sod behind a team of horses hooked to a double shovel plow? I pictured in my mind how he had resisted the Holy Spirit down through the years and how the Spirit must have come to him many times in the late night hour and bid him to be saved. But it was too late, too late.
Still, I had prayer before our visit ended and wished him well and told him to try to pray anyway. He nodded his head that he would so, we said our goodbyes and loaded back up into Grandpa’s old car and headed back to his house. All the time my young tender heart aching because of the fate awaiting my great uncle. I never saw him again, he went back to Jersey to his family and died a few years later. That has been over thirty -five years ago and still, I wonder if the Lord ever spoke to him again and saved his soul. As king David said when the child he fathered by Bath -Sheba lay dying, “Who can tell whether the Lord will be gracious and let the child live?” Maybe, I thought, God will be gracious one more time and speak to uncle Bennett’s heart and let him be saved. Only God knows!
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