Previous Challenge Entry (Level 1 – Beginner)
Topic: Good and Bad (05/07/09)
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TITLE: COOT | Previous Challenge Entry
By Anthony Brown
05/14/09 -
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“Oh no,” I moaned out loud to myself, “he is on the porch.” I had thought about taking the other route home, but it was too late. Maybe if I walk fast he won’t see me, I thought, as I stepped up my pace and looked straight ahead – until I heard the shout.
“Joey, com’er, boy.” Seeing the inevitable, I crossed the street to the corner house and walked up to the front porch and forced a smile.
“Hey Coot,” I uttered, as I kicked around at the bottom step with my tennis shoe.
“Come on up here boy, and I’ll go in and get us a coke,” he slurred.
Trying not to show my reluctance, I climbed the steps and sat down on ole’ Coot’s porch swing. He soon returned with two ten-ounce bottles of coca-cola and poured his into a glass already half full of a different liquid. As usual, the smell of liquor and chewing tobacco hung around Coot like a fog. It was years later before I understood the significance of the nickname “Coot.”
“What cha’ been doin’ today, Joey?” he asked.
“Just playing ball, Coot,” I replied, knowing he wasn’t wanting to start a conversation of any depth.
“It’s a good day for playing ball, all right,” Coot said, as he reached down for his spit can, which was a vegetable can with the paper pulled off the outside. It always splattered when he spit, and dripped down the corners of his mouth.
I could see that distant, drunken gaze in ole’ Coot’s eyes, as he stared straight ahead. It was one I had seen before, but that was okay. It was just the impediment to my young, selfish agenda that caused my reluctant attitude. Even as an eight-year old, I knew Coot just wanted my company – brief as it was – and I always felt good when the visit was over. Coot was not a bad man, just a lonely man.
Across the street from Coot’s little house was our community church. Nearly everyone went to church back then, except Coot and Grandma. Coot drank on his porch and Grandma cooked. One Sunday morning I overheard two ladies talking as they pointed across the street to Coot on his porch. “Mae never allowed him to sit out there like that,” one lady said.
Mae was Coot’s wife who had died a few years earlier. Mae and Grandma were good friends. After she died, Coot walked down to our house every Friday so Grandma could read his mail to him – Coot couldn’t read or write.
One day I told Grandma how those good ladies at church were talking bad about Coot. She said they weren’t so good because they were “self-righteous.” “But ain’t we supposed to be righteous?” I asked Grandma.
“Righteous is, as righteous does,” Grandma replied. “Remember when your little sister broke her arm?” She was referring to the time my sister fell off a wall in the empty lot behind the church, when I was at the ball field and Grandma had left to go grocery shopping.
The other kids said Coot must have heard her screaming in pain and ran over to where they were playing. They said he picked her up and ran to our house like a jack-rabbit, but we weren’t home.
Coot decided to take my sister to the hospital in Mae’s old Chevrolet that had sat in the driveway since her death. My sister said the nurses were mean to Coot when he couldn’t fill out those papers. They thought it suspicious that he didn’t even have a driver’s license and tried to arrest Coot, that is, until Grandma arrived at the hospital. She told them a story about a “Good Samaritan.” When Grandma talked, people listened, and though she rarely went to our church, she always read her Bible.
“Well, gotta go home for supper, Coot,” I said, after my usual short visit.
Coot picked up his spit-can so he could reply. “Okay, big Joey, you and your sister be good.”
I always tried to be good, but being bad came so easy at times. I try to remember what Grandma said about being “righteous.”
I suppose some grown-ups think they are good, when they see the bad in others. Coot may have been bad to himself at times, but he was awful good to us.
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