When Cleave was a young man he worked at a sawmill. Later on, he was a janitor at a church in Charlotte. They treated him pretty good and when he got to be an old man –waiting for his bus to heaven, he said — he spent some days just sitting in the sun, speaking to friends who passed his way.
I knew him but my brother, Dave, was a friend. One morning we passed his way on purpose. Dave took Cleave some fish and chips and we sat and talked.
I don’t know if Cleave ever learned to read but he was a good story teller. He got to talking about the old days, when he was a young man. He said he got paid in cash after work on Fridays.
“And I’d go into town, and I’d buy a bottle of liquor and I’d find a woman and we’d, we’d — what’s that thing we used to do?” he asked us.
And then he laughed, a laugh that started in his belly and made me envy his contentment.
For years we camped in the mountains of North Carolina, at Snowbird, in a three-sided shed, with a potbelly stove in the back and three racks on each side. On cold nights we hung a tarp across the front.
The skunk house, after Pop closed in the front and added a kitchen.
After a while Brother Pop and his friend, Dag Grady, and some others closed in the front, built an annex to the shed — a kitchen — and lugged a cast iron stove up there, a little over half a mile. Pop became the camp cook, a job he held for years.
“Eat it or wear it,” he would say.
We took turns doing dishes in a creek not far off. We did the best we could to keep stuff clean, but with no running water in the shed, that won’t easy.
If you came to Snowbird in those days most people understood that you had to lower your standards a little. If you didn’t think a fork or a plate was clean enough you just wiped it on your shirt and went on about your business.
But everybody didn’t always get the message. On one trip to the mountain there was this guy who was constantly on the lookout for germs, and Pop got a little tired of it.
Pop: “Eat it or wear it.”
My brother often bought venison to the mountain which he mixed with anything and everything, trying to get rid of it, I guess. One morning he made biscuits from scratch and he mixed tiny bits of venison into the dough.
A few minutes later the Germ Inspector came into his kitchen and stood there, watching. Pop took a spatula, picked a small piece of venison out of the dough, and flicked it onto the dirt floor. And then another one. And another, and then, almost under his breath, he said, “Damn rats!”
The Germ Inspector heard him, and the rest of us got to share a couple of extra biscuits that morning.
