behind the Scroll Building. He stood at the back entrance of the Two-Way Café or the Stockman’s or Dr. Bach’s Pharmacy and Soda Fountain for handouts and did at times receive edible offerings from each. He was one evening near the train depot tackled by a pair of men wearing those drab wool jackets issued by the CCC, who took the Bull Durham sack from his hands, then tossed him over a wooden fence when he followed them yelling. He received in that skirmish a gash that angled through his left eyebrow and gave him a scar some ladies later said added just enough intrigue to his looks.
He took to raiding gardens in full darkness, and no summer meal was sweeter than one so gained fresh from warm dirt and still alive in the mouth. A favorite patch to plunder, easy as butter, and not far from the square, was a very large and immaculate garden and clutch of fruit trees maintained by a comically mustached old man called the Rooshian. He spoke greenhorn English with a slow suspenseful drag as he searched for the proper shaping to give words he’d already started to speak. At times he would be heard declaiming loudly in gobbledygook about irksome concerns of some sort, to which only his wife could listen with comprehension. The Rooshian’s house at the north side of the garden was squat and cloaked in shadow by freely spread nature, vines sized thin to burly, with meshed tendrils and shoots, climbed over windows and up the walls to the roof, where tree limbs cluttered closely above and a skim of moss had settled on the shingles. He knew how to grow anything our climate and soil permitted and his crops were beautifully made beneath the sun and abundant.
The fence around this plenty was three rusty strands of barbed wire that had been stretched by several seasons of po’ boy raids and sagged deeply between tilted posts. Even a little kid could hop through at the sagged places. Even a little kid lugging tomatoes or corncobs could hop over running away. A little kid carrying too much might not hop high enough, though, and John Paul was hooked by a barb on the top strand and swung to hang upside down. The plunder fell away from him and he shrieked as the skin of his left calf slowly tore and lowered him by the shriek. His shrieks carried in the still night. The Rooshian came to his door and stood with a spot of lamplight glowing behind him while holding a fat book open with a finger inserted to mark his place.
He made a disagreeable noise and bent to light a lantern, then came into the yard following that light through the cultivated rows and rows of green things that had leaves and rustled and dirt that lay turned and soft underfoot. The moon was no help. He wore bib overalls without a shirt and bent to John Paul at the far fence line and held the lamp close. A patch of flesh was coming off the boy’s leg and had only a thin attachment to one rusty barb remaining.
“Don’t you now move, huh? Fence push in still.” He reached near the tearing yet snagged flesh and suddenly grabbed the sliver of skin and pinched the boy clear. A shriek, more blood. “Best hurt fast that way, boy.”
John Paul in lantern light did see a white wad of himself stuck to barbed wire and the sight of his own meat hanging there doubled the pain. (Baby brother and me, when rug rats, sat at Dad’s feet often to play our fingers across the irregularly shaped but smooth expanse that never grew skin to ooh and ahh over the creepy silken feel and make him repeat the story.) He was carried inside and eased onto a kitchen chair. The wife clucked and shook her head and went to work on the blood and the wound. John Paul in a strange kitchen of strange smells watched the bandage take on his own splashed color.
The Rooshian was Venyamin Alekseyevich Cherenko. (Dad misunderstood the Russian naming tradition and thought the big whoop was the patronymic in the middle and tagged me at birth with Alekseyevich. Mom argued and argued that carrying such a name during
He took to raiding gardens in full darkness, and no summer meal was sweeter than one so gained fresh from warm dirt and still alive in the mouth. A favorite patch to plunder, easy as butter, and not far from the square, was a very large and immaculate garden and clutch of fruit trees maintained by a comically mustached old man called the Rooshian. He spoke greenhorn English with a slow suspenseful drag as he searched for the proper shaping to give words he’d already started to speak. At times he would be heard declaiming loudly in gobbledygook about irksome concerns of some sort, to which only his wife could listen with comprehension. The Rooshian’s house at the north side of the garden was squat and cloaked in shadow by freely spread nature, vines sized thin to burly, with meshed tendrils and shoots, climbed over windows and up the walls to the roof, where tree limbs cluttered closely above and a skim of moss had settled on the shingles. He knew how to grow anything our climate and soil permitted and his crops were beautifully made beneath the sun and abundant.
The fence around this plenty was three rusty strands of barbed wire that had been stretched by several seasons of po’ boy raids and sagged deeply between tilted posts. Even a little kid could hop through at the sagged places. Even a little kid lugging tomatoes or corncobs could hop over running away. A little kid carrying too much might not hop high enough, though, and John Paul was hooked by a barb on the top strand and swung to hang upside down. The plunder fell away from him and he shrieked as the skin of his left calf slowly tore and lowered him by the shriek. His shrieks carried in the still night. The Rooshian came to his door and stood with a spot of lamplight glowing behind him while holding a fat book open with a finger inserted to mark his place.
He made a disagreeable noise and bent to light a lantern, then came into the yard following that light through the cultivated rows and rows of green things that had leaves and rustled and dirt that lay turned and soft underfoot. The moon was no help. He wore bib overalls without a shirt and bent to John Paul at the far fence line and held the lamp close. A patch of flesh was coming off the boy’s leg and had only a thin attachment to one rusty barb remaining.
“Don’t you now move, huh? Fence push in still.” He reached near the tearing yet snagged flesh and suddenly grabbed the sliver of skin and pinched the boy clear. A shriek, more blood. “Best hurt fast that way, boy.”
John Paul in lantern light did see a white wad of himself stuck to barbed wire and the sight of his own meat hanging there doubled the pain. (Baby brother and me, when rug rats, sat at Dad’s feet often to play our fingers across the irregularly shaped but smooth expanse that never grew skin to ooh and ahh over the creepy silken feel and make him repeat the story.) He was carried inside and eased onto a kitchen chair. The wife clucked and shook her head and went to work on the blood and the wound. John Paul in a strange kitchen of strange smells watched the bandage take on his own splashed color.
The Rooshian was Venyamin Alekseyevich Cherenko. (Dad misunderstood the Russian naming tradition and thought the big whoop was the patronymic in the middle and tagged me at birth with Alekseyevich. Mom argued and argued that carrying such a name during
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