Flying on Fried Wings Read online

  FLYING ON FRIED WINGS

  By Deborah Smith

  Southerners are, of course, a mythological people...Lost by choice in dreaming of high days gone and big houses burned, now we cannot even wish to escape.

  —Jonathan Daniels

  Southerners of all backgrounds share a love for sports, at least for certain sports, such as football and baseball, both of which will allow a person of any social persuasion the opportunity to drink beer and holler outdoors. Basketball, however, is primarily a big-city attraction, meant to be played indoors without picnics spread on the grass or giant moths swarming under the stadium lights. Plus there is very little spitting in basketball, either by the fans or players.

  This alone is enough to make basketball suspicious to rural southerners, who value the freedom to expectorate in public. Nor do rural folk care much for golf or tennis. The former is an expensive waste of good hunting territory, and the latter requires that even manly men wear snug white shorts. A good ol’ boy could get himself laughed at that way.

  On the other hand, big-city southerners find it hard to appreciate traditionally rural sports, such as stock-car racing, bass tournaments, and professional wrestling, all of which require a certain suspension of self-centered dignity to understand or trust. Any sport that involves oil, bait, or bodybuilders wearing sequined capes is a little too intimate for sophisticated city folk, who don’t even want to know the names of their next-door neighbors.

  Fans of stock-car racing have an unwritten dress code. Men wear jeans, tractor caps, big belt buckles, and some piece of clothing that advertises either Jack Daniels, Johnny Cash, or auto parts. Women wear jeans and tank tops with ads matching their menfolks’. The stock-car-mama effect is only complete if the gals keep their hair long, perm it into tight waves, and top it with poofed-up bangs that won’t move in a stiff wind. Big-city southern women cannot even imagine poofed-up bangs. They have stylists named Raoul and Bruce who would faint at the very thought.

  Bass tournaments are bewildering, at best. For citified sports lovers, and also, in fact, for the majority of southerners—who only care that the catfish filets are fully fried before the ice cream is finished churning—bass tournaments are interesting solely for the cheap thrills of watching big-bellied men wobble around in precarious little boats. In fact, watching men fish isn’t a sport—there’s nothing to watch. For all but true fishing fans, bass tournaments are as exciting as waiting for glue to harden.

  Pro wrestling is not about serious competition between serious athletes. Any longtime fan knows that the whole thing’s scripted, but a real southern fan doesn’t care, because wrestling is, after all, male soap opera. Women have Susan Lucci; men have Hulk Hogan. The thrill is in the sheer histrionics of the action: the drama, the plot twists, the heroes and villains, the damsels in distress, the evil seductresses, and the noble sidekicks. Add body slams and striped tights to Days of Our Lives, and wrestling fans would feel right at home.

  Despite all the diversity of southern sports life, however, there are a few sports that haven’t caught on with either the uptown or the downhome folks. Soccer is one, no matter what the cable sports channel brags about its popularity or how many polls claim that “soccer moms” are running the country. Not in the South, they’re not. Grown men kicking a ball around the ground while wearing baggy shorts is just too Socialist for southerners’ tastes: we need our sports to be outright dirty and dangerous, completely silly, or supremely white-glove genteel. Soccer just doesn’t fit the bill in any category.

  Hockey has potential because players get to beat each other up and grin without their front teeth, but you’re never going to build a groundswell of support for a sport no sun-baked southern child can grow up playing—unless hell freezes over and the local Dairy Queen sets up community rinks in its walk-in freezer.

  And then there is the steeplechase. It’s not really a sport, it’s a social event that includes horses, and except for ritzy patches of Dixiedom where pseudo-southern-royalty gallop their hunter-jumpers across the countryside in pursuit of foxes, most of us give a slow, collective, Say what? when anyone asks if we’d like to watch it. There is something vaguely embarrassing about watching little jockeys race expensive thoroughbreds around a grassy course while leaping a few fake logs. The feeling is akin to averting one’s eyes when a chubby old uncle breaks into a clogging routine during a barbecue picnic.

  Even so, every spring the well-to-do and/or culturally snooty trek to huge pastures outside the southern cities to attend a steeplechase. It’s like the opera. You have to say you’ve been to one, at least once.

  Entertaining corporate visitors was part of my job as a regional manager for a chain of garden nurseries, so I had been to the steeplechase several times before the year I took my Uncle Hoyt and Aunt Wesma. I knew what to expect, and they didn’t, but they insisted on doing things their way. They had been doing things their way for as long as anyone in my family could remember. The universe usually adjusted to suit them.

  Uncle Hoyt was big, raw-boned, grinning, green-eyed, and full of mischief, a mountain man born-and-raised, like all my uncles. And like them, he had finished high school then refused even one more minute of higher education, opting instead for an independent life of more than a dozen self-employed occupations. Several of those jobs had made him rich, the best one being a heavy equipment sales-and-leasing company he started with my Uncle Benton, who lost an arm in a bobcat accident (the machine, not the animal) and swore he’d recoup his flesh in money.

  So Uncle Hoyt had several million dollars parked squarely in savings and investment accounts, though he’d never let you know it. His little joke was letting strangers think he was just another graying, fattening ol’ mountain feller. In fact neither he nor Aunt Wesma stood much on ceremony, though if you carefully studied the pea-sized diamond rings she wore on her tanned and callused hands you knew you weren’t looking at cubic zirconia.

  She and Uncle Hoyt shopped for most of their clothes at their local discount store, and had furnished their seven-thousand-square-foot mountain log home with plain family heirlooms and a hodgepodge of rustic cedar pieces made by my Uncle JoMo (Joseph Moses,) who owned a furniture-crafting business. Oddly enough, their plain-logic code of living easily encompassed sending my cousin Mima, their only daughter, to gourmet cooking school at a luxury resort in Thailand. The trip was her graduation present when she finished law school.

  “She wanted to learn how them Thais cook,” Aunt Wesma explained while hosting a family potluck dinner of eighty or ninety relatives, “so me and her Daddy said if she was gonna hunt turkey, she oughta go straight to the turkey’s gobble.”

  Uncle Hoyt and Aunt Wesma did not scrimp on fineries on the basis of general principle, but spent their money generously where it pleased them most. Which was why Aunt Wesma had decided, after reading an article on steeplechases in Southern Living, (our magazine of Martha Stewartish lifestyles below the Mason-Dixon line) that she might invest a little money in a steeplechase horse. When Aunt Wesma was a child her family had raised mules and Tennessee Walking Horses. Horses of the non-jumping variety had always been in her blood. She was ready to expand her interests.

  And so it was decided that I would escort Uncle Hoyt and Aunt Wesma to their first steeplechase, so they could study Aunt Wesma’s idea. I got VIP tickets for the event, and ordered a handsome picnic lunch from a local caterer. I packed wooden tray tables, linens, and colorful plates and glasses (the kind of Wal-Mart plastics that decorators call “festive,” but only if used outdoors.) I had my snazzy little BMW washed, polished, and detailed. I was a young professional woman and a modern southern-belle hotshot, all the way.

  I didn’t stand a chance with Uncle Hoyt and Aunt Wesma
. They arrived at my townhouse in their sparkling, cherry-red pick-up truck, a muscular and deluxe model with leather seats and state-of-the-art gizmos, including a booming CD player for Uncle Hoyt’s George Jones collection.

  “Oh, honey, you got the tickets for us; we couldn’t let you do the food, too,” Aunt Wesma insisted when I showed them my neatly packed wicker hamper. Uncle Hoyt slapped a hand on a huge blue ice-chest in his truck’s bed. “We brung enough eats for us and the neighbors,” he bragged. “Now, get yourself in the truck and let us show you a good time. That’s all there is to it.”

  I was defeated and knew it. Trying to explain the world we were about to enter would only have insulted them. We drove out of my suburban enclave into the green rolling hills of the spring countryside, George Jones singing loudly on the truck’s high-tech speakers, Uncle Hoyt driving with one hand and adjusting his cheek full of chewing tobacco with the other, Aunt Wesma catching me up on family gossip as she crocheted an orange afghan for a University of Tennessee nephew, and me gazing out the truck’s passenger window with a worried headache between my brows. I did not want my favorite aunt and uncle to be humiliated.

  The steeplechase was held in an enormous pasture; it resembled a modern medieval tournament with colorful tents scattered about. A white wooden announcer’s booth rose from the center of the temporary steeplechase course, which was outlined in white wooden barricades and stacks of baled hay. Several thousand people had already arrived, channeled into outlying parking areas by stern off-duty state patrol officers hired for the event. They were setting up picnics on the grassy slopes surrounding the race course.

  Thanks to my VIP tickets, we rolled past the less fortunate citizenry, with Uncle Hoyt nodding politely to the officers as if they’d granted him some special favor (which he was accustomed to getting, back in his own stomping grounds.) They directed us into a cordoned-off area in the middle of the course’s infield, and we parked amongst a long line of fellow VIP vehicles. Prime viewing. Prime, period.

  “Oh, my lord,” Aunt Wesma sighed. “Will you look at this fancy crowd?”

  We were surrounded by Rolls Royces, Jaguars, Mercedes, and enough luxury antique roadsters to start a car show. The owners—or their servants, because sometimes it was hard to tell—were setting up small personal compounds in front of their cars.

  The silver Rolls beside us was the most lavish of all. Its tables were draped in fine white linen and anchored by silver candelabra or sterling vases bursting with fresh cut flowers. On them were feasts of fine finger foods, miniature quiches, fruits, fondues, and crudites, all on silver serving dishes or warming dishes. Circling these small banquets were teak or mahogany camp chairs, cushioned with tapestry pillows. A young man spread an oriental rug on the ground and set up his small feast. He was accompanied by several other well-dressed people, all of whom turned wide stares on us and the truck. I expected exotic women to appear at any moment, fanning our neighbors with ostrich feathers.

  “Howdy,” Uncle Hoyt called as he got out. They offered wan smiles and turned quickly to their gourmet nibbles and to glasses of champagne they poured from a tall bottle nestled in a silver ice bucket. Aunt Wesma snorted. “They’ll get headaches, drinking outdoors like that before lunchtime.”

  “Good lord,” Uncle Hoyt said, “I don’t care about watching the hosses run. I just want to study this crowd of peacocks.” We set about unpacking their ice chest, and within minutes had set up enough cold fried chicken, potato salad, baked beans and biscuits to feed an army, along with pound cake, pecan pie, and two jugs of iced tea. Aunt Wesma lowered the truck’s tail gate, then spread her half-finished orange afghan across it like a tablecloth, and arranged the food, which was mounded in her best Tupperware. Next to it she set out paper plates, cups, and plastic utensils, all of it plain white, not festive. Uncle Hoyt unfolded three of his favorite striped lawn chairs, turned up a fresh George Jones CD on the truck’s music system, then announced, “Time to take a walk to the barn,” which was code for visiting the nearest toilet. After he wandered away, Aunt Wesma settled in a chair beside me with a napkin and a chicken leg.

  The first sign of trouble came from the neighbor to our left. She was an elegant woman in silk pants and a sweater embroidered with horses jumping fences. Her tiny white poodle, wearing a jeweled collar, wandered over to Aunt Wesma and looked up eagerly at the fried chicken leg.

  “Here, baby, you just help yourself,” Aunt Wesma said to the poodle, then stripped the meat off and gave the miniature dog the leg bone. Aunt Wesma’s family had raised hunting dogs for generations. Those hounds had prospered on table scraps. So would a poodle, she figured. I watched worriedly as the pint-sized dog dragged the bone next door.

  The poodle’s owner gasped. “What have you got! Oh!” She wrested the bone from the tiny dog’s disappointed mouth and marched over to us, waving the illicit treat. “I’m sure you didn’t mean any harm,” she said to Aunt Wesma with condescending charm, “but I don’t feed my dog garbage.”

  “Neither do I, honey,” Aunt Wesma said with a placid smile. “Your poor little dog looks as hungry as a termite hunting for a plank to eat.”

  “I assure you, she’ll get her own plate of gourmet dog food at lunch.”

  “That’s nice, honey. But it ain’t fried chicken.”

  “Please! This is not a stock car race!” The woman flung the leg bone on the grassy ground beside the truck. I glanced angrily around us, watching a flicker of smug smiles as others nibbled their caviar on toast points. The only exception was one dapper old man with a topknot of fine gray hair, which made him resemble a curious leghorn rooster with its head craned. He scowled at the poodle matron as she swept away.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to Aunt Wesma. “These people are uppity.”

  “They don’t bother me none,” she said with a laugh, and spooned potato salad on a paper plate. “You can tell which people are fine and which just got money. Money can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.”

  A few minutes later a pair of well-dressed men walked by. “How quaint,” one said loudly, and grinned at the truck. Not long after that, a pair of small children peered at us from behind the fender of a Rolls Royce. “Hillbillies,” one whispered.

  “Good morning, Sweetie Pies,” Aunt Wesma called to them. They shrieked and ran away.

  Aunt Wesma had a vulnerable nature when it came to children. Her unshakable good humor began to fade. “I reckon we don’t fit in here,” she said. “I ain’t never been somewhere that the little folks were scared of me.”

  I said a half-dozen polite things to reassure her, at the same time growing angry over the stupidity of the silver-spoon society we’d entered. I fixed her a plate with another chicken leg on it, but she sat without eating.

  “Ma’am?” a reedy voice called. It was the little old man nearby. He held a forlorn china plate dabbed with some sort of delicate yellow sauce and a pile of anemic-looking grilled shrimp. “Mighty fine looking bird leg you got there,” he said to Aunt Wesma. To my surprise, his drawling, high-pitched voice was as country as sorghum syrup.

  Aunt Wesma brightened. “You just come right over and help yourself,” she replied. The little old man thumped his china plate down on a teak tray table and marched over to our camp, grinning. “Real folks,” he proclaimed happily. “Just call me Buck. Glad to meet ya!”

  We introduced ourselves and all shook hands, and he pulled up a chair. Heads turned. People stared with new interest. When Uncle Hoyt returned he found Aunt Wesma and Buck jawing merrily while the elegant crowd inched closer, ears cocked and attitudes humbled.

  Because Buck—his nickname—was a retired four-term state governor, one of the most notable politicians in the South.

  This is the power of southern life, and the magic of sports. Even the odd ones like steeplechase can’t keep us apart, and a sharing of southern soul food, uppity manners, and downhome honesty makes fans of us all.

 

 

  Debo
rah Smith, Flying on Fried Wings

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