Paw

He was not my kin, but perhaps someday I will find that he was, after all, one of my people.

My only connection to him is long gone from my life, an ill-fated romance birthed in high school. But she introduced me to Paw, and so I am somewhat indebted to her for bringing me into his eccentric and loveable orbit.

Paw was what we used to call a coon-ass, born and bred down in Louisiana’s swamp country, that murky and mystical patch of America with its legends and lore, its distinctive patois and food all a part of the myths of the Cajun people. He and his wife, Granny, had relocated to our state when they were still young and had already begun raising their dark-haired brood of children.

A slender, rawboned old cuss with car grease in the creases of his hands and delta dirt beneath his horned nails, Paw ambled through his days on the land and on the lake adjacent to the cinderblock house he built with his own hands. The lake was a favorite place for locals to fish and idle away the hours back in the days when I was easy under the boughs, its dark waters with their cypress knees a reasonable imitation of the swamps of his home state. He wore weathered khaki pants and shirt, just as my own daddy did, his sharp knob of an Adam’s apple bobbing above the thatch of gray hair that spilled out of the top of his BVD undershirt.

Paw loved to tell tales of life on the river and the bayous back home. He enjoyed the descriptions of his people as sung by Creedence Clearwater Revival, people who were generous and giving, people who loved to eat and sing and celebrate. He would often tell stories of family gatherings and parties on the riverbanks in mild weather, of how the people would gather under the trees, someone scraping out a tune on a fiddle and other musicians joining in for a frolic while tubs of crawdads and dirty rice and etouffee and jambalaya and boiled corn would be served up, and the men would sip good white liquor and the women would sing and visit and the children would play until exhausted, at which time they would be put to rest on blankets beneath trees on the riverbank while the get-together continued until late night or early morning.

And the CCR song “Rollin’ On the River” was a magical tune for Paw. If that tune came on the radio, no matter what Paw was doing or who was present, he would shuffle out into the middle of the room and begin a dance that I would describe as Acadian St. Vitus. He would sling his long arms about, poke his skinny butt out behind him, skid his booted feet around on the floor, toss his head back, and gyrate his loose-limbed frame until the song was over, his eyes closed in unselfconscious ecstasy. As soon as the music would end, Paw would come back to himself and continue doing whatever he had been doing before the song started, as if unaware of his little musical conniption. Every time I saw him do this dance, I would muse to myself that he looked exactly like the Pink Panther at a hoedown.

Paw arose at first light every day and poured himself a cup of coffee that would strip the paint off of a barn door. He would continue drinking coffee all morning long, pouring the scalding liquid down his gullet seemingly without tasting it. He was in constant motion, fixing and repairing things around the place, building new projects, tending to his caged pet squirrel Scooter. Paw would open the cage and Scooter would run up his sleeve and sit on his shoulder, chattering at everyone in delight for his few moments of freedom. The lean old man would putter around the place until noon, at which time he would go into the house and sit down to eat a champion portion of whatever dinner Granny set before him, almost always something of the Louisiana or at least Deep South stripe.

After his noon meal, Paw would wash his face with its pencil-thin mustache and change his shirt and go to the fridge, from which he would retrieve and pop the first Old Milwaukee of the day. From then until suppertime, Paw would steadily pull on a beer. I never saw him drunk-drunk, but I did see him buzzed a few times, and I would stifle chuckles at his florid and profane rages against politicians and young folks. He was convinced everyone below the age of 21 was a dope fiend. In fact, after I left his house the first time I met Paw, he told his granddaughter when speaking of me, “That boy is as high as a Georgia pine.” Which I was not. Not on that day, anyway. But with my hair past my shoulders and my ever-present guitar and my overly-solicitous manner with adults, I seemed to invite suspicions of my involvement in drug trafficking, white slavery,  and the overthrow of all Western democracies.

In time, with regular visits to the home, Paw’s liking for me grew, and he often invited me on his lake rambles. He had several trotlines installed around the perimeter of the lake and visited them daily. I enjoyed my outings with him and would watch him as he loaded the old johnboat with supplies for the afternoon. The most prominent piece of equipment was the grimy old Styrofoam cooler, worn smooth on the corners with use, which he would fill with cans of Old Milwaukee and baloney sandwiches. He would add his tackle boxes and a few poles, along with a cast iron skillet, some corn meal and salt and pepper and some utensils, a can of Crisco, and would always dump in an armload of dry kindling. A large green Coleman chest full of ice would await the fish we would unhook from the lines. Lastly, Paw would strap on his .22 pistol and carefully set his double-barrel 12-guage against the gunwales. Then we’d be off.

Like everything else at his place, Paw had constructed his dock himself. It was supported by 55-gallon oil drums and had a nice swinging bridge-type ramp on which to board the boat. I can still see the sun shining down on his narrow back as he would bend to untie the johnboat from the dock and push away with an oar. I would sit up front and watch the black water lighten in color to a dark emerald as we moved towards the center of the lake. I seem to recall that Paw had an outboard motor somewhere near the dock, covered and ready for use, but I can’t recall him ever firing it up when I was visiting. It was always the oars for the Orr in his boat.

After leisurely paddling back and forth across the lake a time or two, Paw would swap places with me, me sitting astern and paddling while he busied himself with tackle while I steered us towards the lake’s edge. There the water grew dark again, black as coffee from the tannins in the vegetation steeping below the surface. Paw would lower his voice to the nasal whisper that I can still hear, pointing out so many things that I missed, like turtles and otters slipping into the water from logs at our approach, the rare coon or possum trundling along in the shadows of the bank. He would keep the shotgun near and would have me pause before passing under particularly low-slung branches, jabbing at them to disturb any cottonmouths that might be sunning themselves and be tempted to drop into the boat…or onto our shoulders.

We would go from trotline to trotline, removing the fish that were fit for eating and placing them on ice in the green Coleman cooler, and releasing the junk fish, if they were alive. If they were dead, Paw would put them in a paper bag and cut them up later for bait. The main haul from Paw’s trotlines were bream (pronounced brim, for you Yankees), crappie (pronounced croppy, for you Yankees), and catfish, with the occasional gar twisting, alligator-like, on the line. We rarely returned to his dock without a cooler stuffed with fish, which we would gut and  clean and place in empty paper milk cartons, which would be filled with water and deep-frozen. Anyone from my neck of the woods has eaten many a fried fish that came out of a chunk of ice in a milk carton.

We usually ate our sandwiches and sipped a brew in mid-afternoon. Drinking a beer with an adult, especially a worldly old desperado like Paw made me feel like a genuine outlaw in my own right, a feeling I savored in those days of weighing 145 pounds and casting the same shadow as a dustmop. The company of men has always been soothing and a source of reinforcement for me, and especially during those days of gangly insecurity and rapid-fire inner dialogue. On some occasions, Paw would announce that we would fry up some fish from the trotline, and so we would make a fire – Paw would tell me that he had his flint and steel with him, then whip out a Zippo lighter and giggle while lighting the kindling – and put the skillet across the rocks and cook up some exquisite lake fish. Paw would tell me bayou stories and ask me questions about my life and my ambitions.

I had no way of knowing at the time that Paw had known and worked with my daddy years before, and so at that time he knew more of my sorry backstory than I knew myself. Perhaps he looked at me with pity, but I don’t think it was pity or condescension I saw when I looked into those eyes so full of kindness and curiosity and life. And worry. Even though I didn’t yet know about Paw’s connection to my daddy, I found it interesting to learn later that while I was in the Marine Corps, Paw would regularly appear at my mother’s door with brown paper grocery bags full of homegrown tomatoes and okra and corn. Mother knew who Paw was because she knew my then-girlfriend, Paw’s granddaughter, and assumed that his acts were just those of an extraordinarily kind old gent. Years later, I would tell her about the connection between the old man and her son’s father, and Mother would stare off silently and think her thoughts.

One of my favorite memories of Paw was his evening supper ritual. At suppertime, he would set aside the last beer of the day, go to the cupboard and get a large mixing bowl, then open the kitchen cabinets and pull out several large bags of different varieties of Brach’s candies. He would grab a fistful from each bag and drop it in the mixing bowl, replace the bags in the cabinets, then sit down at the kitchen table. Paw would use his hands to mix the candies up, then pick a piece, unwrap it, and eat it with gusto, dentures a-clacking. He repeated this procedure until the mixing bowl was empty and a small hill of wrappers was at his elbow. Did I mention that Paw was whipcord thin and drank beer from noon until seven pm? He lived into his late eighties.

The other really hilarious thing I remember about Paw was the time his granddaughter and I showed up at his house about suppertime unannounced, and this time I really WAS as high as a Georgia pine, courtesy of his granddaughter’s stash in the glove compartment. Wacky tobacky always gave me the giggles, and this evening I was in a state of rare laffability. This particular evening was shortly after my then-girlfriend’s parents, who lived in Virginia at the time, came to visit the girlfriend’s mom’s parents, along with their other daughter. My girlfriend’s younger sister, Amanda Kay, was a perceptive child of deep beauty, keen perception of people, and an absolutely razor-honed sense of humor. The parents didn’t care for me at all and their chilly presence in the usually-welcoming house made me want to find somewhere else to be, but Amanda was a shy ray of light during the time they were there in town, and she made me feel I belonged. She later told me that she felt like she was in the way. I remember watching her pretend to play with rocks in the driveway while listening closely to everything her older sister and I talked about while we sat on the hood of Granny’s sedan under the carport.

Anyway, on this evening just after their departure, I watched Paw eat his supper while sitting at the table with him and finding everything he said and did extremely funny. Again, the maryjane. Granny had the tv on in the den, and it was tuned to the show “Dif’rent Strokes,” an abysmal sitcom about a rich white businessman who adopts two black boys. As I recall, during this episode the white man was lavishing special affection on the smallest boy, whose main claim to thespian immortality centered on his much-anticipated outbursts of “Whatchoo talkin’ ‘bout, Willis?” Something about the show really irritated Paw, and he launched into a sugar-and-beer-fueled diatribe against the show. The climactic moment in his outburst was when he stood up at the table, pointed a finger as long as a carrot at the tv, and shouted, “That’s it! Just love on ‘im! Love on that little colored boy! Why don’t you just kiss his nuuuuuuuuuuts?”

My thin self-control fell apart, and I dissolved into the hardest laughter I had known to that point in my life. I laughed so hard I almost vomited. Granny and my girlfriend were laughing too, but they were also watching Paw closely, more aware than I was of his volatility. After I got control of myself, I went out into the backyard and laughed some more. Paw joined me in a few minutes, staring at me as if trying to decide if I was mocking him. After a bit, he started grinning, his mouth spreading wide beneath the Slim Whitman mustache, and he began giggling as well. My girlfriend came outside with us, and at her approach, Paw stopped laughing, took off his ballcap lifted his face to the starry sky, and began praying a long prayer to the Almighty, asking for His forgiveness for the sins of the young folks with him, and for patience for himself. He ended the prayer abruptly, put his cap back on, and patted both our shoulders. When he went inside, Granny had already changed the channel.

I suppose the reason I’ve been thinking so much about Paw is because of the weather here, the matchless golden light of October, which is probably at this moment spearing down into the dark waters of the lake where Paw and I once paddled. The fall weather is something I love so much, and yet it elicits a deep melancholy in me. October always feels like deep, permanent change.

The last time I saw Paw was in October, in fact. I was home on leave from Okinawa, and went out to the old lake house to visit him and Granny. As always, he took me out on the johnboat to check the lines, and we drank beer, and he laughed and swapped stories with me. And at his bidding, we knelt in the deep sand beneath a cypress and screwed our beer cans down into the sand to keep them from tipping over, and Paw once again prayed for me, for my safety and my wisdom. His voice was sad, and had begun to show the warbly high shakiness of an elderly man. I drove away soon after we returned to the dock, and I never saw him again.  Mother continued to receive visits from him during the summer months, when he would bring her the vegetables he had grown with those hard hands.

My connections to Paw, though fragile, continue to this very hour. I wish he were here with me. I could take him to some mountain lakes where he could fish, and we could talk of the universe and God and squirrels and the inconsistencies of womenfolk, and maybe he could tell me all of what he once knew while looking at me with those worried old eyes.

~ S.K. Orr