FRONT-PORCH GOSPEL: This life story begins in 1973 (kind of) – part 6

Standing there beneath the dark clouds of that Alabama sky facing this Doocy with an audience of rough, ragged-looking bricklayers gathered around watching – it was a moment that is almost frozen in time.

Time in a bottle, as Mr. Jim Croce sang back in the ‘60s, but I don’t think Mr. Croce had anything like you are about to see in mind. This bottle was about to burst wide open, just like the clouds above were just about to do that dark, dim Monday morning.

When I say the moment was frozen in time, that is as real as anything can be, in my mind. Now, some fifty years later, that instant still can come back to me in a dream – no, not a dream, a nightmare –  and I’ll wake up in a cold sweat and wonder if I’m alive or dead. The feeling that morning is like the chill you would get meeting an unsavory and dangerous character in a back alley in the worst part of town in the middle of an ebony night.

That’s where I stood that morning.

After calling out to Red wondering “What-in-the-world is it you brung out heah on this job?” and then saying “I bet he don’t e’en shave yet” as he ran the back of that big, white-as-leprosy thing he called a hand down the side of my face, I froze.

And, as we said, I think maybe that moment’s been freezing, almost literally, for the last fifty years, and beyond.

I described that huge, rough-as-sandpaper hand to you.

Stained white from years of handling mortar and looking as if he had plucked it down in a bucket of white paint, I said.

But that wasn’t the worst part.

When he raised the hand and sent it on its journey down the side of my smooth-as-a-baby’s-bottom face, I was able to catch the hand out of the corner of my eye, because I didn’t dare move my head or budge one bit in that moment.

I said I wasn’t sure it was a hand, and that is not just outright hyperbole that some writers throw out there from time to time. I didn’t know what hyperbole was at that time, to my eleventh-grade English teacher Ms. Long’s chagrin, but I could have told you right then that whatever it was it wasn’t something that you could use a great deal of in weaving this tale. You can spin some yarns and tell more stretchers than truth, as Huck Finn would say, but some accounts of life are too real to exaggerate. This just is not one of them.

Thinking on it now, I don’t know if I ever had a time period for the rest of my life that was as immune to hyperbole as that summer, not until a vintage getting-lost-in Yellowstone hike that would not come about until the summer of ’21 – 2021, that is, forty-seven years and eleven months after this equally vintage meeting with Doocy.

You are wondering about that hand whose description is beyond exaggeration. He raised it, and although I only counted out of the corner of my eye, and although I was not breathing (which might distort your ability to count correctly, I suppose), I could see he did not have five fingers the way that most hands that you run across do. There were four. But it wasn’t just the number, because there may have been five, except the last two fingers on that huge right hand were webbed. They were welded together like two pieces of iron in a fire that came out as white as hot sand.

That is the white-hot hand that Doocy rubbed down the side of my pale, tender face, looking at me the whole time with the whites of his eyes showing as if he had just seen a ghost. I’m sure I looked like one at that moment, pale as I was, so maybe that’s why his eyes opened up the way they did.

Everything was quiet, quiet as a tomb, they say. I was hoping Billy Ray, who still stood with his six-foot-two frame somewhere to my left, would help me, somehow. I was even praying for it. I had been praying a series of those quick, instant prayers you pray when you know you don’t have long to live. But Billy Ray just passed by on the other side, just like the priest and the Levite my grandad Preacher Miller had preached just a Sunday or two before. Here I was, all but robbed and left for dead in the ditch, and all Billy Ray would do is pass on by, without so much as lifting one little finger to come to my defense.

As I look back, I remember now that Billy Ray did a great deal of passing by on the other side that summer at times that I thought surely my big brother’s best friend ought to make an appearance. I think I would have held that against Billy Ray all my life, even to this day, had he not stepped up in the biggest moment of all and did something for the history books in defense of his young friend. I cannot even write that without having chills kind of run down my shoulders and arms, because Billy Ray really stepped up in a big way for the boy they soon would be calling “Pup.”

But that would be a month later, thirty long, hard, grueling days that seemed like the biblical “a day is a thousand years.” So, I stayed mad at Billy Ray for every day of a few thousand years from this very starting point as I stood before the tribunal which is Doocy until the day a big cornfed Alabama boy came out on this very job looking for “Pup.” That story will have to wait, because there is plenty of water to roll under the bridge before that. But it will be worth the wait, that much I’ll promise you.

All was quiet on this “Bama” front – Billy Ray, Red, the one they called “Willum,” the one I hadn’t met whose name I would learn is Hook: Nobody budged, and nobody muttered so much as a whisper as Doocy looked me right in the eye wondering what in the world Red has “done brung out heah.”

Then Doocy did something that shocked me as much as he did when he rubbed that pale paw with the white-hot webbed fingers down the side of my baby face.

It would be another moment that is as immune to hyperbole as a possum is to rattlesnake venom. Some things you just cannot make up, and you cannot exaggerate, not at all.

All this, and the summer of ’73 wasn’t even five minutes old yet.

Stay tuned for Part 7 next week.