Aunt Bertha and Uncle Embry

A strange country couple.

Aunt Bertha and Uncle Embry

 

By

 

Elton Camp

 

 

            Each of them really was one of a kind in the real meaning of “unique.”  Aunt Bertha was my father’s oldest sister and Uncle Embry was her husband.  I had many aunts and uncles, but they are the ones who reside sharp and clear in my memory even after several decades.

 

            My first encounter with Uncle Embry was when I was a mere toddler.  I didn’t know he was coming until there he stood.  He rode the bus a long distance to help my mother move to Marshall County from the tiny community of Fayetteville, Alabama.  He wore a brown dress hat even inside the house.  A short, slim man, when he looked directly at me, his head weaved slightly side-to-side in a way I’d never seen. 

 

            “Embry has St. Vitus’ Dance,” my mother explained.  “He can’t help doing that.” 

 

            I had no idea what that meant, but it was enough explanation to satisfy my childish curiosity.  He talked directly to me and listened when I responded.  That made him distinctly different from other adults I’d encountered.  Most only pretended to listen and seemed perpetually in a hurry.  Uncle Embry gave the impression that he had all the time and patience in the world.  He immediately became my favorite relative outside our immediate family. 

 

            My mother and Uncle Embry, with some difficulty, loaded all our possessions into her tiny 1934 Chevrolet coupe.  When they struggled to stow my tricycle, I came up with what I thought was an excellent idea.

 

            “Attach a rope to my tricycle and pull me on it behind the car,” I suggested.  It sounded like fun and would solve the problem of how to get the tricycle where we were going.  That it would have been impossibly dangerous never occurred to a three-year-old.  I was both disappointed and a bit annoyed at their laughing refusal.  The next thing I recall is being at our destination.  Most likely I slept the whole way. 

 

            I became acquainted with Aunt Bertha after the move was complete.  She was far more reserved and changed but little in appearance over the forty plus years that I knew her�"always plain, but never unsightly.  Her gray hair was perpetually pulled straight back and arranged into a bun on the back of her head.  Although she worked hard and long in the fields, her skin was free of wrinkles and pale, kept that way because she wore a bonnet, long sleeves, and a skirt to her ankles anytime she was outside.  Bertha used neither lipstick nor makeup and owned no jewelry, not even a wedding ring.  When I was young, I didn’t question why she was so different from most other women.  She seldom smiled and I recall only one time having heard her laugh.  Yet, I liked her and looked forward to seeing her.  She was my aunt and that alone made her special. 

 

            The couple lived in an unpainted country house on a dirt road.  My parents and I visited them every few weeks.   Uncle Embry showed me the first slingshot I’d seen.  He’d made it from a forked tree branch, rubber strips cut from an inner tube, and a leather pocket to hold the rock.  “Here, try it,” he invited.  “Shoot at the trunk of that tree.”  My shots fell immediately to the ground or went off at a wild angle, but he didn’t criticize.  “Shoot again,” he encouraged.  “It takes a while to learn.” 

 

            My father came out into the yard to watch.  “I had one of those when I was a boy,” he related.  “One day I shot at a humming bird with a small, green peach.  I never dreamed I’d hit it, but it dropped dead to the ground.  I never cared about a slingshot after that.”  When I made another wild shot at the tree, he added in a tone of finality, “You’ll sure never hit anything.”  As my father stalked back toward the house, Uncle Embry gave me a squeeze on the shoulder and a wink that ended the tears that came to my eyes at my father’s cruel remark. 

 

            Uncle Embry enjoyed entertaining me with stories of Tandy Bogus.  “He lives right down there in the storm pit,” he whispered as he pointed into the darkness at the foot of the concrete steps leading into the emergency shelter in his backyard.  “He comes out and drags away boys if they’re bad.” 

 

            Of course I knew the monster was only a fantasy, but it was fun trying to imagine its ghastly appearance.  I sometimes crept to the opening of the storm pit and glanced inside, but never entered.  “Hey, you never know.  Why take a chance?” I thought.  Besides, I didn’t want to disprove the existence of Tandy Bogus.  To remove any possibility of doubt would ruin the tall tale    

 

            Uncle Embry owned a mule he named Old Pet.  The name wasn’t suitable.  It wasn’t a pet, but a working farm animal he used for plowing in those days before tractors became common farm machines.  Old Pet had a distinct bulge on one side, about the size and shape of a head.  “He once swallowed a boy.  That’s his head you see there,” he warned with mock seriousness. 

 

            Across from the house, in a field, was a large erosion ditch Embry called “Old Pet’s Trail.” We often walked down the more than head-high wash when I visited, but the most fun was the time when he mounted me on the back of Old Pet and let me ride down it.   The creature had no saddle, so the bony back of the mule didn’t make a comfortable seat, but it was a big adventure.  That was the first and only time I have ridden a mule. 

 

            One day when we discussed rural mail delivery, Uncle Embry told me, “You put up the red flag on the mailbox if you think you might get mail.”  Although I couldn’t see how one could know when to expect mail, I credulously believed the story for some time. On a future visit I recalled the story and decided to do what I’d wanted to try for weeks.   I slipped down to the road and raised the flag on the theory that they might well be expecting mail. 

 

            When the carrier stopped for nothing and tooted his horn in annoyance, both Embry and my father scolded me severely when I explained why I’d raised the flag.    To my astonishment, Uncle Embry denied that he’d told me that tale about the flag. He let me take the heat for something he’d initiated. I thought less of him for a while, but soon got over it.  It’s a sad part of growing up to learn that grownups sometimes lie, especially when it might cast them in a bad light in the eyes of other adults.               

 

            The pea patch was some distance from the house. One day I went with Aunt Bertha while she picked peas. It was terribly hot so I began to complain about heat and thirst.  “Why did y’all build the house so far from the pea patch?” I asked in misery. 

 

            Aunt Bertha was a humorless person, but somehow this caught her fancy so much that she laughed and laughed about it and continued to tell that story and chuckle for years afterward. It amused her that I seemingly thought the pea patch had always been at that location so that the dwelling should’ve been located in relation to it.

 

            After television came into our lives in the early fifties, we didn’t see much of them for a few years.  My father became enslaved to the medium and watched it whenever he had free time.  It took precedence over almost anything from station sign-on about six o’ clock in the morning to sign off around midnight during hours when we had free time at home.

 

            I missed them.  One time I rode my red bicycle the three miles to their house.  It was a daring trip since I seldom got more than a mile from home.  About half the distance was over a gravel road, a significant hazard to a cyclist.  When I reached the dirt roads, the going was much easier and safer. 

 

            Regular visits resumed when we began to buy milk and butter from Aunt Bertha. Each week, for many years, we bought raw, that is to say unpasteurized, milk in gallon glass jars.   My father had a theory that it was healthier and better tasting than milk from the stores.  Actually, such milk was quite risky from a health standpoint.  Aunt Bertha did the best she could to be clean, but she had no indoor plumbing.  The milk was dangerously high in saturated fat.  Undetected sickness in the cow had the potential to be transmitted to people.  It’s surprising that it didn’t make us sick.

            During the Second World War, to get butter became very difficult since most of it went to the troops at the expense of the civilian population.  A substitute in the form of margarine came onto the market.  The butter producers somehow managed to get a regulation passed to prevent margarine being the color of butter.  To placate consumers who objected to the stark, white margarine, the manufacturers provided a packet of coloring to be worked into the product by the housewife.  That allowed them to conform to the law and yet sell their product.  I recall my mother laboriously working it into the margarine until it approximated the appearance of real butter.  

            My father contemptuously described it as fake butter and wouldn’t eat it if he could find the real thing.  He usually had no choice until his sister commenced her home business.  Most weeks, Aunt Bertha had some to sell, but we weren’t her only customers so we had to take what we could get.  Some of the cow’s milk must be left for her calf.  Cows gave far less milk in those days before hormone stimulation.

            When I turned sixteen and could legally drive, it became my job to pick up the milk and butter.  That put me back in regular contact with Uncle Embry and Aunt Bertha.  I was then old enough to notice the contrast in the way they lived when compared to the general standard of the times.  For example, they were among the last in the county to have electricity. 

            Aunt Bertha admitted, “I wouldn’t have had it put in except that I had to have a refrigerator for my milk and butter business.  It just costs too much.”  Once I came after dark and found them sitting in the living room with a kerosene lamp.  “We go to bed pretty soon after dark,” she said at my look of surprise. She continued to use a wood cook stove.  There wasn’t a single electric appliance in their house until we gave them an electric churner that we’d used before she started to sell butter. 

            “Take this electric churner to Bertha,” Mother told me one day.  “She may not use it, but I’m going to give her a chance.  She spends hours churning by hand.”

            For a while, my mother’s prediction was on target.  The device remained on the counter exactly where she’d placed it when I gave it to her.  “Aunt Bertha, it won’t use much power and it’s so much quicker.  Try it just one time,” I urged. 

            At length, she gave in and followed the easy directions I provided for its use.  She was amazed and immediately hooked.  Never again did she churn manually and nobody could tell the slightest difference in the butter.  It was her first compromise with modern technology, and very nearly her last. 

            As neighbors installed running water, the couple stuck with a drilled well, windlass, and well bucket, although they finally built a sturdy tin shelter over it.  I liked to draw water so they usually let me do it even if the bucket on the shelf by the outside kitchen door was about full.  That water could go into the watering trough for the hogs.  It was necessary to control descent of the empty bucket since to let it fall by gravity turned the metal crank of the windlass fast enough to be dangerous.  When the long, slender bucket sank, the rope became taut.  That was the signal to bring it up.  Until it cleared the water in the well, it weighed almost nothing, but when it suddenly became heavy, it was in the well shaft. 

            “Be extra careful now,” Uncle Embry warned.  “If you let it slip out of your hand, it’ll drop like a rock and the crank could break your arm.”  When it reached the top, I swung it to the side, centered it over the water pail, and pulled upward on the trigger that released a gush into the bucket.    

            They never had the water tested for purity, but kept a metal lid over the opening to the shaft.  “I’ve knowed of a frog getting in a well,” Embry said.  “It dies and ruins the water so bad you can’t drink it until you draw all the water out several times.”  If the unsanitary waterworks ever made them sick, I didn’t know about it.  However, I made a point of never drinking at their house, especially since I’d have been expected to drink directly from the dipper that served as both scoop and communal drinking vessel for them both.  The idea repelled me. 

            It seemed impossible that they could take effective baths, but neither seemed especially dirty despite the hard fieldwork they did as farmers.  Even to bathe in a creek wasn’t possible since one didn’t flow across their farm. 

  

            Most of her life, Bertha lived in abject terror or storms and raced to the underground storm pit anytime even mildly threatening conditions developed. I don’t know what led to this since, far as I know, a tornado never came near her. The closest was the 1908 tornado that destroyed nearby Albertville, but it had no affect where she lived. 

 

            That extreme fear was shared among the immediate neighbors.  Four families combined their money and labor to build a sturdy storm pit at the side of the road.  Heavy clouds or even distant lightning caused a crowd to rush for shelter.  It still stands across the road from their last house. 

 

            I went inside with them one time when I was visiting because I thought it a great adventure to sit in the dampness and darkness of the storm pit. Most likely, Bertha, like most Baptists, believed that if it wasn’t “your time” you wouldn’t be killed, but if so, she made no application of that belief in her own case. It seemed inconsistent to me for a person holding such a tenet to attempt to thwart Divine will.  If her god wanted her dead, it made no sense to resist. 

 

            I was horrified that they were on easy terms with mice in their house. Vermin played openly on the counter in their kitchen. “They’re my pets,” Uncle Embry said when I asked why he didn’t kill them.  I learned later that wasn’t the real reason.  Traps or poison cost money and would have done little good in the rickety old house.  Only a dingy cloth covered the opening to the pantry.  A door would have cost more.  Mice could enter and leave the food storage area at their pleasure.     

 

            Aunt Bertha’s egg custard was the one and only dessert she made.  It was a particular favorite of mine. For years she had me go into the kitchen and get a piece when I came to visit. It was done on a wood stove and had a better taste than any I’ve ever seen. I can “taste” it in my mind right now.  Although made of eggs, she kept it in a kitchen cabinet without refrigeration. It’s surprising that the dangerous practice didn’t result in food poisoning.  Before I bit into the slice, I always thought about the mice and wondered if one of them had already had a nibble. 

 

            In the absence of an indoor bathroom, they used a crude wooden outhouse. The original structure was to the right of the barn.  Tiny, but with two cutouts on the wooden bench, its horrid stench was bearable only because of ventilation provided by cracks between the vertical boards of its construction.  It was improperly made even by country standards.  No pit had been dug under it so that the waste was clearly visible, level with the outside, and open to the pasture to pollute it when rain fell. It looked like a picture out of a parasitology book to show how worms are transmitted to humans, but they never seemed to have any problem. 

 

            In the first outdoor toilet, they had a Sears and Roebuck Catalog plus a box of cobs that served for toilet paper.  That’s how ultra conservative they were. The second toilet, built years later, was behind the house but only slightly better constructed.  Surprisingly, they’d advanced to a roll of regular toilet tissue. No doubt, they viewed that as an incredible luxury

            Among country people of times past, many took great pride in having no grass in the yard around their house. Theirs continued like that for years after others abandoned the practice. Bertha kept it totally free of grass with a hoe and swept it clean with a homemade broom. They considered people with grass in their yards to be lazy and trashy. Ironically, they never thought of themselves as trashy, but I’d venture that the vast majority of people in the United States would’ve classified them that way. It’s only in looking back on it that I realize how poorly they lived. At the time I didn’t think of them in such terms.  It was the only way I’d ever known them.  I still don’t view them as having been “trashy,” but as different. 

            In so far as I knew, they got only three new pieces of furniture during my lifetime:  two stuffed chairs and a couch.  The house was furnished scantily with two iron bedsteads, a wooden dresser, a kitchen table, a kitchen safe for dishes, two wooden rockers that easily turned over, and a few cane bottom chairs.  The only mirror hung on a wall in the back bedroom.  It was farmed, but was the most distorted I’ve ever seen outside a funhouse.  Most visits I’d slip back there to look at my wildly twisted image.  Aunt Bertha had no compact, so I often wondered if she had seen her image clearly for years.  If so, it would have been in town or on a rare visit to relatives. 

            “I got that mirror free as a premium from the peddler,” she told me one day when she discovered that I was amused by it.  “It’s not a very good one, but it didn’t cost nothing.” 

            The only heat was from the kitchen wood stove and from a stove in the living room that burned coal.  Only one who has smelled the revolting odor that coal emits can understand what they endured.  Many winters they ran out of coal before the cold time was over.  “Aren’t you going to get some more coal?” I asked when I found them huddled around the kitchen stove in freezing weather. 

      “Nobody wants to bring a half load this late in the season,” Bertha grumbled.  “I don’t want to pay for a full load.”  That any remainder could be used the following winter seemed not to matter.  She didn’t want to part with the money.  “We’ll make out and it won’t be long till spring,” she added.  They endured a month or more of discomfort rather than spend for the reasonably priced fuel

            They greeted the summer heat stoically without even a fan, other than the paper ones given free by local stores.  Alabama summers can be hot and muggy both day and night.  They must have been miserable. 

            The couple never owned a car, although they could easily have paid for one in cash.  “We just go on foot,” Embry responded when I asked about it.  Going “on foot” in his case sometimes included walking the several miles to the county seat the transact business at the courthouse.  If offered a ride, he’d gladly accept.  Since he drove a neighbor’s tractor I believed him capable of driving.  I suspected that, if it’d been up to him, he’d have bought a vehicle.  “Embry would waste everything we have if I’d let him,” Aunt Bertha told one of her brothers.  

            Uncle Embry had a supplementary way of getting around locally.  He owned the only “skid” I’ve ever seen.  It was a homemade, wooden device on runners that he hitched to his mule and rode standing up.  American Indians had used somewhat similar transports. 

 

      Communication with the outside world was by means of a battery-powered radio with a long, external wire for an antenna.  Only local radio stations interested the two, as they had virtually no awareness of nor interest in the world outside their immediate community.  They subscribed to neither newspapers nor magazines.  They never had a telephone.  When neighbors got the devices, Embry talked on them, but Bertha refused any and all use of the technology.

 

            “I don’t care what goes on in those foreign countries,” Aunt Bertha often declared.  “Why they don’t even speak English.” 

 

            It was an adventure for me to explore their barn. A tin roofed, unpainted structure, the barn had several rooms downstairs.  Some contained cast-off farm equipment.  All had a sweetish aroma of cow feed.  Upstairs was the loft.  In that day, hay was in rectangular bales rather than huge rolls. It was stacked in the barn loft to keep it dry so it wouldn’t ruin. That furnished a great place with passages between bales and places to climb high atop the stacks of hay. The hay had a dusty smell that made me sneeze, so that detracted from the fun and how long I could stay.

 

            To the left side of the barn was the hog pen where they raised two hogs each year, mainly so they could kill them to sell the meat.  They retained only a small amount for personal consumption. The pen was a muddy, stinky quagmire. At the end of each day, they “slopped” the hogs in a homemade wooden trough.  It was fun to watch and hear them eat so enthusiastically.  “Scratch the hog’s side with a corncob,” Uncle Embry suggested.  To my surprise, the animal commenced to grunt with contentment.  It lay down to enjoy being scratched for as long as I’d do it. 

 

            Uncle Embry knew how to cure hams in the smokehouse behind his dwelling so as to make a high grade of “country ham.” He easily sold the tasty hams and kept a waiting list of customers.  We bought one every year until he began to leave so much fat that my parents decided it was a waste of money.  The lower quality of the hams ended his sales to other customers and he stopped raising hogs a couple of years later.  “Embry can do better than that,” my parents rightly complained.  “All he cares about is making money.  We won’t buy from him anymore.”  Of course, that type meat, rife with saturated fat, salt, and cholesterol, was extremely unhealthy, but there was little awareness of such matters. 

 

            On the very rare occasions when we ate with them, Aunt Bertha cooked extremely thin-sliced pieces of that ham for so long that it broke into hard fragments at any attempt to cut it. That was a way to have a small taste of meat at minimal cost.

 

            I saw slaughter of the hogs only one time and was revolted. Embry’s helper used a rifle to shoot them in their heads.  After many squeals plus futile attempts to get up, they died.  Embry made “pets” of the animals, but it didn’t seem to bother him to slaughter them in such a cruel manner.

 

            At one time they had a dangerous rooster with large spurs.  The aggressive fowl was a threat to anyone in the yard. I remember being apprehensive, but it never attacked me.  About the same time they had a vicious cat.  I made a mistake and picked it up. To my astonishment, it turned in my hand and dug its claws on both front feet into my skin.  I still have a scar on the back of my left hand where it clawed me. That was the beginning of my distaste for cats that has grown stronger over the years. 

 

            The two weren’t at all ignorant in the sense of lack of intelligence. Both could read, write and figure but neither had awareness of history or literature or other aspects of cultural literacy. Their manner of life wasn’t greatly different from persons living a hundred years before them. 

 

            Except for a trip to Cave Springs, Georgia and a few visits to Gadsden, I believe they lived and died within ten miles of the places of their births. For a few years they lived at the McLarty community, several miles from their normal locale. One time I drove them to their old “stomping ground” to visit a couple who’d been their best friends.  It’d been years since they’d seen then despite living so close.  If they ever saw them again, I didn’t know about it.

 

            They had, for the most part, made a living from farming. During the Depression, many banks failed, as did the one they used.  The result was that they lost all their money. I can remember seeing Aunt Bertha hide money under her mattress, the first place a thief would’ve looked.  “I don’t trust banks,” she stated.  “They took our money once, but they won’t again.”  As their savings increased, she was forced to relent and again use banks.

 

            Bertha had been brought up to live very frugally, but of her many siblings, she was the only one who might rightly be described as a miser.  That bank experience may have been the catalyst that threw her into a perpetual state of parsimony. When someone took her to the grocery store, she often looked at things she wanted, but wouldn’t buy because she judged the items to be too costly.  “That’s too much,” she often said as she returned the item to the shelf.

 

            At one point in their lives, Bertha and Embry developed pellagra that was due to inadequate diet.  That disease normally is seen only in developing countries or among people living in dire poverty. In their case it was due to sheer stinginess, mainly on the part of Bertha. When Embry ate with relatives, he bolted the food like he was starved, which was close to the truth. Bertha said many times that Embry didn’t know how to handle money.  She did, even though it resulted in them living like paupers. 

 

            They were by no means poor.  By the lesser standards of the time, they had substantial money in banks and their farm didn’t have a mortgage.  Relative prosperity didn’t show in their daily lives. 

 

            On their fiftieth wedding anniversary, Embry’s relatives gave a party where they got a number of gifts.  Bertha wouldn’t use them.  “I’m going to put them away and save them,” she insisted. 

 

            The items were still in that “saved” state at the time of her death.  No occasion grand enough to justify their use arose.  Perhaps others got some use from them.  I know nothing of their disposal.

 

            She acted inconsistently only one time.  Bertha had a kerosene lamp decorated with a bright hand painted flower.  It was, by far, the most attractive item in her house.   Alva, her brother Leamon’s wife, talked her out of it.  On one of their rare visits to her house, Alva asked, “Bertha, if I outlive you, would you will me that beautiful lamp?”

Bertha replied, “Take it with you now.” 

 

            When I saw it in Alva’s house in Bessemer years later, she’d converted it to electric.  I was astounded at how cheap it looked and how small it was. That wasn’t the way I remembered it.  The lamp looked attractive in Bertha’s house, but only because it was the nicest thing she owned. None of us ever understood why she gave it Alva.  Bertha didn’t like her and spoke against her as being a snob.  None of us wanted the lamp.  It was a surprising, out-of-character act of generosity on Bertha’s part that everyone found puzzling.

 

            Uncle Embry cultivated a small patch of watermelons along with his main crops of cotton and corn. When we went to see them during watermelon season, he brought up a melon from the patch.  The group ate it on his front porch. At that time I didn’t like watermelon.  It was a struggle to avoid having it forced upon me. “Every boy likes watermelon,” my father insisted.  His sweeping generalization was wrong.  I didn’t like it a bit, although I learned to eat it as an adult.  It’s still far from my favorite food. 

 

            During cotton harvest, Embry followed the usual country practice by nailing sheets of tin around his front porch to contain cotton piled there.  When enough accumulated, it was taken by a neighbor to the gin for seed removal and formation into bales to be sold to the cotton buyer.  I loved to crawl around in the cotton and dig out caves. It had an aroma unlike anything I’ve smelled anywhere else. Lumpy due to hard seed, it didn’t constitute it a particularly restful place to lie.

 

            My father told about having slept in a pile of cotton when he was a child.  Most likely it was true since they slept three to a bed.  Almost any refuge would be preferable to that.

 

            A favorite country story about a pile of cotton went like this: A man who liked to drink whiskey, but had to hide it from his wife, concealed it in the cotton.  His son found it and drank a bit several days in a row.  After a while, the son noted that the level of whiskey bottle had declined alarmingly.  He took a newspaper, and in his illiterate father’s presence, pretended to read.  “It says here that if you store whiskey in cotton, it’ll evaporate,” he claimed.  “Huh.  I didn’t know that.  Guess I better go check mine,” his father said with concern.  When the man returned, he lamented, “It did just like the paper said.  A big part of my bottle’s gone.  I won’t make that mistake again.” 

 

            The only real hunting trip in which I participated started from Embry and Bertha’s house.  My father wanted me to go rabbit hunting, so to please him I agreed.  As it turned out, I shot the most rabbits of any of the group although the rest of them were older men.  I was in my early teens. 

 

            Uncle Embry cautioned me about being too quick to shoot with the words, “It’s better to miss the rabbit than to get the dog.” 

 

            When we got back my father described my “success” with some excitement to the rest of the hunters, but then added, in his characteristic way demeaning way, “Of course I could’ve shot any of them myself.”  He seemed compelled to put me down.  I never went hunting again, nor do I desire to do so now.

 

            One summer I worked a week for Embry picking cotton.  At that time the cotton stalks grew much taller than current cotton that’s engineered for mechanical pickers. On my best day I picked almost 100 pounds�"very low compared to the adults who might pick 300 pounds in good cotton. Perhaps I could’ve done better, but it was hot and I was lazy.

 

            We put the cotton into heavy cloth pick sacks with straps around our necks.  When a sack was filled, we hoisted it to our shoulders and brought it to the front porch to be weighed.  Balance-type cotton scales suspended from the ceiling were used to determine weight. I think I was around twelve years old when I picked cotton that summer, but am unclear on that point. If I could, I’d like to do it again--for about five minutes.

 

            Uncle Embry had agreed to pay a certain price per pound, but cheated me at the first payday.  Outraged, I mentioned it immediately, but he replied that was enough for me to get, especially since they provided dinner.  After that I didn’t work for him anymore.  Surely he must’ve known why I quit, but he didn’t mention it again and neither did I.

 

            Still, I’m glad to have had that minimal experience with manual cotton harvest.  It was a way of life in the South for a long time, but those days are gone with the advent of the modern picking machine.  Even Embry had his cotton picked mechanically during the last few years he farmed. 

 

            “It don’t pick clean,” Aunt Bertha objected.  “People ought not to use those things.”  She didn’t like the waste of what might’ve brought in a bit more money.  After their first use of the machine, she got out her pick sack and went over the field to gather what it had missed.  She collected so little that she never did it again.  Even for her, it wasn’t worth the effort. 

 

            When I graduated from high school, Bertha and Embry gave me a couple of pieces of inexpensive underwear as a graduation present.  I forced myself to pretend to be happy to get it.  They regarded it as a significant gift, but I knew that they selected it because it was cheap. I’d rather have had nothing.

 

            Toward the end of their lives we gave them a television set, but they rarely watched anything.  “It might run up our electric bill,” Bertha explained.        

 

            Bertha and Embry had one child, a sickly infant that died after a month or so.  Bertha recalled, “I went to get it to nurse it, but it was dead.  Black stuff was oozing from its head and got all over my hand.”  They buried it with only a rock as a marker.  Later, they became unsure as to which was its grave. Bertha never talked about the baby until near the end of her life.  It was unmistakable that she regretted having failed to mark its grave.  “I wish I had a picture of my baby, even if it was just a dim one,” she lamented.   It was quite sad.  She’d never seemed to care much for anybody or anything other than money. That was one of the few times I felt truly sorry for her.

 

            Bertha had nearly died giving birth to her child.  Home deliveries were fraught with many hazards if anything unexpected developed.  “I’ll see that she never goes through something like that again,” Embry declared with determination.  Embry got advice of some type on contraception from a doctor friend of his.  The doctor had an unsavory reputation.  Near the end of her life, Bertha expressed the wish that she could’ve had another baby, and added, “Embry wouldn’t do his part.”  We didn’t know exactly what that meant. 

 

            Embry died as the result of a stroke some years before Bertha.  She continued to live alone in their house, but gradually became less capable of seeing to things. A serious bout of shingles extended over half of her face.  She wasn’t normal after that and became rapidly less competent. Ultimately, she was no longer able to stay at home. 

 

            After that, my wife and I went to her house to give it a cleaning just in case she should happen to improve.  As soon as we entered the side door, we smelled an odor like develops in a closed-up house that hasn’t been lived in for some time.  Yet, things looked superficially orderly. 

 

            “I don’t believe this is gonna be too hard,” I remarked.  “It shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours.”  I was wrong.  The place teemed with insects, mouse pellets, cobwebs, and an enormous numbers of long-legged spiders. The arachnids walked on the floor and walls, inside drawers, crawled behind cabinets, and stalked openly on counters and tables. 

 

            I went into the back bedroom and took the distorted mirror from the wall to take a final look at my reflection in it.  Several spiders adhered to the back.  I quickly returned it to its nail.  It’s disgusting,” Delorise remarked.  “Are they poisonous?”

 

            I looked more closely. Brown with a violin mark on the upper surface, they unquestionably were brown recluse.  One of only two types of dangerous spiders in Alabama, their bite causes a place to rot out.  The victim suffers for months and may even require skin grafts.  “They’re very dangerous,” I replied.  “We’re getting out of here right now.  It isn’t worth the risk.”  How Aunt Bertha managed to live there without serious bites I couldn’t imagine.  Our failure to clean the house didn’t matter.  She was never able to return.            

 

            For a time Bertha was passed around among a few of her relatives, but she proved to be an ungracious, demanding, critical guest.  On a couple of occasions, she attempted to strike my mother.  Soon, everyone had a fill of that type conduct.  Nobody would take her anymore. 

 

            It became imperative for her to enter a nursing home.  She made no objection to the move and seemed happy there.  Her fear of storms vanished and she never mentioned it no matter what the weather did.  It was by far the best place she’d ever lived and she got food much superior to anything in her life.  Family who visited usually brought her marshmallows.  She was inordinately fond of them, never having tasted them up to that point.  She’d been unwilling to buy them.

 

            While a resident of that institution, she became obsessed with sex and discussed it frequently.  “If you’ll marry me, I have a nice house that I’ll give you,” she told an elderly resident of the place.  He politely declined. 

 

            If we can believe what she said, another man at the nursing home convinced her that they were married and induced her to have relations with him.  “I’d never have done it except that he told me we were married,” she declared.  This when she was an old, unattractive woman. Grotesque things do happen in those institutions.  We should’ve pressed the matter, but nobody bothered. 

 

            The nursing home is now abandoned and fallen into ruin on highway 205.  It looks like a scene from “Life After Humans.”  E.L. Clark, a local buffoon operated the place.  He ran unsuccessfully for political office so often that the joke became, “Why’s E.L. running again?”  The answer was, “To keep the flies from blowing [laying eggs on] him.”  I didn’t know him and saw him only from a distance.  The common characterization of him was certainly unkind and may have been untrue as well.

 

            Leon, her youngest brother, took over management of Bertha’s financial affairs.  Nursing home costs gradually depleted her assets.  Despite her self-imposed life as a miser, it didn’t seem to bother her at all that large chunks of her hard-won assets vanished each month. 

 

      “Bertha, all your money will be gone within a few months,” Leon warned her after a few years.  “I don’t care.  I don’t want any of my relatives to get anything.” “Does that include me, Bertha?” “It sure does,” she immediately returned.

 

            Leon had been her unpaid helper for years. When virtually everything was gone, she went on Medicaid and continued to get exactly the same care. None of the attendants were aware of the change.  The business office personnel were the only ones who knew the source of payments            

 

            At her death, a few hundred dollars were left from what Leon had reserved for her funeral.  He struggled over what to do with it.  “I’d give it to our sister Mamie because she needs it the most,” he said, “but she’s been so hateful to me and critical of how I used Bertha’s money.  I just can’t do it.”  “Keep it yourself, Leon,” my parents advised.  I don’t know or care what finally became of the inconsequential amount.  Perhaps Leon used it.  He was well entitled to have it. 

 

            We have a small bowl, clear but with white at the edges, that came from her house when it was cleared to be sold. We keep it in her remembrance.  It has virtually no value. Almost everything Bertha owned was cheap and unattractive. It was money itself that she craved most of her life.

 

            I was out of State at the time of the deaths of both Embry and Bertha.  Therefore I didn’t attend either the visitations or funerals. I’ve never regretted it.  I dislike seeing dead people and don’t plan to see one again if it’s in my control to avoid.

 

            I venture that few mourned the passing of Uncle Embry and Aunt Bertha, but I did.  Despite their faults, I liked them both.  Their graves are at Mt. Olive Church in rural Marshall County, Alabama.  They’re never decorated with flowers.  I don’t do it either, because I know she’d view it as a scandalous waste of money.  It is as Jean De La Bruvere said, “The spendthrift robs his heirs; the miser robs himself.”  Aunt Bertha managed to do both.