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"DD, Clodfelter, and Christmas"

This story is true. I was eight and a half years old. We lived in Virginia. DD was there living with us. That is what we called my grandfather, my mother’s father. He was a grand old man but he could be tough. He had been a six-year old child during the Civil War when the Yankees marched through Columbia, South Carolina. He remembered. He could be tough.

If you misbehaved, or he thought you had, he would take out after you with a flyswatter, his favorite switch, to swat you on the legs, or, if standing near enough, he would reach out and grab you by the ear and give it a terrible twist. It seemed harsh punishment at the time but actually he held back some. After all, we were his grandchildren.

There were four of us, all boys; Jimmy, Billy, Bobby, and Tommy. My name is Robert, the third of this fearsome foursome, all of whom loved DD, for he told us stories and took us on walks and he knew about animals and nature and stuff, having been a farmer. I think I loved DD the best. When I was five, I broke my leg jumping off a seesaw board my older brothers had stuck under a porch railing on the side porch … up and down on the “diving board” then down two stories from the best height reached to slam my leg in a twist on the hard ground. DD came running and looked after me. Then, when I had a cast on my leg and crutches, he would let me win races skimming around the house, me on my crutches, DD pretending to haul it after me!

Anyway, I loved DD and got my love of nature from him, I think. He loved trees. Perhaps because he did and taught me about them, trees have been a part of my deeper experiences to this very day.

Back then, when I eight and one half years old my brothers and I, at least the older three of us, had a great experience with fir trees. Behind the large old house in which we lived, at the edge of the property, there was a chicken coop and a row of tall firs just beyond it. I don’t remember ever having chickens in the coop, though DD may have kept some there in earlier years. Now the coop contained garden tools. Near it, as I said, on the border between our lawn and Mrs. Clodfelter’s next door, was this long line of fairly tall fir trees; a sort of “tree wall” or high hedge between the two homes.

The trees were there when we moved in. They had been there for years, so I do not know who planted them, whether or not it was the people who occupied the house before us or Mrs. Clodfelter who had decided, “Good fir trees make good neighbors!”

Here is what happened one year just before Christmas. These big look-like Christmas trees, free standing in sunlight and air, called us to larger adventure, something the Doss boys were always up for. Jimmy and Billy, my two older brothers, climbed to the roof of the chicken coop; then suddenly one of them jumped from the roof to the fir tree next to it, swung back and forth, then climbed down and back to the roof to try again. We encouraged him, “Do it again. Do it again!” we yelled.

Before long Jimmy and Billy both were starting at the end of the flat roof, running along the surface, picking up speed, and making flamboyant leaps into the fir trees and swinging there with mighty calls. We had a word then, or was it a sound, long before the paratroopers’ cry of “Geronimo!” Ours was a childish half-yodel, adulterated by the inability to sound the primal scream of Johnny Weismueller, tarzan-ing in the jungle. Our call was “ALA-MA-CAH HICKA-MORENUS!” … fly through the air, swing in the trees, and sound the cry!

I was still standing on the ground in my corduroy knickered eight and a half years, watching and longing to be in the fir trees, too. I could stand it no longer, so up to the roof I climbed as well, testing, then racing … "Alamacah Hickamorenus!" – into the fir trees. Oh what a glory, like a religious experience to true believers, to fly through the air and come down clothes and all, covered with resin, North American sticky myrrh, laughing ourselves silly.

We did not notice breaking a small branch or two … or FOUR, until DD rounded the house with an unmistakable bellow, “Jimmy, Billy, Bobby, come down here, NOW!”

And we did!! DD did not have his flyswatter – wrong season. And we did not run away either; too sure and stern was his (it seemed God-like) voice. And he did not twist our ears. No, far worse than that, he marched us over to Mrs. Clodfelter's house, stood at the street side of her front sidewalk, and said, “You boys will apologize for damaging those trees!” Why did he not give us a swat or two with a switch? That would have been easier.

It could have been that DD was grateful that one of us had not broken a neck, or perhaps he, like Robert Frost, had himself been a “Swinger of the Birches,” that is, a tree swinger. He did not scold, really, but he was oh so definite. He just said, “You boys will apologize.”

What was it we were feeling? Was it conscience or only that we were caught breaking tree branches. Well, really, DD seemed then an all powerful One, the nearest such we knew this side of God. I suppose we had consciences, too, but it was such a little thing. NOT TO DD! What would it be to Mrs. Clodfelter? It wasn’t that we did not like her. She was not a bad neighbor, but we did not know how it would go. Besides, guilt and pleasure mixed together do funny things to people, hang-head kinds of things, and we dreaded the encounter.

A righteous DD stood there in the street backing up our compliance. So we moved slowly up Mrs. Clodfelter’s sidewalk, knocked at her door, hung our heads and said we were sorry we had damaged the trees. But we reminded her that the very few not very important branches were on our side of the line – and surely the trees would keep growing, but we were sorry and we did not know why we had done it, but WE WOULD NEVER DO IT AGAIN!

Happily, Mrs. Clodfelter surprised us. Her face grew soft (angelic, I thought). She thanked us for coming. She did not appear to be angry at all; rather forgiving … maybe because she had not yet seen the result of our Christmas Tarzan adventure in the trees. In fact she said, “Come on in boys. It’s Christmas. I’ll make some hot cocoa.”

Oh, man! At eight and a half I knew what it was to be SAVED, saved from the wrath of the Great Punishing One, whom, paradoxically, I loved. I guess that is the way it is with the gods … and saved by the forgiveness of Mrs. Clodfelter from DD.

I’ll bet those fir trees will never forget that adventure.

I KNOW I NEVER WILL.

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