Falmon Entries

On the last day, Old Whitey wouldn't start. Rain did that, or heavy dew, leaking into flathead sparkplug wells through the hood's hinges. The hood folded up old style; gull wings from each side. Old Whitey was the sort of work truck which made caulk booted lumberjacks careful to carry walking shoes. The men of Uncle Uriah's falling crew called their ride a crummy, same as the disappeared railroad loggers, but usually they rode in the cab and not on a bare flatbed. Old Whitey had sidewalls anyway.

In gray predawn Grandpa Falmon waited for Uncle Uriah and Old Whitey. Yellow Jacket Ridge needed falling. Kind of miserable trees. Nothing old timers would call timber. Better than nothing. With the company gone, with the mill two years locked and soon razed, better than nothing.

Dee leaned against the front wall whose vertical planks made a jagged toothy grin where they met soft ground. Falmon construction technique advanced considerably on simple trench and palisade, better than the sort practiced at, say, Raleigh's Jamestown, when the first tobacco rush began, but neither was it yet on a completely modern foundation.

A lot of Grandpa Falmon's contemporaries called him Dee. Or, as they, and he, spelled it, D. His given appellation reduced to a single character, even while he lived. Later even this last iota lost forever to the title Grandpa.

The men called him Dee.

Later this last day for instance. Much later then their customary sunrise, when Old Whitey finally unloaded at Yellow Jacket Ridge. Uncle Uriah would order him to the task. "Dee," he would say, "You take the steep side. Me 'n Jeb'll work over here in the brush." Fast ridges like this often had a steep side, where crowding fir shoots, having more ground than sky, quickly achieved closed canopy. On the steep side, a workmanlike faller could methodically mow timber. On the shallower, brushy side, leafy pest trees, alder and maple, got a stronger start and interfered with the rhythm.

Dee, that's what folks called him, while his body was united with his soul. The fellows up on the ridge called him that, on the last day.

Even his wife called him Dee. Probably because he called himself that. Signed himself that. Never Dee though, not spelled out. Just D period. "D. Falmon."

"D. Falmon" in one inch chalk on imitation slate. In the upper left corner. Then "Spelling," on the next line, centered. Then "1. matmatics; 2. history; 3. terytory…" All the other children put the initial last. There was another Falmon in the class, Uriah's girl, but she signed herself "Suzy F." Plus she could spell. So he never really confused anybody, refusing his name. The chalk lines he wrote with were deliberate but thin as pencil, like he held the chalk stick by the far end and the slightest pressure would break it.

"It's not D," Sybil objected. "D is for Dathan." In his mother's religious conglomerations, a given name signified. Never mind the perspicuity lack, of the bestower. "Can't you take a little joke?" Jesse teased. Dathan's father tried to excuse the naming as an exuberant hilarity which his son would grow to approve. The truth was, he'd read the scripture wrong. He just hadn't got it. When everybody pointed out that the biblical Dathan was actually the doomed nemesis of the great lawgiver, Jesse objected vociferously and forwarded his unique interpretation. Some incomprehensible tangle apparently based on a notion of nascent capitalism.

This, the polyglot superstition of the mother wholeheartedly endorsed.

And that's all it took for the name Dathan to become irretrievably entrenched. Grandpa Falmon was unable, at the time, to object, but it became the son's one indomitable insurrection, never to sign himself with it.

Waiting under the ersatz lanai which served him porch, spiked boots crunching graveled mud, Dee rolled another smoke.

The author's actual father smoked roll-yer-owns. He used the white Zig Zags. He rolled a thick pipe-cut tobacco. Big crumbly shreds of layered leaf. Velvet brand, one of the heaviest. The first good drag stained the hard paper nicotine-sludge brown. His tobacco came in cans the two-pound-coffee size. He employed a collection of the pocket-flask tins for transport on his person. Their red paint and bold white lettering all corner-worn by his shirt pockets.

Father rolled cigarettes cowboy style. He held the paper three-fingered-lefty and tapped crumbs into the fold. He grew up on a ranch, but by my time, he had deliberately shucked every cowboy influence he could. Somehow, not this smoking. Roll-yer-owns were an oddity in a federal power administration engineer as were frostbite stars over his cheekbones from rescuing blizzard dogies.

When I began jewelling, I forged for him a brass copy of those flasks. It made a great hit with him. Often it gave talismanic focus to our balky discourse. In the crash he carried it there, in his breast pocket. Our flask rests in my drawer now. Dry crumbs of Velvet still wait inside. The gentle crush only barely stops the lid closing. But it cannot be repaired.

Dee rolled the same tableless way but from his woodswork. Grandpa Falmon might have had some makings on him too, at the end. But likely he'd already stashed them by a stump. He didn't like carrying much in his pockets, on the job. Top, it would have been, his preferred brand, tobacco and papers both. Real cigarette stuff, not for pipes.

Dee had his way of shucking things too. Both were convicted men to whom family was a light sentence. Guilty as charged, they had got off easy and so put out some father-effort. But only so as not to queer the deal. Dee didn't shuck his upbringing though. Not his past so much as his future.

Dee has waited his ride since before dawn's inklings. Since clear dark. The cigarette stubs at his feet, not mud sullied yet, bore this witness. He'd watched the black's saturation drain to an equally heatless middling gray. Now he figured he'd have to walk again, looking for Uriah and Old Whitey.