The Existential Redneck

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Existential Rednecks

Book One - A Tale of Love and Transformation

Howdy!

While cruising the pages in this book, you and I will be sharing a little time and conversation. I’ll be your host and tour guide for a while – it’s not a long book. And unless you mutter to yourself while on the tour, I’ll be doing most of the talking. Of course there’ll be other dialogue – there’s a host of characters you’ll find chatting with one another, and maybe even thinking out loud to themselves. I think you’ll like them – I hope you do. I’ll start introducing them in Chapter One, but before I do, you might want to know a bit about them. Forewarned is forearmed.

I guess the main thing you need to know is that they’re country folk. By and large they are neither elegant, nor eloquent (but that could change). A slew of them speak with a pronounced southern drawl, and their vernacular, or patois if you will, is as much a part of them as the blood coursing through their veins. So I’ve given them the liberty of speaking in their native dialect. To chronicle their dialogue within the constraints of proper grammar would be doing them a terrible disservice. And I’ve become rather fond of them. Here’s an example of what you’re in for: While you and I might say:

A storm is coming. I think I’ll go inside and do a bit of reading.

They would say instead: A frog-strangler is a comin’. Maybe I’ll mosey inside and do me some readin’.

Their speech is not a reflection of their intelligence, but of their education. An astute person can differentiate between the two. And an education need not be earned on a campus; it can be earned in various ways - as you’re about to discover. I’ll be seein’ ya’ll on the back side.

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Chapter One

Amazing, but None too Graceful

Circa 1951

Darryl McCoy had come close to dying before, but it’d never worried him much. This time was different though. Nah, he’d never come this close before.

During his turbulent young life, he’d been shot at (and hit), fallen from atop a thirty foot loblolly pine, and run plum over by a John-by-God-Deere tractor - all before he reached puberty. His adolescence and come-of-age-years were even worse. Not long after the state of North Carolina had foolishly issued him a license to drive, insurance rates throughout the Piedmont area skyrocketed. It only took five totaled cars, (three of which were his or his Daddy’s), until the slow learning bureaucrats in Raleigh withdrew his license. Pity they couldn’t withdraw his libido too.

Until now, the closest he’d come to meeting his maker was at the ripe old age of twenty-two. And that was such a tawdry story that the local paper refused to print it. But I’ll share it with you.

It turns out, that of the three small churches in Darryl’s home town, one of the three pastors had a wayward wife. Her maiden name was Jessie E. Bell. And after marrying Tobias Foster, she changed it to Jessie Tobias. But even with a new identity, she remained wayward, and Darryl, if nothing else, was also given to waywardness.

So it was, that when the Very Reverend, Foster T. Tobias returned home on one Wednesday night, he arrived early. The reason for his early departure from the weekly Wednesday night service was the untimely occurrence of a flatulence attack, suffered by Mrs. Beatrice Beauregard. Mrs. Beauregard, a staunch elder of the church, had heretofore shown no such physiological faults. She was in-the-pink as they say, looking not a day older than seventy, though that particular Wednesday was her seventy-third birthday.

Perhaps it was the cake that her neighbor, Abigail Pinkerton, had made for her. (She’d always suspected that Abigail was jealous of her cooking, and had it in for her). Maybe it was the over-sized portion of collard greens she’d eaten for supper. Then again, it could’ve been all the years of deep-fried foods Beatrice had cooked, shared and eaten. No one really knows. But all of us at the church that night knew this: Beatrice, while singing her all-too-familiar, boisterous alto part of Amazing Grace, began making an unwanted joyful noise unto the Lord. Yea, and verily, the donation plate was not the only thing passed that night. Beatrice was in the throes of a nuclear, gastronomic meltdown. And the noises she made did not sound joyful at all. I think I need not describe them to you. Let’s just say that a whoopee-cushion would hang its head in shame upon hearing Beatrice’s gaseous symphony. Grace notwithstanding, it was amazing indeed.

And only moments after her symphonic wind instrument announced itself, the olfactory section joined in. As Beatrice’s audible components faded, the aromas and odors she put forth rose into a glorious crescendo, and all hope of a full service was rendered forfeit. No one was so discourteous as to refer to the source, but none could withstand the odiferous assault. The entire congregation began to exit the church – at first by twos, then by four or more, and finally, en masse, as if Moses had parted the seas, and had given us an escape route into the promised land of fresh air.

Reverend Tobias, unprepared for such an inglorious exodus, could only say Blessings be upon thee – Go with God. And the congregation, not really needing the Reverend’s blessing, did just that. They exited the church and reveled in the fresh air outside. And Reverend Tobias was right behind them. Beatrice was spirited away in the rear of Jonas Beetlebaum’s station wagon, still unintentionally passing noxious winds. It was, perhaps, the most amazing grace of all, that Jonas had lost all sense of smell some years earlier in an industrial accident. The trip to the hospital was uneventful.

So that explains why Reverend Tobias came home early that Wednesday night. And one cannot help but feel for the poor man – for if Beatrice Beauregard’s dramatic display was an experience entirely new to him, what he found at home was even more amazing, though there was no grace involved. Here, the story gets a mite ugly.

The church was naught but two blocks from his home, and he seldom drove between the two. More than not, he walked from one to the other. And as he walked up his drive, and onto his porch, he heard curious sounds from within the house. Grunts, groans and moans he heard - sounds that were familiar, but from a time much earlier in his life. He had forgotten those sounds of late, but he suddenly remembered them, and their origins.

Curious, and close to furious, he rushed into the small house, and within seconds, he burst into the lone bedroom within. There, upon his wedding bed, were Jessie and Darryl McCoy, completely oblivious to his entry, doing the thing that they shouldn’t have been doing. It took no longer than a blink of an eye before the Very Reverend Foster T. Tobias lost all reverence, and became the poster child of the justifiable homicide defense.

In the hall just outside the bedroom, hanging on the wall was a rack. Upon the rack were nestled a fishing rod, a walking stick and a loaded 4-10 shotgun. Now a 4-10 is the smallest caliber scattergun made - it’s for bringing down small critters like birds and squirrels. But at point blank range, it’ll blow a tidy hole a man’s body. Reverend Tobias didn’t think twice - he wasn’t thinking at all. He grabbed the gun and returned to the bedroom.

Jessie and Darryl, still in rapturous topsy-turvy oblivion, were yet unaware of Tobias’s presence - but not for long. The reverend bellowed something unintelligible and the two lovers broke from their embrace and sat up in the bed. Seeing the shotgun aimed in their direction, their rapture melted into raw fear. They were powerfully afraid, and shaking like leaves. The cuckolded husband, standing no more than three feet away from his target, aimed the gun at Darryl’s chest and fired.

Darryl’s naked chest exploded into fiery pain, and he almost swooned. Still conscious though, he pawed at the wound and was filled with wonder. There was little blood, and no gaping hole. It hurt like Hell, but the wound was only skin deep. Surprised and thankful to be alive, he gathered what wits he still had about him, grabbed his jeans and made a run for it. Naked as the proverbial jaybird, and barefoot, he dashed past the stunned Tobias, and made his escape.

What had happened? Why didn’t Darryl die that night? Why was the wound no more than a fiery abrasion? Why didn’t the blast blow a deadly hole into his chest? It’s simple really.

Prior to that night, Reverend Tobias could by no means be called a killer - not that he wouldn’t pepper a coyote or a raccoon from a distance with his shotgun if they were snooping around his shed. And at a distance of thirty or forty yards, the shots from a 4-10 shell might penetrate a varmint’s skin, but wouldn’t be life threatening It would sting like the dickens, but it wouldn’t kill the critters. Shucks, 4-10 pellets are smaller than BBs, and at that distance, he’d be lucky if four or five pellets hit the mark.

But lately, some feral cats had been nosing around his garbage cans – nasty, rabid looking felines. This, he could not abide. Yet he had not the heart to shoot them at close range with the small shotgun and risk killing them. I told you, heretofore, he wasn’t a killer. But he did want to sting them and run them off. He was thinking about this minor dilemma, when a solution came to mind – Rock-salt! He didn’t have any rock-salt on hand at the time, so he took a few 4-10 shells, emptied the pellets from within, and filled the shells with coarse kosher salt. And sure enough, on the next night, the cats slinked up to his garbage cans, just twenty feet or so from the back porch door. He took aim at the ugliest cat, and pulled the trigger. He found his mark and the cat screeched, jumped straight into the air, and upon landing, took off like a scalded hound. He quickly loaded another rock-salt shell into the gun, but the other cats had vamoosed as well. It turned out that homemade rock-salt was the perfect solution. Not only had it worked for the feral cats, but it probably kept him out of jail for attempted murder.

After the successful feline safari, Tobias had placed the shotgun back in the hallway rack, forgetting that instead of leaden shot, his weapon was loaded with salt that had at one time or another, been blessed by a Rabbi. Ironic, isn’t it? A Pentecostal preacher, whose fat was saved from the fire, by a Jew.

Why hadn’t Darryl died that night? Now you know. Could that night have been any more bizarre? Any weirder? Yeah, I reckon so – it gets richer.

The date of this tragic two-act farce was June 13th, and believer it or not, June 13th was Darryl McCoy’s birthday. He had just turned twenty-two. But his was not the only birthday remembered in such an inglorious fashion. No, Beatrice Beauregard was born on the same day, and neither of them would soon forget the events of the night. Darryl had come dangerously close to sucking lead, and Beatrice dang near blew a gaseous gasket. Were Beatrice the Flatulent, and Darryl of the Dumb Luck, somehow cast in some twisted karmic opera? Time will tell.

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Chapter Two

R&R

A Mite Later

The events of June 13 had been richly scandalous, but the local paper would not print stories about the affairs. Jebediah B. Bubba Bass, the owner of the paper would not allow it. For starters, he was an elder at the Pineyville Pentecostal Temple, whose recent pastor was Reverend Tobias. And if one had done a genealogic search, they would have found that Bubba was related (though distantly) to Beatrice Beauregard. Suffice it to say, that in the small, rural town of Pineyville, proper folks didn’t speak of such things. Such idle gossip was frowned upon and considered bad form. Nonetheless, there were repercussions to the scandals.

Reverend Tobias was just not the same afterwards. The very day after the tragedy, he withdrew into a near catatonic state. No one really knew what he suffered most – that he attempted to kill a man, or that his wife was such a trollop. He was in no shape to resume his duties as the shepherd of his flock, and in fact could not tend to himself. His sister from Ashville finally came to his rescue. She took him home and nursed him for a while, but to no avail. Reverend Tobias ended up in a special rest home where he lived quietly until the end of his days.

His wife Jesse, was nowhere to be found on June 14. Word has it that she moved to Atlanta, where she secretly seduced a young evangelist and manipulated him into marriage. Rumor further has it that the two of them landed a TV show on one of the religious channels, and the Roberts, Bakkers, and Falwells of the evangelical world would have done well to look over their collective shoulders.

Beatrice Beauregard on the other hand, carried on as if nothing untoward had taken place. Whatever her gastrointestinal ailment had befallen her, it hadn’t returned of late. Her windy recovery complete, she returned to the choir (to some folks’ chagrin), and put the whole incident behind her. It was as if nothing had happened last June. And to no one’s great surprise, she and Jonas Beetlebaum (her accidental ambulance driver), were becoming an item. Even if she were to fall into a flatulent relapse, he would suffer not.

So now we come again to Darryl. After his naked escape from the Tobias house, he ran into an adjacent wood line and slipped into his jeans, the only clothing he had at the time. It being a warm summer night, he wasn’t all that uncomfortable, but unshod, and unclad from the waist up, a man his age was a mite too old to be sporting the Opie look. He eventually found his way to one of the main roads and began walking toward his trailer home.

Waiting for him there, on the concrete block steps was his confederate – Boomer O’Neil, with his Blue-tick hound, Scoffer. They’d been coon-hunting and had stopped by to mooch a Budweiser from Darryl.

"Damn, Darryl! Where’s your clothes? Whachabeenupto? What in the Hell is that mess on your chest? You been rollin’ in the hay with old Jessie? That’s the nastiest hickey I’ve ever