Figs, pigs, peaches and a mule

By Lori Lasseter Hamilton

Wet grass kisses the fish

on Grandma’s patchwork quilt

as I plant her red roses in the ground,

Railroad Park, one fourth of July

while I eat a food truck hot dog

and the orchestra plays patriot songs.

 

When I was a kid, I’d eat figs

from Grandaddy’s backyard.

Now, a bulb yellow as a lemon

pumps chemo in me

and Mom takes me to eat fried green tomatoes

from a Green Springs meat-and-three.

Mom and Dad sit down to eat

at table with me

and I share tomatoes with them,

breaded, fried in grease.

Talk turns to how Grandaddy 

would give his garden tomatoes to them

and Mom would make fried green tomatoes then.

 

Dad tells me when he was a boy,

he had to lead a mule down a country road,

get out and walk, hold the rope

‘cause the mule couldn’t keep up

while Dad held the rope in Grandaddy’s car.

“Sorry, son, but you’re gonna have to get out of the car.”

 

Dad showed me where on his hand a scar

used to be, from a pig’s hoof

scratching him as he held the pig down

so Grandaddy could castrate him for better meat.

And the peaches Grandaddy would not spray, Dad said,

but tried selling them on Broad Street anyway

even though from the inside out, a peach worm infested them

 

the way wild kudzu decayed his backyard

with the scent of rotting grapes.

 

I wonder if that same kudzu

followed Dad down to Birmingham, 

a peach worm and castrated pig caravan

with seething snakes hiding in its tangled vines,

when he was able to escape Gadsden, home

to one hospital, where Daddy’s family

went to die.

 

Growing up, every day we drove by 

a kudzu mountain

on Chalkville Mountain Road

so Mom could drop my sister off 

to catch her Shades Valley school bus.

 

I wonder if, back in the eighties, that castrated pig’s ghost

ever swam in my cousins’ blue swimming pool,

other side of Grandaddy’s garden,

sharpening his hooves, pulling kudzu vines

to pump up his biceps.

 

Saturday nights at Grandma and Grandaddy’s,

we’d eat figs sometimes

or my aunt’s Mississippi mud pie

as we watched Hee Haw.

At the end of their night,

Roy, Buck, and cast would sing 

“May your pleasures be many,

may your troubles be few!”

 

Oh, if only they knew

I don’t stand a chance

with the Lasseter curse

and the ghost of a castrated pig

gripping me in a kudzu undertow.