The Hammock

by Tracy Hensley Bumpus

I hesitated as I lowered myself into the old hammock parked under the maple tree. The ancient canvas, a nice seventies-era orange, creaked with my approaching-middle-age weight but held. It was a hot afternoon, the hottest yet so far that summer and I had spent most of the morning doing laundry and canning pickles. I thought I’d take a break and try out the old hammock for a few minutes while the newly packed jars of dilled cucumbers cooled in the kitchen.

 

It was relatively cool under the tree with a slight breeze generated by the difference between the shade and the hot sun in the orchard nearby.  Our black Labrador retriever came up grinning and wagging his tail, happy to have company. He settled under the hammock and stretched out for a snooze.

 

As I closed my eyes, the sounds and sensations of the country backyard began to seep into my consciousness, and I was suddenly transported back thirty years in time. Instead of 39, I was nine again and in the backyard of our house on Bond Street, lying in the old green canvas hammock that sat in the shade of the red maple during the summer. The canvas feel was the same, the smell of slightly musty fabric was the same, and the creak of the chains on the metal frame was the same.

 

It was mid-July and that period of suspended time between the festivities of the Fourth and the beginning of school. I had a copy of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s book Little House in the Big Woods and I was into my fourth rereading of it. That day, though, I had not opened the book but rather lay there looking up into the branches of the maple tree, watching the squirrels play and the birds hop from branch to branch.

 

The window air conditioner in my parent’s room on the back of the house kicked into cycle and the whir was the sound of the dog days of summer. We had central heat but we cooled the house by two window air conditioners. They were only turned on as last resorts just prior to heat stroke because they were expensive to run and my mother was cheap. Most of the summer was spent with the windows wide open and floor fans whirring. I still find the sound of katydids screeching a somnambulistic sound since most of my summer nights were filled with the sounds of them as they buzzed in the trees outside my window screen.

 

Off to the left, sheets, underwear, and blue jeans hung limply on the clothesline. The load was smaller these days since my brother had gone off to the navy two years before. He was off somewhere on an aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean. It wouldn’t be until years later that I realized he had volunteered for the navy because the possibility was good for him to be drafted into the army for the last days of Vietnam. I missed him and looked forward to his letters.

 

The door to our “back porch”, my father’s workshop, was open and I could hear the sounds of him tinkering around in there as he worked on a small engine or perhaps one of the custom muzzle-loading guns he crafted. He was listening to the broadcast of a NASCAR race on his Panasonic radio so I know it was Sunday afternoon. Sunday afternoons during the summer months always involved listening to the race. In my younger years, he would usually be working in his shop while listening to the broadcasts from Darlington or Michigan or Charlotte, but as we all got older, he would spend more time watching it on TV stretched out on the den couch because his arthritis made it harder for him to work with his hands.

 

On this particular afternoon, he was still in his prime, though, and working away on something. I was laying low, keeping my head down and hoping he wouldn’t call me to come help him hold something, reach down in some small hole for a fallen screw, or go fetch him a cold Coke out of the refrigerator. I spent almost as much time in that workshop as Daddy, watching him work wood and brass or engrave steel gun barrels. Most of his gun work was done in that little back porch while his shade tree mechanic work was usually performed around in front in the garage. Since the back porch wasn’t cooled, he usually worked on his guns in the winter when he could set up a kerosene heater to warm the workshop. Of the mental images I have of my dad, one of the most vivid is of him standing with his back to me smoothing a long gun stock with a plane, ankle deep in sweet-smelling, curly wood shavings.

 

Since it was such a hot summer afternoon, I figured he was in there working on a car part for one of the Volkswagen bugs he kept running. He and my mother had overhauled and completely re-done a bug for my brother’s first car several years before. Daddy had gotten the engine in tip-top shape while Momma reupholstered the seats and put new carpet in. The night my brother sank that car in a flash flood was the maddest I had ever seen my dad. I was glad I was only six at the time and nowhere near driving age.

 

On this Sunday afternoon, Momma was working the second shift at the hospital where she was a registered nurse. It seemed like she worked all the time since going back to college and getting her degree. As a result, Daddy and I spent a lot of time together. We’d go fishing or go to the movies or go over to the Bryce’s house.

 

Bill Bryce was my dad’s supervisor at work and he and his wife Mabel were my dad’s best friends. They had a big family and lots of dogs and I always liked to go over there. Bill and Daddy would work on cars together in the basement garage and I’d play pool on the pool table in the basement rec room. Back then, the hip seventies family always had a rec room and the Bryce’s basement was the coolest place ever. Not only did they have a pool table, but an air hockey table, a TV, a bumper pool table, and a hobby horse on springs. Best of all, they had a refrigerator in the basement they kept stocked with Cokes and Kicks and Dr. Peppers, all in glass bottles. 

 

While Daddy was puttering around on the back porch, my dog Tippy wandered around the corner of the house, her tongue hanging out, looking for a cool spot. Tippy had been a Christmas present for me when I was two. I had brought her home from the breeder’s house in my pocket and she put up with me for the rest of her life. She was a black and white Chihuahua, maybe six pounds at her heaviest, and she was my very own baby doll. I’d dress her up in doll clothes, sit her at my little play table, and serve her pretend tea and Gaines Burger sandwiches. Tippy rode miles in the basket on the handle bars of my bicycle and in my doll stroller. We were best buds.

 

This hot July day she was looking for a cool spot and found it under the concrete steps leading to the sliding glass door. She had a little hidey-hole there and it would be one of the first places we looked years later when at the ripe old age of fourteen, she took her last walk to find someplace quiet to die. We never did find her and I suspect that maybe she was hit by a car and my parents hid it from me. My mother simply told me that she saw her going toward the back of the house with a purpose to her walk and we never saw her again. I cried and cried that night she disappeared. I was sixteen and my heart broke for the first time.

 

I heard a car door slam around front across the street and knew that my best friend Laura and her family were home from church. They went to the Methodist church uptown that had bats in the basement along with a four-square court. My family didn’t go to church but I tagged along whenever I got the chance to the Methodist youth functions. Laura was a year older than me and we were inseparable until high school when she started growing her own direction and I started going mine. We didn’t really lose touch until after we both got married and then we just drifted apart. I haven’t talked to her now in years but I know we would pick up right where we left off. If she called me now in the middle of the night and needed me to come to where she lives, I’d do it in a heartbeat. That’s just the kind of friendship we had.

 

Laura had red hair and freckles and hated it. I always thought it was more exciting than my brown hair but I don’t think I ever told her that. Like most redheads, she had a temper but so did I and we got into spats regularly, going for days without talking to each other. Eventually one of us would call the other and we’d be back like nothing ever happened. I can’t remember any of the things we’d fuss over. I guess it was just normal kids stuff.

 

I knew Laura would be coming around the right side of the house soon after her and her family had had lunch. She’d have on shorts and a tank top and be barefooted. We both went barefoot all summer and our feet were so tough we could run on rocks without flinching. She’d be coming in search of me, knowing I’d be outside and we’d go in the kitchen and get a Coke (which her mother would not let her have at home) or a popsicle (something else her mother wouldn’t let her have). We’d then sit in my back yard where her mother couldn’t see us and enjoy our treat, made all the better because it was forbidden fruit to her.  

 

Laura was skinny and her whole family was the avante garde of the health food/fitness craze that began in the 70s. To her mother, a snack was a piece of whole wheat bread and a glass of water. The whole family got into the jogging craze of the seventies and her brother held records for the mile at the local high school. Laura ran, too, after she got into junior high but her heart was never in it. After her two boys were born years later, she let her weight balloon out of sheer rebellion and just to give her mother fits. I was proud of her.

 

This day Laura and I would be cooking up our annual summer campout. Every summer we set up this old green canvas tent out in the extra lot beside my house and camped out for a week. Laura’s dad had dug the old monstrosity out of their storage building the day before and we were going to set it up that day. We were prepared to spend every night that week camping out, playing Life and cards, and eating Doritos. Inevitably, it would come a thunderstorm at least one night that would drive us inside to the air conditioned (hopefully) comforts of my house. You could also count on us scaring ourselves silly with ghost stories on another night that would also result in our slipping in the sliding glass back door to escape the hideous monsters and ghouls we just knew were hiding in the cornfield beyond the backyard.

 

This camping out tradition was something that we did every summer until we went to college. Sometimes we’d invite other friends to join us but usually it was just the two of us. We’d stay up late and talk about all sorts of girl-stuff; in the elementary years it was school stuff and Girl Scout camp stories, and in the later years it was Shaun Cassidy, Robby Benson, and make-up. After we were old enough to drive, we’d usually take the opportunity to sneak away with the car and go cruising the four-lane or the backroads of the county. We’d always end up back in the tent, though, after coasting into the driveway with the car off and the clutch pushed in. To my knowledge, our parents never knew but now that I’m a parent, I realize they probably knew exactly what we were doing and just didn’t let on.

 

Geneva and Paul, our elderly neighbors, were out on their patio drinking tall glasses of tea. They must have gone to the early service at church because they were already changed into everyday clothes. Paul had on his gardening overalls and looked like he was about to tackle picking tomatoes or squash. Paul was a firecracker and a bit of cat-about-town, even for someone his age. He and Geneva regularly got into fussing matches over his penchant for the ladies. Paul died that summer of a heart attack. Geneva later remarried but I still think of her as Mrs. Lawrence.

 

It is amazing how thirty years can disappear in the blink of an eye, instigated by something as simple as the sound of a summer breeze in the trees and the smell of old canvas. Momma and Daddy are dead now and so is my brother and Bill. The house on Bond Street is still there but somebody else lives in it now, and the cornfield behind it has been turned into a subdivision. Geneva outlived her second husband by many years and survived breast cancer, not once, but twice. But on that afternoon thirty years ago, all was well with my world as I lay there on that old orange hammock.

 

 

Copyright, 2005. All rights reserved.