In the fall of 1960, Champion Bailey Rogers—Old C.B. to his 6th grade students—announced that our class would be the entertainment at the next meeting of the Lee Road PTA.
Lee Road Consolidated was equipped with that most modern of marvels, the mimeograph machine, and so, in due course, a page of purple spelling words was distributed to a select few students by Old C.B.
I enjoyed being in Old C.B.’s class and learning about everything except what was in our textbooks. He spent a lot of time on current events—nuclear annihilation, the Civil War (still considered a current event by the Lee Road Rebels), our governor’s recent stint in a mental asylum, the commies trying to destroy
He exhorted us to study hard, learn every word. "Think of how great it would be if nobody missed a word--if we didn't have any losers!"
Spelling bee sheet in hand, I raided the fridge after school that day. There was nothing in it but a lemon, some lard and something leafy that some people—not me—considered food. (I didn’t eat anything green except crabapples, plums and green M & M's.) I snatched the lemon and went outside to study—away from the four sisters, one brother, two parents and the dog.
Although studying was not a common practice for me, I had some private spots in which to do it—the normal places a boy in a large family would hide out to read library books, as I often did: on the roof of the parsonage, on a pew in the old church next door, or in the new church next door to that one; in the tung-oil tree; in the oak tree; in a neighbor’s barn loft. On this day I chose the cemetery behind the churches. It had a fence around it and that would keep Rusty, our German shepherd, from interrupting me. My sisters wouldn’t be playing there, and if my brother Ricky came over and bugged me, all I had to do was beat him up and he’d give me some privacy.
I pulled some weeds from around my favorite headstone, that of a boy named Alex who had died at the age of ten. Though I’d never known him, I felt a special connection to Alex; perhaps because we were almost the same age; maybe because I climbed on roofs and he'd been killed on one when he touched a power line while retrieving his kite. I visited his grave often, sometimes to lean against his headstone and read, sometimes just to stand there and think about what dying must feel like and whether Alex went to heaven or hell.
I settled onto the ground beside Alex and ate my lemon, peel and all, while looking over the spelling words. The sheet was hard to read. Some words were blurred, like the ink was too heavy or Old C.B. had some malformed typewriter keys. The very first word was a new one on me: A-U-D-A-O-I-O-U-S.
"I've never seen that word," I said to Alex. "Maybe it's supposed to be a C instead of an O--auda-C-ious instead of auda-O-ious."
I felt like Alex agreed with me. The word must be A-U-D-A-C-I-O-U-S.
I studied the spelling words for as long as it took me to eat the lemon, then thought ‘The heck with it’ and went to bridle my one-eyed horse Ranger to ride up the road to Johnny Johnson’s house to play with his monkey.
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As we marched onto the stage at the PTA meeting in the gym, Old C.B. made a real good speech about how smart we were, the brightest, hardest-working students from the best sixth grade class in the parish--his.
Now I don’t know how much time Old C.B. was supposed to kill that night, but the rest of the agenda had been extremely brief, and the crowd was primed for some entertainment, so the spelling bee was probably supposed to last awhile. But it didn’t.
Old C.B. started with the A’s: “Audacious.”
I smiled. Alex and I had figured correctly.
One-by-one my six classmates tried the word and missed it. Several of them spelled it the way it had appeared on the list: “A-U-D-A-O-I-O-U-S.”
Each time Old C.B. said, “Wrong” or “That’s incorrect” the audience groaned.
When everyone but me had tried the word, Old C.B. said, “Don't any of y'all sit down yet, because if the last contestant gets it wrong, you're still in the contest. Randy: audacious.”
I spelled it. Old C.B. mumbled that I was correct. The audience applauded. He offered a little apology: “Heh-heh, our spelling bee didn’t last quite as long as we thought it would.”
And then he hustled us off the stage.
A preacher who was in the audience that night leaned over to his wife and said, “You know, that Reynolds boy is going to make something of himself someday.”
That night I spelled Audacious; later I became it.
And a mere six years later I became the son-in-law of that preacher and his wife.
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