BLACKBERRY WINE

By Randy Reynolds

Richie Maklary made an excellent blackberry wine in his Granny Barker’s canning jars.

The 1963 edition was opaque with a hint of toxic fungus and a slushy consistency highlighted with blackberry pulp. The flavor profile was fruity with notes of yeast and sweeter on the palate than pure Domino sugar scooped from the bag. The finish was gaseous and the result on the digestive system was, to put it mildly, odiferous. But it was the effect on the imagination that was most notable. Under its influence we thought we were invincible--and we almost were.

If we'd had BFF’s back then Richie would have been mine except for the year I couldn’t breathe because our Sunday School teacher told us that Red China was going to nuke Lee Road before the end of the year; I know my nervous snorting for air made me a pariah all that year and I can’t blame Richie, or anyone, for not wanting to be around me. However, when both Jesus and Red China tarried and Lee Road was saved and I could breathe again without sounding like a rooting hog, Richie once again became my best friend.

He and I went to the same church (Shepherd’s Fold) where we whispered and cut up on the back bench and my dad would stop in mid-sermon and order me to the front—memorable embarrassments for me, great amusement for Richie.

In the woods one day near the home of Lee Road's first grade teacher Miss Lewis—who had the only brick house in our extended community—a blacksnake crossed our path and Richie just reached down and picked it up. I was fascinated that someone could be that crazy. And I’ve been doing the same ever since.

(A friend of ours would later try to burn down those piney woods around Miss Lewis’ house—apparently just for the sheer joy of watching it burn—but a deputy happened to drive by just as said friend was throwing gasoline onto the bushes. Our friend was arrested and the woods were saved. But never let it be said that Lee Road was boring.)

Richie and I were among the culprits who got caught breaking the rules on a camping trip by skinny-dipping in an almost-freezing creek because we wanted to prove we were as manly as our Scoutmaster who had told a tale about doing the same thing at our age. Mr. Bill didn't buy our argument that we were just honoring him by following in his skinny-dipping footsteps and he sent us home early to explain ourselves to our parents.

It was at Richie’s house, on a Sunday night, that I first saw The Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show. Richie had feigned sickness to get out of going to church that night and I had been visiting with him all day, so I took the liberty of staying with him despite knowing that I'd be punished for it later. Our church was very down on anything related to The Beatles—and this was years before John commented that their fame was so ridiculous that they were more popular in Britain than Jesus--a money-raising, attendance-boosting statement our churches are still cashing in on! Although they performed in suits and ties, The Beatles’ appearance was ridiculed from the pulpit--hair halfway covering their ears; those communist Beatle boots; songs designed to corrupt young people, with titles such as I Wanna Hold Your Hand, P.S. I Love You, She Loves Me, Do You Wanna Know A Secret and Love Me Do. Why, that trash would make a single girl want to get married and a married one want to shimmy-she-wobble (the word my dad, the pastor, used for dancing, which we regarded as a sin even for married couples)!

When Richie burgled the Fussell's storage shed on Jarrell Road, I was right behind him. We stole a few whatnots and decorated his tree house with them. This was the first time I had stolen anything since the age of 5 when I had slipped a roll of Lifesavers into my underwear at the grocery store and Daddy, noticing my remarkable bulge as we walked to the car, had made me go back in and apologize. Now, feeling guilty about our burglary, I decided to put the stuff back where we got it. So one day when Richie wasn’t around, I went to his tree-house and stole it all back. But a funny thing happened on my way to the Fussell shed: I got the better of my conscience and took the whatnots to MY tree house. It was a proud moment: I had stolen the same stuff twice without getting caught.

We found a set of bedsprings and a mattress in the woods—who knows who put them there, or why they left used condoms for anyone to find. We dragged the bedding to a strategic position beneath Richie's tree house and executed daring swan-dives and heart-stopping back-flips, knocking the breath out of ourselves each time we landed on the mattress and springs. A slight miscalculation could have killed us.

(My mother, when I whined “All my friends are going, why can’t I?”, never knew how useless it was to say, “If your friends were going to jump off a bridge, would you jump off it, too?” Of course I would! After following Richie out of the tree-house, backward, with my arms folded in death and my eyes closed, a bridge was no big deal.)

It was Richie, on his cousin’s mare Lucky, who talked me into a race on my brother’s gelding Kawliga on the paved portion of Lee Road. When Kawliga fell, I suffered a massive blow to the head and now I wonder if that damage is the reason that I think differently from everyone I know who came out of the Lee Road area--(which, in turn, makes me wonder if all they need is a whack on the head to straighten out their thinking, too.) Also, that was the fall that busted my knee, an injury that was to keep me from being drafted during the Vietnam War. Who knows how differently I would have turned out had I not, under Richie's leadership, cracked my skull and knee on Lee Road that day?

Richie and I got many of our life-lessons at the same time, including the sex education offered at the amphitheater at Youth Camp in which Brother Ernie Miller was touched by the Holy Ghost and "spoke in tongues" after warning us what would happen to “these boys who go around deflowering our virgins.” (I don't know if "our virgins" referred to America's, or the South's, or that particular Youth Camp's virgins, but--in retrospect--I don't think there were as many of them there as Brother Ernie thought.) Richie and I weren’t even sure what the word meant and had to go for further clarification to some of the older boys—maybe the very culprits, themselves.

That was the year that Brother Ernie, like all young preachers that I remember, preached about his wanton early years and how God had saved him from all the terrible things he used to do that WE hadn’t even had a chance to do yet. The saved part didn’t sound nearly as delightful as the sins he was saved from—such as mixing Aqua Velva aftershave with Coca-Cola as a substitute for liquor. Richie and I spent the rest of that Youth Camp drinking Aqua Velva and Coca-Cola and talking about virgins. For these and certain other reasons, it’s a wonder we didn’t go blind that year.

Back home after Youth Camp, we got off the Aqua Velva and started back on Richie’s blackberry wine. There was nothing that loosened our inhibitions as effectively as sharing a jug of Richie’s wine before committing a burglary, picking up a snake, falling backwards out of a tree-house, racing horses on the highway or speculating about virgins.