***Names have been changed to protect me from the living.***
My Sainted Southern Mother grew up on a tobacco farm in Columbus County. She was the youngest, and prettiest, of six children who survived infancy in a very Southern Baptist family. Besides my Uncle Lewis, who married a fellow Monkey Junction barfly when he was in his 40s, she was the only one who got married. She was the only one who had children, so though my sisters and I had four uncles and an aunt, we had no first cousins on that side.
When I was born, my parents named my mama's Irish twin (my Uncle Rick) and her one sister (my Aunt Jane) as my godparents.
Uncle Rick is a genius. After graduating early from Acme-Delco high school, he went on to get his bachelor's and master's degrees in engineering in just under five years from N.C. State (go Pack!) on full scholarships. He'd never been on an airplane, but before he graduated he was flown all around the country to interview with companies and agencies like NASA that wanted to recruit him. He accepted a position with the Department of Defense and moved to D.C. to begin his career designing weapons for the Pentagon during the height of the Cold War.
I remember Uncle Rick coming home a couple of times a year. He didn't play with me like a little kid, he talked to me like a person with a brain. He didn't ask me about school, he asked me what I thought. When I was in 7th grade and tricked the school system into thinking I was a high performer, he was the one who paid for me to go to science camp at ECU to study computer programming and electron microscopy. He even encouraged me (me!) to become an engineer.
Uncle Rick had a girlfriend in D.C. he used to bring home on visits. I don't remember her name or anything about her other than she looked like a 70s-80s femiladyist type with longish, unstyled dark hair and round glasses. She must have been really intelligent, otherwise, my uncle wouldn't have been dating her.
When she dumped him sometime when I was in high school, it was too much for him. He'd had an extremely stressful, top-secret job his entire adult life and kept the fact that his vision was fading a secret. He snapped. Lost it, as it were. Nobody heard from him for several years. The family heard rumors that he'd moved back to Columbus County, but we're the sort of people who don't ask questions; if you choose to lay low, have at it.
One day out of the blue, in 1994 a couple of months after my sister Amy died, Uncle Rick showed up unannounced at my parents' house to give condolences. Though he and my mama grew up side by side, he only seemed interested in talking to my daddy. He told Daddy he was living in a trailer without electricity or running water on some family land, but before he got too comfortable and into the story, he heard my sister Jill's rap music from the back bedroom. He announced that he could not handle noise and abruptly left. Nobody heard from him again for four years.
In 1998, after suffering for a decade with Alzheimer's, my grandma Tommie died. My sister Jill was eight months pregnant and living in Kentucky, so I went down to the funeral solo. I was relieved that my grandma's suffering was over, but I was seriously curious to see if Uncle Rick would come out of the woods and show up. He was a titillating mystery to me.
My daddy, mama, Aunt Jane, Uncle Buck and I (Uncles Lewis and Irvin died before then) filed solemnly into the little Baptist church in Delco and sat in the front row at the funeral. Halfway through the fire-and-brimstone service for sister Tommie, I heard some shuffling behind me. Then I began to smell a body odor fouler than when my army boyfriend used to come back from field training, with not-so-subtle touches of head oil and dirt. I couldn't turn around in the middle of paying respects.
I could, however, turn around as we stood up to file out behind the coffin. There he was, my Uncle Rick, unkempt red hair, wrinkled, ill-fitting clothes, wild eyes and all. My misanthropic Uncle Buck, who never moved out of his parents' house, actually extended a hand to Uncle Rick, but after not having spoken in years, these two middle-aged brothers got into a Stooges-like hand-slapping fight right there in the front of the church.
Because my Uncle Buck, the executor, was too cheap to hire a limo to follow the hearse to the gravesite, a bunch of family piled into my parents' Cadillac. I was sitting in the back between my mama and Aunt Jane when Uncle Rick wedged into the front seat with my daddy and second cousin Martha. He stunk up the car immediately. He never turned around to acknowledge his two sisters or his niece/goddaughter, but he told my daddy he was sorry for being late: He had to decide between finishing an algorithm he was kicking around and taking a shower.
At the graveside service, I held back and observed him while the preacher performed the obligatory "ashes to ashes, dust to dust" bit. Once it was over, to everyone's horror, Uncle Rick asked to have a look, as he hadn't seen his mama in years and missed the viewing the night before. Seeing the funeral service people pry open the casket was too much for me, so I went back to the car.
Nobody said anything on the way back to the church for the reception. Once there, Uncle Rick stayed in the corner of the fellowship hall talking to a distant cousin as the rest of us got our fried chicken and deviled eggs. I kept my eye on him. In my heart and mind, I gathered my wits to speak to him. He was my godfather, had such an uplifting role in my younger years, had accomplished so much in his lifetime and I wanted to know him. I threw away my Coronet plate and made my way back to that corner, only to see him out the window, walking away toward the woods through the recently harvested tobacco field.
Two years after our encounter with him, Uncle Rick showed up at my parents' house, towing a trailer loaded with more than 100 potted lilies. Apparently, that's what he'd been doing all those years: growing and cultivating lilies. He unloaded them and left them in their pots, and my daddy wasn't terribly pleased to be left with the job of planting them, but he wasn't about to let them die, as they were stunning.
I went home to visit a couple of months later. My mama took me on the standard yard tour of her flowers (she's the two-time president of the garden club). She showed me an absolutely breathtaking blue lily with fuschia highlights, then pulled out the plastic deleanator piece listing the genus, species, scientific name and name. It read
And it told me everything I needed to know.
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