yet another story

a while back, i bought a book called, If You Can Talk, You Can Write.

Not necessarily so.

I once knew a man named Geech (not his real name, but damn, it sure did suit him) who could talk up a blue streak, but he couldn’t write. Nor could he read. I met Geech long before my restaurant days. He was one of Dad’s white lightning henchmen. He, along with Big Freddie, Son, and Robert McCrimmon, were around the house during hog killing season and liquor making season. Don’t ask me when the latter is. I suppose it’s just after the corn crop is harvested?

It is said that, in his younger days, Geech could wrestle a full grown boar to the ground, with his legs. He was a stout, flat-faced man, but it never occurred to me until later that his stoutness was all muscle. And then he was in the car accident that almost killed him, and made him a wealthy man, by local standards. It also ended his ‘wrestling’ days.

At some point, when I was older, Geech started bringing me his mail.

“Miz Lady, would you read that for me and tell me what it says?”

And I would. At first, it was junk mail. As time wore on, it was hospital bills. And I became his secretary, calling doctors’ offices, making appointments, straightening out bills.

But one day, Geech brought me a real, honest-to-goodness letter. It was from his wife, who was in a nursing home.

“Miz Lady, would you write her a letter back for me?”

Of course I would…wasn’t I his secretary?

But what really prompted the yes was a soulful sadness behind his eyes. The poor old sick thing missed his wife.

“Tell her that I’m doing ok, and that I’ll be down to Wilmington to see her real soon.”

So I wrote. I threw in an ‘I love you and miss you,’ because that unspoken was in his face.

His health failed steadily. The day came when he was too sick to come to the restaurant for his morning coffee, or to bring his mail to be read. Dad grieved his old friend even before Geech left this world, and sent Mom and me to deliver any number of tempting dishes that might prompt him to eat. A platter of fried fish. Chicken and dumplings. Ginger ale. I suspect Dad didn’t deliver the food himself because he couldn’t bear to see his friend, once so strong and robust, weak and wasted by cancer.

His house still stands, all these years later, the steep steps leading up to empty rooms. Occasionally, I drive past it, and remember him. And the irony is – for someone who couldn’t write a word, he was a remarkably writeable character.