By Jim Dodson
This was the year my dad’s rural relatives, several distant aunts and uncles, a Bible-quoting grandmother and five girl cousins from the country came to our house between Christmas and New Year’s Day. I barely knew them. I was almost 13, my brother Dickie was 15. We were informed by our mom in no uncertain terms that we had to be good hosts and proper young gentlemen for the duration of their visit. She had that look in her eye that said she meant business.
Five girl cousins in one house, if only for a couple days during an otherwise unblemished holiday week, is a serious challenge to the mental stability and character formation of any boy approaching teenagehood.
Dickie at least had a Life Scout project to work on, which took him out of the house most of the week. I wasn’t so lucky. It was 1965. America was still buzzing about the Beatles. I was smitten with George Harrison and taking Wednesday afternoon guitar lessons at Harvey West Music downtown. I tried sticking to my bedroom to play along with “Rubber Soul” but the oldest girl cousin kept coming in without knocking and sitting cross-legged on the floor just to stare at me. It was unnerving. My mother said she “just really likes you, it won’t kill you to be nice to her.” Her name was Cindy. She was about my age — the oldest girl cousin — but she scarcely spoke, just sat and stared at me with her huge round eyes as I fumbled my way through “In My Life.”
The other country girl cousins, meanwhile, occupied my tree house and turned it into a teahouse for their dolls. They played board games and poured imaginary tea. I came home from my Wednesday afternoon guitar lesson and found them there acting like my tree house was Buckingham Palace and they were visiting the Queen. I wondered how I could survive the week.
By Saturday morning I had to get out of the house, so I grabbed my baseball glove and bat and prepared to head for the park to play roll-the-bat with my buddies Bobby, Chris and Brad. I hoped Della Marie Hockaday might be there, too. I’d just given her a genuine imitation sapphire dimestore ring that meant we were kind of an unofficial thing.
My friends and I played roll-the-bat most Saturday mornings, but the country cousins weren’t leaving until later that afternoon.
“Listen,” said my mom, “maybe you should take the girls to the park with you. They’re a little bored. They might like to play baseball with you guys.”
I wondered if my mother had lost her mind from having all those rural uncles and aunts and a Bible-quoting grandmother under the same roof. She clearly wanted them out from underfoot while she prepared the big lunch that would send them all home.
“Come on, sweetie,” she said. “Do this and I’ll make you a chocolate pie and you can stay up and watch ‘Bonanza’ tomorrow night.” Sunday night was a school night and her chocolate pie was the ultimate bribe. We made the deal.
As agreed, I led the girl cousins and their dolls to the park, hoping with every ounce of my being that Della Marie Hockaday wouldn’t be there to witness my complete humiliation.
The park was across the creek from a new housing development where the earth had been churned up into mounds of fresh, angry red clay. Some other kids from another part of the neighborhood were over there messing around one of the new houses. I recognized Randy Fulp. He was the spawn of the devil, the meanest kid at my junior high school, always trying to intimidate younger kids.
The school we attended was a tough school full of scrappy white mill kids and a large number of black kids. This was years before public schools in North Carolina officially desegregated. You learned to survive by keeping your mouth shut and avoiding trouble. Fortunately, I played JV football that year for the Jackson Junior High Trojans and earned enough street cred so that Randy Fulp wouldn’t mess with me. I had a couple of oversized teammates who would happily have pounded him into the red clay of South Greensboro.
Not long after the girl cousins found spots on the hill to watch and my buddies and I began playing roll-the-bat, a large red dirt clod landed at my feet as I was preparing to hit a ball. I kicked it aside and looked across the creek, where Randy Fulp was grinning like a jackass with his friends. He threw another dirt clod that I had to step out of the way to avoid being hit.
There is almost nothing as deadly as a dirt clod made from authentic sticky red clay earth from the upper Piedmont region of North Carolina. It can blind, maim or simply wound for life.
Naturally, I picked up the dirt clod and threw it back at Randy Fulp.
I missed. He laughed.
All hell broke loose.
Suddenly dirt clods were raining down on us and we were throwing them back.
I turned to see the girl cousins and their dolls fleeing the scene of mayhem.
All but one, that is.
Cindy was standing beside me in the creek bed, grinning as she formed hard clay clods with her bare hands. She turned and winged one with stunning accuracy at our attackers. It splattered on the windshield of a bulldozer where they were crouching. They scattered like frightened birds.
Cindy had an unbelievable arm, far more accurate than any of the boys in the fight. Her finest moment came when she caught Randy Fulp with a fireball to his throwing arm and he let out a yelp, turned and led the retreat around the corner of the unfinished house.
By the time we climbed out of the creek, both of us were soaking wet and streaked with red clay mud. Even more amazing, everyone else had vanished, including my friends.
Cindy and I walked home together. I wasn’t surprised to learn that she played softball on her junior high school softball team back home. She was also her class president.
My mom was so put out at me, however, she made me strip down to my orange-red underwear before she would let me back into the house. Cindy’s dress was equally filthy, but she got to go inside and change.
The Great New Year’s Dirt Clod War was the topic of lunch that day and many years thereafter.
Cindy and I sat together and watched the Rose Bowl on TV. I almost hated to see the country girl cousins — one at least — go home.
More than a decade passed before I saw Cindy again. We met at the last family reunion I attended before heading off to college. She was going to N.C. State hoping to become a small animal vet, but not planning to play softball.
She had a boyfriend and was much prettier than I recalled.
At one point she asked me if I remembered the New Year’s Day when we got into a dirt clod fight with some boys across the creek, getting so filthy my mother made me strip off before I could come into the house.
“Yes, I do,” I replied. “That scarred me for life. Worse than any dirt clod.”
She laughed. “It was kind of unfair. I was dirtier than you were. But wasn’t that fun?”
I heard from Cindy a few years ago. She was a new grandmother living in Indiana. She’d read a book I’d written about taking my young daughter and aging golden retriever on a 6,000-mile cross-country fly-fishing and camping trip across America one summer. The book had just been made into a feature film. She asked me to autograph her copy of the book. She said Faithful Travelers was her favorite read.
I happily signed her book and sent it back, thanking her for saving my skin during the Great New Year’s Dirt Clod War.
Contact editor Jim Dodson at [email protected].
