Cripple Joe: Stories from My Daddy

by Donald Davis

Overview

Donald Davis has remarked that he "didn't learn stories, I just absorbed them" from a family of traditional storytellers that has lived on the same western North Carolina land since 1781. Considered by many to be the father of family tales, Donald turns the focus of his newest collection on his own father, Joe.

As Donald reveals in the opening story, when he was 28, he mistakenly thought his father had died. Until learning of the mistake, he lamented that he'd been "too young and immature to know to ask for the stories that would have filled out his life." Given a "second chance," Donald asked those questions for the next 22 years. In this collection of 20 tender and often humorous stories—including one that tells how the elder Davis came to be called "Cripple Joe"—he shares the lessons he learned from his father.

The late Wilma Dykeman wrote in an article for the New York Times, "I could have listened all morning to Donald Davis. . . . His stories often left listeners limp with laughter at the same time they struggled with a lump in the throat." If you are already a Donald Davis fan, here's his latest offering. If you have yet to discover him, here's your chance to see what all the excitement is about.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780895876676
Publisher:	John F Blair, Publisher
Publication date:	06/03/2016
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.60(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Donald Davis grew up near Waynesville, NC, before attending Davidson College. After earning a BA in English there, he graduated from Duke University Divinity School. For over 20 years, he was a minister in the United Methodist Church. In 1989, he became a full-time storyteller. He now tours the country, making approximately 300 storytelling presentations annually. He is a regular headliner at the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, TN, and at the Timpanogos Storytelling Festival in Orem, UT—the largest such festival in the West, attracting over 25,000 people. He lives on Ocracoke Island, NC.

Read an Excerpt

Cripple Joe

Stories from My Daddy

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By Donald Davis

John F. Blair, Publisher

Copyright © 2016 Donald Davis
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-89587-667-6

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CHAPTER 1

A Second Chance

My father, Joseph Simmons Davis, was born in 1901, the eighth of my grandfather's thirteen children.

There were two families on my father's side.

My grandfather Joseph Smawley Davis was born in Iron Duff, a township in the north end of what is now Haywood County in the western mountains of North Carolina, on December 9, 1852. When he was twenty-six years old, he married Nancy Jane Medford. She was sixteen years old. In the eleven years of their marriage, five children were born. Three of them died, the story goes, of whooping cough between ages three and six. Then Nancy Jane died at age twenty-seven. When I asked my father whether she, too, died of whooping cough, he replied, "It may have just been old age" — the old age of bearing five children and burying three of them by the time she was twenty-seven.

Grandfather took the two surviving children, Grover and Flora, and returned to live with his own parents until these children were themselves mostly grown. He then, in 1895, married my grandmother Ella Moody, who at twenty-seven was the same age Nancy Jane had been when she died. She and my grandfather then had eight additional children, the last of whom was born when he was fifty-nine and she was forty-two.

In my childhood, everyone in Daddy's family seemed to be old. My uncle Grover, his half-brother, born New Year's Day in 1885 (between the election and inauguration of Grover Cleveland as president), was the oldest relative I knew in childhood. My father was forty-three when I was born. The whole bunch seemed to a child like they had been here forever, and that they would live likewise.

The first four children born of the second marriage were boys. They seemed to me to have come into the world together, and they were inseparable of heart even through adulthood. There was Uncle Moody, the oldest, then Uncle Harry, then my father. My father's name, Joe, was somewhat unusual, in that he was the eighth-born child in the family and the fifth-born son, yet he was the one who was finally given his own father's name. The last of those four boys was Daddy's little brother, Uncle Frank.

In childhood, they did everything together. In fact, when they were quite small, a traveling photographer came through Iron Duff. In addition to family portraits, these four boys posed for a special photograph. Uncle Frank, barely old enough to walk, and my daddy were in little chairs in front. Harry and Moody stood in the back. Frank was holding a little stick in his hand in the photo. From then on, every few years, they would gather and have another photograph taken with the four of them posed in the same positions. Gradually, the little stick from childhood changed into a walking cane in the pictures.

I loved these three uncles. They were all like magicians to me, and when they came to visit or when we visited them, I wanted the time to last forever.

Uncle Harry lived with Aunt Zula and our cousins Margaret and Ruth in the little town of Leaksville, a long drive from where we lived. Uncle Harry was an automobile dealer.

At birth, he was named Faraday. It seems that my grandfather, who was in the North Carolina legislature at the time, had a great close friend in the legislature by the name of Mr. Faraday. Some in the family even thought that Mr. Faraday and Grandfather were sometime-roommates sharing a hotel room in Raleigh when they were there for the winter legislative session. So the baby carried forth Mr. Faraday's name. It was a difficult name for others to understand and pronounce and promised to trouble the child his entire life.

The following year, Granddaddy went off to the legislature as usual. Went he got back home, he walked in the door of the house, pointed to baby Faraday playing on the floor, and pronounced, "We will call him Harry."

It was sometime later that the family learned that when Granddaddy had gotten back down to Raleigh for the legislative session, he learned that Mr. Faraday had turned Republican! That was more than he could abide, and so Faraday became Harry, and carried that name with him for the rest of his life.

At some time in his past, Uncle Harry had the tip of his forefinger cut off in some accident. Now, it was blunt and had a tiny fingernail that looked like a grain of popcorn. Every time we visited, he would show me his finger and ask me if I wanted to know what happened to it. I always fell for the bait.

Then he would tell me the sad story, except that every single time it was a different story of how he had come to lose the end of the finger. I loved these stories! In one story, a game rooster pecked his finger off, once it was cut off in the fan belt of a car, once slammed off when a window fell shut in his childhood, once bitten off by a shark in the Gulf of Mexico, another time blown off when his gun exploded. There was no end. If he had lost a thousand fingers, they might all have exited in a different way.

Children on their way to school passed in front of the car dealership, and Uncle Harry loved to visit with them. As a special project, he built a sort of robot-looking creature complete with yellow light-bulb eyes. The body was made of a metal trash can, legs and feet from lengths of stovepipe, arms of more stovepipe, head of a galvanized bucket. The robot's mouth was an old radio speaker.

The metal character was on small wheels so that, tethered by a slender wire cable, it could be slowly let down the sloping drive from the car dealership to the driveway and the sidewalk. The speaker-mouth was connected by wire to a microphone inside the building, where Uncle Harry could watch out the window and talk through the robot.

The children would come up to it, and he, watching hidden inside the building, would call them by name and talk with them. It was so fascinating that finally the little robot would have to be pulled back up the slope so the children could continue on home from school.

Uncle Moody lived with Aunt Rebekah in the nearby little town of Spray. They had no children. But Uncle Moody also loved children. Their house was in a new development where there were lots of neighbor children for him to entertain and play with.

As he gradually discovered, most of these children had grown up in town and had little acquaintance with country life. It seemed to be his role to educate them in rural ways, so that they would know things that they needed to know about the realities of the world.

So, one day as he traveled home from work at the wholesale grocery company, he stopped by the farm supply store and bought two bales of straw. After that, he stopped by the grocery store and got two quart bottles of milk.

Once home, he took the bales of straw back into the edge of the woods behind the house, took them apart, and built a large nest about six feet across on the ground. He put the two glass bottles of milk in the middle of the nest.

That afternoon, as the children came by on their way home from school, he called to them, "Come with me, kids. Come back here behind the house and see what I found in the woods. It's a cow's nest!"

The children, who had never seen a cow's nest, quickly followed. There in the woods, they saw it — a big straw nest on the ground, exactly the size for a sleeping cow. And it was complete with the two glass bottles of milk she had "laid" in the night. The kids eagerly ran home to tell their parents of the great discovery in Mr. Davis's woods!

Every afternoon, they would stop by to see how much milk the cow had laid, secretly hoping to catch the cow on her nest. They never caught the cow, but one afternoon they discovered that the cow had laid two quarts of chocolate milk!

"How did she do that?" one little girl cried.

Great discussion followed until a clever little boy solved it: "She lays chocolate milk in the dark!"

Uncle Moody also cultivated a chewing-gum tree in the front yard. Though it looked a lot like a black locust, when it "bloomed" in the springtime, the tree was covered with unwrapped sticks of various flavors of chewing gum. All the children had to do on the way home from school was pull the gum out from where it emerged from cracks in the bark, and it was ready to chew.

The third of these brothers, Uncle Frank, I saw much more often. It was he who now lived on the farm where Daddy was born and grew up, and we often went there on weekends to visit. Uncle Frank was the fearless childhood daredevil and inventor of problematic ideas — a habit that did not end when he grew up.

My father, Joe, was as interesting to me as any of the uncles. He worked at First National Bank in Waynesville, and whenever my mama wanted to go somewhere without me, she would drop me off at the bank in the afternoon to stay with Daddy.

In those days, the banks were open from nine until one — "banker's hours." This was because there was no separate bookkeeping department at the bank. At one o'clock, the bank closed and the tellers became the bookkeepers. They each entered their work from the morning and carefully checked everything until all the columns balanced. Sometimes they were finished before five, and sometimes they had to go back after supper and work until everything on the books was perfect.

So, anytime it was after one o'clock, my mother knew that she was free to leave me at the bank without interfering with customers. I loved it. The tellers were young women who had no children, and I was their toy. They spoiled me and bought me toys and treats.

They also let me play with the machines at the bank. They would assign me to a big hand-cranked adding machine that produced a paper-tape record of whatever you did, and then tell me to add up all the numbers in the Waynesville telephone directory. By the end of the afternoon, I would have paper tape all over the floor, though I never completed the addition assignment.

My daddy also let me play with the coin separator. It was a set of stacked trays with holes of diminishing sizes in each lower tray. You would dump a load of mixed coins on top, then shake the trays back and forth. In a few minutes, each tray contained its own set of coins — half-dollars on the top and dimes on the bottom. I could do that over and over again and never get tired of it.

Sometimes, Mama would leave me at the bank with Daddy even during the hours when the bank was open and customers were coming in and out. On occasion, some adult would come into the bank with a child I knew from school — sometimes a friend, often just an acquaintance. When that happened, I would tell Daddy, "I know that one!"

He would reply, "Then let's do it!"

I would go up to the kid I knew from school and talk a little bit. Then I would offer, "My daddy works here at the bank, you know. Do you want him to show you where they keep the money? He might show you, since you're such a good friend of mine."

Of course, the kid would agree. Daddy would give a wink to the parent, who waited patiently for this educational moment. We would take the little kid back through the door of the huge Mosler vault, past the rows of safe-deposit boxes, and on to the back, where there were bars separating us from the rear portion of the vault. Daddy would point through the bars at canvas bags he told us were filled with coins and flat canvas cases for currency.

Then, while the little kid was mesmerized with fascination, Daddy and I would slip out of the vault, quietly close the big door, and turn out the vault light. Then we would stand there and wait for a minute or two while the little kid screamed his head off inside the dark vault.

After an appropriate interval, Daddy would open the door back up and let the kid out. Then came his spoken warning: "That's what we do to every robber who ever comes into this bank. So you better not be one!"

There never was a bank robbery in Waynesville. My daddy scared it out of every child who grew up there. And the parents were appreciative, in that he saved them the reputation of parents who raised a child who turned out to be a bank robber!

All through my growing-up life, I was surrounded by these four men and their antics.

It was in the summer after my tenth grade in high school, and my parents had come to pick me up at the end of a week of band camp at Western Carolina Teachers College. As soon as I got into the car, Mama told me, "Your uncle Harry died yesterday. He had a heart attack. As soon as we get home, you need to pack your clothes so we can go on to Leaksville for the funeral."

I was shocked.

This was the first family funeral I remember attending. We indeed packed our clothes and left the following day. It was a five-hour drive to Leaksville, a long and tiring trip for a family that had no travel habit.

"We're not going to stay at their house. Zula doesn't need company on top of this," Mama told us. Staying in a motel was a totally new adventure for us as a family.

We arrived, got dressed, and went to the funeral home. We were going, as Daddy told us, "to see the corpse that Harry made." It was my second dead body to see, the first being Jody Palmer, a neighbor of my other grandparents, who had drowned when he was five years old. While I knew the Palmers as a family, I did not personally know Jody. So Uncle Harry was the first dead person I knew.

When we got there, I do not know what I expected. I guess I thought he would "look dead," whatever that meant. No, he simply looked asleep and healthy, though dressed up as for church. What seemed strange to a puzzled fifteen-year-old was that, as good as he looked, they would close the casket and bury him like that. It was a confusing age for a boy unexposed to the major issues of life.

What I remember most strongly is this: Daddy, Uncle Frank, and Uncle Moody walked into the church together and sat on the front row with Aunt Zula and my cousins Margaret and Ruth. Mama, brother Joe, and I sat on the pew behind them. It was then, when I saw the three brothers sitting together but, without even thinking, leaving a space for the missing fourth, that Uncle Harry's death had its strongest impact. It was not a single individual who had died, but one-fourth of a corporate entity of brothers who had been always as one. A part of each of them and, by extension, a part of me was now gone. He was sixty-one years old.

Eight years later, I was married and in graduate school when my mother called. I could hear the pain in her voice before the content of her message came over the line. Her call was to tell me that she had gone to a church women's meeting the night before. When she came home and walked in the door of the house, the look on my father's face was unlike any look she had ever seen before. She was sure that either my brother, Joe, or I had been killed in an accident.

"No," my father replied to her question, "it's my brother Moody. He had a heart attack and died this afternoon. He was doing some work inspecting houses for a realtor. When he went out to work and didn't come back, they went out to look for him. They found him dead in the empty house he had been sent to do the inspection on."

Two days later, I found myself again sitting on the second row, in a different church in Leaksville. On the row in front of me sat my father and his younger brother, Frank. They sat on either side of Moody's widow, Rebekah, as we all said goodbye to the second of those four brothers. Now, more of all of us was gone. He was sixty-nine years old.

Four years later, I had finished school and was living in Lexington, North Carolina. My wife and I were only weeks away from the birth of our first child when my mother called again.

"It's your uncle Frank," she started. She could have stopped there, as I clearly knew what was coming next. "He went out to the barn to milk and didn't come back. Kathleen found him there. She called the ambulance, and they took him to the hospital, but Dr. Hammett told your daddy that Frank was dead way before they got him there. He probably died when he had the heart attack right there in the barn."

The funeral was on a Sunday afternoon. This time, I watched my father sit all alone with my aunt Kathleen and her children, Philip and Frances, as we said our goodbyes to his younger brother. Frank had just turned sixty-nine years old. A lot of the "us" was missing as I watched my father, now, of those four boys, all alone.

It was an early-April morning just a year later when I was awakened by the ringing of the telephone. At that time, I was a United Methodist parish minister and was not totally unaccustomed to phone calls coming in at odd and emergency hours. I reached out of bed and picked up the phone.

"Donald," the voice on the other end of the line said, and I already knew who was calling. It was the unmistakable voice of my cousin Kay. Kay and I were only a year apart in age. We had grown up together since we were born. I did not need to have her identify herself to know her voice. No, I knew who she was as she spoke my name.

Kay was the daughter of my mother's next younger sister, my aunt Eddie. They lived very close to us, were very close as sisters. In fact, as a sort of joke, Kay had always called both her mother and my mother "Mama."

"It's your daddy," she went on. "Mama just couldn't get him awake this morning. He is gone."

If you can be shocked but not surprised by news, that was the feeling that flowed into me. After his three brothers' sudden deaths, this certainly did not come around the corner of disbelief.

"Where's my mama now?" I asked.

"She's at the hospital. She called the ambulance, and they took him there anyway. I came back to call you, and her neighbor is going to bring her back when she's ready to leave him."

I was making plans in my head as clearly as I could. "We will get ready as soon as we can and be there as soon as we can get there. I need to wait until I can call some people before we can leave." We said goodbye.

It was a Thursday morning, and Sunday was coming. I knew that I would be out of church on Sunday and that plans for my absence needed to be made. When I looked at the clock, it was just past six-thirty — too early for phone calls. We would have to get ourselves ready and then wait a bit.

Suddenly, I was hit with an overwhelming feeling of panic. I was just beginning to realize that there was a lot about my father's life that I did not know. I was just beginning to enjoy asking him questions and hearing the stories of his childhood and early life before he met my mother, when he was already forty-two years old. Now, that was all over.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Cripple Joe by Donald Davis. Copyright © 2016 Donald Davis. Excerpted by permission of John F. Blair, Publisher.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Author's Note ix

A Second Chance 1

The Swimming Hole 16

Uncle Frank and the Skunk 26

The Big Hunting Trip 31

The Principal 45

The Cigarette 53

Fontana National Bank 63

"See You Next Sunday!" 69

Straight to Heaven? 86

Miss Metcalf and the Potatoes 96

The Little Weasel 112

Cripple Joe 126

Farther Along 139

Goldie Goldie 151

Punishment 180

The Grand Canyon 203

The Drunk Chicken 220

Two Birthdays 230