The Red house

This was the first house I remember well. All the details, most of em anyway. It was either clapboard or has like wooden shingles on the walls, all a deep red color. The roof was black fiberglass tar shingles.

I lived there with mama and deddy. I remember the big garden behind the house, a big patch of woods in back and a steep hill that went down to 5th street. There was an orchard and flower garden between our house and the landlords, the Dunns, who lived in a white Colonial facing the road. Their house was big and nice. Our house was small and quaint.

We had chickens for awhile. The Dunns hated the crowing cocks before dawn. There was a flat-bottomed aluminum Jon-boat. We took it out to the mill pond fishing. There was a waterfall, tall and strong. I couldn’t swim and was scared. It was probably only 12-15 feet tall, looking back.

I was lucky because behind my house, just a stone’s throw were some woods. I got to play all the woods games, mostly Indians, the Alamo, and Silver War. Me and a neighbor, Bill who was a good bit older, we would paint our faces and sometimes chest with finger-paint, like warpaint. We’d ambush unsuspecting settlers, or enemy villages. Whooping and hollering, chucking our homemade spears and swinging tomahawks made with rocks wrapped around forked sticks with rawhide or bailing twine. We’d be stripped to the waste and tuck old t-shirts or towels into our waste band to made loin cloths. This game lasted many years, til I was at least 10, but in another time and place, the Duck Ranch. My deddy still lives there now. I don’t talk to him. He’s too mad. So am I.

The other good one was Silver War. It wasn’t until I was 6 or so that my mom corrected me that it was Civil War. I’d put on every piece of grey clothes I had and some tan or brown pants. I had a bayonet made out of a stick stuck in my belt. I had a toy muzzle loader I’d got from Disney World when I visited my grandparents in Orlando.

Same game as Indians usually. We’d be rebel scouts. We’d wait alongside the road. The woods were perfect like that as there really were a few old carts paths in them. We’d pop out from behind logs popping shots off, screaming, we had cap guns, the ones that used the smoky-red paper rolls of powdered caps. After we fired off our salvos, we’d rush ’em, swinging out muskets and stabbing with the bayonets and killing off all them dirty Yankees.

My Aunt Judi told me stories of Yankees, and so did deddy. I knew we’d come from South Carolina and the Yankees took everything away from us. I knew we should have won the war and that was a fact. Grey was the only uniform I was interested in wearing. Later on, I wore the olive drab deddy brought back from Vietnam. I even wanted to wear the tan cartridge pouch and mortar mitts he’d taken off of a dead VC. He told me I wasn’t old enough. When I was old enough, I understood why I needn’t wear it.