What Uncles Are Apt To Do

While daddies will skin your hide, uncles are more apt to be the reason your hide gets skinned in the first place.

It was an uncle who first asked me for a smoke, which was his way of offering me one. A small boy choking on a cigarette must have been great entertainment.

It was an uncle who gave me my first beer and even though my dad grew up running moonshine, it was an uncle who introduced me to that, too.

It was uncles who taught me to hunt and fish and how important drinking and cussing were to both.

It was an uncle who was drinking, who, after meeting a young girl at the store, climbed out of his car into hers and told a 13-year-old to drive around and meet up with him later. His friends who were much older continued to drink and argue for the driver’s seat, leaving a 13-year-old to have a battle of wits with a carload of rednecks.

It was an uncle who took a nephew on a double date to keep a younger sister busy in the back seat while he and an older sister kept busy in the front. It was that same uncle who outdrove their daddy later in the night as a shotgun took out the back windshield. I guess I didn’t keep the younger sister busy enough.

That was the same uncle who talked us into riding Mr. Hawkins' cows one night. When Mr. Hawkins awoke to find his cows distressed and being generally molested, he too broke out a shotgun and commenced to firing at six kids in the dark. At least the uncle stayed behind and herded us out of range, received a rear end full of rock salt for his efforts.

The others refused to help, but one of my cousins and I dug salt from that rear most of the night. I was close to that uncle and that cousin for the rest of their lives. I guess digging salt mixed with screams, pain and the subsequent laughing bouts between those things are redneck forms of male bonding.

How about the uncle and his friends who decided to steal gas from state tractors? They were much older than I.  I was 15 and on crutches and still trying to figure out how to use them. I begged to stay in the car, but my request was refused. We parked on a dirt road and approached the tractors, parked on the paved road, through the trees. Halfway through filling a five gallon can a cop drove by and we squatted. No one said a word, the cop pulled over then started backing up, my uncle yelled, “Run,” and everybody did.

That was the day I learned to run on crutches. I ran as fast as I could through the planted pines, jumping dead wood and slipping on the damp straw. Halfway through the woods I watched as the rest of my outlaw gang climbed into the car and, u-turning, sped away down the dirt road. After two hours of hiding in the woods as the cops drove by repeatedly I was finally retrieved. Everyone in the car was drunk and I was the hero of the day — they’d expected to pick me up from the police station after I’d told on them.

We rode around most of the night as they drank and worked on newer, better ideas. Later that night — or more likely the next morning — they got into some other foolishness and were arrested. I was asleep in the car. The cop woke me up, asked if I could drive with a cast on and sent me home to inform my grandmother about my uncle's visit to the county jail. I didn’t even have a driver’s license.

Last, but not least, how could we forget Uncle Wayne, who, after removing the back seat from a '55 Chevy, shoved a Shetland pony into it. Then after driving 150 miles they arrived at my grandparents and both were liquored up. The horse's head was sticking out one window and his tail was sticking out the other, all this to deliver a drunken birthday present to my aunt. I learned that while the revenuers gave up on 'shine many years earlier, the members of my family never did.

For all their shortcomings, these are the same uncles who held me tight as I learned of tragedies, who provided shots of moonshine and appropriate toasts in the parking lots of funeral homes after unimaginable loses. Sentiments I did not provide after their passing, I’m sorry to say. I don’t remember doing many of these things for my nieces and nephews and don’t regret it, much, but I hope I did do the important things that only an uncle can do.