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families.
They’d hand one of the several store employees there at Bard’s their
weekly list of needs. Then they would migrate, sometimes all day, from
that store to the street or to another store, just looking and visiting.
Bard’s
Store was downtown between the corner filling station and the boarding
house across from the depot. If you looked around long enough, there was
a good chance Bard’s had just about anything you needed. If they didn’t,
they’d order it for you. They had nasty tasting curatives like Black
Draught Syrup and Buckley’s Cough Medicine, but they also had candy
and ice cream. They had kitchen pans, plates, utensils, furniture,
lamps, kerosene, rugs, home décor (cheap replicas of pastoral
paintings), shoes, socks, sewing notions and fabric, face powder, ladies’
Sunday hats and wigs. For the farm they sold rakes, hoes, shovels, farm
implements, cow bells, horse shoes, bridles, saddles, small arms,
ammunition, leg traps, and among other groceries, absolutely the best
head cheese you have ever put in your mouth.
The
door on Bard’s back wall loading dock was where customers would go to
get feed or seed loaded. Often there would be twice as many vehicles in
the alley as in front. You could also bring your peas or butter beans
around back to be hulled, or Alfred was always buying pecans and peanuts
that he sold to a confectioner friend in the city.
As
far as anybody knew, the Bards had no real kin. They had no children and
neither of them had siblings other than Mrs. Bard’s invalid sister who
lived outside of New Orleans. At her insistence, a couple of generations
of us locals grew up calling her "Aunt Abba". We were her
progeny.
Aunt
Abba was a stout Cajun woman, less than five feet tall with a Creole
accent that was music to the ear. She had a gray-blue, bouffant hairdo
with a huge single curl that went the entire length of the right side of
her head at ear level making the top of her head look like a warped,
upside-down fleur-de-lis. She always wore tennis shoes and a
comfortable-looking cotton moo-moo. Over that she donned a frilly apron
that had two large pockets in front for taking money, rendering change
and bestowing upon an unsuspecting customer a piece of rock candy. She
wore globs of varying shades of eye shadow that accented her large,
horn-rimmed, silver-colored glasses. The jewelry she wore had been
bought during the years when Alfred could afford it. She gave the
impression of being regal, while at the same time slouchy. She was a
character of the purest Southern form and a friend of every child she
ever met.
In
our first attempt at making some pocket change, a buddy’s father had
urged several of us fourth-graders to grow melons and had allowed us a
small parcel of land in his truck patch. With the father’s guidance
(and help with the initial plowing and, later, hoeing) we had managed to
grow a nice crop of watermelons, honeydews, muskmelons and cushaws. Come
harvest time, we loaded them onto the Radio Flyer wagon and hauled a
load the four miles to Bard’s.
When
we got there the ever-jovial Aunt Abba, rubbing her hands together
making her rings clickity-clack and her bracelets jingle, greeted us.
"What choo boys got for me today? Some melons! Well, ain’t dey
fine looking, indeed! What’d y’all put on ‘em to make ‘em so
big?" She thumped and squeezed on each fruit, stopping at one point
to comment on a baby tooth one of us had finally lost and how much the
tooth fairy should have given for it and then jumping back to the
subject of the melons, offered us more money than we could have
imagined, "I’ll give you two bits apiece for the small ones and
six bits for the watermelons. I bet y’all are hot, pulling that wagon
all the way from ‘cross the bayou. How ‘bout a RC? I’m paying! Y’all
done a fine job. Your folks ought to be plumb proud! " All of that
she said, pretty much, in one breath without any of us getting a word in
edge wise.
Some
of the boys referred to her as "Aunt Jabber" instead of Aunt
Abba because of her non-stop talking. We had all heard, at one time or
the other, a grown-up talking about how hard, when the time came, it
would be for the undertaker to make Abba’s mouth stay shut and how
un-natural she would look laying there not saying anything. |
