The Dummy-Man

By

Tina Parker

"I got two words for you. Booze and convicts. Newport will become a hub for them two if that migrant school opens up here. You can’t give them people nothing without them turning around and robbing you blind."

I tell you what’s the truth, that Lloyd Greer could make a preacher cuss. He just don’t lay it to rest about them migrant workers. He gave me another earful when I saw him at the Newport Heritage Festival last weekend. Lloyd sets him up a booth there every October, so he can sit and demonstrate his whittling. It’s usually right popular because people like to buy the toys, kitchen utensils, or make-shift instruments they’ve watched him make. But Lloyd sure was on his high horse this year, and people got an extra show when they gathered around him.

"I lived here 40 years and never seen a new school built for our children, and they’re the ones that’s rightfully here," Lloyd kept right on talking just like he was preaching a sermon. A big old string of words come out with every strip of wood he peeled back. He was whittling the whole time he talked, making a tiny doll. Too bad his words didn’t make something as innocent.

Lloyd, he’s got right much pull in Cocke County. He owns a feed store in Newport and sits on several boards. I think he’s even earned him a seat on the county commission. Anyway, he got so stirred up last month that he went and called a community meeting. Now I go to all the meetings and social goings-on in this county. I’m something like the town crier around here, and people expect me to get them the news. Not this uppity sounding talk like what the papers will print, but the clear facts.

And the fact is that Lloyd don’t want them migrants to have nothing in this town, and he sure made that clear at the meeting. Why Lloyd called them every name in the book---druggies, crooks, lazy good-for-nothings---even though they work as hard or maybe harder than anybody. Most of them work up there at Harloff Farms at the edge of Del Rio, just about ten miles east of Newport. They work out in the heat all summer, just to bring in the bean and corn crops Old Man Harloff puts out every year.

Right many migrants stay on through the winter, working as hired hands on the farms in Del Rio. But you don’t hardly see a migrant around Newport, save at the laundry mat there on the east side of town. And I guess most people that live in Newport are wanting to keep it that way because a lot of them’s so stirred up they’d probably rather move the courthouse to Del Rio than see that school built here.

But Newport is the county seat and it makes sense for them to put that school here. Besides, I just can’t see no harm it. Why, Mayor Ottinger told at that meeting how it would just be a Head Start center for the children that’s too young to go to the grade school. With their parents working in the fields, them little’uns need a place to go.

As for Lloyd, he’s just scared to death thinking on how them migrants might come and live right there near him. He ranted about that during the meeting, talking on how them migrants is hoodlums that will bring drugs and crime into our town. "They bring their children to school here, next thing you know they’ll be living here. Them migrants are selling drugs, stealing, and killing each other over in Del Rio, and Newport will be headed down the same path before we know it."

That’s just how Lloyd put it to everybody at that meeting. And when he did, his boy Greg’s face turned red as a rooster’s comb. I got right embarrassed from Lloyd’s talk myself, and I felt plumb sorry for his boy. Greg ain’t but 15 year old, that age when a boy is ashamed of his folks, and his face was flushed for the duration of that meeting. Why, he slumped down in his chair until he looked like he’d slide right out.

Only Greg couldn’t sneak away during that meeting. There was really no place to go. But it was a different story altogether when I stopped there at Lloyd’s festival booth. Greg usually helps his daddy by collecting money or going for more wood, but I guess he got plumb tired of hearing his daddy run his mouth. At any rate, Greg had run off to look around at the festival with his buddy Todd Spangler.

I can’t say I blame them boys for wanting to take in the sights. Most every family in the county comes into Newport at festival time, just to look at the antique tractors, buy hand-made crafts, and sample the food. Why, it’s the only time of year you’ll find funnel cakes and homemade pinto beans for sale on the same street. And music to boot. They turn that wide, concrete sidewalk there in front of the Newport Post Office into a stage. Just within one hour, I heard the Heaven’s Harmony quartet sing "Beulah Land" and Tom Hartsell’s boy sing "Blue Suede Shoes."

I thought Greg and Todd wanted to feast their eyes on the festival wares just like everybody else, but come to find out they had decided to a put on a show of their own. And I’d have never guessed the meanness them two boys was up to. I never have known Greg to be the rowdy sort. Why, I kept him in the church nursery when he wasn’t but three year old. I’ll never forget how he couldn’t say my name right. He’d call me Sue L-wee, no matter how hard I tried to get him to say Sue Ella.

I don’t see Greg much these days, but I still take in sewing for his mama. She’s told how he’s artistic turned, that he likes to draw pictures and whittle like his daddy. Lots of boys his age is into hunting, but seems like Greg would just as soon use a pencil as a rifle. But I sure saw another side of Greg at the festival. Him and Todd got together and put on one of the biggest scandals Newport has ever seen.

C.J. Doyle had just finished plucking some bluegrass with his buddies when a loud cry came echoing up from behind the post office. We all craned our necks to see what was the commotion and here come Greg running up to the stage, only it wasn’t just Greg.

At first I thought he’d gone and hoisted Todd right up on his shoulders. But when he got closer I saw he’d made a dummy-man. He’d took some of his daddy’s two-by-fours to make a frame, then put ragged jeans and a old flannel shirt on them boards. Them clothes was filled with what looked like cotton stuffing, something like what I use for making pillows.

And the face on that dummy-man. It was made with a volleyball that’d been painted up a tan brown, light like the color of a deer. And with black yarn glued on for hair, it was the spitting image of them migrants I seen down to the laundry mat.

Well Greg, he just kept whooping out and hollered until Todd came up there on the stage with him. Then before we knew it, one of them boys struck a match and held it right to that stick man. Them flames shot red ribbons up into the sky, and that dummy-man ignited like it’d been near-saturated with gasoline. I never seen the like.

The boys walked off real casual, just like they’d finished their act. Left the dummy-man there to scorch up that high-faluting singing equipment. Flames leaped across the side of that stage and reached some of the parade floats lined up the street by the post office. Them flames got to the Bear Hunters’ Association float first, and it was all them hunters could do to untie the real-life beagle dog they had on there to play like it had treed a coon. And those poor women from the Newport Garden Club. They just had to stand and watch that fire eat up every single crepe-paper bow they’d used to make the life-size flower basket they was going to ride in during the parade.

People had stood kindly in a trance until the flames started lapping at them floats, and then everybody got into the biggest panic. All the women, well they commenced to screaming and running toward their cars with their children right at their heels. The fire got close to a truck full of Cocke County High School cheerleaders lined up for the parade and them girls jumped off the side of that pick-up like flames was right under their feet. They hollered out like a bunch of banshees and scattered so quick you could hardly see a thing from all the pompom strings that shook loose right in the middle of it all.

The volunteer firefighters must’ve heard the commotion, because Lord knows nobody thought to call them. The fire hall’s just right down the road, but the fire chief had to sound the town’s emergency siren to call in all the firefighters who’d been directing traffic to make way for the parade. It took the chief near ten minutes to get everybody together and geared up, but once they got them hoses going, the flames were easy to contain.

But that fire sure put a damper on the festivities, what with the smell of singed crepe paper and frayed electrical wires. The parade was canceled, seeing as how two of the clubs had to disqualify their floats, not to mention the poorly condition of the cheerleaders. So people started clearing out pretty soon after the fire was put out. The folks that had set up booths packed up the preserves and honey they’d brought to sell. People was carrying their boxes of pumpkin-shaped pillows and hand-made broomsticks for Halloween just as quick as they’d brought them in to sell that morning.

I heard Lloyd was one of the last ones to go. Greg was just sitting in his daddy’s pick-up, waiting to see if he’d be in trouble. But when most everybody had gone and Lloyd still hadn’t come to load up the truck, Greg went back to the whittling booth to see if it was near time to go home. Now Greg, he studied his daddy’s face real hard trying to see whether he was mad. But Lloyd mostly looked disappointed, kindly like a kid that hadn’t gotten his way.

"How come you to hurt my business that way?" Lloyd asked, without looking up from his whittling. "Most money I can make in one day’s here at this festival. And half of it gone, just like that."

Greg, he didn’t say nothing back to his daddy, just looked plumb surprised. At what his daddy said and about the trick he’d pulled his own self, I guess.

As for me, well I can’t hold nothing against Greg for what all he’s heard from his daddy. It’s just a shame how people kindly get stuck in a pattern, least that’s how it is in this county. People have gotten into the habit of seeing just one side to everything and most of them’s set that way, set solid and still as the carved-in faces on Lloyd’s wooden dolls.