Calvin Saw Catamounts A-Comin’

After heavy rains gave Dad’s cotton crop a much-needed soaking and halted fieldwork on his Mississippi Delta farm, my boyhood best friend and mentor Jaybird offered to take my cousin Calvin and me fishing. The night before, we pitched a tent in Jaybird’s yard, knowing the old black man, a master storyteller, would entertain us with terrifying, hair-raising tales as we sat around the campfire. I envied Calvin. Only fifteen years old, he was an athletic Adonis, muscle-bound, over six-feet tall, with what girls called “come hither” cobalt blue eyes, perfect teeth that flashed in a devil-may-care smile, and thick, raven-black, curly hair. On tiptoes, my ninety-pound-weakling frame barely reached five feet, I had over-sized lips (Jaybird called them “dumpling coolers”), pimpled face, un-curly hair, “run thither” myopic bland eyes, and front teeth the size of a horse’s that made my face look like a Studebaker grill.

Hot Cayenne in the Coffee

Calvin’s mother, Miss Lila, who lived nearby, coddled him, let him sleep late every day, gave him money, bought him fine clothes, and assigned him no chores. Miss Lena, my mother, bounced me out of bed at daylight, never gave me a cent I didn’t earn, and assigned chores that included feeding the chickens, gathering eggs, slopping the hogs, chopping the garden, mowing the yard, trimming hedges, and washing her car. That evening, as we rigged fishing poles and dug earthworms from Jaybird’s compost pile, I tried to set aside my jealous thoughts about Calvin and enjoy myself, but couldn’t. Whenever I was around him, I felt inadequate, insignificant, un-athletic, and just plain ugly. That night, after listening to Jaybird’s stories about ferocious, man-eating catamounts, we boys crawled into the tent and lay down to sleep. Soon I heard Calvin’s rhythmic, restful breathing, while I lay wide-awake, cringing and trembling, certain one of those ferocious monster cats would enter the tent, claw me to bloody shreds, drag my body away, and feast on it. At dawn, appetizing aromas of fried eggs, bacon, cathead biscuits, and Jaybird’s strong coffee aroused me, and I headed for the breakfast table, but Calvin continued snoozing. After fixing me a plate of food and a mug of coffee, Jaybird headed to the tent to drag Calvin out of bed. Knowing that my cousin would sip his coffee as soon as he sat down, I grabbed a hot cayenne pepper from a bowl of them Jaybird kept on the table, sliced it open and smeared the rim of his mug with it. Sure enough, half-asleep, Calvin reached for the mug. One sip and he catapulted in capsaicin catalepsy toward the door, his eyes no longer cobalt blue but cherry red and bulging from the sockets, as if staring at the Grim Reaper. In one fluid movement, he vaulted from kitchen to porch to ground and bolted homeward. “I’ll swear, what you reckon come over him?” Jaybird asked. Delighting in my diabolic deed, I said, “From that terrified look on his face, I think I know: Calvin saw catamounts a-comin’.”