Puts Me In Mind Of Miz O

Mrs. Olivia O’Dale, known as Miz O, was an old dowager who owned a cattle ranch near my father’s Mississippi Delta Farm. Ill-tempered and spiteful, she would knit her eyebrows, stab folks clean through with stiletto, steel-gray eyes, purse her lips, and expectorate, as if the person toward whom she glared stank. She was fullback big, stingier than Scrooge, and richer than Croesus, having inherited half the county when her husband gave up the ghost after quaking in fear of his battleaxe bride for half a century.

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One day she pulled up in front of Jaybird’s house in her long shiny Cadillac, blared the horn, and scowled impatiently while waiting for the old black man who was my boyhood best friend and mentor to come to the door. When he did, she growled, “Jaybird, my arthritis is acting up lately, and I can’t check on the ranch as often as necessary. If you and Junior, that snotty-nosed little brat you call your white son, will check on my cows once a week, y’all can fish in my pond.” On our first trip to the ranch, I flung my favorite lure out into the pond. Instantly the water exploded, and a monster bass tail-walked across the surface. After fighting him to the bank, I screamed, “Jaybird, get the net, get the net! This trophy catch is going on my bedroom wall.” When Jaybird waded out to net him, the huge fish rocketed clear of the surface, glared balefully at us, and flung the lure. On our next trip, I was determined to catch that big, bad, bucket-mouth brute. Miz O and her daughter Jasmine, a churlish, corpulent clone of her dam, were picnicking on the bank under a shade tree. We greeted them and asked to use a boat she kept in the pond. “I reckon, and while you’re out there, fetch my pole. I think a turtle drug it off,” she said. “We got tard of fishin’, so we stuck the poles in the mud.” Jaybird paddled out, and I grabbed the pole. Snickering at her primitive tackle, I thought … a turtle is all she will ever catch with this twenty-foot cane, forty-pound line, and an apple-sized bobber. Hand over hand, I pulled until the pole purloiner broke the surface. My blood froze — instead of a turtle, I was looking dead in the eyes of the same monster that I lost on our last trip. Instantly, Jaybird swooped the net under him. “Got you now! I whooped. “On the wall you’re a-goin’.” When I showed him to Miz O and commented on what a beautiful mount he would make, she belched, tossed a bone in the pond, and growled, “Dress him.” “Surely you aren’t going to eat this trophy!” I gasped. “My pond, my pole, my fish … my supper,” she snarled. At least she gave me his head. Mounted on my bedroom wall, it shoots me a mean stare every day: Puts me in mind of Miz O.

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