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Florabelle Oxley by Robert Brague June 27, 2007 Born Florabelle Stillwater, part Choctaw Indian, or maybe it was Cherokee, in a little town in Central Texas, she married Bud Oxley, a nice enough guy who owned his own plumbing business in another little town and who also drank maybe a little too much a little too often; she had two sisters, one in North Las Vegas, Nevada, and one in Tulare, California. Florabelle raised Poland China hogs on a forty-acre farm she and Bud owned two miles north of town; she also raised a son named Jimmy Wayne who didn't do well in school but loved to hunt squirrels, loved to drive a tractor, loved to swim in the pond where the hogs and a small herd of cattle came often to drink, loved most of all to fish in the selfsame pond, and after leaving home he became a fishing guide somewhere down in East Texas. We could hear Florabelle calling her hogs every afternoon at four-thirty, regular as clockwork, sooooooey, sooooooey, suey, suey, suey, sooooooey, sooooooey, a siren beckoning to Ulysses, or Circe wooing Ulysses' men in from the fields to be slopped and penned up for the night, fattening them up for the kill but not before winning prizes at the annual Livestock Exposition and Fat Stock Show in Fort Worth. Florabelle had a heart of gold, telling my parents, "So sorry about your well, of course you can get water from the spigot and hose on the side of my house," which we did for three long years, or rather I did, I, carrying drinking water in buckets across the pasture between our houses every other day, I, pulling an old Red Flyer wagon with a large aluminum garbage can, shiny and new and filled with water, balanced on top across the same pasture twice a week, I, hauling water so we could bathe and wash dishes and have clean pots and pans, I, whose mother had earned a teaching certificate from West Chester State College in Pennsylvania but died of cancer anyway in October of my senior year, I, whose father never finished high school and didn't intend to part with good money just to dig a new well or install indoor plumbing for a sick wife, I, who did quite well at school and became valedictorian of my class, dependent on a country woman with little education who raised hogs and had a son who didn't do well in school. After fifty-three years of living with Bud, Florabelle became a widow and lived thirteen more years to the ripe old age of eighty-eight; she was confined to a wheelchair for the last three years of her life, but that didn't slow her down much because Bud's niece, Jolene, his sister Gaye's youngest daughter whose father had been mayor of the town, Jolene, who as a teenager thought dancing was a sin and told us all she was going to become a Southern Baptist missionary, Jolene, who instead became a registered nurse and a three-time divorcee, and decided to learn how to square dance when she was in her fifties, Jolene, who fell in love for a fourth time with David, a Mormon guy from Utah, and told him, "If you agree to learn to square dance for me, I'll become a Mormon for you," and he did, and she did, and they lived happily ever after, that Jolene, at the age of sixty-three assumed full responsibility for Florabelle who was eighty-five and confined to a wheelchair and needed help getting dressed and into and out of bed and couldn't even go to the bathroom by herself and had a touch of the Alzheimer's to boot, assumed responsibility for her aunt because Jimmy Wayne was still somewhere down in East Texas helping all those city people catch fish on weekends; she and David, her fourth husband, toted Florabelle all around the country, driving all the way to North Las Vegas, Nevada, and Tulare, California, and back east to North Carolina to visit Jolene's sister, Bernice, and all the way up to Washington state where they flew kites on a beach by the Pacific Ocean and took photographs to prove it, and out to Kaysville, Utah, several times each year to visit David's children and Jolene still found time to produce and distribute a quarterly newsletter complete with scanned photographs on her laptop computer for her old classmates. On the night all forty-two members of the class of 1958 marched across the football field and sang "Moments To Remember" as sung by The Four Lads to the crowd assembled in the stadium seats and I gave my valedictory address and we graduated from high school, Jolene was my date, although date is the wrong word because I didn't know how to drive yet so we sat in the back seat of my Dad's car while he and my soon-to-be-stepmother took us somewhere to eat and drove us around for a couple of hours, pretending to have a good time when they probably wanted to be somewhere else; it was Florabelle who had quietly suggested one afternoon that it would be nice if I asked her niece to go out after graduation. A couple of years ago Florabelle, Jolene, and David spent a Saturday night with us in North Georgia on their way back to Texas from North Carolina; Florabelle didn't know who we were or where she was but she did remember Ruth, Ted, and Billy, her old neighbors from fifty-some years ago, and she flirted shamelessly with David at the dinner table, and they all attended Easter service with us the next day because Jolene wanted to hear me play the piano once again, and Jolene seemed to enjoy our church even though Florabelle said the service was too long and David said it was more exuberant than he was used to, and before they left to get back on the road Jolene snapped some pictures and scanned some photographs to use in a future newsletter. Last week Florabelle died. I sent flowers to the funeral home and signed the online guest book that was provided by the obituary department of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram; I left a note saying what a good neighbor she had been, always ready with a laugh or a tear, whichever fit the occasion, and that Mama and Florabelle were neighbors once again; the next evening one of the class officers called and said "I went to a funeral today and your name came up; it was mentioned from the pulpit." According to the Bible, love covers a multitude of sins; I would simply add that love lets your neighbors have water when they have none, love makes you more than happy to rearrange your life to care for an elderly relative who can no longer care for herself; love doesn't mind all the equipment you have to lug around or all the trouble it is to produce a quarterly newsletter for your classmates. Dancing is not a sin; being divorced three times is not a sin; drinking maybe a little too much is not a sin; wanting to be a fishing guide is not a sin; not having enough money to be able to afford to have a new well dug is not a sin. Sin is that which causes you, upon receiving a brand new telephone directory, to look at your own name and address first; it is loving yourself to the exclusion of others, it is concentrating on your own needs and ignoring anyone else's; it is the complete self-centeredness that makes you secretly pleased to hear that your name was mentioned from the pulpit; it is trying to write something to honor a neighbor or a friend and ending up making it about yourself; it is the missing of the mark altogether, the coming short of the glory of God, the glory in which, I hasten to add, Mama and Florabelle now reside. About the author: Robert Brague lives in a spot in North Georgia where the smell of the automobile exhaust of commuters is mixed with the aroma of chicken farms, where pastures are filled with horses and cows and the occasional upscale subdivision, where Atlanta's suburban developers are attempting to destroy the rural paradise as rapidly as possible. His story entitled "Silver" was published in this space in September 2006, so he feels he knows you well enough now to reveal that his middle name is Henry and that he has been married for 44 years to the same woman. | | | |
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