Icy Rain and Falling Tears

 The vacuum wipers of my old 1950 Plymouth slowly swiped the light icy rain peppered on the windshield late one night as took a co-worker home. Clifton and I talked of the cold night and possible snow flurries that would create a panic among the people of Alabama and especially Chilton County.  We were having a light-hearted moment in Clifton’s heartbreaking relationship with his wife.

To pacify his wife, Clifton bought her a new red with white stripes, Ford Grand Torino fastback.  It was a beauty.  It was also a gift to harness his wife’s wandering ways.  As we passed Friendship Baptist Church, one I pastored years later, I spotted Clifton’s Torino underneath the security light of the church parking lot.  Whether he knew it or that he acted dumb, we joked that his wife left it there.  Having an eye for details of automobiles, I knew without a shadow of doubt that it was Clifton’s car.  I had this empty, wishing I was wrong, moment.  It would become a defining moment as I witnessed something that will always be etched in my mine.

Clifton lived just over the hill from the church at the Blacksnake Trailer Park.  Ice collected on the wipers as I pulled to his driveway.  Clifton said, “She’s gone again.  That was her Torino.”  I waited as he opened the mobile home door.  He motioned for me come to the door.  I saw three little girls, all in t-shirts and diapers, cuddled up like puppies on a rug at the front door.  The oldest little girl said, “Momma is gone.”

My heart broke for these precious little girls and for Clifton.  Clifton had an alcoholic brother who appeared from the darkness.  He had tried to open the door, but it was locked.  He waited in shadows and from the cold underneath another mobile home until Clifton arrived.

These three little girls were ages three, two, and one.  They were red-haired, blonde, and brunette.  All three had different dads and Clifton was not one of them, but Clifton loved them as though they were his.

I never will forget the first time I met Clifton.  He had grown up in the same Mars Hill community that I did.  He was older than I was, and we had never met, but since he worked where mom did, and I eventually did, I heard a lot about him.

He was pale as a ghost when I first met him.  He was recovering from a gunshot wound to his stomach and had a 22-caliber bullet lodged against his spine.  Days before, he had escaped, yes escaped, from a Birmingham hospital by hiring a cab to transport him to Clanton.  He was wearing a hospital gown.

Clifton claimed that he had accidentally shot himself while cleaning a rifle.  Truth was that his wife shot him.  Can I tell you that I had lived a rather sheltered life, and I learned a lot about life in the real world?

Clifton’s wife was a very loose woman.  She was a little on the trashy side.  She loved men, but Clifton loved her more.  I had never seen a man that loved a woman as he did her.  As the old saying goes, “He put up with a lot.”

As the energy crisis of 1973 swept the nation, I faced my first layoff, and it would be the last time I saw Clifton alive.  Clifton kept working and his wife kept running around on him.  She was so despicable, that her mother and father disowned her.  In fact, Clifton had moved in with his in-laws who were helping with the three girls.

A friend called me to tell me that Clifton had committed suicide.  The bullet against his spine continued to cause pain and health problems.  Overwhelmed by the heartache of a wayward wife and a bullet she placed in his body, Clifton borrowed his father-in-law’s 410-gauge shotgun to shoot rabbit or squirrel, but placed the barrel against his heart and pulled the trigger.  His in-laws saw him stagger and fall near the clothesline.  Helped came too late.

I attended his wake.  My heart was with the three girls.  I had not been married very long and thought about adopting them.  As for Clifton’s wife, I was told that as Clifton lay at rest, she lay intimate with another man in a Clanton parking lot.

Every year at Christmas, I wonder what happened to the girls.  It was the Christmas season when I saw them cuddled on the rug cold and shivering. If they are alive, they are in their forties now. 

When I think of Clifton and them, I think of God’s love for us and Hosea’s love for his wife Gomer.  Love is a powerful force.  I could understand the love of Hosea and the wandering of Gomer a little better when I read Francine Rivers Christian novel Redeeming Love.  If you have not read it, you are missing a great book.  I could not put it down.

 

The beginning of the word of the Lord by Hosea. And the Lord said to Hosea, Go, take unto thee a wife of whoredoms and children of whoredoms: for the land hath committed great whoredom, departing from the Lord.  So he went and took Gomer (Hosea 1:1-3a KJV).

Unemployment

 When I was a kid, I went with my daddy to Calera, Alabama to the unemployment agency to “draw his pennies.”  I had a hard time imagining why pennies.  Why not nickels, dimes, quarters, half dollars, or dollars?  The first time I went with him I had images of him bringing out large sacks of pennies.  He said that when you are unemployed you got to draw pennies, which was money you paid to the state that you could get when you were on layoff.  Of course, I asked him why he did not pay the state dollars where he could draw dollars when out of work.

Daddy drew his pennies a whole lot when we moved back to Alabama from Illinois.  Having moved back to the South, unemployment was something that we grew accustomed to experiencing.  Dad was often the low man on the totem pole where he was employed.  With many younger men in the employment pole, daddy had difficulty finding a job.  When he did, at the first economic downturn, daddy got to draw his pennies.  When Christmas season approached, we knew that daddy would be on layoff.  When the weather was inclement, daddy would be sent home.  When the mill quit taking logs, daddy got to stay at home.  When the lime stockpile was overstocked, the plant sent daddy home for a few weeks.  Layoff became a way of life.

I would watch daddy during these layoffs.  He would get depressed.  He did not suffer depression, which I am thankful.  If he had, he would have been suicidal.  When times were hard, he would talk of it since his dad had committed suicide due to a crippling injury.  Daddy did have many days that he would mope around and have feeling of hopelessness.

In order to draw his pennies, he had to be actively seeking employment.  I have watched him on many occasions return home discouraged.  Place after place would turn him down because of his age, repeated unemployment, and dozens of other reasons.  During these times, we never received food stamps or government assistance.  Daddy did not want the government to control him by funding him.  When we farmed, he would not take government assistance saying he wanted to plant what he wanted and not controlled by Uncle Sam.

I was in the sixth grade before daddy had a job where he did not have to worry with a layoff.  He worked at this plant for more sixteen years as a heavy equipment mechanic.  Diagnosed with cancer in 1982, he had to take disability.

I experienced my first layoff while working with Hiwassee Land Company.  We were ahead of schedule one summer and the supervisor gave us a few “Moon Days” off.  It was when Neil Armstrong and crew landed on the moon.

My second layoff came in 1973 from Keystone Metal Moulding when there was the “Oil Crisis.”  I had survived several layoffs by Keystone, which made chrome moulding for automobiles, but new car sells were down and unemployment was up.  I was a die-setter. 

My third time off came in 1976 from Linefast Corporation working as a machinist.  I was beginning to think that I was following in my daddy’s steps.  Times were harder.

The real hard layoff was 1982 from Martin Marietta Cement.  I was an oiler with a new house, a new truck, and two babies, Andy and Angel, it was very hard.  This was the first layoff in the history of the plant.  It was a corporate takeover of Martin Marietta by the Bendx Corporation.

This had nothing to do with an economic turndown, my job performance, or my work record, but I, as did everyone on layoff, took it personal.  I remember as dozens of us went to the unemployment agency.  We felt abandoned, dirty, guilty, and ashamed.  We told it horrible to draw our pennies and then told to apply for food stamps.

With that in mind, my thoughts and prayers go out to all the men and women who are suffering layoff in our area.  Join with me as I pray for them.  I have been there and had it not been for the help of the Lord I would not have made it.  My family and I struggled during that five-year layoff.

 Thus my heart was grieved, and I was pricked in my reins.

 So foolish was I, and ignorant: I was as a beast before thee.

 Nevertheless I am continually with thee: thou hast holden me by my right hand.

 Thou shalt guide me with thy counsel, and afterward receive me to glory.

 Whom have I in heaven but thee? and there is none upon earth that I desire beside thee.

 My flesh and my heart faileth: but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever (Psalm 73:21-26 KJV).

Ye have sown much, and bring in little; ye eat, but ye have not enough; ye drink, but ye are not filled with drink; ye clothe you, but there is none warm; and he that earneth wages earneth wages to put it into a bag with holes (Haggai 1:6 KJV).

PS Aaron came at the end of that five-year layoff.