The Adventures of Flash Jackson Read Online Free Page A

but my grandmother was the opposite of me—she was what you’d call Old Order Mennonite, and was about as religious as a person could get without floating straight up to heaven. She wore long, plain dresses with a shawl, and a kind of starched lace handkerchief on her head, and she lived in a tiny shack in the woods, without electricity or a telephone, or anything that might be considered a distraction from a life of Godly goodness—whatever that might consist of.
    Now, you may have already realized that my mother and I were not Old Order. The reason for that is a long story, and I suppose I’ll get around to telling it soon enough, but for now it’s enough to say that Mother and I lived at the end of the twentieth century, and Grandma lived somewhere in the middle of the eighteenth. That’s considerably bigger than your average generation gap, I believe.
    And my grandmother was odd even for Old Order. I may not be the churchgoing type, but one thing I do like about Mennonites is that they believe in the importance of a community—everyone sticks together and helps each other out, which is a way of life that a lot of the world has lost now. You don’t usually find Mennonites living off by themselves. But my grandmother did, kind of like a lady hermit—a witch, in other words. Now, even though she gave me the creeps, here is one point I get a little touchy on. It’s a case of antiwomanism, plain and simple. It’s always been fine and dandy with everyone if a man wants to take off by himself and live in the woods or something. That seems to make him automatically smarter, or wiser, or more holy, or something—people assume he must know something the rest of us don’t, and sooner or later they trek out to his tree or to the top of his mountain or wherever to ask him some deep and important question, such as What the hell’s wrong with the Buffalo Bills these days, anyway? But when a woman does the same thing, she’s suspected of witchcraft. Folks think she’s up to no good out there all by herself, cooking upevil potions and eating any children who might happen to wander into her strawberry patch. Oh, the world is a stupid place sometimes. I heard no end of cruel comments from folks about my grandmother, the same folks who thought old Frankie should be locked up somewhere, the same folks who made fun of me for not acting like a girl. People love to romanticize small-town life, how folks sit around the general store and chew tobacco and talk on and on about things, just taking life easy. They seem to forget that what those folks do mostly is gossip —and there never was a bit of gossip that did anyone any good.
    To fetch my grandmother, Mother had to drive our old pickup about fifteen miles down County Road, due south, and park next to a big old birch tree that had been standing there since God was in short pants. There were no towns for many miles in any direction from that point—you were smack in the middle of nowhere, and praying you didn’t spring a leak in one of your tires or run out of gas. Then she had to strike out along a path through the woods. It was a path my mother knew well, since she’d grown up at the other end of it. After about a mile, she would come to the little clearing where my grandmother had her shack. Likely as not she wouldn’t be home right then—even though Grandma was old, she was in pretty good shape, and she spent a lot of time wandering around in the forest gathering herbs and berries and roots, and grubs and snakes too, if you believed the stories people told about her—which I didn’t. She used these things in making her homemade medicines, which could cure just about anything: fever, ague, flu, the vapors, colds, menstrual cramps, menopause, skin rashes, snakebite, cross-eyedness, you name it. Grandma lived off what she grew in her garden, which was considerable in size, and also whatever supplies my