Pocket Full of Posies

Chapter Ten

   I remember the time Joey broke Aunt Nelly’s brand new camera. I don’t even pretend to know the exact type of camera it was, but it was professional looking and had been very expensive. Uncle Harmon had been putting money aside for it for over a year and bought it for Aunt Nelly on her birthday. It was a couple years ago now—the twins had been seven or eight. But I remember Aunt Nelly carrying that camera around her neck for two days straight, snapping pictures of everything—seriously, she actually took a picture of me mucking out horse shit whilst covered in grimy sweat. To be honest, it drove us all nuts; including the person who’d given it to her in the first place.

  It was on the morning of the third day she had it that it happened. She was outside taking pictures of the twins and Sally on the trampoline. Joey had gotten off the trampoline and asked if he could take pictures, too. Aunt Nelly being the type of person who always shared, no matter how new her possessions were, allowed him to snap a few. Then the phone rang or something—I forget, but basically it was something that called caused her to go inside. She’d instructed that Joey put the camera on the little table in the backyard.

  Joey, to this day, swears up and down that he did just that. But somehow the camera ended up on the ground in any case. We had a dog at that time—a dog that mysteriously disappeared two years after this event—who was absolutely awful. He was an outside dog that just kind of dropped by our house one day and somehow made himself at home. We’d had him for about a year by then and he was the dog you either loved or loathed. Most of us, with the exception of the twins, loathed him. He was untrained and absolutely the rudest dog ever. But he wasn’t vicious, so automatically that meant we’d had to keep him. Apparently there was a contract to all farms that if a dropped off animal or stray wasn’t outright mean, they had to stay. Period.

  Anyway, this dog—this rude, untrained beast—attacked the crap out of the camera. Completely trashed the thing. He even managed to get the lenses out and smash it to pieces. It was like he had some vendetta against the thing. It was that broken by the time he was through with it.

  None of the kids noticed until it was too late; and even then, it was my aunt who happened upon the scene. She came outside, me apparently with her because I certainly remembered this well, and just stared. I shooed the dog away—I think I might have kicked him, too, but he was labeled evil for destroying my aunt’s precious gift so I don’t even care—and tried picking up the bitten pieces as best as I could.

  My aunt just stood on the back steps, tears silently running down her cheeks. She didn’t say a word. That was how I knew how absolutely crushed she was. Aunt Nelly could get loud, she could yell, and she could cry whilst yelling. But she hardly ever was so devastated that she simply stood and cried without making any sound. I had only seen her cry like that twice after this incident.

  Needless to say, it was too expensive to be replaced and we didn’t have a warranty. Joey apologized profusely, in tears his own self. We were kind of all in shock at that point, so it never even occurred to us to help the little guy out.

  All Aunt Nelly got out was a quiet, “It’s okay, Joey. It’s okay,” before retreating into the house and locking herself in her room.

  I’d expected there to be sobs coming from behind that door—some very similar to the ones going on behind Joey’s door—but there wasn’t. She kept up her silent tear fest until my uncle got home. She told him the dog jumped on the table. Uncle Harmon cursed in a way I hadn’t heard very often and demanded that we get rid of ‘that thing.’ I couldn’t have agreed more. But my aunt told him no, that the boys loved the dog and they should keep it.

  The official story, two years later, was that Banjo had ran away; and maybe that was true. But somehow I think Uncle Harmon loaded him up in his pickup and dropped him off at some unlucky household. It wasn’t uncommon for people in the south to do such things. It was probably how we ended up with the tyrant in the first place. Bottom line, the dog got several strikes. I think the final straw was the massacre of the neighbor’s chickens, guineas, and ducks; all of which occurred in the same day.