[gardeners] Sothern crazies

asidv@fbg.net (gardeners@globalgarden.com)
Sat, 4 Jul 1998 13:44:51 +0000 

Dear DeDe:
Right odd, your mentioning Sheriff Yang like that. Leastwise, I 
suspect it was Sheriff Yang you had in mind although you wrote 
"Yung." Couldn't be two with such like names, do you think?
	Sheriff Yang, dear DeDe, was alluding to the fact that Chatty Cathy 
didn't need to go to all that sweat and blisters to plant her own 
corn. Why he has prisoners aplenty who are more than happy to work 
off their fines or sentences doing little favors like that for the 
Sheriff. He has a broad interpretation of "community service" 
figuring if'n you're in the community and need a little service . . . 
Well, you understand.  In return, a vote every two years -- and maybe 
a fryer or two, or a slab of bacon, or have your unattached 
brother-in-law take his ugly daughter to the Saturday night 
dance.	
	Strange man that Sheriff. You might be asking how a man could 
have a name like Yang and be from these parts. It's a long story, of 
course, but the basic parts involve his momma (a Chinese girl brought 
here by some government people to be nursemaid to their youngun's) -- 
name of Precious Jasmine Yang. 	About that same time a stranger came 
to the area and set himself up as a trainer of horses, but when he 
all but killed a couple of mares "training" them, folks around here 
wouldn't have none of him. Said he had a mean streak. He shore did 
talk with a funny sound. One drummer, coming through, said he 
sounded like one of them Nazis and he remarked on the armband the 
feller always wore. It was pretty threadbare but it was mostly black 
with a few threads of red and white. Man took quite a store in the 
thing and once when it dropped off a little kid picked it up and 
tossed it into some manure being scraped out of the livery stable. 
That man turned some funny colors of red and purple, swore in an 
outlandish way, and when he had rescued his precious, went away and 
was never seen or heard from again.
	That's how I got into the story. It was when I had just come from 
the seminary and ready to be a preacher-man. One of the ladies 
of the town came to me saying she had heard the outlander speech of 
the man and she wanted to know if he was speaking in tongues. After I 
had asked some of the others who had heard him to try to make the 
same noises the stranger had made -- and after I had read and prayed 
over it -- it was my opinion that it wasn't tongues he was speaking, 
he was just plain touched in the head.
	Everybody thought that was the end of it but six months or so later 
Precious Jade came to me with two problems: one,the people who had 
brought her to this country had fired her and thrown her out. And 
two, it only took one look to know what that problem was -- what 
with the Chinese being so slim and all by nature. She wanted to find 
a home for the little stranger and although she was not, in a manner 
of speaking, of the faith she was a god fearing creature and she was 
concerned for her child.	
	In due time the child was born, a boy and an enormous one. 
A low brow, coarse brown hair, dark eyes, and a pasty look. Like a 
pup, you could tell by the size of his feet that he was going to be 
of monster size. Maybe Doc was so struck by the size of the baby that 
he forgot about the mother for a time. In any case, Precious Jade 
died.	I was hard put to know what to do about a funeral service, not 
knowing if she had been baptized or not -- but since everyone I had 
ever known had been dipped in the water, I felt it would be unfair to 
make an exception of her. The baby was given her last name -- Yang -- 
but I didn't know what to do about Christian names. If seemed fitting 
that he have his mother's initials if he couldn't have a mother's 
love, so we baptized that child Percival Jason Yang. And then sent 
him off to the orphanage.	
	It is getting dark and the kerosene lantern 
here on the porch needs its wick trimmed. Will write more about the 
Sheriff later. There's a heap to tell.
	Preacher