Looking For AN UNCLOUDY DAY

WHERE THERE’S SMOKE I would like to say that was my last experiment with tobacco, but it wasn’t. It seems I am a slow learner. Several years later, after we had moved to Mississippi, I had another run in with tobacco. My Grandfather, John Pinkney, was a character. He was ninety-two when he died and up until his last year or so he hunted ginseng in the woods and did just about whatever he wanted. I heard someone say to my Aunt Pearl that Grandpa was beginning to act childish. Aunt Pearl shook her head and said, “Humph, he’s always acted childish.” He would ride with Thurman Dye to First Monday in Ripley, Mississippi every month that he could. First Monday happened on the first Monday of every month as the name implied. It was an open-air flea market and trade day. It started many years ago around the courthouse square but outgrew that, so it moved to the fairgrounds. People from all over would bring dogs, guns, knives, or just about anything and swap or sell them. Grandpa would often take a gun or something else and trade all day and come home with the same item and maybe fifty cents profit. To Grandpa, that was a good day. My unmarried Aunt Alice lived with him and did the cooking and housekeeping. One First Monday he came home with two boxes he had bought from an Indian auctioning them off from the back of a truck. One box was full of new shoes and the other one of socks. Grandpa was very pleased with the bargain he had gotten. Aunt Alice was looking through the socks when a disgusted look came across her face. She shook her head and said, “Pap, this whole box of socks is just one of a kind. Not a mate in here.” Grandpa was busy examining the box of new shoes and didn’t miss a beat. “Well, that should work out just right. All these shoes are for the left foot.” One Monday he brought back a box of leaf tobacco. Now, I had seen chewing tobacco, pipe tobacco, cigarette tobacco and the like, but never leaf tobacco. I got to thinking, as only a fourteen-year-old boy can and came up with what I thought was a brilliant idea. I would get my friend, Billy Don and we would make some corn cobb pipes. After swiping two or three leaves off the top of the box, we headed out to the woods, planning to have a Tom Sawyer good old time. I crumbled the leaves and put them in an empty Prince Albert can. Then we loaded our pipes like I’d seen Grandpa do and lit them up. Black smoke boiled up from the pipes. A taste like burning hair filled our mouths and, in fact, smelled that way too. We spat and sputtered and threw away the pipes and ran to the water pump and tried to wash away the taste from our mouths. Why would anybody want to smoke this stuff we thought. A few days later, I was at my grandpa’s house with my Daddy. “You still have that leaf tobacco, Pap?” He asked Grandpa. “Yeah, but I’m going to throw it away.” Daddy looked puzzled. “Why are you gonna do that? I thought it looked pretty good.” “It was,” my grandpa replied, knocking the ashes from his pipe. “That is until the cat had a litter of kittens on top of it.” They never knew why I ran out of the room.