Uncle Jim

Uncle Jim
Since a cousin's gathering just before Christmas I've been reconnecting with the seldom seen but often remembered cousins on one side of my family. This reconnection has largely centered on memories of what we called "the Country", the 100 acre farm near Dickson that was the childhood (roughly speaking) home of our aunts and uncles and parents. Some of my best memories of this era centered around my Uncle Jim- James McCord to give his full name. The childless husband of my Aunt Harriet Marie, and many years her senior (in part due to lying about his age), he was an uncle by marriage and not by blood. In spite of, or maybe because of, having no kids himself he was always kind to and fun with the kids. He wore his hair long and slicked back with Vitalis, kind of like John Mellencamp- and looked a little out of step for the day. He often called me "Glenn, Curt-tail, Shirt-tail Britches Yates", which kind of annoyed me and kind of gave me a kick at the same time. He also called me, "Old Buke" the meaning of which is still unknown to me. He drank coffee from a saucer and smoked unfiltered Lucky Strikes- only the health nuts smoked filtered cigarettes back then, and he made money in a variety of exotic ways. Sometimes he'd hunt jimson weed, sometimes working day labor, and when he got sick he and my Aunt sold Watkins products door to door. He was a good storyteller, and he had lots of good stories. He got bitten by a rattlesnake once, and had to drag himself a couple of miles back to the farm for help. My favorite story about Uncle Jim, though, was one that I never heard him tell, but I did see him live. I heard the story from my Aunt and from my Mom, and it is worth telling again here.
By the time I knew my country Uncle Jim he was as kind and engaging and mostly as normal a guy as you would run across. He was also "deeply religious," as they say, not that unusual for country people in the South in the 50's, or today for that matter. He was not always that way,though- and far from it even. At one time he was a bootlegger and alcoholic, and he was the only one of his brothers who did not spend time in the penitentiary for some kind of malfeasance according to my Aunt. This didn't mean he wasn't just as rough as the rest of them, I think it's just that he wasn't caught. For the first ten or so years of marriage Aunt Harriet said Uncle Jim was drunk much of the time, and would often come home from a night of drinking and even beat her. Very hard to imagine now, but that's what she said. Of course she prayed for him a lot, and I'm sure for her situation as well, but back then if you had a bad marriage you pretty much just had a bad marriage, and that was that. In any case she continued to pray for him, and one night she was washing dishes with Mammaw (my Grandmother) Yates and she heard Uncle Jim singing as he was coming home. "He's drunk again" was what my Aunt said to my Grandmother, but Uncle Jim came in excited and told them that the Lord had taken away his drinking, and he wasn't ever going to need it again. The encounter became like the one in the Gospels when the local church group had been praying all night for the release of Peter from prison, and when he miraculously showed up later that night they adamantly objected that it had to be his ghost. In other words, there may have been lots of hoping and praying, but apparently there wasn't much believing and praying. My grandmother, who I never really knew all that well, surprisingly took him at face value though and told my Aunt that something was different, and that if he said "the Lord took it away," to believe him. She turned out to be right. According to my Mother and my Aunt, this is what had happened that night...
Uncle Jim had shown up at a beer joint and was hanging out with his buddies. He said he was about to grab a beer when he heard a voice say to him, "Don't touch that- I don't ever want you to touch it again." According to my Mom it was an audible voice, but whatever kind of voice it was it was powerful enough to cause him to listen. He had a bottle of some kind of liquor in his back pocket and took it out and started to head outside. His buddies asked him where he was going, and he said he was going out back to smash the bottle. His pals thought that a waste, but he went out back anyway, smashed the bottle, dropped to his knees, and gave his heart to Jesus on the spot.
Audible or not, there isn't any doubt to me that that was the voice of God, and it was pretty well evidenced by the next twelve years of his life, where he was a changed man. Like Ebenezer Scrooge, who learned to keep Christmas well, he learned to keep life well. To say he never made much money is beyond understatement, but he was invariably cheerful, even when he was missing half of his tongue from throat cancer. My last memories of him were of an emaciated but still joyful man at the VA Hospital in Nashville, and according to my Aunt his final words were the sweet and fitting words of Paul- "I've fought the good fight, I've kept the faith, I'm going to be with Jesus." It's always been my hope to close things out with the same verse myself.