Hubert is Bonnie’s third husband. They were high school sweethearts seventy years ago in Drexel, Missouri, until he went off to war and she went wild. Bonnie eventually hooked up with Ben – the first man she ever met that could handle her – and bore him three sons and a daughter in their eleven year marriage; Dean the oldest. Pete, her second husband, fell over dead of a heart attack in ’92, and “Hub” found her again on the internet in 2003, thirteen months after his only wife passed of pancreatic cancer. They’ve been together since.

When Pete bit the dust, he and Bonnie had ten acres out south of Stover; a weekend playground for the grandkids when they come down from the city. It has a pond, stocked with big fat catfish and some bass, swing set, teeter-totter, horseshoe pit, fire-pit and tent-pitching area. Now, their boy Dean’s grandkids come down to fish and swim in the pond. Re-generational, recycled joy.

Hub loves “The Ten,” and would rather hang out there than sit in that damn recliner listening to Bonnie snore at the TV set all day long. He’s usually shit, showered and shaved by 8:30am and sitting out on the front porch at 9:00am, waiting on Dean to pick him up for coffee down at Mitchell’s Café, then on out to “The Ten.” No different this morning.

Last spring the great-grandkids brought down some weeping willows and planted them around the pond on Arbor Day. Hub’s only chore in life (as he sees it) is to walk around the pond each and every day with a plastic milk jug that has the top cut off, but handle still intact, and water the four future shade trees. He takes an odd pleasure in watching the pond water splash upon the ground and spatter out onto his Red Wings. Makes them look like they have been worked in…and by him.

When a person passes the autumn of life and moves on into the cold, hard winter, even the slightest sign of still being of some human value (like watering trees) is a daily goal. They fear that if they fail at their one, remaining ability to function, the Good Saint Nursing Home will be their next, and final, stop. Yep, Hub waters those willows religiously.

This particular morn Dean is trenching a new shithole for the outhouse with posthole diggers, rock-bar, and a broken-handle shovel. This is one of those annual, must-do chores, or by August even the second hole of a two-seater is full…and rank. Hub is on his way to the far bank to soak down the trees planted along the dam, and watches Dean flail away, shoulder deep in the rocky Ozark ground. Dean’s shovel and diggers stabbing through the pebbly dirt and Ash roots, occasionally a rock-bar bouncing off a tough chunk of gasconade, the only sounds skipping across the pond to Hub’s ears, which are still amazingly sharp.

He’s named each of them after his favorite Lonesome Dove characters; Gus – who he just watered, Woodrow, he’s doing now, Pea Eye and Newt yet to go. “Can’t be much of a crime, whackin’ a surly bartender, Woodrow.” As Hub grins to himself and watches the toes of his boots catch spittle, he notices an eerie quiet drift across the pond. Maybe Dean struck water, or Montana.

He glances up from Woodrow and over toward Dean’s hole. The digging has, indeed, stopped, and Hub can no longer see Dean’s bald head or shovel occasionally breach the surface. “Hey, boy,” cupping his hands to help his old, scratchy voice reach all the way over there, “Did you get to China, or what?” Nothing.

Hub goes on and empties that gallon of pond water onto the willow and heads back around from whence he came, Pea Eye and Newt will have to wait. “Dean? Hey, boy…Dean?” By the time Hub gets there he’s winded and wishing a bucket or something was nearby to sit on, but that wish is brutally interrupted by the sight before him.

Apparently, the rock-bar slammed into something damn hard, ricocheting off and back-slamming Dean square between the eyes. Both sockets seem to be pushed into the back of his face, along with his nose, blood gushing from the wound like the fountain at Lourdes’s. His body lies twisted into an odd heap, legs buckled under him…and five feet down. For Hub, it may as well be fifty.

Standing at the top of that shithole, Hubert, eighty-nine –year-old Ozark native, makes the decision of his life; try to save Dean now, and no doubt fail, or go for help. He hasn’t driven in nine years – his ears are still good, but he’s damn near blind – and the closest phone is thirteen miles away. He notices Dean’s chest is still moving, sucking for air through a gaping, bleeding mouth and knows he must act now…or.

Hub spins around on those tattered, wet Red Wings and races like the wind (off a turtle’s back) for Dean’s old Chevy truck. He digs around frantically in the bed for whatever he can find that may give him an idea for getting the boy out of that pit. An old rope, looks like it might have once been a tow rope, but snapped about a dozen times. Good enough, by God.

After climbing into the cab, Hub’s hands flail along the dash and steering column looking for the key, or ignition, or whatever turns these damn things on these days. “Ah! There it is! Let’s see now, turn the switch, give her some gas…put it in -D-.” Hub slowly pulls Dean’s pickup up to the freshly dug shithole with a body in it and hopes he doesn’t drive right over the top of it. He’s guess-driving, here.

When he figures he must be close enough, he puts the lever in –P- and crawls out, grabs the rotten old tow rope and makes his way to Dean. Hub can still knot and quickly creates a dandy lasso in one end and lowers it into the pit. One arm is folded under the torso with his legs, but one lies across his heaving chest. Blood still streams from his face, his breathing more labored and Hub knows he’s got to get his ass in gear. On the second try he catches his loop around Dean’s hand and slides the rope up around his wrist as best he can. Pulling it tight, he grabs the rope and feeds it back through his hands till he finds the other end and feverishly ties it to the truck’s bumper.

-R-.

Real slow, like…

About twenty-five seconds later, Hub sees Dean’s hand clear the top of the shithole and it kind of spooks him, somehow, causing him to gun the accelerator a little bit. Shit! By the time he gets his foot over to the brake, he sees Deans body pop out of that hole and bang over the edge. Shit!

-P-.

Hub heads back for Dean, Old Timer at the ready. Just as he prepares to cut the rope, it dawns on him he still has to get Dean into the truck. Damn, shithole, anyway. Shit!

He scans the Ash tree Dean’s been digging under and spots a sturdy limb not ten feet off the ground. Back to the truck, to the bumper end of the rope, and whack!…just one swipe with Hubert’s Old Timer, by God. He quickly ties two more lengths of the rotten, old rope together giving him another twenty feet or so and loops it up all the way back to Dean.

As the old man looks at the limb just a few yards up, he knows this is the moment that determines the rest of his life, as well as Dean’s. If he can’t get the rope over the limb before he wears out trying, he will fail at saving a life, and no doubt begin the end of his own. That limb looks a mile away if a foot to Hub, but The Good Saint Nursing Home looks closer.

He recollects the Roy Rogers and John Wayne Saturday Afternoon Matinees he took his own kids to sixty years ago when they were tykes, and begins to twirl his one good arm. It takes him three tries, but he finally tosses that rope across the Ash limb. That’s what I’m talking about.

-R-. Soon as he’s tied off to the bumper again and back behind the wheel, Hub gingerly edges the pickup back away from the hole, slowly lifting Dean’s limp body off the ground. A few inches… a foot, two feet…finally his hand nears the limb and his feet dangle a foot or so of the ground.

-P-. Hub is so spent he can hardly get out of the cab of the truck and set his feet on the earth again. His legs feel wobbly as licorice sticks and his hands shake something fierce, but he somehow gets them to work and reties the rope to the trunk of the Ash. Back to the cab…-R-., -D-., Hub’s arms are so weak he can only turn the wheel a few inches at a time, using them both and all his upper body. Finally he gets it turned around and asses up to Dean’s still unconscious, dangling body. Guess driving again, he slams on the breaks when he hears a knee-cap clank the tailgate.

Oh, God. He’s got to climb out of the truck again…oh, God. When he finally gets out, he can’t walk. Hub can’t feel anything in his legs from the stomach down but a tickle-tingle kind of sensation dancing around inside his skin. Clasping tightly to the rail of the truck bed he slowly slides one foot at a time along the dirt, finally reaching Dean. With that one good arm, Hub picks his legs up at the back of his knees and sets his feet, legs and butt into the bed. A long, four-full-second breath in through the nose and out through the mouth, and back to the cab. Oh, God.

“Good Saint, Good Saint, Good…” Hubert keeps repeating this mantra to himself until he finally pulls the lever again, -R-. When he guesstimates he’s backed up two feet, -P-. Another breath, another mantra and he soon has Dean’s body completely in the truck bed. He can finally cut the rope. THAT’S what I’m talkin’ ’bout.

One more –D-. and one more –P-. and forty-five minutes later, Hubert shuts down the Chevy pickup truck with a cargo of his step-son at the Bothwell Regional parking lot. He can’t unfurl his fingers from the steering wheel, so he drops his forehead onto the horn and prays.

Hubert woke up what seemed to him eons later. From that last memory of the horn blasting his eardrums to this one he has dreamed a thousand dreams, relived lifetimes; set wrongs right; raised children; and saved worlds. His first blurred vision upon opening his ancient eyes is a pastel blue sign on a bright white wall that reads: Good Saint.

Guess Dean didn’t make it. Hell, he tried, by God…he tried, damn it! Oh, for the love of God, Good Saint? So it’s all over now. He’ll never water the Hat Creek gang again, or complain to Lucy Mitchell about the coffee being too cold, or hear Bonnie sawing logs in her recliner…ever again. Yep, it’s all over now. Good Saint…oh, my God. And, Lord…Dean. Oh, Christ…his grandkids! Shit! Why didn’t he just try going for help in the first place? Why try to act like a damned old, fool hero and blow everything. Shit!

Tears start to well up in Hub’s eyes as he inspects the IV’s and tubes intruding his sore and aching body. Before he can reach over to the little beige counter next to his bed for a tissue, another hand hands him the box; a bandaged hand; Dean’s hand.

He’s in a wheelchair, that hand bandaged the other in a sling, gauze covers his entire head save a dark plastic shield across the brow and an air hole at the mouth way. He sets the tissue box on Hub’s stomach and takes his wrinkled, bruised hand into his own bandaged one, “Thanks, Pop. You saved my life.”

Gus, Woodrow, Newt and Pea Eye never spend another day alone. Dean builds a little cabin on the pond’s edge for Hub and he waters those willows, tends them and sings Roy Rogers songs to them every day of his remaining life. When he passes on, Dean scatters him beneath the willows that had grown into forty foot shade masterpieces, and places a brand new, fancy-schmancy outhouse over that hole, with a little hand-painted sign hanging above the door: The Good Saint Hub.

That’s what I’m talkin’ ’bout.

No doubt media stands as the biggest culprit in this long black veil of misconception, but the entire emo aura does exist, thus having an origin of some sort. Festering and growing like a grotesque, infected boil on a wino’s neck for the past two-hundred years, it haunts even the new millennium Missouri, Ozarkian hillbilly’s world-wide façade.

Obscure as those origins may be, several small clues (dropping from the holey pockets of American history and lore over the last couple centuries) probably create a fairly close to accurate depiction in the birthing of the terms hick and hillbilly. From the first documented definition of the term “Hill-Billie” in a New York Journal of 1900, “A Hill-Billie is a free and untrammeled white citizen of Alabama, who lives in the hills, has no means to speak of, dresses as he can, talks as he pleases, drinks whiskey when he gets it, and fires off his revolver as the fancy takes him.”*. Obvious to me this author spent their life sipping tea in a New York reading room and never set a foot on Alabama soil, or any other hillbilly terra firma, in their life. In 1900 America ANYONE outside the east-coast metropolises probably lived and behaved similar to this fellow’s description.

Gratis, modern day media “entertainment” usage – i.e., The Beverly Hillbillies – anyone from Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, Tennessee, the Carolinas, Virginia or West Virginia, is obliged to bare the moniker – whether they want to or not. Ironically, and oddly, Missouri has become media’s hub for these banjo playing jet-setters. Makes no matter if you were born and raised in a big city (K.C., or St. Louis); you are from Missouri, you are a hillbilly.

Documentation suggests Appalachian immigrants of eighteenth century Scotland actually coin the term in their Catholic support of James II, for the Protestant “King Billy” (William III) hill-folk backers. Those fortunate enough to make the big pond crossing to the new world, most likely brought the term, or a slang derivative, with them. Wikipedia.com suggests the following: “…it derives from the linkage of two older Scottish expressions, ‘hill-folk’ and ‘billie’ which was a synonym for ‘fellow’, similar to ‘guy’ or ‘bloke’.” Hmmm, maybe.

Perhaps originally an Appalachian expression, the word hillbilly now stands as standard nomenclature of anyone descending from one of the states mentioned above, and most likely, anyone south and west of Pittsburg clear to Topeka, or Southerners that sound like they have a mouth full of potatoes when they speak (bet that irritates Texans something fierce). The general concept of a hillbilly to most Yankees and west-coasters is that a cousin slept with his mother, who was his brother’s aunt, and born in a holler under a still. You go, Li’l Abner!

Example: Once, in the great state harboring the best of all men’s vices (California), yours truly makes it to the finals of a nine-ball tournament in beautiful, downtown Rancho Penasquitos. Naturally, I have on my bib-overalls, Red Wing boots and long-sleeve Henley t-shirt with my Cadillac sitting right outside the front door shining Missouri vanity plates: OZARKZZ. When the final match begins between me and a young, blonde surfer dude, the bar patrons are all about the table gaping at the old hillbilly that quietly and methodically destroyed all comers to get to their local best; surfer dude.

The championship match is a race to seven between the last two warriors standing. Surfer dude wins the lag and gets the first break. He makes zip and never shoots again. On my sixth consecutive rack run, the crowd reaches full tilt boogie frenzy. They all stand about oohing and awing as surfer dude grows more and more irate. Finally, when he consumes enough White Russians, he puffs his chest and tail feathers, proclaiming to his buddies, the crowd and especially this old hillbilly (hoping to rattle me), “Yo, dude, did you know all of us think you hicks back there in Missouri are f***ing your sister?”

His buds have a good giggle and all point my way in mockery. This old hillbilly calmly steps back from the table, holding the stick as a wizard might his staff and gently nods at surfer dude. Normally I don’t partake in fifth-grade social demographic slur matches, but he set himself up too well, and asks for it, so I respond, “Ain’t that funny the way the world is? See, back home we think y’all are out here f***ing your brother!”

The place falls apart. Surfer dude’s intoxicated mouth shut, I finish him off on the slate and the once cliquish crowd now accepts me as one of their own, bibs and all. Initially, however, I was simply a cast member from Deliverance.

That’s only one example of the myriad of clichés and misnomers hanging about the necks of Missouri’s, so called hillbillys like a scarlet letter. In a half-century of walking extensively about the face of the earth, this author has heard them all, documenting most. Interestingly, it’s usually only offensive jibes and uneducated opinions of Missourians getting voiced. What of honor, chivalry, morals, manners, compassion for man and beast, common sense or work ethic? Four continents, eight countries and forty-four other American states have yet to offer this pilgrim a Missouri equal in any of those social disciplines. “Show Me.”

Yes, there are some backwoods, negative-I.Q, sons of sisters in Missouri…just like every place else. But in this twenty-first century, most are that way by choice. The methamphetamine culture runs rampant in our fair state (second only to Washington according to DEA statistics), and the meth-heads, of their own volition, now thrive back in the hollers and caves to avoid the law, as well as social conformity. By definition, however, these mutants are not hillbillys, but hicks; “remote from big cities and regarded as lacking in sophistication.” ** Most hillbillys dwell in communities with craftsman style houses and use forks; hicks live in shacks and tin-can trailers, always wiping sticky fingers.

Most Missouri hillbillys, those I know anyway, simply prefer life at a slower, less congested pace and desire to raise their families in areas with less crime, better schools, smiling retail clerks and total strangers that wave at them through the windshield when they drive to town. Modern hillbillys live in nice new homes (as noted) in burgs, or restored rural farm houses with manicured lawns (even if no one sees them) and grow their own tomatoes.

Perhaps hillbillys originated in the Appalachians, or Scotland, or east coast newspapers, but Missouri hillbillys, particularly Ozarkians, have somehow morphed into the rest of the nation’s current idea of hill folks; that Deliverance cast previously mentioned. Thank you, Ned Beatty…and Buddy Ebsen…and big-city talking-heads.

Lake of the Ozarks, most probably the hillbilly capitol of the world, reigns as the top vacation spot in the Midwest, and boasts more condominiums per capita than Florida. Missouri number crunchers over in Jefferson City estimate that by 2012 the Lake Ozark area will be the third most populous region in Missouri (after St. Louis and Kansas City). Now, something pertaining to the hillbilly mystique must be acceptable to uplanders, as the numbers attest.

So the next time you snicker at Ma and Pa Kettle reruns, or drool at Stupifyin’ Jones in Li’l Abner; The Musical, and curse Jed Clampett for letting Milburn Drysdale walk all over him…remember this little article. Perhaps the next hillbilly you run in to won’t look so much like a hick.

Mark Twain, Missouri native (and my hero), made the following statement in a speech called, “Plymouth Rock and the Pilgrims” in 1881. If a Missouri hillbilly hooked up with one of the Kennedy gals, this may very well be what you end up with: “I am a border ruffian from the State of Missouri. I am a Connecticut Yankee by adoption. In me you have Missouri morals, Connecticut culture; this, gentlemen, is the combination which makes the perfect man.”

Beside Twain, a number of other Missouri “hillbillys” have left an enduring and endearing mark on the arts, sciences and literature. Believe me, these folks represent the true nature of Missourians, Ozarkians, hillbillies far better than the trailer-trash anti-socials, or Hollywood hick stereo-types picking at that dern boil.

See y’all at the lake!

~Ozark
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Famous Missourians (not all true hillbillies, but nigh near)
Robert Altman, Burt Bacharach, Josephine Baker, Wallace Beery, William Bent, Robert Russell Bennett, Yogi Berra, Thomas Hart Benton, Bill Bradley, Omar Nelson Bradley, Grace Bumbry, William Burroughs, Sarah Caldwell, Martha Jane Canary (Calamity Jane), Dale Carnegie, George Washington Carver, Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain), Walter Cronkite, Robert Cummings, Jane Darwell, Charles Stark Draper, Jeanne Eagels, T. S. Eliot, James Fergason, Eugene Field, Redd Foxx, James W. Fulbright, John Goodman, Betty Grable, Dick Gregory, Jean Harlow, Edwin Hubble, Jack S. Kilby, James Langston Hughes, William Lear, Rush Limbaugh, John Huston, Jesse James, Bernarr MacFadden, Mary Margaret McBride, Robert D. Maurer, Marianne Moore, Geraldine Page, James C. Penney, Marlin Perkins, John J. Pershing, Vincent Price, Ginger Rogers, Charles M. Russell, Nellie Tayloe Ross, Ted Shawn, Casey Stengel, Gladys Swarthout, Sara Teasdale, Virgil Thomson, Harry S. Truman, Dick Van Dyke, Dennis Weaver, Pearl White.

(*) Hillbilly, A Cultural History of an American Icon, by Anthony Harkins
(**) [Encarta Dictionary: English (North American)]