Signs

Signs and Alabama Memories

Coca-Cola.  Buffalo Rock.  Slow Children Playing.

Old signs on the brick wall of Ray’s Furniture Store in Calera,  Alabama, shot this time through the lens of Chip Cooper’s camera for his 1989 book, Alabama Memories.

I’m drawn to Cooper’s photograph .  It takes me back to the 1970s and pop art, a canvas of bricks painted black interrupted by loud colors.  A circular Coca Cola sign sits top and slightly off-center, a red bulls-eye pocked with four bullet holes.  Canary yellow shapes, part of some giant unknown off-camera word, flank the Coca-Cola sign.  A white X with “Railroad Crossing” in black letters claims the lower left side.  Warning signs, their black letters against yellow-orange or white, alternate across the center and edges of the photograph, warning of speed limits, children playing, traffic lights.  Reds, yellows, black, white, go slow, be careful. Be warned.

Cooper’s photo transports me to another sign-clad store in the 1970s.  Nehi.  Clabber Girl Baking Powder.  Pure Oil.  Chew Mail Pouch Chewing Tobacco.  Metal signs that sheathed the dark red walls of the old store in Martling, Alabama.

Weathered wood under a tin roof, the Martling store measured the width of two cars parked end to end and not much deeper.  Martling was hardly more than a crossroads, and the store sat squat at their intersection.

In those years, our family drove through Martling on the back country shortcut to our cabin on Lake Guntersville.  The store marked the place where we made a left turn, which was the only reason to slow down; too few cars passed through Martling to require speed limits or lights.  If a car were to slow to a stop, houses would empty of people eager to learn about the trouble and offer help.

We rode as a family, the four of us inside one car, with parents driving and in charge, despite the eagerness of our young teens to take the wheel.

The narrow road from Martling switchbacked down Sand Mountain, through the wildlife refuge to the lake.  Our eight acres jutted out into the water.  On one bank sprawled our apple-green cabin with its screened porch long enough for a hammock at one end, a row of wooden rockers, and a round picnic table for meals.  Willows shaded the cabin and bordered the water’s edge. Crabapple and pear trees lined the road leading from the highway to the house.  In the spring the trees hung so heavy with fruit that their limbs snapped.

Every weekend we filled the car with kids, dogs, and enough food to feed an invasion of teenage visitors and headed to the cabin to play with water toys.  We lay out on the dock past midnight watching the August meteor showers, sang happy birthdays, and shot skeet.  I made a lifetime supply of crabapple jelly from our trees.

My mind returns to Cooper’s photograph.  I study its composition. The weight of the colors, the shapes of the signs, and their placement on the wall balance the picture, a balance created and preserved by the photographer.  With his camera, he chose what the focus would be; he determined what would be included and excluded.  Even though yellow shapes allude to an off-camera word, the word remains unknown.  It may hover outside the photo, but it will never intrude on this scene. Cooper controlled the boundaries of the photograph, safeguarding its bright red and yellows on black, and he conserved it within a frame and on a page in a book.

About eleven a.m. on the morning of May 18, 1977, a silver-haired woman wheeled her Ford pickup into the Martling Cemetery.  A bucket of red zinnias from her garden wedged against the floorboard, ready to decorate her parents’ graves.  The truck bumped up a washboard road to circle behind their tombstones.  The woman pushed down the brake pedal.  Something lay across the road, something like a tree limb.  She stepped out of the truck to move the obstacle, squinted to see it better as she stooped to grab hold, and screamed.

[ Cont'd :                About eleven a.m. on the morning of May 18, 1977, a silver-haired woman wheeled her Ford pickup into the Martling Cemetery.  A bucket of red zinnias from her garden wedged against the floorboard, ready to decorate her parents’ graves.  The truck bumped up a washboard road to circle behind their tombstones.  The woman pushed down the brake pedal.  Something lay across the road, something like a tree limb.  She stepped out of the truck to move the obstacle, squinted to see it better as she stooped to grab hold, and screamed.]

At her feet lay the charred and yellow-painted body of a young white man, red blood dried around the slash in his throat, his fingers burned off.  A tattoo of a peace symbol colored his upper arm.

“I’ll never forget seeing that body,” read the headline in the next edition of the weekly newspaper.

“Didn’t know much about paint,” said a deputy sheriff.  The killer had doused the body with flammable liquid and set it afire, but the water-based latex paint preserved the body instead.

Yellow, red, black on white flesh purpled with a sign of peace.  A killer’s composition. Installed in a country cemetery.

News of the murder blasted from television accounts and screamed in black and white headlines all over the state.  Martling? Where is Martling? people asked.  An unspeakable murder in a town too tiny to warrant a dot on the map?

I knew Martling.  I knew which road led from Martling’s store to the cemetery.  And I reeled in disbelief that someone had defiled this simple place.

No one could identify the man.

“If anybody was missing in Martling, everybody would know it,” said another deputy sheriff.  Neither news stories nor FBI bulletins stirred up missing persons reports that matched the yellow body.  Two weeks later in an effort to learn his name, the newspaper ran a front page picture of the body lying on a slab at the mortuary.

The police theorized that the dead man was a drug informant murdered as an example to others, killed elsewhere and dumped in the Martling Cemetery.  That is where the Methodist minister buried his body in mid-summer.

One night the following June, we were returning from the cabin after a weekend of pulling skiers and grilling hotdogs.  Our son announced from the back seat that he wished he had good parents.  “Good parents” meant other parents who we learned were offering beer and vodka to the fourteen-year-olds.  In August my husband, Frank, hoisted the ski boat during a rainstorm and was struck by lightning.  He didn’t appear to be injured.  And in September when we arrived with friends to watch a football game on TV, a burglar had smashed a window and stolen the television set.  Eventually we sold the cabin.

Twenty years later Cooper published Alabama Memories.  At the same time, The Sand Mountain Reporter ran a series on unsolved crimes.  The murder at Martling topped the list.  To this day, people remember the yellow body in the cemetery, but no one knows his name.  According to the news story, someone places flowers on his grave.

Cooper’s photograph intrigued me, evoking as it did my memories of a sign-covered store.   And the newspaper story roused my curiosity.  I drove back to the cabin, the first time I had been back in many years.  This time I carried my camera, ready to capture my memories.

I didn’t know what to expect or even what I hoped for.  Recollections played through my head with each mile.  I thought about naps in the hammock on the red brick porch.  I pictured giant pots of crabapple jelly frothing on the stove.   My knees braced for the Jet Ski’s slap against the white wake of the boat.

I recognized the open gate, despite the overgrown hedges around it.  I helped hang that gate.  One day I discovered the remains of a joint by that gate, the morning after our son and our friends’ daughter slipped away during an evening party.  I crept the car up the long driveway toward the fruit trees. And hit the brakes.

The cabin had been swallowed up by a gray box, an aluminum-sided barn of a house.  I caught my breath.  Nowhere were the giggles of little girls, the happy birthday songs, or the boy washing his first car in the yard.  I backed away from this assault on my memories, backed out the gate, and turned the car toward Martling.

I couldn’t find the old store.  How could I be lost at Martling’s only crossroad?  And then I realized the store was gone.   Replaced with the yellow concrete blocks and red letters of a Dollar General store.  A sign on the corner posted the speed limit.

Searching, for what I couldn’t say, I drove down the roads I’d never taken before, my camera loaded.  I rode past rows of mobile homes permanently fixed to their small plots of land, past chickens scratching through red dirt, broken down cars in yards, and an old yellow school bus lettered on its side with “The First Church of the Last Faithful Followers.”  Next to the bus hunkered a rusted, doorless Chevy Caprice with a goat perched on its roof.  I slowed to take this picture, but sensed I was being watched from porches and windows.  I moved on.

The next road swung off to the cemetery where the body was found. Circling round and round with the car, I tried to spot the grave of the murdered man, wondering what its marker would say.  Something cold, like a breath, played over the back of my neck.  There alone in the cemetery, or not so alone, I dared not leave the car’s protection to search on foot.

A year passed and I was still drawn by Cooper’s photograph and the Alabama memories it stirred for me.  For reasons I can’t explain, I made my way south more than one hundred miles to Calera in search of Rays Furniture Store.  I crawled past the city limits sign.  At the railroad crossing, I looked both ways before I bumped over the tracks.  I braked for stop signs and red lights, but didn’t find a black brick wall of signs or Ray’s Furniture Store.  Like the old store at Martling, Ray’s had been demolished, obliterated, replaced.  Its signs exist only in the photograph.

Today our son brews beer on the West Coast.  The muscles in Frank’s hands have atrophied, a delayed result of the lightning strike.  Our daughter worked for Coca-Cola at the Atlanta headquarters, where bulletproof glass protected her office.  Chip Cooper’s Alabama Memories rests on my top bookshelf, closed.

I still have a jar of homemade crabapple jelly.  Red jelly.  Yellow label.  Black letters on white.