Light the Cruciform ( A Ku Klux Klan story) - Part 1

I walked out of the classroom at exactly three-fifteen brooding over the assignment I had been given by the professor. In three weeks, I had to turn in a huge paper on something important that had happened in history. And I had to interview someone. But who? Who did I know experienced a part of history? Nobody.

I griped to Professor Hein about the project the next day, telling her that there was nobody I knew about that could tell me something they did extraordinary in the past. That's when I was assigned to go to the nursing home to talk to Zachary Ethelwulf, some eighty-nine year old dude who'd lived through the jazz age, the depression, the world war, and even the period when Martin Luther King Jr. He was probably nothing more than some dude who had flashbacks from the Holocaust and would give me the same story that most other students would get from those veterans. But boy, was I wrong.

I walked into the nursing home with a notebook and pencil in hand, prepared to talk to Mr. Ethelwulf. I was ushered down the hall like a cow in a feedlot by some burly woman with a mustache. When I entered his room, I was immediately attacked by the smell of pee, potato salad, and BO. I figured that the pee and potato salad smell came from Zachary, the BO coming straight from the mustachioed nurse behind me.

"Mr. Ethelwulf. Tara Caldwell is here to interview you," the nurse announced in a loud, booming voice that made me jump.

"Oh?" The shriveled old man sitting on the bed barely moved. He peered at me from behind thick glasses, his eyes beady little dots in his wrinkly face. He was dressed in a sweater and wool pants, even though it was early September and hotter than an oven outside. What hair he had was little, covering his liver-spotted head in white strands. The way he looked at me made me nervous, almost as if he was hiding a weird secret from me.

"You can sit in that chair, Tara." The nurse pointed at a leather chair that was across the room from Mr. Ethelwulf's bed. I sat down delicately on the chair and opened my notebook to a clean page. The nurse left the room. "If you need anything, ring the bell." She shut the door behind her.

"So,you a college student?" Mr. Ethelwulf asked me.

"Yes." I wrote a title at the top. I was tempted to call it The Interview with an Old Coot. But instead, I just simply wrote Zachary Ethelwulf.

"What do you want to know?"

"Mostly about your youth." I was going to add that he was recommended as an interesting person to interview. I didn't understand why, but I would soon find out, I guess.

"My youth wasn't like your's is, that's for sure." He used a cane to push himself into a standing position. There was a matching leather chair by the bed. I waited until he was sitting down before I looked down at the sheet of questions I was supposed to ask.

Of course my youth wouldn't be like Mr. Ethelwulf's. He probably wore knickerbockers, a tweed cap, and who knew what else back when he was a kid! I come from the era where flares and peasant tops were in style. While he was dressed in those uncomfortable-looking clothes, I wore khaki cargo pants, a NOFX t-shirt, and a pair of converse shoes on my feet. I'd pulled my brown hair back into a sloppy bun, something that was probably not tolerated in the years he was a child.

"Were you rich, poor, medium?" I catalogued.

"I was middle-class. I come from a small town in Georgia, where I lived with my parents, Edith and Richard, and my siblings, Mary Anne, Robert, and Louella, and my uncle, Charles. I was the eldest child," he said so quickly, I had trouble keeping up with his words. For such an old man, he could speak quite fast and coherently.

As he reached over for a small album on a nearby bookshelf, I asked, "What was your family life like?"

"All of us got along. Charles came to live with us when I was fifteen. He was an all-right man, except for he was racist." He paged through the album until he came upon a sepia-tinted photo. "Here's my family. I'm the one standing closest to the left." He handed me the album.

I stared hard at the photo. I glanced quickly at him and then harshly at what he looked like in the photo. Back in the day, he had been attractive with his blond hair cut very short, his eyes dark. He had a clear complexion, unlike that of many teenage boys these days. Now, he was just an old man who stayed in a pee and potato salad-smelling room.

"Could you tell me more?" I asked, closing the book and giving it back to him.

"What else do you want to know?"

"Like, what type of car did you have? What did your parents do for a living? Did you go to school? Those type of questions." Funny how calm I was being. Usually, I tensed up when I spoke to old people. But not right now.

"We didn't have a car," he said flatly. "We had a wagon that we used to go to church and to school, which I attended until I was fourteen years old. After that, I just helped out on my parent's farm and worked on other farms for money," he muttered.

For the rest of the hour I had with him, he spoke mostly of his family life, when and from where his ancestors immigrated, what he did for fun and games, and what his family members were like. For the most part, it was dull, uninteresting things. This was the great and wonderful old person recommended to me by Professor Hein? Some interesting person. Ha! It was like talking to a rock. For the next week and a half, I'd be coming here for an hour after school to listen to this guy talk. And of what? Of boring things! Yawn!

When I left, I took a deep breath of air, gulping in the scent of flowers. The stench of the pee and potato salad room clung to my clothes like burdocks; I easily could have hurled from the smell. I vowed to take a shower as soon as I got home. If this guy didn't give me a halfway decent story tomorrow, I was going to find someone else to interview.

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