By Mike Gaddis

He was old Father Christmas . . . the eternal countenance of gentility, giving and goodwill, the essence of innocence and sincerity, the harbinger of peace and joy.

The bleached, disheveled timbers of the old house protrude above the honeysuckle like the scattered bones of a forsaken corpse. The cedars that once soldiered the fencerow straight and full are mostly gone, the few remaining, shabby and gnarled. Garden and grounds I knew so well in the green breath of summer lie in sere anomaly under the leaden December sky. The desolation assails the innocence of my memory and punctuates the years of his absence, yet it cannot displace his legacy. Gazing along the threadbare suggestion of the wagon path, I still sense the splendid baritones of his presence.

The proud script penned by his father into the worn, leather Bible on the parlor secretary pronounced him William Manly Ashworth. The year was 1890 and it was the 22nd day of the Christmas month.

For three generations of us who arrived afterwards, he was simply and dearly “Uncle Manly.”

He was a large man for his day, standing six-feet-three in his prime and scaling maybe 220 pounds. A gentle person, blessed with a lusty voice and a ready smile, his generosity was well fitted to his stature. In a normal conversation he could be heard in lucid, resonant tones at Union Grove Church, a good half-mile west. There were clear, still, go-to-meeting mornings, with the windows opened, when the enthralled congregation mistook the preacher’s desperate peaks of inflection as an augury of conviction. On a summer Sunday, in the years I knew him, his perennial attire was a long-sleeved white shirt under a pair of clean, but well-worn overalls. In an era when most men of his generation religiously wore hats, he went bareheaded, his full thatch of silver hair wetted and neatly groomed.

He lived on the family homeplace, a small farm of 90-some acres in the red clay, white flint and buck-tallow of Cedar Grove Community in Randolph County. The house, clapboards over logs, stood on a gentle swell at its center, overlooking meadows of butterfly weed, zephyr lilies and goldenrod, and the cool, shadowy bottomland skirting Taylor’s Creek. It was a place of simple grace and charm, from the strength of the oaks bordering the farm path to the harmony of the blue gingham curtains behind the blown glass windows. When his nine siblings left to find their fortunes in the world, Uncle Manly discovered his in the place he was raised.

Uncle Manly was a confirmed bachelor. Whether by choice or happenstance, he lived alone. Maybe he loved and lost. I never knew. There were, no doubt, times he was lonely.  

But never on a Sunday. On Sundays, he welcomed the gathering of an extended family, which found its way back to its ancestral beginnings, drawn by taproots and tranquil memories into a mutual search for renewal. Uncle Manly was forever at its epicenter, the cornerstone of its commerce.     

To the grown folks he was the herald of simplicity and country values in a world increasingly complex and urbane.  

To us young’ns he was a companionable mentor, oftentimes accomplice. Forever young at heart, he would welcome us with boyish anticipation, never tiring of our endless questions, rejoicing at the eagerness of our insistence.

He knew the hidden woodland where the first trillium grew, the secret of a butterfly chrysalis, how to trick the door shut on a freshwater mussel with the stem of a straw. Deftly, he’d unravel the mystery in a quail roost, find the cool, cloying muscadines that hid themselves safe from frost under November leaves, fashion a pop gun that shot gumballs.

Do you know when the hazelnuts ripen along the slopes of the meadow? How the king snake gets its name? When it’s safe to eat a persimmon? How buckeyes look when they first peek from their husk? He could explain.

Would kids today recognize the lyrical music of the wood thrush, the bubbling trill of the wren, the whipsawing of the whippoorwill? Has someone told them that snapping turtles won’t turn loose ’til it thunders? That a bobcat jumps tree? That you can squall a coon? Has somebody explained about bee trees? Stinging nettle? Molly-pops? Have they been taught to pick a bird when the quail rise?
Can they fashion a bow and arrow from a hickory sapling and some Dominecker feathers? Skin a snake? Turn a catalpa worm?  

“Come,” he would say in simple phrases, “the world is full of fascinations,” revealing each in turn.

Along the alders that shadowed the creek banks in the shimmer of summer, where the brown water snakes resided, we wandered in a cluster, relishing the old man and tobacco smell of him, the words of his stories. By his side we sat with the fishing poles he had whittled from a stick, catching redbreasts on hook and line from his overall pockets. About the painted meadows, through the dusky bottoms, deep into green forests we followed his reverent footsteps, gaining respect first for the world around us, and then for ourselves.

In the wonder of a wren’s nest in a discarded sunbonnet we learned legitimacy . . . in the honesty of tumblebugs on a mound of cow manure, we were brought to humility.

In a thousand ways, in a hundred places, we were taught that the least is as important as the greatest, and that a boy, or a girl, is simply one creature in a Kingdom.

Uncle Manly was the lesson the sixth grade forgot to teach.   

In the grace of the old house, when Aunt Bessie instigated parlor hymns around the wheezy pump organ, we reveled in the comforting strength of his song.  In an acapella anchored by his rich baritone, 20 strong and four generations deep, we shook its moorings with strains of Will There Be Any Stars In My Crown, Amazing Grace and Rock of Ages. When Aunt Rachel railed in from Mississippi, and Baxter Skeen hauled in George Pegram and the Boys to renew his smoldering courtship, we waited anxiously for the Boys to blow into Rocky Top. By then, inebriated by the feeling, Uncle Manly would explode into a spirited buck dance. Enthralled with his exuberance, we would clap and whoop, spirits soaring.  

At the scuppernong vine in September, he would throw himself into an industrious frenzy, picking from the top of the scaffold for the smaller of us, and generally watching out for the womenfolk. On the return trip to the big house, he was ever vigilant for that year’s round of Christmas trees.

“I’ll be doggone if that ain’t a pretty one, Joe!” he’d proclaim to my grandpa, calling us kids around to see.

Before the flickering firelight on the Eve of Noel, the room inundated with the scent of red cedar and baking sweet potatoes, the beagles kenneled and the rabbits hanging silvered and frosted by moonlight on the side porch, with the promise of the long-awaited morning dancing in our heads, he was old Father Christmas . . . the eternal countenance of gentility, giving and goodwill, the essence of innocence and sincerity, the harbinger of peace and joy.

I remember him most vividly at this season. But always he is there, reminding me of how I began, how I should strive to live, and why I love equally both mistletoe and doodlebugs.  

He was a constant in a hundred childhood evenings.  In the gathering twilight, when it came time for farewells, he was everywhere at once, it seemed, clinging to the last fleeting minutes as a child clings to the hand of his mother, sincerely and anxiously taken with the notion that the day would only end in success if he could extract a promise of return, “God willing,” from every departing soul.

He would be standing by the path as we left . . . a lantern in hand against the growing night . . . amid the fragrant amalgam of lilac, jasmine and honeysuckle that had melted onto the cooling air of the rising evening, the clack of the cicadas and katydids in the foreground, the long, throaty yeeeaannnks of the toads, the whipsawing of a distant whippoorwill. For as long as he could see us, he would wave, entreating again and again, “Come back, Joe. Come back, Joe.”

Dusk is falling now as well, almost 60 years later, as I turn from the lifeless old home place and make my way back along the faint wagon path, yet I hear him calling still, ever so clearly in the quiet, cold air.

LEGEND’S LEGACY
“Ashworth Sundays" is one of 31 parables of incomparable warmth and intonation in Mike Gaddis’ newest book, Legend’s Legacy, in which he explores the enchanting realms of outdoor mentorship. This remarkable, 304-page book stands unparalleled as an affecting commemoration of the most endearing and enduring aspects of our sporting traditions – an inspiring tribute to those who cared, who taught us then and guide us still.

Legend’s Legacy, with more than 30 illustrations by artist Dan Burr, is available in a hardcover Trade Edition for $30 and in a Deluxe, leather-bound edition limited to 525 signed and numbered copies for $60.