My grandpappy was from Coonbottom. He was born in 1902 in an old farmhouse on the Georgia/Florida line. The kitchen was in Georgia and the rest of the house was in Florida. He told me once that one of his brothers used to sit just out of the kitchen and spit a wad of tobacco juice across the room into the fireplace and proclaim that he was such a good spitter that he could spit from Florida to Georgia. No spit! Apparently that wasn't all just bull spit (ok, ok, I'll stop) because he won the Florida State Fair tobacco spitting contest sometime in the nineteen teens. Granddaddy also told me that they would stand by the gate to the barn as the cows came home in the evening and try to spit in their eyes. He said my uncle was way better at it than he was even after the cows wised up and came through the gate with their heads at ninety degree angles from their bodies. Cows ain't that stupid. (I made the mistake of telling that story once in the company of a liberal Yankee animal hugging female. She looked at me like I had peed on the carpet.)Anyway, from Granddaddy's stories Coonbottom became a kind of mysterious, mythical place to me as a boy. I imagined a place far off in the swamps of the Ochlocknee where moonshine stills sent up wispy tendrils of smoke through the Spanish moss draped live oaks, and overall clad men sat on tar paper shack porches smoking and chewing and telling stories while cur dogs twitched and dreamed in the cool darkness beneath them. Coonbottom always had a dark, shadowy feel to it in my mind, like perpetual twilight. And I always thought of coons for some reason. Lots of them.
Granddaddy finally took me to Coonbottom when I was about 10 or so and I got to see the old house on the state line and what was left of the farm that he had grown up on. One of his sisters still lived there, I can't remember her name, and I got the impression that they weren't on the best of terms. We walked around a bit and he told me how him and his brothers would finish their chores on Saturday and walk a trail through the woods to the Ochlocknee River and fish and swim the rest of the afternoon. He told me about a tornado that came up one day while they were working in the field and how they all ran for cover and discovered later that it had picked up a neighbor and transported him a mile before dropping him on top of a car, breaking his back. These days I wonder why he just up and decided to take me out there that day. We had never been before and we never went back. I seem to remember he seemed a little withdrawn that day, and as we walked I remember feeling like I might not really be there, or maybe that he was only partially in my dimension of time. He seemed to be seeing things that only he could see. And I guess he probably was.
In only seven or eight years he would be dead from a heart attack at 82 and it would be 20 years before I went back.
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