Jim Spearman, mom's youngest brother; two years older than her, at 80, died on May, 8th; to little fanfare. None of my immediate family went to the funeral nor did we even send flowers, because we were not told when or where it was.
I can't remember for certain the last time I saw him, but it would likely have been at mom's mother's funeral; in early 1998. I remember he said he was the ugliest man there, when I told him I thought he looked good. The top half of one his ears had been cut off in a car wreck.
When I was a boy, we lived near him; near all my blood relatives, but we moved away in 1967, after which we only saw any of them at funerals or other odd times, averaging maybe once ever two years.
Jim looked like a 1949 Ford, because the grille of that car looks like a grim, but likeable man's face.
He and mom's other brother, Paul; taught me to whistle. They both had big biceps from physical work, Jim's was round and steep, Paul's was broader. Paul looked like a 1954 Chevy.
Jim spent years in prison in North Carolina for stealing a man's car at gun point. When mom and dad went to get him out of prison sometime in the early 1950s, dad flipped his 1936 Ford. None of them were severely injured.
Jim's first wife was killed, years after the divorce, by their son Leon. Far into middle age, he married Shirley, a feeble-minded woman who was the way she was, they said; because her parent's were first cousins. I don't want to be crude, but she was strikingly unattractive and one time she asked my brother Earl if he wanted to "date her", since, as she said; he was a purty thing.
The last twenty years or so of his life Jim lived with different women across South Carolina, Alabama, and Florida. His children and grandchildren from the marriage with Shirley were all raised by mom's saintly sister Lula May, and her wonderful husband; Wiiliam Major.
I don't know what to make of Jim's life story. It reminds me of something out of Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road. I could say I wish I would have seen him again, and that would be true. But after we discussed the weather, or lives and deaths we both recalled; what would we have said?
Its funny what you remember from time spent with people you know you're supposed to try to know better, that you love because they were said to have loved you when you were little; but one of the last times I saw him, probably in the early 1990s, it was scorching hot, and we were at mom's mother's house in Williamston, SC., and Jim said: "It's too hot to go in swimming,"
So that's about it: half an ear, a carjacking, bad luck with women, a big-round muscle, me able to whistle; and days too hot to go in
swimming.
