Uncle Quasimodo

      Dennis’s had another uncle who was the younger brother of Luke, and I will call him Quasimodo.

Quasimodo was also a sharecropper. He was married and his wife was a very plain but pleasant woman. Quasimodo asked to have Dennis, Sammy, and me to stay overnight at his house a few times to help with the chores. His wife always put out a good dinner spread. She always seemed like she was long suffering over some secret sadness in her life. Some of the locals said it was because she was unable to have children, other people said it was because her husband was an overgrown child, who drank heavily and frequented the cathouses too often. From what I gathered, I believe it was all of the above.

      For all of his faults, Uncle Quasimodo, was a very fastidious guy, he could put a cat to shame. He was a medium height, -- medium built but strong body. He shaved his heavy beard two or three times a day. He shaved so close it almost appeared as if his hair follicles were below the skin line. He was bald and kept the hair that he had very close to his scalp. He had a lean tanned face and was kind of handsome. When he smiled unlike his older brother, he showed a mouthful of perfect strong white teeth. He was always fiddling with a toothpick in his mouth working it between his teeth and gums. His eyes were his most striking feature.

      They were a piercing electric blue and when he talked to you he would usually have a slight smile on his face and look at you with unblinking eyes slightly open wider than normal and those eyes seemed to have an odd shine. I could tell he didn’t do this for affect, it was just the way he was, still, and it was very unsettling. I couldn’t put a finger on it back then but something about him was wrong. He was scary.

      He’d compulsively rubbed his fingers tips like a safe cracker getting ready to pick a lock. He did this all the time whenever his hands were empty. I often thought that he did this to get rid of any debris off of his fingertips, real or imagined. Whenever I think of him Ted Bundy also comes to mind.

      He also liked to change all of his clothing two to three times a day. His wife would have to keep all of his shirts and slacks perfectly clean, starched and creased. Throughout the day when he wasn’t preoccupied with work, in between finger rubbing, he compulsively straightened his pants and worked to keep the creases sharp. His shoes and work boots were always perfectly cleaned and polished. I think he had a sock fetish.

      He designated one large drawer to hundreds of socks. He was always buying new socks. My aunt said that whenever he got a new bunch, he took the oldest socks out and made them into rags.

      When we worked at his farm, and often at the other sharecropper’s farms, he mostly worked the rafters in the curing barns.

The curing barn is the nastiest place on the farm to work; yet while everyone would be filthy by the end of the day, he somehow stayed very clean. He was the anti-pigpen (Pigpen- a peanuts character).

      He liked to drink a lot. Beulaville like many of the town or counties in North Carolina was dry. There were no bars or watering holes. The locals had to go to Richland to buy liquor.

      They would either take the liquor back home, or sit in their trucks out in the cornfield somewhere, or go to the Moose Lodge in Richland and keep the liquor out in their auto. The people would dance in the Moose Lodge and then go out to share a snort of liquor. It was rumored that Uncle Quasimodo liked to go to all of these haunts. Sometimes he liked to hang out with the younger crowd that courted their girl friends in their trunks or on their father’s tractors.

Sometimes they liked to hang out at a joint called the ‘Hoot and Hollar”, which was a drive up burger joint of which you hoot your horn and hollar!