By Darrell Williams
Special to the Salisburyt Post
If you have stuck with me down through the years, then you know of my family about as much as I do.
Especially about Codney Killick. That’s not his name, of course, but he gave it to himself, so he has to live with it.
His real name is Marcelle Williams. He was the last of eight kids — except me. I was the last. He had a four-and-a-half-year start and must have figured he was the last. And then I showed up, rolling on like a snowball trying to catch up, but never quite making it.
As I have revealed before, he was somewhere about 8 or 9 when he came home from “up street” (Faith, population 400 at the time) with the information (at the supper table) that he had heard that Shuf Lippard had the “codney killic”. He was slightly off mark — it was the kidney colic that ol’ Shuf had. Anyhow, Pop told the tale at the next after-dinner gathering around Babe Rainey’s store’s cracker barrel, and Marcelle Williams was branded forever.
So, we know all of that, but what’s new with Mister Killick?
I called him up on his birthday and asked what he was doing. “Finishing up,” he said. It was 10:30 a.m., and he was just “cleaning up the dishes. Don’t have anyone to do it for me, so I just do it myself.”
At that moment, however, on the date of his birth, he said he was standing at the kitchen sink, “looking out the window to the old home place,” a couple of hundred yards away. What he saw, and what I saw in my mind, was a lot of joy as simple as the wildflowers that used to thrive in the meadow down below – Mom and Pop and Grandma, eight kids and Jack, the birddog; Beauty the cow, the hog pen, the granary, the barn, the well that supplied water as cool as a popsicle, and with a taste that couldn’t be imitated.
Well, they had a party for him last Sunday and invited friends and neighbors to drop by. It’s a good thing they held it in the crisp, new family life center at Faith Lutheran Church, or some of us might have had to wave from the parking lot.
He had reached the high pinnacle of 90 years. Ninety years of giving and taking, but mostly giving. I thought he was pretty much of a nut when he was yanking the milking stool from under me and leaving me to finish that job standing up. Then he grew up, and the acorn became an oak. The nut was gone but the tree was firm.
I think the truth began to sink in about the time he became chairman of the Rowan County School Board even though he had finished only the 10th grade in high school, an achievement that seldom, if ever, is matched.
Along the way, he also worked his way up in the American Legion to become state commander, supported his town in many important projects, has been a fixture in the annual Faith Fourth of July Celebration and has been a church pillar all his life. Among a pageful of other things.
At his party, I asked him why he never graduated high school. He said: “Pop said it was time to get a job and help out.”
And so he did. He got a job with Cannon Mills in Kannapolis and was driving his own car within a month.
It wasn’t long until the flaming-haired Binky Peeler came into his life. She lived on one end of town, and Marcelle lived on the other. No matter. That black ’36 coupe made the difference. Pretty soon, they were closer than Hansel and Gretel. And closer than that when they married in her home in 1942. Binky’s brother and I gave them a fine send-off by putting rocks in the Chevy’s hubcaps and fish under the hood. They drove out of town, loud and smelly.
The war moved in, they moved out — to Wilmington where the fresh groom worked as a machinist in the shipyard. He joined the Navy and was in the Pacific when an errant piece of metal found his left eye, and that was the end of his eye and of his military service.
Well, not quite. Later, as a veteran, for a quarter of a century or more, he conducted the service for the bereaved at the National Cemetery. He probably would still be doing that but the cemetery, established after World War I, now is full.
Marcelle and Binky, (she now deceased), built a home within 200 yards of the old home place. And that is where they reared their two daughters and one son. Now their many-membered family comes in from their own homes on special occasions and coils around the patriarch.
Some of them call him “Dad,” others call him “Grandpa.”
When I call him on the phone, I call him Mozelle.
But that’s another story, not nearly as good as Codney Killick.
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Darrell Williams is a retired editor of The Gazette in Gastonia. You can reach him by email at bwilliams6864@ carolina.rr.com