Ronny.

He steps out of the truck and I think, Well hello, Hickville. Where have you been all my life?


Ronnie is the epitome of a redneck, a medium-height, skinny older man with scraggly grey hair and a questionable sense of humor. As he approaches us in the falling dusk he is weaving slightly, although for the amount of beer he consumes every night it is a miracle he could even stay on his feet. I’m fairly certain that if I were to ingest half of what he does, I would die of alcohol poisoning. But he does so cheerfully, and keeps right on trucking.

One of the most eccentric people I know, his scrawny-ness is completely offset by his wife, who towers over him in both height and girth—the kind of person at whom my uncle Keith shakes his head admiringly and says, “Now that’s a big woman!”

On this evening he’s dressed in what I later find out is totally typical Ronny attire—ragged short cut-off shorts, an old white wife beater with the axel-grease of bygone days still decorating it, knee-high used-to-be-white socks, and laced high work boots. On his head was an old confederate hat from the Civil War days, complete with a blue jay and cardinal feather, and numerous old buttons—across his chest was what looks like the type of man-purse that Davy Crocket would wear, canteen shaped, with a long leather fringe hanging off of it. His .25 pistol is stuck in the back of his pants and his long musket is propped up in his back window, but no, Ronny isn’t here to fire guns with us, although he did take a shot with the little brother’s new Beretta. No, Ronny is there to fire his cannon.

This marvel of modern engineering is handmade. Currently, it consists of a large rusty pipe about three, four feet long, six inches in diameter, with two handles at the bottom and a piece wielded on to make it stand up at an angle. Still weaving slightly, he hauls it out of the truck and proceeds to pack it full of gunpowder and cans of baked beans, beating it down with a shovel and pouring water down the barrel. He tells us, “The blueberries were too expensive, and I couldn’t find no sauerkraut, so I got the beans.” I just look at him in disbelief.

Now, mom has only heard about Ronny. This is the first time she has had the privilege of meeting him, and he’s drunk as a skunk, dressed like the Redneck poster child and about to fire a handmade cannon off of our new house site to Lord knows where, armed with a shovel, baked beans and a handful of bottle rockets. For the fuses, you know. Her eyes can’t get any wider. Even my dad is grinning because we’re not sure if he’s about to fall over or blow himself to kingdom come.

They set up on a pile of evacuated dirt. The cannon is pointing somewhere between the direction of my grandfather’s house, a mere ½ mile away, and John’s old abandoned place in the jungle, which everybody knows it haunted. It’s getting dark at this point, and mom and I crouch down in the cement stairwell and peer over. Dad and Alex retreat to a safe distance, and Ronny goes up to light the fuse, which he does with his cigarette.

He retreats. Nothing happens. The fuse has gone out, although it’s still glowing quietly. None of us know what to do—it’s like the bomb that won’t go off. Except for Ronny, Ronny always knows what to do. With the fearlessness of the perpetually inebriated, he grabs the shovel, strides over to the cannon, and begins beating it. At this point, my mom is clutching my arm and uttering squeaks of alarm, because she just knows we’re about to be splattered with alcohol-soaked little pieces of Ronny, and she can’t stand it. I’m laughing too hard to do anything about either one of them.

He finally realizes that nothing is going to happen, so he bends down to the now burned-off fuse and relights it. Three and a half seconds of retreat, and the thing spectacularly explodes in a shower of paper, sparks, and the distinctive smell of baked beans. The cannon itself is shot backwards five feet, and we’re all dancing around like proper heathens, yelling, whooping, and hollering as the sound rolls in a palatable wave over the mountains, deep like thunder sunk into your bones.

At this point, we notice a light flashing erratically across the top of the opposite field. It’s my uncle Keith, and he’s hiding behind a massive pile of dirt and plant life, yowling at the top of his lungs and trying not to wet himself. I don’t blame him. It’s not every night you have a drunk Confederate soldier shooting baked beans at you out of a cannon.