Having the Last Laugh

The Last Laugh

His name was Ed Lafever and when I first met him he told me he was 95 years old and that he had lived in the Cherry Hill Community nearly all of his 95 years. Cherry Hill is one of those communities where little remains to indicate it was a community. At one time there were as many as three general stores and a school there. Not just a one room school, but all twelve grades through high school. It is located on highway 56 just where the road exits at Silver Point to run from I40 to Smithville. As one crosses the Putnam/Dekalb County line near Center Hill Lake, you pass through what once was the epicenter of Cherry Hill. His house was small but clean and neat, I am sure due to the loving attention of his daughters who looked in on him regularly. They and his grandchildren were the light of his life, since his wife Helen had long since been laid to rest in the little family plot a little to the north and east of his house.
The brown eyed girl and I visited him because he was a first cousin to her daddy who had passed away a number of years before. When we began working on “Ridin’ the Blinds,” which told her daddy’s story. we became frequent visitors. Orphaned at the age of 5, George Lafever, my father-in-law, had been raised by his grandparents on the old Lafever home place which sits just to the north of Ed’s house. Ed’s father was Oziar Lafever whom everyone called Ode. He was a brother to George’s father, and George and Ed and the other cousins grew up pretty much like brothers there in the cosmopolitan climes of Cherry Hill. To look at Ed was to see George, and no one could miss the impact of the common DNA on looks and mannerisms.
Ed was an interviewer’s dream. You could simply prime his pump with a few appropriate questions such as: “Were you old enough to go into the service in World War II?” and off he would go with a detailed and interesting story about how he rode the train from the west coast across the country guarding POW’s bound for prison camps and all of the interesting things that happened along the way. Or perhaps I would ask if he remembered what the Caney Fork was like before Center Hill Dam was built and for the next hour we would learn about summer fish camps where cool cave springs provided natural air conditioning, and hear about the Maynard “Holler” and the people that lived there before the icy waters of the Caney plunged it into the kingdom of Neptune.
We must have visited a dozen or more times prior to publishing the book in 2008, and it is difficult to determine who enjoyed the visits more, the brown eyed girl and I, or Ed. We all had a wonderful time laughing and remembering with me trying to keep that wonderful pump of memories primed.
On one trip he announced that he had purchased a 4 wheeler, and walking with the unsure gait of one his age, he took us down to the shed behind his house to show us an enormous 4 wheeler that dwarfed his now frail frame. At first we were alarmed at the thought of him riding the monster, but as the conversation continued, it became clear the purchase had been made to accommodate and entice his grandchildren, who came there on the weekends. He spoke of Possum hunting with Fowler Stanton who had been his lifelong friend and my former band director, and trying to score “shine” with his teenage buddies. Once, he walked us carefully down to the blacksmith shop where he told the story of how his grandmother, upon discovering his “Uncle Joe’s” pistol, had taken it down there and beat it to pieces on “that very anvil”.
Toward the end of the interviews, we had gone in to find that he had his single barrel shot gun propped up against the couch, ready for business. He explained that a stranger had showed up at his door and told him he was from the government and that he was going to measure his house to see if it was small enough to be eligible for exemption from taxes. The stranger had given Ed the end of a tape measure and told him he was to hold it by the end while the stranger went into the other rooms of the house to “measure.” Ed was old but not dumb and he knew something was up and that the stranger was likely searching for money or valuables while Ed stood holding the end of the tape measure. He was also sharp enough to realize that to confront the stranger was to invite being beaten senseless or killed. Thinking quickly, he managed to hook the tape measure to a door knob and maneuver himself to the couch where the shot gun lay hidden. When he had secured and cocked the old single barrel, he simply let the end of the tape measure drop. The stranger began to swear and curse Ed for letting go saying he was “messing up the measurements” but when he appeared in the doorway of the front room again he was shocked to find the 95 year old had the drop on him and told him in no uncertain terms what would happen if he did not leave in a dead run and keep on going. The stranger accepted the invitation to evacuate. “After that,” Ed declared, “I promised myself I would keep that thing loaded.”
Finally one morning the call which we had been dreading came, Ed had crossed the bar and I found myself being thankful for every hour we had spent listening and collecting the stories he had shared with us.
One of his son-in-laws conducted the funeral service and did a wonderful job of telling of this person of Joy. He told of the Joy with which Ed received them each time they came to visit, of the exuberance he felt toward life in general. How, even in his declining years, he was interesting and interested in life and living. I suppose some would have found his life bleak and joyless, but to Ed that never appeared to be the case. He found joy in his friends who sat on the front porch in the cool of the evening and talked with him, he found joy in his daughter’s great salsa made from tomatoes in his garden, he found joy in just looking at the big red 4 wheeler, he found joy in giving and we never left his home without a can of tomato juice or some other gift that he insisted we take. One Christmas Eve, we took our son and daughter-in-law and two of our grandchildren to visit him, brought with us fruit, candy and other small gifts reminiscent of Christmas gone by, but he would not let the children leave empty handed. He pulled from his wallet two crisp one dollar bills and pressed them in their chubby little palms.
His needs were simple and family and friends were everything. When once we witnessed a daughter tenderly ministering to him by washing his feet and then rubbing them with lotion, or when we listened to another speak of him adoringly, there could be little doubt in our minds that he was a rich man indeed.
As we sat together through the funeral service, holding hands for comfort against a day of gray skies and drizzle, I was shocked to hear his son-in-law say that Ed was 93 years old! “Dave”, I asked, “did I misunderstand, I though Ed told me several years ago that he was 95?” “Oh,” Dave said, “he has been telling everyone that since before he was 90. He thought it sounded better.”
Well Ed, as always, you had the last laugh and I will always remember you as a man of great Joy.
Matthew 6:34 says, “Take therefore no thought for the morrow, for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself;” and I never saw it lived out better than the life of Ed Lafever. Have a blessed day,
Bob Robert.r.chaffin@gmail.com