Roger’s Reality – The Jasper Chronicles: The Wasp Nest

By Roger Owens

The summer I was ten, I learned that the two massive oak trees that bracketed the driveway to my Aunt Sue’s house had grown from the green oak gateposts in front of the old plantation house. The house, originally a white, two-story clapboard Colonial structure, sat on the north side of Route 6 about three miles east of the town of Jasper, Florida, and had recently been demolished and rebuilt as a one-story, red-brick Ranch.
    The trees had become the subject of conversation because, without anyone noticing, an enormous paper wasp nest had grown high in the branches of one of those miraculous Live Oaks, and the wasps had finally made enough of a nuisance of themselves that the family had decided that Something Had To Be Done. I remember the Sunday dinner at which that proclamation had been made, by my uncle John Dedge, and how it had seemed to me that, so portentous was this statement, it must have been capitalized. Why, Uncle John was the mayor of Jasper, after all; he owned the furniture store and the movie house, and was a member of the Moose Lodge and of the Eagles, and was a Mason in the 31st Degree of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, the first level of the venerable and mysterious Blue Lodge. Even my grandpa, A.W. “Red” Dedge, John’s younger brother – who came in third, in my estimation, only after God and Jesus – had achieved merely the 24th Degree, and the stratospheric aspirations of the Blue Lodge would forever elude him. The wasps had become a threat to my spinster Aunt Sue, aka Effie Sue Dedge, she of the shortened leg and clunky corrective shoe, and threats to Effie Sue were simply intolerable. It had been decided at the highest levels: Something, without a doubt, Had To Be Done.

And so it was that on that sultry Sunday in July, after church and family dinner had been safely disposed of, the “boys” – my grandfather and his multifarious brothers, John, T.W., Walter, and Guy – decided to burn them out. I was out in the yard between the new house and Guy’s old Shell gas station with my brothers and several of our local cousins, including John Jr. and Tonda, a blonde babe of about fourteen years at a second  familial remove, who inhabited my adolescent dreams in a way that would most definitely not have met with the approval of any of the adults, had they had the slightest idea, which of course they did not. My two older brothers, Don and Kennie, were engaged in throwing at a pine stump the bayonet Uncle T.W. had taken as a souvenir from the Korean War – throwing with little success. I remember snatching that long knife off the ground after another failed toss and telling them, without the tiniest inkling why, “Let me show you how it’s done.” I sucked at throwing knives, as well as at most anything else that involved physical skill of any kind, and still do to this day. I stepped well back, took aim, and threw, and that blunt hunk of cheap iron flipped over and over and then stuck, deep and quivering, in that rotted stump as if I had been an expert for all my short and unsatisfying life. With amazed faces, they demanded I do it again; they knew what a clumsy incompetent I was. But I, lacking in finesse but never in brains, told them they had had all the expertise from me they could expect that day. I walked away, more astonished than both of them together could possibly have been, ready to bust the buttons off my sweat-soaked shirt and send them flying across the grass.
    It was right then that the men, who I thought of as old at the time but who were only in their forties and fifties, told us “kids” to go get in the old cars that sat back by the corn field between Guy’s gas station and Aunt Sue’s house. We were a bit surprised; we had been told again and again not to play in those ancient autos, left there to rot as unrepairable, even with the considerable abilities Guy and his older brothers had at resurrecting such dinosaurs. Why, Guy had a 1929 John Deere diesel tractor that ran like a top; even missing his right leg from the knee down, he could still plow a field with it as well as the next man. The seats were shredded, the windows immobile, and every car was a faded, dusty black; the joke had been, for the longest time, that you could have any color Ford you wanted in the old days, as long as it was black. These Model A’s and T’s, which would fetch thousands at auction today, sat there rusting away with their back bumpers against a barbed-wire cornfield fence. Our elders regularly warned us that snakes holed up in those cars, but for some reason, today they thought it was all right for us to seek shelter in them. It was as if they knew things might not turn out the way they planned for the wasp nest, but I doubt they had a clue what was really in store. As we sweated unmindfully in the cars, out came a three-gallon hand-pumped kerosene can with a long-distance spray nozzle, which I gathered was used at the time to burn the weeds from ditches and between rows of pecan trees. It had seen better days and required some coaxing and lubrication to even allow the handle to be moved up and down, let alone to hold pressure. But hold it finally did, with only a modicum of cussing and discussion, and with that the day’s real entertainment began.

First, they tried to light the nozzle with an old welder’s friction lighter, a funny device that scratched a huge, steel, bobby-pin like pin along a flint inside a little cup at the end. A fair amount of kerosene was expended onto the ground at their feet in this failed endeavor, and this puddle of flammables would play a significant role in the debacle to come. As we watched through the aged windshields, with their accumulations of pine needles and oak leaves and corn pollen, our male relatives decided they needed to take a more direct approach, and the ubiquitous Zippos were pulled from every pocket.
    At this point, one of the men had an idea; they should first soak the wasp nest with the kerosene, and then set it afire with the torch. I think it was about that time that I noticed the womenfolk, standing on the porch of the brick house to our right, beginning to shake their heads. I could tell: something, in their considered opinions, was about to go disastrously wrong, and seldom was it that they were mistaken when it came to the foibles of these men they knew so well. Aunt Sue turned, knobbing her cane and dragging her withered leg, and retired into the house. Me? I wouldn’t have missed this for the world.

The thin, pressurized stream of kerosene was trained upon the nest, a good twenty or more feet above the ground and maybe the same horizontally from the group of men; that can could shoot an impressive distance. At this insult the wasps became restive. A cloud of angry insects buzzed about the contaminated nest, high up in the tree. Then, the pouring nozzle pointed downward, my Uncle T.W. flicked his Zippo and the torch, wielded by none other than his Honor the Mayor, John T. Dedge, flashed into demonic life. The first thing that occurred was that the pool of kerosene that had gathered before this august assemblage, having had time to vaporize into the humid air, burst into flame and sent the men reeling backward. John had the sense, or at least the idea, to send the stream of fire upward toward the intended target, but no one had considered that on the way, that blast of blazing liquid would spray onto the yard between the torch and the tree and leave a volcanic trail that could be seen from space. From the ball of fire at their feet, up the tree trunk, and into the branches above, flame blossomed as from the very gates of Hell. By now, I and all the other “young-uns” in the cars had begun laughing as seldom before and rarely afterward. And then, the instant that fire hit the wasps’ arboreal abode, all Hell indeed did break loose.

Paper wasps are dangerous, canny, and vindictive, capable of singling out an enemy and converging on him like the hordes of the Devil himself. This day they emerged from that flaming nest like tiny avenging angels and, unerringly following that glittering line of fire towards its source, descended upon their tormentors like the armies of a vengeful God. The most important, most influential, and most esteemed individuals that inhabited Jasper’s environs were scattered before this onslaught like chaff before a violent wind. Wasps attacked them in clouds, stinging like fire, as they ran in all directions, slapping, ducking, and wildly waving their arms as though they could possibly avert the retribution of these outraged, inescapable assailants. All the while I and my brothers and cousins cried in laughter, beat the dashboards of the decrepit vehicles that protected us, and fell about the shredded seats in paroxysms of hilarity.
    The kerosene can, dropped in haste by John, lay in a pool of fire until the decaying rubber hose burned through and, due to the pressure still contained in it, spewed even more kerosene onto the near-explosive grass fire in the middle of the yard. It seemed for a time that the tree itself might catch fire and burn, but live trees other than pines seldom do, and this one was no different.
    Poor Uncle Guy, with his prosthetic leg, could not run; he simply lay near the blazing grass fire and waved a hand helplessly as the wasps seemed to devour him. Grandpa Dedge ran to him amid clouds of the wasps, and we cheered as he courageously dragged him off towards the gas station. As the men retreated in defeat, the wasps seemed to accept their Pyrrhic victory, milling about higher in the air and eventually returning to their nest, which, despite the fire, seemed to have survived.
    As our laughter changed to a sort of melancholy and our tears of mirth converted to real tears, we slowly exited the decrepit vehicles and made our way warily to the brick house. The women said not a word, just sat us at the huge table and served us cold fried chicken and iced tea. And when the men made their way back to the house, we knew not to laugh, not to shame them in their failure. But in our hearts we knew we would never see anything so funny, so pitifully poignant, ever again.

Copyright © 2019 by Roger Owens