The Strange Death of Randleman Stokes
Jonathan Farlow
I don’t believe that I’ve ever seen a man who loved to laugh as much as Randleman Stokes. I think that every time that I ever saw that old man he was either laughing or looking for something or someone to laugh at. Yeah Randleman Stokes loved to laugh twenty-four seven. His right hand was always callused from slapping his knee and his britches were always thin at the knee from his hand slapping it. His face was always dimpled, his eyes always sparkled and his mouth was always turned up at the corners. The bad thing was that pretty much everybody who knew him didn’t share in his good humor. It doesn’t look like there would be anything wrong with anybody laughing and having good time. The bible says: “A merry heart doeth good like a medicine.” If that’s the case then I would think that it’d be a good thing for somebody as old as Randleman Stokes to have a smile on his face as much as possible. But sure as somebody finds some enjoyment in something they’ll be somebody else there to suck it out of him.
First off Stokes’ family didn’t approve of his behavior. He was the town of Streibly’s most illustrious citizen. He owned and ran the Stokes textile mile which was the main source of commerce in that area for fifty years at least. He served two terms as mayor, sat on the town council and he was a deacon at Streibly Baptist Church. Because of this visibility in the community his wife thought that he had certain standards of behavior which he had to live up to and walking around town drinking beer out of two cans mounted to his hat did not fall into these standards. Even after the mill fell on hard times and had to be shut down and Stokes walked away from most of his posts in the community it was thought by his wife and children that he should maintain a certain level of dignity. I guess it didn’t matter that such things as dirty limericks and plastic dog doo kept his spirits up when the sight of the old mill, sitting dark and cold for almost fifteen years always seem to pull them down.
As he got on into his later years Randleman Stokes’ sold off most of his property except the mill and a little five-acre strip along highway 606. He got a lot of nagging about the mill from family, friends, lawyers and all the other supposed experts. He tried to sell it to some company who would bring some industry into town and most importantly who would prevent the old mill from being torn down, but there was hardly anything in Streibly to attract flies much less business.
Streibly’s a crossroads in the top corner of the county just a mile or two from the Davie County line. Actually calling Streibly a crossroads might be stretching it a little. It’s more like a wide place in the road on 606. They really don’t have anything other than a few houses, a drug store, a gas station/grocery store, a medical supply place and a greasy spoon. The youngest resident of Streibly is probably pushing eighty. You see when the mill shut down there was nothing to keep a young person there, not that there was ever a major influx of fresh blood to begin with. The last under sixty resident had moved out of his parent’s house two years before Stokes died and headed to Winston Salem to start a dot com. He left just over 200 residents with the average age of about double the speed limit when you passed under the blinking yellow light in the center of town. Those people had no reason to leave and a stable routine existence to make them dig their roots even deeper. But getting back to Randleman Stokes and his property. He kept the mill, but he let that other piece of land go as soon as a representative from a small group of businessmen called him up one day. They were planning to open up a cafeteria just down the road from Streibly between there and Nazareth.
Man that was big news when it got out that Striebly N.C. would have their own cafeteria. The day after the girders started going up in early April the construction workers started noticing a almost steady flow of pickups, Buicks, Bonnevilles and the occasional Cadillac passing by on the highway. In late May when the brick was being laid the president of Dupin Construction Company got a phone call from a concerned citizen asking him why his workers had to take so many breaks and couldn’t they pick up the pace some. In June while the interior of the building was slowly being completed several cars would pull into the newly paved parking lot and sit for hours at a time. In July while the landscaping was being finished and the new manager was interviewing prospective employees elderly residents would walk up to the front door, press their faces up to the glass like kids outside a toy store and then walk away.
Finally on August 15th at 5:15 p.m. Randleman Stokes himself cut the Carolina blue ribbon and the new cafeteria opened its doors for the first time. The first influx of customers was something akin to the running of the bulls in Pamplona. They all herded in, pressed in between the wrought iron and mahogany gates and were corralled back and forth a half a dozen times before they grabbed a tray and silverware and were put before the middle aged women in hair nets who glared out at them through steamed up sneeze guards.
“What cha want sweetie? Move along.”
“Meat sir? Move along.”
“Roll or cornbread? Move along.” Everybody dined on white fish, pinto beans and Jello and over next few weeks almost everybody was pretty well satisfied that is until the place blew sky high early one evening.
It was Willie Pegram who did it. The Welbourne County sheriff’s department couldn’t figure that out for a whole two years until somebody found Willie’s false teeth on the water tower, but it was him rest assured it was Willie.
Willie was mad about being charged double for a bowl of green beans.
He pointed it
out to the fat girl behind the check out counter who brought out the manager, but neither
one would cave and Willie went home in a huff. He learned how to make the bomb from
his grandson and he stuck it together one Thursday morning in his tool shed. I don’t
know how exactly how he did it and if I did I probably wouldn’t tell you. Next time you
get a wild hair who knows who or what you’ll send scattering to the four winds.
Willie came in Saturday September the first about five with the dinner crowd, but he didn’t eat. He had refused to eat at the cafeteria after they had charged him twice for those green beans. He went straight to the bathroom and stayed there until the cafeteria closed. It closed at six-thirty that night for Labor Day and wouldn’t be open that Sunday so he’d have plenty of time to work. He gave them a good hour and a half to get everything cleaned up then he snuck out of the can, crept into the kitchen set the timer on the bomb to go off in fifteen minutes, slid it under the big stainless steel stove and headed for the door.
Randleman Stokes who lived a good two miles away heard the explosion, but it wasn’t that that killed him, it was Willie’s walker. You see Willie had it all figured out as far as getting in and setting the bomb. Where he went wrong was getting out again. You see Willie had planned on walking out the door getting in his Oldsmobile and being as far as the stop and rob before the place blew, simple as that. He thought that there’d be a knob or something on the inside of the door that he could just turn to pull the latch, but there wasn’t. Just a deadbolt lock with a place to stick a key.
Willie was yelling and banging on the door when the bomb went off, taking out the
gas stove and the main that fed it. Pieces of Willie hit the side of a chicken truck
travelling down 606. The trucker stopped and made a statement and the sheriff’s deputies
went over the truck pretty good but I can’t help but think that a little bit a Willie made it
into a bucket of extra crispy somewhere.
Willie’s walker kind of arced up clearing the highway and kept rising until it was at exactly the right angle to fall out of the sky and kill Randleman Stokes where he sat in a lawn chair in his backyard. He was laughing when he died and I’m sure that he still is if he found out about Willie Pegram blowing up the cafeteria over a bowl of green beans. The family didn’t know what happened. They just saw Stokes flat of his back on the ground, a grin on his face and they saw the walker, but they knew it wasn’t his. It didn’t have streamers, or a horn, or a rear view mirror, or that toy mechanical hand to goose woman on the butt when they got in his way. No this one was dented and charred black. It was still smoking and covered in collards.
The ambulance came and got Stokes. The police got the walker. It was taken back to the sheriff’s department where it was tagged, cataloged, set back and promptly forgotten. It’s probably still there covered in dust and crusty with old greens. The explosion was ruled an accident. The company that owned the cafeteria cut its losses and what was left of the building stayed there on the side of the highway. The residents of Streibly had to go back to either staying at home, eating barbecue or riding into Ashewood Falls to eat at the Sizzler. And the Stokes family made arrangements to send the old catbird to his final reward
Randleman Stokes left two provisions in his will in addition to all the usual rigmarole. As per his instructions the body was brought back home for visitation and the family was to sit up with the body all night like they used to do years ago. One of Stokes’ favorite songs was Sittin’ Up With the Dead by Ray Stevens about a hunchback who dies and the undertaker has to chain him down to keep him in the coffin. Well in the song late that night while the family’s sitting up a bad thunderstorm knocks out the power. It was about then that the chain holding that hunchback down broke and the dead man just sat up right there in the coffin and as they like to say mayhem ensued. Being a hunchback himself Stokes always hoped that the same thing would happen while his family sat up with him. He was tied in there tight though and all that happened was they sat up and told stories about Randy/Daddy/Grandpa and when it was over they had to admit that it was kind of nice.
Stokes left the entire estate to his wife. He left his son his classic cars, a 57 Chevy and a 41 Chevy Pickup both in mint condition. He left his daughter a very expensive collection of silver dollars that he had collected over the years. The rest of the family, the grandchildren got trusts to be put toward their education as well as things of sentimental value, photo albums, books, knick knacks, a collection of antique toys and of course his joke stuff.
It was in the last provision of his will, written and sealed five years before it was opened again, that his family thought Randleman Stokes, in this particular situation, probably told the best joke that he had in a long time. This provision concerned an account into which Stokes had been putting money over the last fifty plus years to sort of save for a rainy day. That money which had added up to a pretty good amount would be used to fix up the old mill and to put it into consideration for the proposed site of a museum to be dedicated to the history of manufacturing in piedmont North Carolina. The bill to build such a museum had been before the North Carolina General Assembly for several years and it looked like it would go through the next session.
Should the Stokes Mill building not become the site of that museum, which it didn’t, then the Mill would go to the town of Streibly to be used for whatever purpose that the town council saw fit. In the last few words of that section of the will Randleman Stokes had a few suggestions as to what the Mill should be used for. These are his exact words:
“The Stokes Textile Mill is a very well built brick structure. It’s very spacious, separated into four buildings, the largest being 82,300 feet, and after it has been renovated it will be a very attractive building as well. I do have some suggestions for the building although this decision is to be made by the Streibly Town Council and I hope that my words do not influence their decision. It would make a nice community center where the town could meet socially or perhaps where the town council could meet and allow for the community to watch or take part in the proceedings. It would make a very nice banquet hall or it could be rented out to another business to try and breath some life into this marvelous little town. One final suggestion would be to sell one of the buildings to a restaurant franchise so that there might actually be a good place to eat. Maybe a steak house, or a fish place, or better still maybe a nice cafeteria.”