There was this tradition that my family had. I’ve since learned that other families also participate in similar traditions, but for the longest time I thought that my family was unique in our holiday spirit.
Whenever a big holiday would come around, specifically big Summer ones like the Fourth of July, my family would throw a huge pool party for all the extended family members. A staple of every Stewart family pool party was the greased watermelon. Some Uncle or another would show up with a massive watermelon and a tub of vaseline, and we’d get to work smearing the watermelon down with a thick coat of jelly. After the coating was over it would take four grown adults to stabilize the thing enough to transport it over to the pool, where they would promptly dump the newly slicked melon into it.
The melon would float around the pool for the better part of the party, until it was time to serve lunch or dinner or whatever meal the season necessitated. It was a good way to keep the fruit cold, and it provided a fun obstacle for me and my cousins to avoid when playing pool tag or marco polo or whatever game we had heard about last week at the last pool party we went to. Summer in my hometown, at least when I was five, was a series of endless family and friend pool parties, beach birthday celebrations, and river boat inner tubing races. If you weren’t throwing some event, some friend had a reason to and all of a sudden your parents were best friends with their parents and you were swimming in a pool at a mansion in the part of town you’d only ever seen out of the window of your mom’s SUV.
I said that for a long time I thought that my family was the only one that did the watermelon in the pool at parties, and this belief was reinforced by the fact that at these friends’ pool parties there was no such dunking of produce. Their pools were always salt water filtered and utterly free of disgustingly oiled grocery store goods. It would confuse me, but at five I was the type of kid who was more afraid of being perceived as different than I was the kind of kid who asked the questions that were really on their mind, so I would keep these observations to myself and wonder how these families kept their watermelons cold until it was time to eat.
Now, my family wasn’t in abject poverty, I mean we had a nice house and a huge backyard, and my Gramma lived in the house with the pool where we’d spend so much of my summers as a kid. We could afford a lot more than a lot of other people, but we weren’t exactly well off either. My parents divorced when I was barely one, and my mom was single for a good bit of time. We lived paycheck to paycheck until I was about six, when she got remarried and we had a couple years of financial stability. Unfortunately the 2008 housing crash really messed up our finances after that, and we lived on the edge of what I would consider true poverty for five years, until my mom got her second divorce and we moved in with my grandmother. Needless to say my young life was marked with my parents’ insecurity about finances and worries about providing for me and themselves going into the future. My family were also what you could call rednecks. For most of them, that meant exactly what you think it means. But for some, like myself and my immediate family, we regarded it more as the culture that we came from that we could disagree with and try to change going forward. We were a bit more progressive than most of our family members, and that would get me in a lot of trouble years down the line, but on the Fourth of July, 2005, there was a sense to a five year old me that the politics at family gatherings were not to be talked about. If anybody asked me who mommy voted for I was supposed to say that I was too young for politics and I didn’t know, especially if Gramma asked.
“Now Kimberly you know I only asked Aggie because I worry. Florida almost gave the votes to dick Cheney last year! Imagine the horror. I just want to make sure my little girl is making the decision that is actually going to benefit her and her family in the future. Is that so wrong?”
Gramma had my mom in a tough position.
On some level Gramma knew she messed up asking me about my mom’s decision in the voting booth, but she also knew my mom was so afraid of contradicting her that my mom would never outright say ‘yes you were wrong for that’, especially when she played the my little girl card.
My mom thought.
“I just would prefer you directly ask me,” she held back ‘instead of confronting my five year old son who has no idea why that question is so loaded’ and simply added “I’d always tell you.”
“Well I’m sorry, but I hope you know that my heart was in the right place.”
“I do. Let’s move on though! It’s the Fourth of July we should be-”
It was at that moment my Uncle Jeremy decided to pick me up and throw me into the pool.
He must have seen that I was caught in that conversation and, though adding nothing, didn’t know how to escape. He empathized, he also hated being caught in a heated debate between my mom and his mom. Many times he had tried to diffuse the situation, and it only ended with both of them mad at my Uncle for not taking either of their sides. He decided physical removal was the best option to get me out of there.
Unfortunately he had horrible aim.
Either that or he failed to actually look where he was throwing me and ended up chucking me directly on top of two of my older cousins and the watermelon which, though greased, was still incredibly solid and gave incredibly little when my forehead collided directly with the green behemoth. As I hit the water I immediately saw red. I didn’t react or process what was happening enough to close my eyes when I was thrown, so going under my eyes were completely open. The water around me clouded as soon as my head hit the melon, pushing it under water and then back up above the surface as the buoyancy of it took effect. I panicked. My head was throbbing. The red liquid diffusing through the water had to be my blood. I had hit the watermelon so hard and so fast that my skull had literally split open and I was bleeding out in this pool in front of all my family and friends. I was underwater so I couldn’t actually tell, but it felt like I was sobbing. I was definitely howling in pain, but the water muffled the sound, and I was in too much of a state of shock to think about trying to swim for the surface. In my panic I put my hands to my forehead to try and at least feel for the injury, instinctively trying to apply some pressure in some animalistic attempt to stop the hemorrhaging that was going to kill me.
But I felt no wound. I definitely felt pain when I pushed on the spot where I hit my head, but I felt no actual cut or split in skin where the blood would be coming from. Even though I grew up around water, and at five had fairly good breath control and stamina for my age, I had let out a lot of air with the noises I was making due to the pain and the panic, so my five year old brain was running on fumes at this point. I couldn’t put two and two together. How was I bleeding with no wound? It was only then I started to think about swimming to the edge and trying to get out, but luckily my other Uncle, Randall, had noticed me flying through the air and saw that there was an unidentified red substance seemingly dispersing through the entire pool. Right as I was thinking I might not have enough air left to make it out, I felt a hand grab under both my arms and I was being pulled up towards the surface. I had sunk all the way to the bottom of the deep end, the air in my lungs that would’ve provided me with any buoyancy had been spent howling underwater in pain.
I didn’t pass out, though I was groggy as Uncle Randall hoisted me up onto the side and laid me out on my side to cough up any water I had swallowed. Miraculously I hadn’t. At a young age you learn the instincts of swimming underwater, and even in a panic, my exposure and experience had kept me from inhaling.
As I started to be able to hear again, or maybe I was just able to focus on the fact that I could hear, the first thing I noticed was Uncle Randolph absolutely berating his younger brother. In the sibling dynamic, Randolph was the oldest, my mom the youngest. Jeremy was older than my mom but younger than Randolph and their other brother, Terry who was in the middle of Randolph and Jeremy. All of the siblings, including my mom, viewed Jeremy as the perennial younger brother due to his placement in the boy lineup. Every mistake was amplified tenfold, and nothing was ever an accident when Jeremy did it. I remember laying there thinking “Uncle Jeremy didn’t do it on purpose. This isn’t fair. It would’ve been fun if the watermelon wasn’t there” but I wasn’t the kinda kid who would stand up and say that. I would just have to let Jeremy know that he was my favorite and that I didn’t blame him for this later.
“You absolute fucking idiot! Do you not understand that not only did you throw forty pounds of dead weight on top of my kids, you threw a child into a watermelon! God it sounds absolutely ridiculous when I actually say it out loud but you always find ways to look even more stupid!”
“Randolph that’s enough,” Aunt Laurie, Randolph’s wife, stepped in, “it’s not like he meant to hurt Aggie it was an accident I’m sur-”
“I don’t fucking care, he could have killed our kids. Kimberly’s kid. It was stupid and irresponsible and-”
“I think he knows that Randy,” whenever Aunt Laurie called my Uncle Randy he knew that she was serious, “nothing you can say now will make him feel worse than he already does. Right Jeremy?”
It was Jeremy’s turn to make peace.
“Yeah, I do feel very shit. I feel incredibly shit because you’re a fucking asshole who doesn’t know how to be a brother and decides to fucking berate me in front of my entire family over a stupid fucking mistake! Why do we even have that fucking thing in the pool anyway it’s a fucking safety hazard.”
In the commotion of the post rescue argument I had completely forgotten about the watermelon. That must have been what happened. When I hit my head I must have split the watermelon instead, causing the red flesh and juices to leak into the pool, tinting the water and clouding my vision immediately.
My attention drifted only momentarily however, as the fight that was breaking out between Randolph and Jeremy threatened to spill into actual bloodshed. My grandfather and his brother had both grabbed one of the men each and were holding them back as they hurled spit and insults at each other, faces and necks growing red and veiny from the effort. If I didn’t know any better I’d say Jeremy was provoking his older brother in an attempt to get his head to actually explode from the spike in blood pressure.
Jeremy removed himself from his father’s grasp and walked away from his brother and the crowd that had formed.
“You know what! Fuck you, fuck this family, and fuck everyone who’s ever shit on me behind my back just to make themselves feel better. When I never talk to you again, you’re going to wish you had said something.”
And I almost did. I almost yelled out that I didn’t blame you Uncle Jeremy and that I was glad that you got me out of the boring and scary conversation. That it was an accident and that I didn’t think you were a bad guy. His eyes found mine, and in them there was a look that almost pleaded with me to say something, anything.
But I didn’t. I rolled back towards the pool and began to cry.
And Uncle Jeremy walked out of the fence, got in his car, and drove away.
In the commotion, most had forgotten completely about the watermelon, and had turned away from the pool to watch the confrontation that brewed between the two brothers. This meant that I was the first person to look at the pool itself in quite some minutes.
The pool had turned completely red.
One half of the watermelon was floating on the surface, its shell sunk in the water making it a boat almost. The other half wasn’t visible, presumably somewhere at the bottom of what now looked like a huge red lake. Most people were still fixated on what had just happened, and hadn’t yet turned their attention to the pool, but I think my mom noticed that I was stirring and decided to come check on me. She had been so fixated on the fight between my brothers that she hadn’t even realized that I was the one who caused it. Only when Randolph had mentioned her name did she first start to realize what had happened and came to check on me, but as the fight escalated, and she knew I was fine, she had to get involved to try and mitigate the disaster.
“What in the…” her voice trailed off as she noticed what had happened to the pool.
“The watermelon.” I said. “It split when my head hit it. It must have leaked into the pool.”
My mom looked surprised. She knew that there was no way that one watermelon could have done this to that much water. By now, people had started to notice something was up, as more and more family members looked at the pool, now fully red, more and more voices started to pipe up showing concern. Wondering what in the world happened.
By this point I had made my way over to the half of the watermelon that remained floating on the surface. It was on the other side of the pool from where the exciting events had just occurred, so I couldn’t see it that well at first. As I got closer I noticed that something was kinda hanging over the side, just barely. I also noticed that there really wasn’t any flesh left in the watermelon. It looked hollowed out, the rim the only thing left behind. Did the force of the impact really knock all of the meat out of the watermelon?
No, there was something else.
The thing that was floating in it. There was definitely something in the shell. I could see it even closer now. It was just a little ways from the edge, so I couldn’t see all the way in the bottom, and there was no way in hell I was getting in the pool, so I positioned myself just so that I could reach out and grab the edge of the watermelon husk. I sat up as I reeled it in, slowly being able to see more and more of the inside.
I screamed when I saw the severed hand inside the shell.
I realized that the thing poking up and out over the side was the tip of a finger. The hand was laying up on the curved side of the watermelon, making it invisible from the edge of the pool. I threw the rind up and out of the pool as fast as I could, almost hitting my mom as it flew onto the deck where most of the people were standing. I curled up into a ball and cried as my mom came over to see what the fuck was going on with her child.
I heard other people scream as they looked inside and saw what I saw, and I cried even harder.
All in all, the cops fished 17 body parts out of our pool. One of each limb divided up into small enough parts to fit inside a hollowed out watermelon, the rest of the space inside was filled with blood. The watermelon had been pre cut to be hollowed, and the two halves glued back together with some sort of super adhesive that the cops were unfamiliar with. It was strong enough to hold for a bit, but with enough force, the whole thing would fall apart.
The parts inside were ID’d and were revealed to all belong to one Asher Rankins. A 19 year old who had moved back to Tatum’s Beach only recently after falling on some hard times. He had taken to selling weed to kids at the high school he lived near. I can’t say he really would have been missed, it was known that most of his family had publicly disowned and shamed him following his big move out, but he was well known and the discovery of his limbs in our watermelon sent a shock through our community.
I never knew much about Asher Rankins before that day, and it would be a long time before I heard his name again. But when I would, it would make me wish I had never known who he was in the first place. Some traditions are better left undone.