If life’s a tapestry, my stitches were placed strong and tight, in parallel fashion, beside my cousin Artie’s. They weren’t fancy because that isn’t our people, but they were sewn with a lasting, quality thread. Whatever the final product may have been lacking in trend and style was squared up with durability and creative function. That tapestry multi-tasked. It could be used as rug, blanket, wall hanging, tarp, rain slicker, most anything, because that’s who we were, who we are, who we will always be.

It started with our Grandaddies, Clyde Evelyn Barber and Arthur Calton Barber being born brothers. This relation made Artie’s dad, Arthur, and my mom, Jean, first cousins. Artie’s daddy was named after my grandaddy, creating two Arthur Barbers – one uncle and one nephew, in our small community. Grandaddy went by Arthur, Calton, Calt, AC, and Mr. Barber. He was called Grandpa, Paw Paw, and Grandaddy by us grandkids. My grandaddy was not a man of many words so the fact that he had this many name references is a bit baffling, yet it wouldn’t have been his nature to expend energy on others to straighten things out. While we are a simple kind of folks, it’s complicated. It’s who we were, are, and always will be.

Artie’s dad went by Arthur Barber, which seems formal considering his life was a doppelgänger of Andy Taylor’s in The Andy Griffith Show if Andy had worked for the Fire Department rather than Sheriff’s Office, and Mayberry had shifted southeast a couple of hours to Carthage. The rest of the deets bear resemblance.

Artie’s mom, Miss Charity, was my mother’s lifelong best friend. Miss Charity taught me in Sunday School and was a constant presence in my life. When I arrived on the planet in September of 1967, I followed the Harris twins by 10 weeks. The three of us shared a crib in Bethlehem Baptist Church’s nursery. I imagine a two-year-old Artie, looking in through the rails, plotting the adventures we were going to have once we ditched diapers and adult supervision.

The radius of the Barber side of my family circles tight around central and upper Moore County, so it makes sense that Artie and I were washed in the blood of the same country church baptistry. Together we were Carthage Bulldogs, Union Pines Vikings, and later, ventured west to be Appalachian State Mountaineers. Artie was the best kind of relative, a built-in stunt brother without the everyday sibling baggage. I’m not embellishing for writerly enhancement when I say he was a walking one-man band kind of party. For real, he could even make picking field peas a good time, and that’s a difficult feat for even the most skilled funster.

The spring before I turned five, my parents and I were visiting with Artie’s family. Artie had gotten a new bike and his old one hung in the balance, up for grabs. This two-wheeled unit had been previously owned by more people than just Artie and the mileage shone through. If I could retroactively give the bike a name, it would be Tetanus.

My parents were busy visiting with Arthur Barber and Miss Charity and waved us away with, “Sure, she can have the bike.” I was four years old.

My daddy was a working person. He had a full-time job and a full-time farm. He was not a “teach children to ride a bike by running behind and holding the seat” kind of dad, plus that wind would have extinguished his Pall Mall.

In his six-year-old wise way, Artie took me to a grass embankment and helped me get the bike aligned for speed. He said going downhill would help me ride faster. It worked. That’s the day I learned to ride Artie’s old bike and it went to live at my house. I would have slept with Tetanus if not for the sharp edges and Mama not allowing rust in the house.

At school, Artie gave me the low down on Santa Claus. I held a grudge against him for a long time over this, but in our teen years, he also gave up the skinny on suitors. While he was a quintessential bullshitter, he was a straight shooter. He spoke hard to hear truth if he thought I was heading in a direction that had potential to cause me harm.

In sixth grade, Mitchell Bauguess made a disrespectful remark about part of my anatomy and eighth grade Artie went WWE on him. “That’s my cousin,” shouted Artie as he put Mitchell in the Sleeper Hold, then flipped him for a little Halls of Justice action. They then descended into a cloud pile of sand and dust as they fought it out. My memory involves suspension, but it may have just been reconciliatory conversation by Principal Bowen. What I know without question is there was no at home punishment since that’s how we stood up for kin. Artie had my back. It’s who we were, are, and always will be.

If I produced a film about our high school years, Artie would star in a Ted Lasso, Friday Night Lights, Smoky & the Bandit, Porky’s, Ricky Bobby extravaganza. He was a larger than life, extroverted, football playing wild man and damn, we all loved him.

In college, during exam week (when we should have been studying,) our friend group played Artie’s in full contact, ninja Pictionary. Campus security was often called for noise violations. On one such occasion, Artie was singing AC/DC’s Back in Black, subbing in a curling iron as a microphone. I was on bass air guitar. When the police came, Artie acted as though he was interviewing the officer with the curling iron, and the guy did what most everyone did when Artie was involved, he laughed. The police told us to keep it down and we went back to singing.

Adulthood separated Artie and me. He stayed in Moore County, and I moved away. We both pursued careers, married, had children, divorced. We lost our parents. I remarried and moved again.

Artie was champion at staying in touch. He called me frequently over the years, to ask after certain family members or situations or to discuss friends. He liked to take his son, Noah, to my parents’ old homeplace and see the cows or pet the donkeys. He sent me pictures. He called me to catch up, to stay connected. Sometimes he called me to correct a detail in my writing. “Artie, why don’t you start a blog and write it the way you remember it,” I once said to him. “I would, Emily, but then you would still be wrong.” We laughed.

This next part is hard. So very hard.

Artie’s mental, emotional, and physical tapestry started to break down. He unraveled at the seams. There were hospitalizations and attempts at intervention. There was an amputation. There are stories of painful things that I won’t write as I don’t want to spread the darkness. Yet some of it’s true and dang, I hate that.

He left this world in the early morning hours of St. Patrick’s Day. All accounts of friends, family, and ministerial staff, report that he was at peace, that he was ready. He had condensed medical care to a minimum, so he left on his terms, signing his own ending treaty.

I’m a windshield kind of girl. I don’t like to look in the rearview mirror, don’t dwell in the past, but I’ve been looking back since Artie crossed to the other side. He lived his life out loud, on speaker even, and we sure had some good times.

His casket traveled from the church to his final resting place in an antique fire engine. It was a vessel of pure dignity, and it chugged up the hill toward Carthage, a line of cars stretching far behind. It was a beautiful day, cold and sunny, the early spring flowers on edge by the low temperatures but blooming just the same.

Preacher Bill said that heaven doesn’t provide a window to earth, that heaven is all light, love, and glory. My version is different, it has Artie with a telescope watching over Noah, and glancing my way occasionally, with a loving kind of ceaseless commentary. To me, it’s who we were, are, and always will be.