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Rook

My father’s family always played Rook.

My grandparents lived on a farm in a small town in the middle of Tennessee, a place called Estill Springs or Winchester Springs. It wasn’t really a town, more the country near a town called Winchester and not that far from Tullahoma. My family visited them often, at least two or three times a year, for a few days each time. Their next door neighbor was my great aunt (Mabel). A short walk down the road was my father’s sister (Aunt Carolyn) and her family (Uncle Tommy, Tina, Tanya). Within a few miles, my father’s brother (Uncle Jim) and his family (Aunt Shuron, Sherry, Jimmy) had a house. There were a handful of other relatives that often came around, and anytime at least four adults gathered, a card table was likely to appear in the front room or the living room, and the Rook cards would come out. Apparently, we played some variation of Kentucky Rook, but I didn’t know that until I just looked up the rules online.

As small children, my cousin Tina and I always wanted to play, but nobody would let us for a while. We weren’t old enough to really understand it, after all. We were too eager but not ready. Eventually, we certainly were allowed into the adult ranks of playing the game, with a learning curve involved.

The basic rules were somewhat like Euchre and other card games with four players, with a goal of collecting the point cards. A 5 card was worth 5 points. A 10 or 14 card were worth 10 points. A 1 card was 15 points, and “the bird,” the Rook card, was worth 20. You would bid for the five cards in the middle of the table (“the nest”) based on how many points you thought you and your partner could get. You would discard five cards, presumably the weakest five, and whoever won the last trick would win the discard pile. Whoever got the pot would lead by declaring which card color would be trump cards. A bird would catch anything, then a 1, 14, and the cards descended from there to the 5. There were 180 points in any hand, so each person is dealt ten cards apiece, and you bid on how many points you’d expect to get; if you get that many, your team gets however many points you could (and the other team got whatever they could). If you got less than your bid, you lost your bid from your total, and the opposing team got however many points they set you with. Dealing would revolve around the table, and the first bid was from the person to the left of the dealer. 100 points was a starting bid, though we occasionally pretended we could start below that. If you didn’t want to bid, you passed, but then you couldn’t bid again on that hand. So the goal was to either control the hand or make the other team stake a lot of points and hope to set them. Around most hands, with my family, most hands were won with bids of 130, though someone with a really good hand would bid 135. 140 was a dangerously good hand, but it happened. Often, if you didn’t have a good hand, you’d bid 125 just to force the other team to go to 130, but they occasionally made you play it because they knew you didn’t have anything, hoping they could set you back from your total. Whichever team reached 500 points first, however many hands that took, won the whole game (the directions say 300, but we always played to 500).

When I was a young player, my cousin and I would sometimes “shoot the moon,” staking 500 points on the hand if we thought we could collect all 180 points. We often didn’t make it, and then we’d feel the need to do it again to try to make our way out of the hole we dug for ourselves.

At the height of my family’s playing, there would often be three different tables set up with four players at each. My grandmother would usually be cooking or cleaning up after the big family meals, so she sat a lot of games out. Before he was banned from the house, my “Uncle Eugene” would set the deck. Eugene was a string of vague memories for me, a scoundrel who would borrow money and never repay it, a drinker and a cheater when I thought those were the worst things you could be. He was charming in a slimy sort of way, I think, and by the time it was done, he wasn’t just told to never show his face again; I remember a moment where the family thought they heard someone outside, we all quieted down to see if we could figure out what was happening, and my grandfather got his rifle in case it was Eugene. A number of years later, Eugene was working as a shredder for the Mint, I was told. He swore he’d pay my grandmother back for money loaned to him, and he sent her an envelope of shredded money as repayment. My grandparents put it in a bowl and displayed it on the coffee table.

 My strongest memories of the game had to do with playing against my uncle Mike who still lived at home. He was the youngest of my father’s siblings, and he was the cool uncle I wanted to be when I grew up, despite or maybe because of the disapproval of my parents. Mike would quietly sing while he played, trying to distract the other players. He would repeat the same lines over pretty often, as if those were the only words he knew or the only words that mattered. John Prine’s “Illegal Smile” was a favorite, as was the country song that I never knew at the time, Tom T. Hall’s “Old Dogs Children and Watermelon Wine,” of which I only heard the name of the song repeatedly. “For it’s old dogs, children…” mumble mumble trailing off, an attempt to get you off course.

When I look over my childhood, I fondly remember the family card games. We occasionally broke out the Uno deck, of course, but only if we didn’t have four people. Rook was the expectation, and it was our common language. We might not have agreed on other things at times, and certain topics were always difficult. But Rook always mattered, always gave us a reason to sit together and share our goals of the moment, even if they were only to reach 500 points before the other team.