by Donald Davis
If we ever had to be punished by our father, it was a dire situation. Usually, he thought everything that we did was funny, and even helped us at times avoid Mama’s switches. But on occasion, he was called into action. The nature of these rare times of paternal punishment led us to eventually have two totally different labels for what we were up against. If the punishment came from Mama, it was called “a switching.” If we had to get it from Daddy, it was a certified “whooping.”
Even our neighbors Larry and Ronnie knew about the “whooping” label—probably because when punishment came from their father, it deserved the same title.
Before we moved to live next door to the Leatherwoods when I was twelve and Joe was nine, we had lived at our old house on Plott Creek Road. Though we looked up at Eagles’ Nest Mountain, all the creek-bottom land around that house was totally flat. It never occurred to us at that house to beg for sleds for Christmas. When it did snow, there were no hills at all for us to even dream about sliding down. On Plott Creek, our snow activity was focused on building snowmen or throwing snowballs.
We moved to the new house in the summertime, and though we immediately began playing with Larry and Ronnie, we still did not notice that this new location had a totally different topography for winter play. Our house and the Leatherwoods’ house shared a long hilltop. In almost every direction, the hill dropped down from the two houses—perfect for winter sledding.
By the time cold weather came, we were already talking with Larry and Ronnie about what would happen when it snowed. They showed us that the very best hill for sledding was the old pasture hill behind their house. There was no longer a cow in that whole pasture, and the hill came down, down, down, then turned back uphill at the bottom to naturally stop you before you hit the fence. It was made for us.
Starting in about September, Joe and I both began begging for sleds for Christmas. We also hoped that all of the snow that might be planning to fall this winter would wait until after we got our sleds, so we could take full advantage of them.
The snow held off, Christmas came, and so did the sleds. Santa did not fail us! Joe and I got two sleds. Both were Flexible Flyers. Mine was long, and his was short. I think that Santa thought that sleds came in sizes like boys did—a tall one for me and a shorter one for my little brother. Actually, the longer sled worked well for two riders, but it was not as fast if only one person was on it as was the short, small sled that Joe got. We swapped them around so much that neither one really had anyone’s name attached to it.
Not only did the sleds come on Christmas Day, so did the snow. It started about dusk that afternoon. It was a disappointing-looking start. It was not huge, flat, feathery flakes. No, it started as tiny, grainy-looking little balls of snow. It really didn’t look like it was going to amount to anything.
When we complained about the snow, Mama told us that, no, it was actually the best kind. “If it starts off big,” her opinion was offered, “it never ends up amounting to anything. But you watch out now. With this kind of little start, there will be as much snow as you want by morning.”
She was right! The next morning, we looked out the window at daylight and discovered that the entire world was deeply white. It had started out looking like a dry snow, but as it accumulated, the flakes must have gotten bigger. Now, it was a perfect ten inches of good, slick, wet, perfect-for-sledding snow.
It was hard to eat breakfast before going outside. We looked out our kitchen window and could see that there were already tracks from the Leatherwoods’ house out toward the old cow pasture. Larry and Ronnie were waiting for us.
It was torture to have to get dressed the way Mama made us do it. We had on so many clothes we could hardly bend our joints. Finally, we were ready for our first trials of the new sleds.
Larry and Ronnie were ready when we got over there. “You’ve got to break them in before they really go,” Larry advised. “I’ve brought some wax for the runners.” He held up a block of paraffin that he had snatched from his mother’s canning supplies from the summer. “Keep rubbing this on the runners every time you get back to the top, and as the new paint wears off of the runners, you will get faster and faster.” We were in business.
The only obstacle on the whole hill was one old apple tree. It was right in the middle of the field and about halfway down the big hill. What we did was slide down on one side of the tree and walk back up the other side for a while, then reverse the whole order of things. It was not really a problem at all.
For a while, we each rode our own sleds. Larry and Ronnie’s older sleds were faster, as the runners were polished free of all paint and had been waxed over and over again. Neither of them had a long sled like the one I had gotten.
Pretty soon, we were trying it out with two people riding. It seemed like the thing to do was for two people to sit up on the sled, instead of lying flat on your belly the way one rider would do it. That way, the person in front could steer by putting his feet on the sled handles. When we tried it this way, however, our center of gravity was so high that we always fell off before we managed to get to the bottom of the hill.
Soon, we figured out that the way to do it was to put whoever was bigger on his belly on the bottom and whoever was smaller flat on top of him. The bottom person steered, and the one on top just held on for dear life. We soon got pretty good at this.
The four of us had been out on the hill for a couple of hours when one of the little brothers had to go to the bathroom. As soon as one of them got the idea, the other one realized that he, too, had to go. Larry and I told them to go in the snow—that you could actually write your name in the snow and it would show up yellow. They were shy and thought that was nasty. So they both decided to go in the Leatherwoods’ house for a bathroom break.
Larry and I waited. We were looking down the hill and talking, and suddenly one of us had an inspired idea. We got the long Flexible Flyer. It had a rope loop on the front that ended in knots through both steering handles. The rope was what you used to pull the sled back up the hill. We worked out the plan. The little boys were in no hurry to come back, so we had plenty of time.
“Get on the sled,” Larry said to me. “I’ve got hold of the rope.”
I got on the sled on my belly. While Larry used the rope to hold the sled back like a leash held a dog, I steered the sled as we let it make tracks in the fresh snow straight toward the one apple tree.
As soon as the nose of the sled was right at the tree, I got off the sled, trying to step in the snow as far from it as I could, so my tracks would be mixed in with old tracks. Larry and I then carefully picked up the sled. We let it down at an angle so that a runner was sitting in one track that had come down the hill, and extended this track past the apple tree on one side of the tree. Then we moved to the other side and extended the other track past the tree on its own side. After that, we put the sled back down in the snow so it fit right in the two tracks that now extended past and were below the tree. It looked exactly like the sled had gone right through that tree.
The little boys were coming back. We could hear them talking. Larry and I both got on the sled. Just as they came into sight, we pushed off and screamed, “We did it, we did it! We rode through the tree!” We sped on down through the fresh snow to the bottom of the hill.
Joe and Ronnie could not believe it, but they had practically seen us do it. And there in front of everyone was the clear evidence: two sled runner tracks started at the top of the hill, they came down toward the apple tree, one went on each side of the tree, and they had actually seen us as it looked like we finished the ride to the bottom of the hill.
It was so clear that Larry and I did not even have to suggest it. They wanted to try. “How do you do it?” one of them asked.
We were eager to give advice: “You have to hit it right in the middle. You have to be going as fast as you can. You need to close your eyes at the last moment. You have to believe!”
The two of us watched, trying not to smile, as the l
ittle brothers loaded up at the top of the hill. They started down the slope, one on top of the other, going faster and faster. All of a sudden, Larry and I had twin unanticipated attacks of conscience. At the same time, we started running down the hill toward them, hollering, “Nooo! Nooo! Stop!” It was all too late. All we were doing was announcing to our little brothers that they had been tricked and that we were guilty.
Luckily, their aim was not as good as we told them it needed to be. They did not quite center the tree. It was bad enough, though. The big sled came to a cracking dead stop. They did not stop, but each one hit a good part of the tree. They ended up with knots on each head.
Blame and bad language were exchanged, punctuated by tears, for a good little while. (Maybe it would have been better had they been knocked out.) And on this first day of its life, my sled had a bent crossbar on the front of it. But it had all been worth it.
Larry and I knew that we were going to be in bad trouble. It never happened. The little brothers were so ashamed that they had been taken in by us that they did not tell on us. They even managed to hide the visible damage so that no convicting questions were ever asked by our parents.
We were sure that we had gotten away with it . . . we thought.
It was probably March, and Larry and I had forgotten all about the sled/tree incident. On a Sunday night, as usual, all four of us boys were at one house watching television before bedtime. It was a Disney show and the feature was about Davy Crockett. Then, at one point in the program, Davy Crockett and his buddies were digging a pit and covering it with sticks and leaves in order to trap a bear for them to eat. It was great.
The next day, Larry and I were talking about the bear pit. That’s when the idea came to us. We could dig a pit like that, but not for bears. We could dig a pit and catch our little brothers. (Why we wanted to do this, we were not sure. It never came up. It just seemed like a good idea.)
The sledding hill was behind the Leatherwoods’ house. It was all open pastureland, and you could not hide anything there. But on the opposite side of our house, the hill was either wooded or at least grown over with brushy vegetation. We often played hideout sorts of games there when the weather was good. It was the perfect place.
That Saturday, the little brothers were watching cartoons on television, so Larry and I started our plan. We went down onto the grown-up hillside and chose a place out of sight below the edge of Daddy’s garden. We marked off a square about eight or nine feet on a side and started to dig.
The soil was a loose sandy clay mix. It was easy to shovel. We had picked a place away from big trees so we would not have to deal with any roots. It was good.
The only problem we had was what to do with all the dirt we dug out of the hole. The top layer that had grassy stuff growing on it we carefully kept to the side. We figured we would need it to help disguise the trap later.
It was springtime, and both of our fathers had recently had their side-by-side gardens plowed. They were just above us on the top of the hill. The dirt up there looked just like the dirt down here. So Larry and I dug the sandy clay into a big bucket, and, taking turns doing the carrying, we carried each bucket of dirt up to one of the garden plots and scattered it all around so it would never be noticed. It was hard work but a good plan.
Over a period of a few weeks, we dug the pit deeper and deeper. In a short time, we had to take a small stepladder from our garage down to the pit so we could get both the dirt and ourselves out of it as it deepened. Before long, we had the pit deep enough that no one could climb out of it without our help. Now, we were ready.
Larry and I carefully put pine limbs over the pit. Then we added fallen pine needles and leftover leaves from the winter. We used the old sod we had saved to cover the ends of the pine boughs so no one would see them. We had done a job that would have done Davy Crockett proud.
That Saturday, we asked our little brothers, “Want to go outside and play? It’s getting to be springtime now. We can play down in the woods.”
“What do you want to play?” they asked.
“Let’s play ‘Wild Animals in the Woods.’ ” I made up the name.
“What does that mean?” one of them asked.
“It means that we each choose a wild animal to be, and then we chase each other all over the place to see which animal can catch which animal. It will be fun.”
They agreed. We chose up to be lion, tiger, bear, and jaguar.
Larry and I chased Joe and Ronnie all over the hillside, but they simply would not run over the top of the pit. We got them to chase us, but they only followed right in our tracks. We could not trap them, and we surely did not want to catch ourselves. We abandoned that plan in the middle of an argument about which of these animals could beat the other ones.
We needed a new plan.
The coming weekend was Easter—time for the Easter egg hunt. It had possibilities. All four of us agreed to work on our eggs together and then combine them for the hunt, so there would be a lot more. We worked most of Good Friday decorating eggs. The big hunt was to be on Sunday afternoon after church and Easter Sunday dinner.
It was a beautiful April Easter afternoon. Both families, parents and kids, gathered on the back porch of our house to get ready for the egg hunt. The parents had us flip a coin to see who would hide the eggs first. Larry and I won the right to hide the eggs, and we were off.
There were two dozen eggs to hide. We hid some of them so thoroughly that the next summer I hit two rotten eggs when I was trimming at the edge of the yard with the lawn mower. We hid some eggs in the yard and others down on the hillside. Twenty-three of the eggs were deeply out of sight and took real work to find. The twenty-fourth egg was totally visible. It was out in the open, right in the center of the covering of the little-boy trap. They had to fall now.
Joe and Ronnie searched until their time was up. They found over twenty of the eggs we had hidden. One of those they never seemed to see was the purple-and-yellow egg that was perched over the pit. We just couldn’t seem to get them to fall in it in any way in the world.
After both sides hid the eggs and the others had looked for them twice, we were tired of the egg hunt. Besides, our eggs were now down to nineteen with the recurring inability to find them all and the simultaneous forgetfulness about where they were hidden. We had a great afternoon.
Way in the afternoon, Daddy and Mr. Leatherwood were poking around to see if they could find any of the eggs we had totally lost. All of a sudden, Mr. Leatherwood jumped back and warned Daddy, “Watch out, Joe. There’s a yellow jackets’ nest here at the base of this little dogwood tree. It’s in the ground and looks like it’s about the size of a gallon jar. We better burn it out.”
Mr. Leatherwood walked over to their house to get the kerosene while Daddy watched the yellow jackets’ nest as if to be sure it didn’t move.
In no time, our neighbor was back with a quart jar of kerosene and a few wooden strike-anywhere matches. It was almost sunset, and the yellow jackets were coming home and settling down for the night. Our fathers watched the nest for a while to be sure the residents were home and settled. Joe and Ronnie got tired of waiting for this, so they headed in the house to watch television.
Finally, all was calm.
“Watch this, boys,” Larry’s daddy warned. “We’ve got to be quick!”
He then squatted on the ground beside the buried nest, reached out with the jar of kerosene, and poured quite a generous dose down and into the nest. That alone might have killed them, but it was, on this day, not enough.
Then Mr. Leatherwood pulled one of the wooden matches out of his shirt pocket, struck it on the sole of his shoe, and dropped it on the kerosene-soaked yellow jackets’ nest. What followed was beautiful. The nest, itself being almost the same as paper, had absorbed all the kerosene. Now, it burned like a torch. We watched as a few early yellow jackets tried to fly away, only to succumb to the combination of fire, heat, and smoke being generated. Smoke was everywhere.
&
nbsp; Suddenly, here came the little brothers, running like the wind. “What’s going on?” they asked. “We saw all that smoke from inside the house and headed out here to see what had happened.”
Daddy and Mr. Leatherwood were standing there. They were watching the fire until it was all out. “It’s nothing, boys. Lawrence and I were just burning an old yellow jackets’ nest. It’s almost out now.”
It was later that evening when Larry and I got the idea: “That smoke really did bring those little guys running. Did you see them coming out of the house? What we need is to generate some smoke to bait our trap.”
I got the idea. Every time Daddy started a fire in our fireplace, before he lit the wood, he would roll up some old newspaper and light it. He would let the newspaper burn and let its smoke go up the chimney a little bit before he lit the wood. He called this “warming up the chimney to make it draw.” The newspaper always produced a lot of white smoke.
Larry and I hunted up some old newspaper and waited for the next morning. It was Easter Monday, and school was out—a perfect day for our final victory.
We waited until late morning, until it was warm and pleasant to be outdoors. Larry and I got Joe and Ronnie to play a couple of games with us. Then, when they went off on their own, we got ready to start the smoke signals. We got another piece of newspaper to use to light the paper in the pit and took wooden matches with us.
Once down on the hillside, we were again impressed with the good job we had done concealing the pit. If we ourselves did not know exactly where it was, even we would not have seen it.
Once at the edge of the camouflage, we knelt down, raked back the grass and leaves, and separated two of the pine boughs. Looking deep down into the darkness, Larry and I wadded a mass of old newspaper and dropped it into the hole.
Satisfied that we had enough in the hole, I held the last piece of paper while Larry struck the wooden match on a rock. The paper blazed up, then settled down to burn. I dropped it down the hole. We could see by its light that it landed right on the clump of wadded paper we had already dropped to the bottom.