A Yellow Watermelon

by Ted M. Dunagan

  A

  Yellow Watermelon

  A novel by

  Ted M. Dunagan

  Junebug Books

  Montgomery | Louisville

  Junebug Books

  P.O. Box 1588

  Montgomery, AL 36102

  Copyright 2008 by Ted M. Dunagan. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Junebug Books, a division of NewSouth, Inc., Montgomery, Alabama.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-58838-197-2

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-60306-076-9

  LCCN: 2007039151

  Visit www.newsouthbooks.com

  To Poudlum,

  my good friend who knew a good melon

  when he saw one.

  Table of Contents

  1 — The Sawmill

  2 — Jake

  3 — Dinner on the Grounds

  4 — Nail Soup

  5 — Snakes

  6 — Bullies

  7 — Milk and Butter

  8 — The Bootlegger

  9 — The Still

  10 — The Money Tree

  11 — The Cotton Field

  12 — Fire

  13 — The Cotton Gin

  14 — Hiding Out

  15 — The Whiskey Maker

  16 — School Clothes

  17 — Lying On Sunday

  18 — Up a Tree

  19 — Robin Hood

  20 — Down the Creek

  21 — The Miracle

  22 — A Yellow Watermelon

  1

  The Sawmill

  I was forbidden to play at the sawmill, but from behind Miss Lena’s store where I was nibbling on a chocolate-covered MoonPie and sipping on a peach Nehi, it beckoned to me through the shimmering heat waves.

  The store was located where Friendship Road reached a dead-end at Center Point Road. There were no signs; I just knew that was what everyone called those dirt roads. The big log trucks would come roaring up from all three directions, spreading a thick layer of red dust on the roadside vegetation; then they would turn in beside Miss Lena’s store to deposit their loads of logs thunderously at the sawmill behind the store.

  I was turning twelve years old that late summer of 1948, savoring my last days of freedom before I had to start back to school in the fall. School was like being in prison while being forced to learn things, not to mention that you had to be scrubbed clean and wear a shirt and shoes. I spent a lot of time that summer trying to figure out a way to avoid having to go back.

  The steady droning of the great saw blades began to abate and I knew it was noon. It was also Saturday, and I knew the sawmill would be deserted soon because the men, including my father, would collect their pay envelopes and go directly to Miss Lena’s store for groceries or to the bootlegger for whiskey. My father usually went for groceries, but sometimes he drank whiskey.

  My job wasn’t finished yet, though. I had seven more Grit papers to sell. I remember being so excited back when I received my first fifteen papers along with a canvas bag to carry them. Also, there came a thin folding envelope with slots to place dimes, nickels, and pennies into before mailing them back. The paper sold for a nickel. I returned three pennies and kept two for each paper I sold. With a complete sell-out I made thirty cents, which seemed like a fortune. The catch was that I had to mail in forty-five cents each week whether I sold the papers or not. So far, I had never been stuck with more than two papers. On those occasions, I usually gave one to my grandfather Murphy and one to my mother.

  Today hadn’t been a good day. Two of my customers hadn’t been home and two others just didn’t have a nickel to spare. I had seven papers left and three more stops to make. The sawmill had grown quiet, like a giant beast taking a nap. I drained my Nehi and took one last look toward the mill’s mountainous pile of sawdust and knew I would be back before the day was over.

  Before beginning my last five-mile trek, I ventured around to the front of Miss Lena’s store in the hopes of selling a paper to one of the sawmill workers. The only one I had any luck with was my father, who, after peeking inside my bag, flipped me a nickel and took a paper. I was glad to see the big bag of groceries in his other arm. He admonished me to watch out for snakes and to hurry home. I watched him walk away in his sweat-soaked shirt and pants and sawdust-covered brogans and decided I didn’t want to be a sawmill worker, but I did like to play at it. I watched his big broad back disappear around the corner of Friendship Road, walking toward home; then I headed east on Center Point Road seeking my fortune.

  By the time I reached the Mill Creek bridge, I was hot, thirsty, and my bare feet were burning from the sun-baked clay road. Off the road, down the bank, and underneath the wooden bridge, I stretched out on a big flat rock at the water’s edge and drank my fill of the clean, cool running water before I sat up and submerged my feet. The taste and feel of the water quenched my entrepreneurial spirit and I decided to quit for the day. I had never gone home with six papers before, but I did have the money Mrs. Blossom had given me.

  Mrs. Blossom was the first customer on my route each Saturday morning and she always bought a paper. Her husband ran the sawmill and they lived about a hundred yards from Miss Lena’s store. After pulling the Grit papers out of our mailbox this morning I had inserted them into my bag and walked directly across the road to her house. Once I was on the front porch, I knocked and, as usual, yelled through the screen door, “I got your Grit paper here, Mrs. Blossom.”

  To my surprise, rather than appearing at the door with my nickel, she yelled back, “Come on in—I’m back in the kitchen.”

  I opened the old squeaky screen door and walked through the living room into the kitchen. To my amazement, she was sitting with great piles of money spread all over the table. There were paper dollar bills and a stack of coins in each pile. It was more money than I could imagine. She noticed the wideness of my eyes and said, “That’s the payroll for the sawmill workers. Did you have breakfast this morning, Ted?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I replied.

  “What did you have?”

  “A biscuit with fig preserves.”

  “Well, I’m sure you have room for a little more,” she said as she pulled out a chair from the table. “Sit down here and eat this fried chicken leg. Mr. Blossom loves fried chicken for breakfast, but he wasn’t too hungry this morning.”

  Hungry or not, I would never turn down a piece of fried chicken. Mrs. Blossom chattered away while I was eating. When I finished she handed me a rag to wipe my greasy fingers and mouth, then she placed a stack of envelopes on the table and said, “I have a job for you, Ted. There’s thirteen envelopes there. I want you to stuff each one with a separate stack of money, lick it and seal it, but before you do, take yourself one nickel out of each stack.”

  I had wondered why there were thirteen envelopes because as far as I knew only twelve men worked at the sawmill. Now, as I sat on the rock under the Mill Creek bridge counting my money, I also wondered why Mrs. Blossom had been so generous to me. I was to find the answer to both of my questions later that day at the sawmill.

  Staring at the neat stacks of pennies, nickels, and dimes next to me on the rock, I realized it was the most money I had ever had. There were fifteen pennies, three dimes, and fourteen nickels—a dollar and fifteen cents. I reached inside my canvas bag and retrieved the return envelope and carefully inserted the forty-five cents I owed for the papers, using the pennies and dimes because they were the smallest and stood a better chance of getting lost if I kept them. Then I carefully inserted my fourteen nickels in the watch pocket of my worn mail
-order jeans from Sears and Roebuck. I was having one more drink of the clear, cool water from the creek when I heard a car coming. I quickly sat back up on the rock, tilted my head back and enjoyed the eerie feeling as I watched and listened to the big heavy wooden boards of the bridge move, creak, and rumble when the car crossed over my head. While waiting for the dust to settle I gave my feet one last soaking before leaving my cool sanctuary, knowing that if I didn’t dally I could be back down the road and at the sawmill in about half an hour.

  A few minutes later I passed the road which led to my Uncle Curtis’s house. I was tempted to stop, but the lure of the sawmill was too strong. Up the hill and around the bend I passed the Center Point Baptist Church and dreaded that tomorrow morning I would be suffering inside it. It would be extremely hot and the only relief would come from a cardboard fan with a wooden handle like a big Popsicle stick and a picture of Jesus on it. Before the service, the women would congregate in the churchyard and talk about their vegetable gardens, their chickens, the price of sugar and flour, and dozens of other subjects of no interest to me. The men would talk about the price of timber and the crops in the fields. My father never went to church; in fact the only time I ever remember seeing him in that church was years later at his funeral, and of course he wouldn’t have been there then if it had been up to him. Tomorrow morning while I was sitting in there sweating, he would probably be sitting in a cool hollow in the woods hunting wild turkeys.

  The service would officially get under way when Addie Brooks, without any sheet music, started playing the old upright piano and everyone stood and began singing, “Shall We Gather At The River.” As soon as the haunting notes of the hymn faded away, the collection plate would be passed and my mother would watch me closely to make sure I put in one of my hard-earned nickels. Then the preacher would start ranting and raving and praying for what seemed like an eternity. I would be praying too—for him to please shut up so I could get out of there and get out back to the pump for a cool drink of water.

  But that was tomorrow; today I was heading for the sawmill. Before I got there I passed the cotton field of my Uncle Curvin, Uncle Curtis’s twin brother. The plants were taller than me and turning brown. The hard green bolls were beginning to burst open. In a week or so I would be out there pulling the fluffy white fibers out of their prickly bolls. Uncle Curvin had promised me last year that I would be big enough to pick this year. He paid a penny a pound. I would be out there making a lot of money real soon.

  Miss Lena’s store came into view and I slowed to time my prohibited entrance into the sawmill. I passed Mrs. Blossom’s house and the store, looked up and down the road to make sure it was deserted, and darted into the woods. After a short distance I doubled back and came out of the woods in the area where the logs were unloaded from the trucks. There, behind a huge mound of pine logs, I was hidden from view. On the ground in front of me was a peavey, a big wooden lever with a metal point and a hinged metal hook near the end. The men used this tool to handle the logs. I reached down and grasped the big round hickory handle and lifted it off the ground while I contemplated moving one of the great logs. When I felt the full weight of the peavey and studied the jumbled pile of timber, I dismissed the idea, knowing I could get crushed like a bug if the logs started rolling.

  Not so with the neat stacks of lumber. I could climb up the back side and peek over the tops toward the road. I tried this on several stacks wishing I could stand on top and see how far I could see, but daring not for fear of being spotted from the road. The stacks were different every week, in size and types of cuts, because trucks came on Mondays to haul the rough-sawn lumber away to another mill where it was planed smooth into a finished product.

  After exploring each stack of lumber I entered into the bowels of the beast, past the motor and the conveyor belts, to the great round saw blade which they turned. I climbed down into the pit which housed the part of the saw which was below ground level and stood face to face with it. I reached out and touched the smooth shiny steel and pressed my fingertip against one of the sharp teeth and imagined how the giant blade would look and sound turning at full speed with me standing there next to it. That was enough to get me out of that pit.

  Next, I ventured down the long wooden ramp where the slabs were disposed of. These were the irregular parts with bark on them which were cut away from the outer portion of the logs before they were sawn into lumber. The ramp had side rails about chest high to a grown man, and the rail tops were worn smooth as a kitten’s fur from the constant wear of the slabs being laid across them and pushed off the end of the ramp into the fire pit below.

  The fire never went out. It blazed high all day and turned into a huge bed of coals at night and on weekends.

  I stretched out on my belly, hung my head over the edge of the ramp, gazed down and wondered if the inferno below was anything like the burning hell the preacher was always yelling about. Feeling the heat blistering my face, I scooted backwards on the rough boards to a safe distance from the edge, got to my feet, and headed for my favorite spot—the monstrous sawdust pile.

  When the sawmill was operating, a conveyor belt carried the sawdust away from the mill and dumped it on the top of the mound, where it cascaded down in all directions. That’s what I wanted to do, slide down that sawdust pile.

  On many occasions I had been told to stay off the pile because it might cave in, suck me under, and I would smother or burn up because there was a fire inside it. But I knew those were just tales everyone told to scare me away from the sawmill.

  At the base of the sawdust mountain, I found a scrap board on which I carefully stacked my eleven nickels and laid my canvas bag. I knew that if my money fell out of my pocket during a slide it would be lost forever.

  Climbing up was difficult. My bare feet sank past my ankles while I clawed upward with my hands. I stopped midway up, looked down and thought about sliding back to the bottom from there. But I decided to struggle on to the top for the ultimate thrill of sliding all the way down.

  When I arrived at the summit, just as I had from the lumber stacks, I peeked over and surveyed the road, the store, and Mrs. Blossom’s house. There were no sounds or movement anywhere. Everything seemed frozen in the heat of the day.

  Turning, I gazed downward and started running to get a good start. It was like running in slow motion. After several steps, I threw my feet into the air, landed on my seat, and watched the world go racing by.

  After a soft landing—covered with sawdust from head to toe—I climbed back up and checked out the world around me again.

  Everything still looked the same, but just to be safe I carefully looked all around the sawmill knowing someone could have come through the woods just as I had, see me, tell on me, and eventually I would be feeling the sting of a long switch from a peach tree.

  The only thing that bothered me was that the door to the old black tar-papered shack off to the right was open. Was it open before? I couldn’t remember, but somehow it bothered me.

  I decided that after this slide I should vacate the sawmill area, but I wanted to make it a good one, so I moved a quarter of the way around the mountain to smooth sawdust. The move took me out of the sight of my belongings below.

  Once again, the world sped by while I surfed the sawdust all the way to the bottom. Again, I was completely covered with it. I slipped out of my jeans and t-shirt, shook them vigorously, quickly put them back on, and walked around the sawdust pile to retrieve my money and Grit bag. But when I arrived where I had left them, I stood there stunned. I couldn’t believe it. They were both gone!

  2

  Jake

  Standing there staring at that empty piece of scrap lumber realizing that my little fortune, as well as my prized canvas bag containing the envelope with the forty-five cents I owed the Grit paper were gone, I silently began to cry. I thought I felt the worst I had ever felt in my young life; that is until I heard the deep
gruff voice behind me ask, “What’s yo’ name, boy?”

  I started to run, but I was just too scared. Slowly, I turned to face the voice and there stood the blackest man I had ever seen. He was well over six feet tall and needed a shave, but was handsome even in his overalls and sweat-stained work shirt. Most importantly, and much to my relief, he was grinning. It was a friendly disarming grin which gave flight to my fear.

  “Cat got yo’ tongue, boy?”

  “Uh, no sir.”

  “Den what’s yo’ name?”

  “Uh, Ted. Ted Dillon, sir.”

  “You one of Mister J. D.’s boys?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You can forget dat ‘sir’ business. You don’t wants no white folks hearing you ‘sir-ing’ a black man. You gots some brothers, too, don’t you?”

  I wasn’t afraid anymore and I knew he was correct, that I would be called down hard if I was to be heard calling him “sir.” “Yeah, I got two brothers,” I answered.

  “What’s dey names?”

  “My oldest brother is Ned, then Fred, then me.”

  “And you Ted. My, my. Why you think yo’ momma named y’all all dem rhyming names?”

  “I don’t know. Guess they were the only ones she could think of.”

  “No, I ’spect maybe she a poet. You needs to learn to look at things a little harder and think a little deeper. Things ain’t always what dey seems to be on the surface.”

  I knew I needed to think about that a while, so I just said, “Uh, okay.”

  “And you can be proud to have Mister J. D. for yo’ daddy. He a good man. I sho wouldn’t want to get into no scuffle wid him. He know you messing around dis here sawmill?”

  “No. You gonna tell on me?”

  “I don’t know. I gots to think on it a while.”