“Whereupon the lady said, ‘Well, I do happen to have just one potato in my pantry.’
“After adding the potato to the pot the traveler proclaimed, ‘Yes, ma’am, dis soup gon’ be mighty good, but, you know, if we just had a piece of meat, den it would be delicious.’
“The lady jumped to her feet and said, ‘Guess what, I do have one small piece of meat.’
“A little while later while dey both were sitting at the table enjoying de soup de lady said, ‘This is some very good soup. And just think, we made it from nothing but water and a magic nail.’”
Jake stopped talking and I realized the story was over. I also figured there was some kind of hidden meaning in it and he was waiting for me to tell him what I thought it was.
My feelings were confirmed when he asked, “All right, Mister Ted, what do you think dat story means?”
“That people hide their food?”
Jake chuckled and said, “Dat too, but something more—think about it some.”
I did, and then said, “The traveler tricked the lady into giving him some food?”
“Yes he did, but then he shared it with the lady. The main point is dat a smart man, a resourceful man, can always figure out a way to find hisself a bite to eat. So, don’t you be worrying about old Jake, ’cause I’ll be all right.”
I wanted to spend more time with Jake, but I knew it was getting on toward midafternoon. Pretty soon my cousin Robert would be driving my mother and Fred home. If they found me on the road I’d have to explain where I had been, so I said good-bye to Jake, sneaked through the woods, and started walking toward home.
My father hadn’t seen me coming down the road. He was on the front porch skinning squirrels and singing a mournful sounding song. I heard two lines of the tune before he saw me. It went like this:
“All around the water tank
“Just waiting for the train . . .”
When he saw me he stopped singing and asked, “Where’s your mother and your brother?”
“They’re visiting Uncle Curtis. I wanted to come on home and see if you got a turkey.”
“Naw, I saw a big old gobbler, but I wasn’t able to call him up. He outsmarted me today, but I’ll get him sooner or later.”
I had been turkey hunting with him before. He would scrape a piece of slate across a small wooden box he had made out of cedar, imitating the sound of a hen turkey, drawing the gobbler in close enough for the kill with his shotgun. All the while you had to sit hidden and motionless for a very long time, ignoring the bug bites and cramps. Then the sudden blast of the shotgun would make me just about jump out of my skin. Still, it was better than going to church. He always cut the beards off the big birds and gave them to me. I kept them in a cigar box underneath my bed. “What’s that song you were singing about?”
“Oh, it’s about a man, a hobo, hanging around the water tank beside the railroad track because he knows the train will stop there. While it’s stopped he’s gonna sneak into a box car and travel on down the line to some place where he might find some kind of work.”
Jake was right! White folks could sing the blues. My father had just been singing them and didn’t even know it.
He kept dressing those squirrels while he talked. I looked into the pan of murky water and saw six skinned and gutted carcasses floating there. I knew that later my mother would cut them up with her butcher knife, roll them in flour, drop them into hot grease, and fry them up crispy and brown. Then she would make the gravy and drop the fried pieces of squirrel into it. While it bubbled away on the stove, she would bake the big biscuits. Eventually we would burst them open, cover them with gravy, and eat them with the fried squirrel. I liked the back legs. It wasn’t turkey, but squirrel was good.
“Where’s Ned?” I asked, while following my father from the front porch to the kitchen.
He set the pan containing our dinner on the table and answered, “He’s gone back in the woods with a bucket. He found a honey tree and he’s gone back to rob it.”
My brother Ned was good at finding a honey tree, which was a hollow tree with a wild bee hive inside it. The bees gathered pollen from the wild flowers in the woods and the fields, resulting in the production of the most delectable honey to ever touch your mouth. I know how he captured the honey—I had been with him when he did it. He would build a small fire around the tree, throw some wet leaves on the fire, and the smoke would drive the bees away. While they were away he would scoop the honeycombs out with his hands, deposit them into a bucket and be gone before the bees returned. He never got stung and always brought home the honey.
Today was no exception. After a while I saw him emerging from the edge of the woods lugging a five-gallon bucket, which he set on the front porch. He was smoky and sticky, so I dipped water into the wash pan for him. While he was washing up he said to me, “Taste and see if it is good and sweet.”
I dug my hand into the bucket, tore off a piece of honeycomb and stuffed into my mouth, and started chewing. My mouth was a flower garden. I chewed until there was nothing left but a hunk of wax, which I spat out in the yard.
“Well?” Ned asked.
“It’s great,” I said, licking my fingers.
Later my mother squeezed the honey from the combs and had six quarts of golden liquid on the table at supper time. Besides the squirrel gravy on the biscuits, we also had the nectar of the gods, thanks to my brother Ned, the bee hunter.
After supper, as we were all sitting around the table, my mother asked, “Well, how was everything?”
I said, “It was a lot better than nail soup,” then I got up and left the table with everyone staring at me.
5
Snakes
Monday was a work day for everyone. My mother began doling out chores right after breakfast. We needed corn meal, so Ned’s job was to shuck and shell twenty-five pounds of dried corn, which he would put in a cloth sack, drape the sack over his shoulder, and carry it to the mill to be ground into meal. No money was involved. The miller kept five pounds and Ned would return home with twenty pounds. I had been to the mill with him before. It was a long walk, several miles past Miss Lena’s store on the way to Coffeeville. This wasn’t such a tough job for Ned because he was fifteen years old, big, and strong; besides, he liked to visit and talk with the folks at the mill while waiting for the corn to be ground. At one time the mill had been on the creek near my hiding place under the wooden bridge. Then it was water-powered, but now it was run by a motor like the one at the sawmill, just not nearly as big.
Much to Fred’s sorrow he was assigned to pull weeds in our garden. There were long rows of peas, green beans, butter beans, okra, squash, tomatoes, and corn.
When I heard my task I knew that we would be picking and shelling peas and butter beans for the next few days. My job was to wash the jars my mother would use to preserve the vegetables. Soon they would be on the shelves next to her stove, along with the wild blackberries and blueberries we had picked earlier in the year. These were used to make cobblers and pies during the winter months, but before summer was over there would also be jars of apples, peaches, pears, fig preserves, and all kinds of jellies and jams.
It was fun washing those glass jars. There were pints, quarts, and half-gallons. I was furnished with two foot-tubs of water, one hot and soapy, the other clean and clear. I used a small mop attached to a piece of wire to scrub the inside of the jars, plunged them into the clear water to rinse them, then turned them upside down on the table to drain.
I was finished long before my brothers. I decided to see if I could help Ned. Shucking and shelling corn was a better job than pulling weeds in the hot garden. He had finished removing the tough shucks from the ears of dried corn and was sitting on a bench just inside the open door of the corn crib, bending over the corn-shelling machine. This wonderful contraption was a wooden box with an iron cone attached to the inside
. Inside the cone were metal teeth which ripped the dry kernels from the cob while you pushed the ear of corn down into the cone and turned the crank on the outside of the box. My father had traded a cypress skiff boat for it. He was a carpenter by trade, and a good one; except there was nothing to build around where we lived. But sometimes a cypress log would show up at the sawmill. When this happened he would keep the lumber from it to build his fishing boats, which he would always trade for something we needed.
I pushed the ears of corn down into the cone while Ned turned the crank until he decided he had enough. I held a sack open while he scooped the grains out of the box and deposited them into the sack. When I stepped out of the corn crib to the ground below something long and black slithered between my bare feet. Horrified, I yelled, “Snake!”
I grabbed a garden hoe that was leaning against the corn crib and began frantically chopping at the snake.
“Stop!” Ned yelled. “Don’t kill it!”
But I kept chasing the snake until it circled back under the corn crib to safety. I could feel the tiny hairs on my arms standing up and see the chill bumps surrounding them. Ned took the hoe from my hand and said, “That was just a rat snake. You know we don’t kill them because they keep the rats out of the corn.”
“I don’t care what kind it was. If I see it again, I’ll kill it,” I said. My voice and hands still shook.
“Well, you shouldn’t, ’cause it won’t hurt you,” Ned said as he slung the sack of corn over his shoulder, on his way to the mill. Halfway up the road he turned and yelled, “Throw those shucks over the fence for the milk cow.”
“I ain’t going back in that crib,” I yelled back.
“Then tell Fred to do it,” he yelled again, turned and rounded the curve.
I got another scare from Fred who had sneaked up behind me and yelled, “Snake!”
I jumped, but realized what he was doing and said, “I ain’t scared of no snake.”
“Hey,” he said, “tell you what—I’ll feed the shucks to the milk cow if you’ll help me finish in the garden.”
“Gonna take more than that.”
“What else you want?”
“I want my marbles back.”
“I’ll give you half of them.”
A few days ago he had won all twelve of my marbles, plus my “shooter.” To play marbles we would draw a circle in the dirt, drop an equal amount of marbles into the circle, then we would kneel outside the circle and take turns shooting. To shoot you placed your shooter on the crook of your forefinger and flipped it with your thumb. Before the game, to see who shot first, we would lag our shooters at a line drawn in the dirt. The object of the game was to knock your opponent’s marbles outside the circle. Any you knocked out then belonged to you, and you got to keep shooting as long as you kept knocking marbles out. Fred was real good at shooting marbles. He had a big rough bump on his right thumbnail from shooting so much.
“Plus my shooter,” I demanded.
“All right, your shooter, too.”
“Okay, but I ain’t working around them okra plants.”
Okra leaves made you sting and itch. I like to eat okra, but I didn’t like weeding around the plants or cutting the pods off them.
Fred and I were both brown as berries from going half-naked all summer. Our blond hair had bleached almost white causing people to call us “cotton tops.” So, today, while we toiled in the garden, the hot summer sun didn’t even make us blink.
About noontime our mother came into the garden, inspected our work, approved it, and told us we could do as we pleased for a while. After washing up on the front porch we sat down to our dinner of butter beans, hot cornbread, and a glass of sweet milk. Before we got up from the table our mother reminded us that today was “egg day.”
We gathered eggs daily from the chicken house which was inside a fence to keep the chickens in and the foxes out—though Old Bill, our black and tan coonhound, usually kept foxes and other varmints away.
On Mondays, we usually had a surplus of about three dozen eggs which we took to Miss Lena’s store and sold them to her for ten cents a dozen. She would then sell them for fifteen cents a dozen.
“I’ll go,” I immediately volunteered. There were no protests from Fred, which made me happy, because I had a plan.
“Can I wait and take them later today? I’m too tired to go right now.”
“That’ll be fine. Just don’t forget.”
I followed Fred out to the wood pile where he had been making a toy log truck. He had nailed together strips of scrap lumber from the sawmill to form the body. For the cab, he had nailed on an empty Prince Albert tobacco can after cutting a strip into it and lifting it up to make it look like a seat. Behind the cab, across the body, he had attached two bolsters with nails partially driven into the tip of each one. The nails would keep the toy logs from rolling off the truck. Today, he was going to attach the wheels.
I held a small round hickory tree trunk firmly across the chopping block while he used our father’s handsaw to cut four wheels. I held the truck sideways while he nailed the wheels to the axles and worked them back and forth until they turned. Finally, he set the truck on the ground, tied a string around the front axle, and we headed toward the woods with our log truck tumbling along behind us.
We cut ourselves a toy logging road into a stand of small pines where we began to cut the first load of logs for the truck. When we began loading them on the truck I said, “We need a toy mule to drag the logs up to the truck for us.”
Fred looked at me incredulously and said, “A mule is a living and breathing thing. I never heard of such. How the heck you gonna make a toy mule?”
We whiled away the hours without a care until I heard our mother calling me.
“I guess it’s time to take the eggs. What you gonna do?” I asked Fred.
“I’m gonna look for some straight sticks to make arrows with. Stop by the sawmill and find some thin strips of wood and I’ll make us both a bow tomorrow.”
Before going into the house, I went to the special place where I hid my money. Our house sat on tall round wood blocks at each of the four corners, high enough off the ground that I could almost walk under it. I quickly scooted underneath and found the half-pint fruit jar which I kept tucked away on the top edge of the block near the rain barrel. While I was extracting four nickels I heard a thumping sound. Looking up, I saw Old Bill lying sleepily in the dry dirt. His wagging tail sent up puffs of dust as it thumped against the ground. I knew Old Bill would keep my secret. I saw him yawn and heard him whining as I crawled from beneath the house.
The eggs were in a basket on the kitchen table. I looked at the big clock, saw that it was about twenty minutes before five o’clock, and thought, good, I have just enough time to get past Miss Lena’s store before the sawmill shuts down for the day.
My mother was on the front porch with a churn between her knees, slowly, methodically churning the clabbered milk. That meant fresh butter for breakfast and probably a cake tomorrow night. She looked up as I was going down the steps with the basket of eggs and said, “Don’t you be hanging around Miss Lena’s the rest of the day.”
“I may stop by Pa Will’s for a little bit.” He was her daddy and my grandfather. I knew she wouldn’t fuss about that.
“You just be sure and have yourself home before dark.”
“Yes ma’am,” I answered, comforting myself with the fact that I had said “may.”
I kept my eyes peeled for that snake as I walked past the corn crib.
Actually, I was scared to death of snakes, and there were a lot of them around. I was constantly lectured, warned, and educated about them, especially the poisonous ones. The cottonmouth moccasin and the big rattlesnakes were the ones to be really concerned about. But there was another kind of snake, a coachwhip, which everyone said was nonpoisonous but that struck fear into
my heart. This snake was long and shiny brown with a golden yellow belly, and the unique thing about it was that it could run along the ground with two-thirds of its body rising straight up in the air. I had heard people say that if one of them caught you it would wrap around you and whip you.
Earlier this summer I had taken the short cut through the woods to Pa Will’s house rather than the road. I was almost there when this giant coachwhip snake came tearing out of the tall weeds heading straight toward me. It seemed like it was raised up in the air so far it was taller than me, and I could see its red eyes and forked tongue. It felt like that snake chased me forever, but I outran it. By the time I got to my grandfather’s house it was nowhere to be seen.
I heard the high-pitched whine of the big saw blade as it bit into a log after I passed the store and entered the woods with my eggs. Carefully, I counted out a dozen into a nest I formed with my hands in the pine straw. Then I covered them with more straw with hopes that no egg-sucking varmint would find them before I returned.
By the time I entered the store the sawmill had shut down and all the workers had departed. When Miss Lena counted out the eggs she asked, “What’s wrong with your mother’s chickens?”
“Ma’am?”
“There’s only two dozen eggs here.”
“I guess them hens were just lazy this week.”
“Well, fine, then. Here’s twenty cents for your momma. You take care and don’t lose it.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I called out as I went through the door.
6
Bullies
I returned to the sawmill by my usual route, stopping to retrieve the dozen eggs on the way. I found Jake sitting on his usual block of wood, staring into his fire. But something seemed wrong. He didn’t flash his big toothy smile when he saw me. He just said, “Hey, Mister Ted. What you got in dat basket? Mo’ fried chicken, I hopes.”
“No chicken, but I brought you a dozen fresh eggs,” I said as I held the basket out for him to see the light brown globes.
A Yellow Watermelon Page 4