The Life of Me - an autobiography Part 2

I told her, "Lady, you may know your English, but you sure don't know milk cows."

Now back to the Flint farm.

I was so little that, when I would throw out corn and maize seed to feed the chickens, I couldn't throw it far enough away from me. Some of it would fall at my feet. So the big chickens would crowd around my feet to pick up the grains and I was afraid of so many big hens so close to me. And I really got scared when they started pecking the feed out of my feed bucket. Sometimes I would drop the bucket and run away.

I remember seeing Papa digging up big trees where he was going to make a field. It wasn't far from our house. Sometimes I would go take him a drink of water. And sometimes Mama would send me to tell Papa dinner was ready.

While Papa was drinking his water and resting a bit, I liked to get down in the big hole he dug around the bottom of a big tree. The dirt was damp and cool in the hole. Some of the holes were so big and deep it was hard for me to crawl back out.

Sometimes our old surley (bull) was close by and I was afraid of him, so Mama would leave me at the house to watch after Albert while she took Papa a drink. But if the cows were way over in the other side of the pasture, I wasn't afraid to go.

I remember our garden just outside our yard. I was big enough to pick fresh beans and peas. The older ones in the family taught me how to break the peas off the vines without breaking the vines. Mama could pick them so easily, with just the right twist of her hands. But I had to hold the vine with one hand while I twisted the peas off with the other hand.

I had the smartest Mama. She could do so many things, and she could do them so easily.

I especially remember one little incident that took place in our home when I was three. Most of the things I remember from my early childhood have been almost forgotten and I now remember them through special effort and recall. But this one brief moment has lived with me and was never put aside to be recalled later.

Mama was sitting in a chair in our living room. Albert was in her lap getting his natural milk breakfast. I was in a hurry for the baby to get through nursing so I could play with him down on the floor. In the meantime, I was standing leaning against Mama and playing with the baby-playing with his hands and feet, rubbing and patting his "tummy," and sometimes tickling him to make him laugh.

Now all this activity caused a lot of wiggling and squirming in Mama's lap. And it also caused a lot of letting go of, and getting back to, the baby's morning meal. This kind of playing with the baby might have aggravated some mothers and might have brought a word of scorn, or at least an expression of impatient dissatisfaction from them, but not from this mother. She was one of a kind. She seemed to enjoy it all. She was my Mama.

I was standing on Mama's left. When Albert finished and was full, Mama stood him down on the floor on her right. And while he was standing there holding to her dress for support, before Mama put his breakfast away, back into her blouse, she looked over at me and very motherly asked, "Now, do you want some of the baby's milk?"

I didn't say a word. I just bashfully backed away a step or so and looked up at her and thought something like, "That's for the baby, not for me."

For the first time in my life I was consciously aware of my mother's love for me, in that brief moment, because of that simple little gesture. The poet expressed it better than I can, when he wrote, "...the love of a mother for her son that transcends all other affections of the soul." I was deeply moved by the thought that, although she had another little one to hold closely and love and nourish, she had not pushed me aside. Her love included me too.

As the years went by, sometimes all seemed hopeless and I would ask myself, "What the heck? Who cares anyway?" And always that little three-year-old kid would give me the answer, "Mama does."

I remember the windmill by our garden and the water tank way up high on the tower. When the wind blew and the mill was pumping water, we could open a faucet at the top of the well and get a drink of fresh cold water. We had a tin cup hanging on a nail on the windmill tower to drink out of. And we kept some water hanging up on our back porch in a wooden water bucket made out of cedar. There was a dipper in the bucket that we all drank out of.

Once when Papa was building his big barn at the Flint place, before he got it finished, a strong wind hit it and leaned it way over, but it didn't blow it all the way down. Papa took a block and tackle and got some men to help him and they pulled it back up straight.

Our house had three rooms. One of them was a kitchen and dining room together. There was a long porch at the front of the house and an L-shaped porch on the back. There were flower beds and flowers in our front yard, and morning glory vines on the front yard fence and china trees in the back yard. They made good shades to play in.

There was a hog pen on the north side of the barn, with sheds to protect the hogs from the summer heat and the winter cold. The horse lots and cow lots were on the south side of the barn, with sheds to shelter the stock. Feed troughs were under the sheds and feed was stored in the big barn.

I remember the hill west of the barn about a hundred yards. It wasn't a steep hill-just a gentle rise in the land. But it was high enough to get up on and see Uncle Andrew's house and Grandma's house. I couldn't see Grandma's house as good as I could Uncle Andrew's because hers had so many big trees all around it.

I remember we had a syrup mill too, up on the slope northwest of the barn. We had a horse that would go round and round and make the big iron rollers squeeze the juice out of the cane stalks. The juice would run down a spout and we would catch it in buckets. Then Mama would cook the juice in a big pan over a fire out there in the pasture.

Of course Frank and Susie and Earl would all help keep the fire going and help Papa keep putting cane stalks through the big rollers. Joel would help a little bit, but I was just in the way. And Albert had to be looked after too.

Sometimes the cows and horses would come and try to eat the cane and we had to put them in pens by the barn. When we finished squeezing the juice out, we would let them all come out of the pen and eat the stalks we didn't want any more.

When we got the juice cooked enough it was good ribbon cane syrup and we would put it in big jugs and take it down in the cellar. But not all of it. We would take some of it in the kitchen to eat.

I remember a big pile of wood and lots of mesquite posts. They were southwest of the barn on the slope of the hill. The wind had been blowing and lots of sand had drifted up in piles by the woodpile. Some of our plows and wagons were out there too by the woodpile. The posts were leaning up against big trees.

Just north of the hog pen was our stack lot with big stacks of bundled feed in it. And when I think of the stack lot, I think of a little black horse we had named Keno, because all too often Old Keno was in the stack lot without an invitation. He was not a big work horse, yet he could hold his own when hitched to a cultivator. And he could outdo all the others at acrobatics.

Yes, Old Keno was a fence jumper. We often found him in the corn patch or maize patch, what time he wasn't in the stack lot. That's probably the reason I always remember him as being fat and having a shiny coat; he got more than his share of goodies to eat.

Anyway, one time I remember seeing Old Keno in the stack lot when we were coming home from church or from Uncle Andrew's. We drove up from the west and as we came over the rise west of the barn, there he was, in the stack lot again.

I really believe we were coming home from church because we were all dressed up and were in our new hack.

We had an old buggy and I think we had an old hack. I think I sort of remember when we got the new hack. The old one was good enough for everyday use, and so was the old buggy. But for really stepping out in style, that shining black new hack was something else. For Sunday and for going to town, we used the new one. It had two seats, rubber tires, and a beautiful glossy black finish-with tiny little yellow pinstripes at just the right places. When Papa hitched his two trotting horses to it, it was truly a carriage to be proud of.

We also went socializing in the new hack. And Papa never fooled around with a walking team, they always trotted. Even when we drove 18 miles to Anson to visit the Hood family on Sundays, our team trotted practically all the way. And then they trotted back the same day.

As I said, Old Keno was eating more than his share of the grain from the bundles of feed, and he was wasting a lot also.

I was in the front seat with Papa and some of the other kids. I was probably in Papa's lap, I don't remember. Mama was in the back seat with some of the others. In fact, Mama always rode in the back seat. There is no picture in my memory of Mama ever riding in the front seat of our hack. I don't really know why she chose the back seat. Fact is, it never occurred to me until now that she may not have chosen the back seat; she may not have had a choice. While she was with us, it never entered my mind to ask her why. But now as I ponder these things, I wish I had. If she were sitting here in the room with me now, I would stop writing long enough to look up and ask, "Mama, why did you always sit in the back seat of our hack?"

And I haven't the slightest doubt that she would answer, "Why, Willie and you children always rode in the front seat. There wasn't room for me."

Anyway, I was less than five years old, probably less than four. And I don't remember what else Mama was doing, but I'll bet a dollar she was holding Albert in her lap. And I'll bet another dollar I can guess what Albert was doing. Since baby bottles were almost unheard of in those days, and were not needed in our family, he was probably getting his milk from some other source, as mother nature meant for him to.

Be that as it may, Old Keno was eating at the feed stack and he seemed to be much happier than Papa was to see him there. I don't remember what Papa said, if anything, but I do remember that Mama expressed her disapproval of Old Keno's bad manners by calling him a scoundrel. That was the name Mama gave to troublesome animals and mean people.

There was plenty of work to be done on the farm, and we kids learned to work early in life. Joel was just 16 months older than I was, and one spring, when he was too young to go to school, Papa had him planting in the field with a two-row planter. In the afternoons, when Earl got home from school, he would relieve Joel, so Joel could go home and play the rest of the day.

Then one day Joel got a foot hurt and couldn't run the planter. So I had to take his place on the planter for a few days. Planting had to go on. I don't remember how old I was at that time. I do know for sure I was planting at the Flint place. And we moved from that place in January-the same January in which I became five years old. So, I must have been planting when I was a little over four years old or when I was just past three, I'm not sure which. I am sure, however, I was older than two, because, when I was only two, Earl was too young to go to school.

If it were not for skeptics, I could go ahead with my memoirs. But I feel I should detour here and explain a thing or two, or some folks will think I am lying. One man has already questioned my story about the two-row planter. He thought they hadn't made a two-row planter as early as 1910. This one happened to be a special type planter. I have never seen but two of them in my lifetime.

But you could be sure, if William Franklin Johnson heard of a farm implement that he thought could be used to do a better job on the farm, he would get it, if at all possible. And if it wouldn't do to suit him, he would make it do whatever he wanted it to do.

I remember having seen Papa, as early as the Flint place, mind you, using a combination cultivator-planter. He could cultivate his young feed or cotton and, at the same time, plant new seeds in the skips where the first planting had not come up to a good stand.

He built the implement himself. That was ingenuity. He was my father.

This special two-row planter that I used was pulled by two big, gentle horses. They knew how to follow the furrows and stay on the rows. And they knew that "whoa" meant stop, even when a three-year-old said it. What's more, Papa was plowing along beside me, just a few rows away, and he worked the lever and turned my team around at both ends of the rows.

Now, that doesn't sound so far out, does it?

I'll bet the people around the little town of McCaulley would believe me without an explanation. They had a man in their community who used a dog to do his plowing for him. It's true. And the man didn't have to be there to work the levers for him and turn the team around at the end of the rows.

There were no rows. He was flatbreaking his ground, going round and round. His mules followed the furrow all day long and the man only had to sit there hour after hour doing nothing. Then he got the idea of tying his lines up and slipping off to the house without his mules knowing he was gone.

This worked well except when the mules would stop once in awhile, and he would have to go start them again. So, next he put his little dog on the plow seat. The dog liked to ride so well that, when the team would begin stopping, he would bark to keep them going.

People could hardly believe their eyes-the very idea-a dog plowing while his master sat on his porch in the shade.

Now, Papa didn't have a dog, so he used me.

We Texans have to be careful what we say and to whom we say it. When I start talking with a man, the first thing I want to know is, where is he from?