The Life of Me - an autobiography Part 26

"What if you have a flat? Can you put the spare on?"

"Oooh, I hadn't thought of that. We better not try it."

Now, if Anita had known at that time about the traveling I had done alone when I was not much older than 15, I think she might have argued that Hamlin was not nearly as far away as McCamey or the Gulf of Mexico or Denver. And if she had brought up that argument, I think I would have handed her the keys and said, "Good luck Be careful."

At that age Anita hadn't yet mastered the art of arguing. But she was willing and practicing. Dennis was going to town one night to a show or something and he asked Anita if she wanted to go. But she said, "No, Vera and Coy are coming over here tonight and I want to stay home and listen to Vera and Daddy argue."

She listened well and learned fast. I don't believe I have won an argument with her since that time.

There was always something happening on the farm, some good, some bad. One year weaning pigs got so cheap that I couldn't resist the urge to buy some of them and let them run wild about the place. At the Abilene auction sale, I bid on a bunch of the prettiest little black pigs I ever saw. They were selling by the pound. I usually bought the ones that sold by the head, because I didn't have much idea how much a pig would weigh out. But this bunch only cost $1.16 each. There were eight in the bunch. I took them home and turned them loose. Then I bought others from time to time, and we soon had lots of pigs running all over the place. Of course, when they got older, we put them in pens.

Ima ran over one of our pigs in her car one day and killed him. He was about a 25-pounder. We butchered him and he made such good eating, we decided that was a good size to butcher next time.

When Max Carriker learned that we had all those pigs running around the place, he asked about letting him take some of them and sell them. He had a Model A coupe with a pig box in the back end. We told him to come any time and take all he wanted. He sold them at five dollars each and paid me three dollars for the ones he sold. He brought back the ones he didn't sell each day and turned them loose again. He and I both picked up a few dollars on my cheap pigs. Our neighbors didn't know that the pig market had hit bottom.

A neighbor boy and Dennis were out in our pasture one day with their 22 rifles, hunting rabbits and snakes and whatever. After hunting for hours, they came running to the house all excited and out of breath, and told us they had killed something, they didn't know what it was, but wanted us to come quickly. We went and found that they had killed a bobcat. He was the first one we had seen or heard of in that part of the country, and it was the first one the boys had ever seen.

They had been up on Cedar k.n.o.b Mountain looking around, and there was that bobcat 12 or 14 feet directly below them, lying in the shade on a ledge. Apparently the cat didn't see the boys. They stepped back quickly and planned their strategy. One boy had a pump-gun, the other one a single shot. They planned to advance quietly to the spot above the cat, take good aim and both begin firing. The boy with the single shot gun carried an extra sh.e.l.l in his hand ready to reload as quickly as possible. Then they walked slowly to their vantage point and carried out their mission.

By the time the boy with the single shot gun had reloaded and fired his second sh.e.l.l, the other boy had emptied the magazine on his gun-all 15 sh.e.l.ls, and the bobcat lay very dead. But they didn't know what it was that they had killed, so they didn't go near it, but ran home for help.

We skinned the cat to get his pelt, and would you believe it, we found two bullet holes-and only two-in his head, and none anywhere else. We believe that the boys killed him with their first two shots and missed him completely with all the others.

We lived on that farm 17 years, and if we had lived there 50 more, I believe something new would have happened the last day we lived there, as well as each and every week during that time.

One fall I got a job helping at the Royston gin. I had my welding torch and all my tools in a closed-in trailer. When I wasn't helping gin cotton I was repairing gin machinery. One Sat.u.r.day they put me to helping load bales of cotton on trucks to be hauled to the Hamlin Compress. The trucks were large truck and trailer jobs. We stood up one layer of bales on the truck, then we stood up another layer of bales on the first layer. Then we placed another layer lying down on top of those two layers. Now, doing all that purely by main strength and awkwardness took a lot of energy and manpower. By the end of the day I was possessed with a lot of awkwardness, and all my manpower was gone. So I used my head.

At the close of work that Sat.u.r.day, I took all my tools home, and Sunday after church I built an A-frame on the back of my tractor, tall enough to lift bales of cotton three-layers high up on a truck. The tractor motor did all the work. No man ever had to lift another bale of cotton as long as I worked there. The men laughed at me for being so lazy. After that they said, "Give Johnson the hard jobs, he'll make them easy."

Along with all our work, we had our share of fun. Clarence Clark was a farmer who lived about a mile from the Royston store, and he loved a good joke as much as or more than the next fellow. And he also liked to play practical jokes on other people. Nor did he seem to mind if one of his jokes backfired right in his face.

One day a bunch of us were sitting around outside the store waiting for the mail to run-gabbing and "spittin and whittlin," when a man drove up with a fairly good-looking used, wooden icebox in his pick-up. Clark didn't move from his sitting position, but asked the stranger, in a loud voice, "How much for the icebox?"

The man said, "I'll take ten dollars for it."

Now Clarence didn't need the icebox-he didn't even want it. He had one just like it, only better. So, his idea was to play around with the stranger awhile, exchange a few words, sort of horse-trade with him a bit, and then let him go on his way with his icebox.

He reasoned that if he offered anywhere near $10, the stranger might accept his offer and he would be stuck with a box he didn't want and wished he didn't have. But by any standard, no horse- trader is going to sell anything for half what he's asking for it- -leastwise, not without coming down slowly, a step at a time. So, Clark thought five dollars would be a safe offer. So, when the man said, "I'll take ten dollars for it," Clark didn't hesitate to say, "I'll give you five."

Nor did the stranger hesitate to say, "I'll take it."

Clark said, "You'll have to deliver it."

"Sure will. Where to?"

"About a mile. Follow me."

Clark drove his car and the man followed in his pick-up. As the man backed up to the back porch, Mrs. Clark came out of the kitchen and asked, "What have we got here?

Her husband said, "We've got an icebox."

"We don't need it. We've got one icebox."

"You're wrong, woman, we've got two iceboxes."

I don't know what they ever did with the old box, but I'm sure he didn't let it bother him in the least.

At the Royston gin, the house in which we stored our cotton was about 30 or 40 steps away from the office building. The door leading into the cotton house was on the far side, away from the office. The door opened to the outside, and the V-s.p.a.ce behind the open door made a nice little outhouse for men, who, for any reason at all, preferred not to walk the long distance to the two- holer when all they wanted to do was stand and drain a load of water against the cotton house wall.

One day I was up in a farmer's trailer unloading his cotton into the cotton house when Clarence Clark came out from the office and stood half hidden, his front half that is, behind the aforementioned door, and began his little ch.o.r.e of getting rid of excess waste water. Whereupon, I seized the opportunity to play a practical joke on this practical jokester, Mr. Clark.

I went to the back of the trailer, leaned out over the tailgate so I could see around the corner of the cotton house and, looking toward the office, I said in a loud voice, "No, ma'am, he's not here now, but he was here a few minutes ago."

Of course, I was only pretending. There wasn't a woman within a half-mile. But, you know, my performance did exactly what I had hoped it would do, only more so. In a fraction of a second, Clark had put away his drainer before he had time to stop the flow of water. I could tell by the way he stepped out from his hiding place that dampness was already down beyond his socks and into at least one shoe. Then in about three seconds, when he realized what I had done to him, he looked up at me and said, "Johnson, I'll kill you for that." But he didn't. And I'm sure he felt better when he got home and got a bath and put on dry clothes.

Now, changing the subject, Anita came home from School one day and asked, "Daddy, why is it that, when kids at school tell a joke or a story, the goofy guy in the story is always named Clarence?" You know, I couldn't think of a good answer to give her, and I still can't.

During those years on the Royston farm, we witnessed the advent of cattle auction sales in our part of the country, and of course they led to other little happenings. I might as well tell about one or two of them right about here.

From our home it was only 30 miles to Sweet.w.a.ter and 50 miles to Abilene. Those two cities together had at least three cattle sales a week. I was sitting at one of those sales one day, waiting for the cows to start selling, when they began selling a lot of odds-and-ends prior to selling the cattle.

There are times when these odds-and-ends can defy the imagination. Some of the items I have seen sell at such times were old saddles, new saddles, lariat ropes, milk goats, six bantam hens with matching rooster, three quart-bottles of screw worm medicine, a set of badly used harness, four weaning size hound pups, and many others.

Well, on this particular day, I was just sitting there being bored when suddenly here comes a sorrel saddle horse for sale. The bidding got off to a slow start and didn't speed up an awful lot. This gave me time to start thinking, but I started in the wrong direction. True, he was a good-looking animal-beautiful, not a blemish on him, tall and strong, just the horse for me.

Now, what I should have been thinking was, "If he's all that good, why isn't he bringing more money? Why aren't more men bidding on him?" I think I figured out the answers just about the time I made the final bid on the old horse. I think everyone there that day, except me, knew the horse, had owned him a week or two and had brought him back to sell to somebody like me, someone who had not owned him and didn't know about him. In fact, I sold him the following week. Only I didn't take him back to the sale, I sold him to a cow-buyer who didn't know him. And he took him back to the sale a week later.

Anyway, the bidding had only reached $20 when I offered $22.50. But just as I announced my bid, something told me I shouldn't have. And since no one would raise my bid to $25, nor to $24- not even to $23, I found myself with a horse I wasn't quite sure I wanted. I really think the owner had bid the $20 and waited for a sucker like me to raise his bid.

But at home the next day, Dennis rode the horse over to a neighbor's place and came back with a good report. He said the horse was lively, spirited, and altogether well behaved. I was beginning to feel better about my purchase, until a few days later when Anita tried the new horse.

Now, I'm not altogether sure she really wanted to ride the horse. It might have been my idea, or maybe it was Dennis' idea. One thing I do know for certain, it wasn't Ima's idea. However, there Anita was, up on the horse in our front yard, when the wind began flopping her neck scarf. And that was when the old horse began to come unwound.

I was holding the reins and managing to keep his front end fairly quiet and close to the ground, but his hind end kept bouncing up and down, getting higher and higher until Anita landed on the ground right by his front feet. That's when we learned that anything waving or flopping drove the horse crazy and made him pitch. He was not a flag-waving patriotic horse.

The man I sold the horse to learned the same thing the hard way when his hat almost blew off and he reached up quickly to grab it. He said he barely managed to stay on top, but got off as soon as the horse stopped bucking, and walked him to the barn. Next day he took the horse to the cow sale and auctioned him off.

Fortunately, Anita's fall off the horse didn't hurt her, but it sure scared Ima. And now, 40 years later, she still tells people how foolish I was for letting Anita get on the horse. But I say, "Why shouldn't she have ridden any horse she wanted to? After all, she was thirteen years old, and has been riding horses and cows for twelve years."

Ima insisted that she was going to rear her children correctly- protect them, see after them, teach them good manners, good moral standards and religious ethics. And the thought of all this brings to memory the time Anita was three years old, went to sleep in church one night, fell off the seat and broke her collar bone. Now, the way I see it, the moral to all this is, ride more bucking horses and stay away from church. At least, if your pastor can't keep you awake during his talk, sit on the floor.

There seemed to be no end to new experiences and challenges. When I was working at Carriker's river farm, one afternoon at quitting time, Calvin told me to let Dennis saddle old Pony Boy the next morning and ride him over to the river farm.

I asked, "Why not haul him in my trailer as I come to work?"

Calvin said, "He has never been in a trailer, can't get him in one."

It was a six-mile trip and I saw no need for the horse to have to go that far on foot when he could just as well ride. So, next morning I hauled him over in my trailer and Calvin was surprised. He wondered how I loaded the horse.