I know, Texans have a reputation of being big liars. It is true, all Texans are capable of lying, but they are not all liars. They don"t have to lie. In Texas the truth is wild enough.
If I am talking with a man from north of the Mason-Dixon line, I only have to tell the truth and he thinks I am telling a big Texas lie. But if the man is from Oklahoma, I sometimes have to lie just a little to make the story interesting to him. Those Okies are almost as bad as Texans about story telling.
Some people think Texas is a state, but it"s not. Texas is a state of mind, an att.i.tude, a broad open expanse of freedom and liberty known only to Texans. It"s a feeling you can never get just by living in Texas, you"ve got to be born in Texas.
There are other happenings dating back to the Flint place. Here are a couple which took place before my time. I can only relate them to you as they were told to me.
We don"t know where Frank got his first taste of chewing tobacco, but he liked it and he wanted another taste. It was only a half- mile from our house over to Uncle Andrew"s. Now, Uncle Andrew chewed tobacco and Frank knew it. So, Frank found it easy to get Mama to let him walk over there to play with Ruth. He also found it easy to ask Ruth if she knew where her dad kept his tobacco.
She knew all right, and she found it easy to "snitch" a chew for Frank. She also had the forethought to make sure she took enough for both of them. But, now that they had the tobacco in their possession, it wouldn"t be smart to risk being caught playing around the house with tobacco in their mouths.
So, now Frank tells Aunt Mary he came over to see if Ruth could come over to his house and play. Yes, Aunt Mary would allow her to go, which was a perfect set-up for five-year-old kids. They could chew the tobacco all the way from Ruth"s house over to Frank"s house, just so they got rid of it before they got there. Who cares how long it might take two little kids to walk a half mile? They could chew a long time.
However, one little problem developed. The tobacco didn"t affect Frank at all, but before they got to Frank"s house, Ruth was as sick as a horse.
Naturally, they didn"t dare tell why she was sick. And she was sure she would feel better in a little while.
Another little story came to me from Susie, my older sister. She was always having to see after the baby of the family. At this time Albert was the baby and I was about three years old. She probably had to take care of me also, when I was a baby. But on this particular day-the day of the snuff-Mama, Grandma, and I went out to the garden. Susie wanted to go but had to stay in the house with Albert.
This was one of the few times during my childhood that I was just the right size, and here I am, unable to remember a thing about it. Susie had to tell me about it. If I had been any smaller, I might have had to stay in the house with Susie and Albert. And if I had been any larger, I might have had to watch after Albert while Susie went to the garden.
Anyway, Susie"s brain was partly angry but mostly just idle, so the devil used it for his workshop.
Grandma had put her snuffbox on the door casing above the kitchen door. Susie had never been allowed to taste snuff, but she reasoned that it must be something special, because Grandma "dipped" it all the time.
Many"s the time Grandma would send me to the "branch" (creek) to bring her a small hackberry limb for a tooth brush. (It was really a snuff brush.) She would take a hackberry twig about twice as big and twice as long as a wooden match and chew on one end until it "frazzled" out into a bristle. Then she would dip the damp bristle into her snuff, put it in her mouth, and work happily for hours, with the "brush" extending out one corner of her mouth.
Now, this picture of contentment on Grandma"s face as she dipped and worked, is what the devil showed to Susie when he told her she ought to climb up on the kitchen cabinet and get her some of that delicious brown snuff in the little tin box.
She climbed up in a chair and got up on the cabinet, only to find that she couldn"t reach the snuff. But she didn"t give up. She climbed back down and put a chair up on the cabinet. Then she climbed up in the bottom chair to get onto the cabinet so she could get up in the top chair. And by leaning way over, she could reach the snuffbox.
Now, Susie didn"t want to climb down to dip her snuff. It would be too hard to have to climb all the way back up to put the snuff back on the shelf over the door. So she just sat down in the upper chair and began dipping the snuff.
That"s about all the story. At least that"s all she remembered. She never did know how she got down from the chairs and the cabinet. She only remembers that, when she began to regain consciousness, she was a mighty sick little girl, and snuff had lost its charm and glitter.
CHAPTER 3
AT THE EXUM FARM AFTER I WAS FIVE
We, the Will Johnsons, owned this first farm 12 years. Then in the fall of 1910, Papa bought the Exum farm, just east of us. It was much larger and it fitted our needs better. There were 332 acres in the place, and we paid $9,000 for it.
When January rolled around, it was time for us to move onto the Exum place. And on the day we moved that half-mile, I had to stay at our old home. I was allowed to help load the wagons at our old farm, but they wouldn"t let me go with them to our new home to unload the wagons. Of course, that hurt my feelings terribly.
But I was hurt even worse when one of the older boys came running back to the house to get a gun to kill a skunk down on the creek-and Mama wouldn"t let me go with him.
She said, "No, you can"t go. You"re too little."
I didn"t understand how Mama could be so mistaken in my size. I was as big as most of the other boys, I thought, and smarter than some of them.
After we got moved to the new home, again Papa set out to build whatever buildings we needed to suit our wants. There was already a house and a good size barn. And when Papa finished building, there were shelters for tools, livestock, poultry, and a blacksmith shop.
He made a large, roomy cellar at our new home. I can"t remember ever having to go to the cellar because of a storm, but it was there just in case. And it was good for storing fruits, vegetables, and canned goods.
One time Papa brought home a stalk of bananas and hung it down in the cellar. Down there it would be protected from the heat of the days and the freezing nights. Papa explained to us that we should eat the ripest bananas first before they got too ripe and had to be thrown away. Then some of the older kids jokingly told that Papa said, "Eat the rotten ones first and wait till the others rot to eat them."
We were poor in terms of money, yet we had as much as or more than the average family in our community. Papa was a carpenter, a blacksmith, a good farmer. And when automobiles came along, he became a mechanic.
We never left our hack out in the weather, we had a shed to shelter it. Our barn was second to none in our neighborhood, especially by the time we finished building sheds and stalls on both sides of it. Later on, we got a car and built a shed for it. We didn"t call it a garage, it was a car shed. And one time Papa bought another house, moved it up beside ours, and joined them together.
We had a good well of water, a big windmill, and a cypress water tank on a tower about ten feet tall. The tower under the tank was boarded up on all four sides to form a room that was used for keeping milk, b.u.t.ter, watermelons, and other things cool. Screened windows allowed the wind to pa.s.s through. That was about the coolest place on the farm.
Next to the windmill was a garden, fenced rabbit proof and irrigated with water from the well. Every summer we had roasting ears, popcorn, cantaloupes, watermelons, peanuts, okra, squash, pumpkins, and more kinds of beans and peas than I can name.
The barn was filled with feed heads, corn, and cottonseed, both for planting and for feeding. There was room in the barn and adjoining sheds for horses, cows, chickens and hogs. And up in the loft, there were peanuts still on the vines.
Some of our neighbors had given up trying to grow peanuts because rabbits ate so many of the vines. It was all but impossible to keep the rabbits out of the patch. But we always grew peanuts anyway. When neighbors asked Papa how he managed to grow so many good peanuts, he told them he just planted enough for the rabbits and the youngsters too. I can"t remember when we didn"t have enough peanuts in the barn loft to last all winter. We stored them on the vines and then we picked them off as we needed them, and fed the vines to the stock.
I remember one sunny afternoon, four or five of us boys were sitting up in the barn over the horse stalls eating peanuts. I was sitting on a board that was nailed to the underside of the ceiling joists. Well, the nails pulled out of the board and I fell to the ground and hit my head on a wooden block. The block proved to be tougher than my head. It cut a two-inch gash in my scalp above my right ear. Papa took me to our family doctor and had it sewed up.
The story was told on us boys that, when we were all little, a mule kicked one of us in the head, and that boy was never quite normal after that. But then, as we grew older, we all got to acting so much alike that Mama and Papa couldn"t tell which one of us the mule had kicked.
Many years later, during the depression of the 1930s, a neighbor was giving me a homemade haircut one Sunday afternoon and, when he discovered the scar on my head, he laughed and said, "Now I know which one the mule kicked."
Now let"s get back to the story of when I was a boy on the Exum farm. I started to school when I was seven. In fact, most kids started at seven in those days. And since I was seven when school started in September, that meant I had been seven since last January 11th. In other words I was almost eight.
While we lived at the Exum place, we went to school at Wise Chapel, which was about three miles northeast of our home. In winter we faced cold northers many mornings, and in the afternoons, we often faced strong southwesterly winds on our way home.
As we walked to school, other pupils from other farms joined us, and then still others. By the time we arrived at school, there might be as many as 20 of us in one bunch. One of the families whose kids walked with us was the Bruner family. Papa"s younger brother, Ed, married Eva Bruner.
What do you mean, "Did we walk that three miles to school?"
Of course we walked-except maybe two or three times a year when the weather was extremely bad.
I might as well take time right here to mention another little incident which took place along our school trail. It involved one of the Bruner boys. And what happened to that boy should never happen to anyone. But when you get that many school kids in one bunch, most anything is apt to happen, and it did this time.
In the first place, I guess school trails shouldn"t cut across pastures, but they did. In the second place, I haven"t been able to figure out why G.o.d made p.r.i.c.kly pears, but He did. In the third place, if school kids are going to use the trails which wind in and out among the th.o.r.n.y bushes and cactus plants, they should never scuffle near p.r.i.c.kly pears, but they did. And in the fourth place, if a boy scuffles and falls down, he should never sit right flat down in a p.r.i.c.kly pear, but he did.
After he got up, he went straight home. His mother took the tweezers and removed all the large thorns and many of the small ones. Then they took him to Mama because, they said, her eyes were better. She removed all she could see, which left the boy in fairly good shape, I suppose, all things considered.
What we now know as kindergarten was unknown when I started to school. Beginners started in the Primer, and the Primer was not a grade in school-it was a book. As Webster defines it, "an elementary book for teaching children to read."
We went to school to learn to read, write, spell, and work arithmetic problems-and to obey the teacher.
We also learned many other things that were not a part of the regular curriculum and which were not necessarily sanctioned by those in authority. We grouped them all together and called them "recess."
In my first year, I went through the Primer, the first grade, and far into the second grade. I was almost ready for the third grade at the beginning of my second year. According to my teacher and my parents, I was smart and well behaved. I was a good little boy.
Even at that early age, the teacher granted me special privileges and I was in love with her. My love and admiration for all teachers, especially women teachers, went with me all through high school and college, at times causing my wife some displeasure.