ROAD WORK AT GORMAN, TEXAS
While we had been working on the farm six days a week and resting
on Sunday, there were millions in this country living in cities
and working on Sunday. Then we moved to town and Sunday became a
way of life for us also--but not all at once. At first our
working on Sunday came gradually and very reluctantly. But many
town-people had no stumps to dig up, no cotton to pick, no fields
to plow, no weeds to hoe, nothing to make them tired enough
during the week that they needed to rest on Sunday. So, instead
of sitting and resting, they played golf on Sunday. Now, Earl
became a good golf caddie. But he couldn't just caddie on week
days and rest on Sundays. Golfers liked him and wanted him to
caddie for them on Sundays also.
Well, the love of money may be the root of all evil, but in
Earl's case it was not so much the love of it as it was the
necessity of it. Earl liked to eat, so he caddied on Sundays.
At the same time, Papa got involved in trucking and there were
times when his services were needed on Sundays as well as during
the week. He just simply couldn't get it all done during the
week. It became a real emergency when one of his customers had
to have his goods hauled on Sunday so that he could begin his
work on Monday morning.
We all know that it is perfectly all right to help the scriptural
ox out of the ditch on Sunday. And when a trucker helps the ox
out on Sunday, and receives good pay for doing it, he soon gets
in the habit of wanting to help the ox out every Sunday. It even
comes to the point where a man might push the ox into the ditch
on Saturday in order to get to help him out on Sunday, for pay of
course.
If I wanted to try to justify our working on Sundays, I might
mention that it was hard to make ends meet even at that. We
lived three years in Hamlin before we gave up the old kerosene
lamps and moved up to electric lights. Even then it took some
planning. The meter deposit was three dollars and we spent five
dollars for a bunch of used insulated wire and light fixtures.
It wasn't easy to get eight dollars ahead in just three short
years, but we did it. We still didn't have screens on our
windows, nor did we have an icebox. I took some scrap lumber and
built an icebox just large enough to hold a dime's worth of ice,
a pound of butter, and a quart of milk. The ice would last two
days. Most of the milk stayed in the milk cooler on the back
porch, with damp clothes spread over the containers. It would
have cost too much to refrigerate all the milk.
When I was 13 I made the interesting discovery that a flashlight
consisted of nothing more than two cells, a bulb, a container for
the cells, and some kind of switch. I couldn't afford to buy a
flashlight so I made me one. I used a radiator hose to put the
cells in, a copper wire for a bulb holder, and I pushed the bulb
down against the center post of the cell to switch the light on.
I was beginning to learn a little about electricity. This was
the beginning of my knowledge of how to wire our house for
electric lights. Yes, I did the wiring; we couldn't afford to
hire it done.
Shortly after we moved to Hamlin there was another new adventure
in our lives. It involved a little detour to Gorman, Texas, to
do some road work. You remember the truck that Papa let Frank
use to go everywhere and haul whatever people would pay him to
haul. Well, by the time we landed in Hamlin, Frank was getting
tired of hauling everything for everybody. So Papa inherited one
good used truck from one tired-of-trucking boy named Frank. Papa
also had a friend named Marvin Hood who was building a paved road
near Gorman. I think it was generally understood that Marvin
could use some of us if we would come on down to his camp. We
needed to work--for pay, that is--so we took the truck and an old
Dodge car and went to see Marvin.
Sure enough, Marvin could use us four boys, and Papa could haul
supplies in his truck. We lived in a canvas tent in a pasture
about a half-mile from the rock quarry from which they were
getting rock for the road. Albert became waterboy; Earl was
powder monkey, in charge of all blasting. Joel operated a road
grader which was pulled by horses. I fired a steam boiler and
made steam for a steam drill to drill holes into the earth. And
into these holes Earl would put his dynamite and blasting powder,
which, when set off by a fuse and blasting cap, excavated the
rocks which were crushed and then hauled and placed on the road
which Joel had smoothed so perfectly with his little grader. We
were doing so many things for Marvin, I wondered how he managed
before we got there.
Marvin paid his hands three dollars a day and they paid him one
dollar a day to eat at his cook shack. We didn't eat there; we
could eat much cheaper at our tent. There were two men cooking
for the crew, but they got to drinking so much and cooking so
badly that Marvin was losing some of his workers. He had a
problem. So Marvin came to Mama and asked her to cook for him.
He hired a farm woman to help Mama and together they cooked for
the men. And Marvin let our family eat at the cook shack at half
price.
As usual Mama wouldn't throw out any food if it could be used in
any way. She took the left-over biscuits and made coldbread
pudding out of them. At first the men were reluctant to sample
the dish. But after getting a taste of it, most of them asked
for more--and they called it "make-'em-eat-it."
Sometimes Earl would find a can of powder that had been wet or
had sweated in the can and was lumpy. He was told to pile those
cans out behind the mule barn and not try to use the lumpy
powder. Well now, that pile of 12 or 15 cans of blasting powder,
which no one wanted, seemed to me to be an excellent source of
fun, as well as research material. So, unbeknowing to all
others, I toted a can of the stuff home to our tent one day.
Then I decided that Papa might frown on the idea of my having 50
pounds (or maybe it was 25 pounds) of powder about our tent,
especially if he found it hidden under his bed, so I thought I
had better do a lot of experimenting in as short a time as
possible, before anyone else came home. I felt that any one of
my brothers would scold me for taking a can of powder home to
play with. And I was sure he would not be able nor willing to
keep such news to himself. I'd better work fast and let it
remain my own little secret. After all, muzzleloading a rifle
was child's play as compared to playing with 50 pounds of
blasting powder. So I'd better try to get by with this powder as
I had gotten away with other secret adventures--all alone. How I
longed to share some of my good times with my brothers, but I
didn't dare try. Such secrets can only be kept by one person. A
partner would be sure to spoil things.
Sometimes a kid's reasoning without certain knowledge can lead to
trouble. I reasoned that, since a big stick of wood burns slower
and longer than a small stick, a large rick of powder would burn
more slowly and thereby afford more pleasure and excitement. I
even envisioned me walking along beside the burning powder as it
wiggled and twisted here and there, as a snake would crawl across
the pasture. I remembered the matches I had stood up in the sand
at Grandma's, and how the flame had leaped from match to match
until it reached the last one. And that's what I wanted to do
with a string of powder--light it at one end and watch the flame
slowly travel to the other end. I had plenty of powder so I
piled it up into a rick about two inches high and as long as from
here to yonder.
And that was when I learned, by experience, that big powder burns
faster than little powder. When I lighted one end of the powder-
snake, it blasted fire and smoke right up into my face. I fell
back quickly for protection. Then I reopened my eyes just in
time to see my fireball fizzle out at the far end of the rick of
powder. I hardly saw any of what happened--it was all gone in
two or three seconds. I was glad no one else had seen it.
Needless to say, that ended my monkeying around with powder,
trying to play powder monkey.
There was no one at the quarry who really knew how to blast
efficiently. But then one day a man came out and showed Earl how
to use electric blasting caps instead of the fuses he had been
using. By drilling shallow holes, placing less explosives in
each hole, and setting them off all at once, electrically, the
blasting was much more efficient and a lot safer. Before that
time, the custom was to set off a small blast in the bottom of a
deep hole for the purpose of opening up a "pocket" large enough
to hold as many as eight cans of powder and 80 sticks of
dynamite. That didn't result in a lot of usable rock for the
road we were building. Instead, it mostly made a big hole in the
ground and sent rocks high into the air.
Earl did most of his blasting late in the afternoons after work
hours when the workers were out of the quarry. When he was ready
to set off a blast, he yelled, "FIRE IN THE HOLE," and everybody
took cover, and the most reliable cover was a lot of distance. I
saw a few rocks as large as your fist fall a half-mile away. One
time a rock about the size of a basketball went so high and came
down so fast that it came down through the roof of the cook
shack, came on down through the ceiling, landed in a stack of
metal dinner plates and took them down through the table and on
down through the floor. Another time, one man got under a wagon
for protection. The heavy wagon bed protected him from the
falling rocks, but one huge rock rolled against a wheel and
scooted the wagon sideways a couple of feet.
They told us that before we went to work there, one blast failed
to go off for some reason. They waited ever so long and it still
didn't go off. Then finally they cautiously ventured out from
hiding and it blew up with Marvin standing almost on top of it.
It must have been a small charge or it might have killed him. He
said, however, it was big enough. He said he looked down on
trees during his flight. I don't know, really. Of course it
could be true, it happened in Texas you know.
One day a man signed on to work for Marvin, worked a couple of
days, and disappeared without asking for his pay. We had not
known it at the time--even the bookkeeper thought nothing of it,
but when a couple of men came out a week later and arrested one
of the mule-skinners, (lingo meaning mule driver) we put two and
two together and came up with the answer. The man who had worked
two days was an undercover agent for the F. B. I.
When arrested for manslaughter, the mule driver told the agents
he had been expecting them. He had planned to work until payday
and move on. They got him just before payday. He had been going
to church regularly and had preached a few times in a little
country church near by.
Well, we Johnsons were making money and things were looking good.
But we might have suspected something would go wrong. I guess we
should have moved on as the arrested man had been doing for
months. But we, like he, stayed too long. Anytime our present
and future looked that rosy, we might have known that financial
disaster was lurking near by. The old devil was after me again.
To calm our financial tempest, my family might have to throw me
overboard, as the sailors did Jonah.
This time the bank went broke--the bank in which the road-
building company had its money, the money which was paid to
Marvin Hood month by month. He couldn't pay us. He couldn't
even pay himself. Papa often paid cash out of his own pocket for
supplies for Marvin. Then Marvin would repay him on payday. The
bank closure caught Papa without any cash. And Marvin couldn't
get any money to repay Papa. He couldn't even get a little money
to help us get back to Hamlin.
We had the truck and the Dodge car. I don't know how we made it.
I think we drove part way on kerosene; we could buy it for only
four or five cents a gallon. And of course we arrived home
hungry. Duck soup from a rusty bucket would have tasted good.
After years of negotiating, Papa finally got about half the money
Marvin owed him, and that included two of the wagons used for
hauling the crushed rock at Gorman.
While there at Gorman, Old Scotch took sick with what was
commonly known as sore mouth, and after many days of severe
suffering, he finally died.
If Old Scotch had died suddenly before his period of suffering,
it would have been almost like losing one of the family. He was
one of the family and had been in the family longer than some of
us could remember. We wouldn't have sold him for any amount of
money. But, though we regarded him highly, since we had found no
means of alleviating his suffering, and since he had suffered for
so long, his death didn't bother us quite so much. We hated to
see him go but were glad his pain had ended.
I don't really know what was done for Old Scotch during his
sickness. That fell in Papa's line of duty. I would guess that
he asked the advice of a druggist or an M.D., or maybe other
owners of dogs. Veterinarians were practically nonexistent. If
there had been one around he would have been called an animal
doctor. I seriously doubt that we did much of anything for the
dog which could in any way be classed as veterinary medicine, as
we know it today.
All my memories of Old Scotch are pleasant ones except for those
last miserable days of his life. He seemed to always be in the
right place at the right time. And I don't recall that he ever
once did anything wrong. There is no way of knowing how many
times, if ever, he saved one of us from the poisonous bite of a
rattlesnake.
On our Lamesa farm rattlesnakes were everywhere, not every day,
but at one time or another. They were in pastures, in cow
trails, beside cow trails, in the garden in shades of potato
vines, in chicken houses, in feed barns, in the corn patch and in
the watermelon patch. Wherever they were, there was a 50-50
chance Old Scotch had been there ahead of us. And when there was
a snake, he often found it first.
When there was something he wanted us to know about, he barked.
And the tone of his bark told us whether the something was
dangerous or only a horned toad to be played with for a moment
and then ignored. A cow in the yard brought a bark in a tone
which seemed to say, "Come and help me, or at least come and
close the gate after I drive her out." Chickens in the yard
brought no bark at all. He could handle chickens alone. A skunk
or a badger brought a bark from Old Scotch which told us he would
like to have some of us around if only to keep him company and
help him make decisions, and maybe take note of the swell job he
was doing. After driving it away, he would always accept a
congratulatory pat on his head, if we had one to offer. And he
was most certain we would have.
Old Scotch knew things instinctively. Of course, we all know
that dogs know a lot of dog things by instinct. But Old Scotch
knew human things which he had never been taught. One day Papa
was building fence on our Lamesa farm. We boys were in school,
so Old Scotch was with Papa, also building fence and looking
after Papa. As the morning warmed up, Papa pulled off his blue
denim jumper and laid it down. He probably laid it on the
ground, there not being many bushes in Dawson County large enough
to hang a jumper up on. Anyway, when he finished doing what he
was doing at that place, he started walking along the fence to
his next place of work.
Then he noticed an enthusiastic whine from the dog, which was
really a half-whine-half-yelp expression, but anyhow, it got
Papa's attention. He looked back. The dog was sitting there
pleading with Papa. He first looked at the jumper and whined,
then at Papa and yelped, and wagged his tail in a manner that
could mean only one thing, "You are forgetting your jumper and I
don't want to stay here and watch after it. I want to go with
you."
Papa went back and let him know he got the message, but that he
hadn't meant to take the jumper. Then he spoke to the dog in
words which he could understand real well because he had heard
them often through the years, "It's all right. Leave it alone.
You can go."
And with a happy little yelp which meant, "Thank you," and with
an enthusiastic wag of his tail, he quickly bounced up beside his
master seeking a pat of approval before going on his way out
front to clear Papa's path of any and all vermin, and to warn him
of any danger that might lurk in his path.
Old Scotch may not have been the fightingest dog in the world,
but there is no doubt he was the whippingest. So far as I know,
he whipped every dog that ever challenged him, and quite a few
who came in peace with no thought of conquest. Once I saw two
dogs jump him at the same time. Either one of the dogs was as
large as Old Scotch, but he whipped them both and sent them
scampering away. He didn't suffer a scratch. I'll admit he had
a slight edge that time; he was fighting on his home ground and
the cheering section was on his side.
Once a man came to see Papa about something and he allowed his
dog to come along. His dog was about as large as our dog. And
while the men were talking business, the two dogs went about
their business of getting acquainted with each other. It seemed
they were getting to be friends until the fight started. The
speed with which Old Scotch struck the other dog took him by
complete surprise, and he went backward and sideways, almost
losing his balance.
Then almost as quickly as the fight had started, Papa brought it
to a halt with the command, "Scotch, stop that!" Whether the
command was "sic 'em" or "stop that," Old Scotch usually
responded immediately. In this particular case, a "sic 'em"
started the fight and the "stop that" ended it.
As we all know, dogs have a keen sense of hearing. They can hear
sounds that we humans can't hear. And as we also know, 12-year-
old boys like to see dogs fight. Show me one who doesn't and
I'll help you try to find out what is wrong with the boy. I was
12 at that time.
Old Scotch was by far the easiest dog I ever saw to sic onto
anything he wanted to get onto. And he usually wanted to get
onto any dog that happened to be close when one of us boys said,
"Sic 'em." I think maybe this was because the dog lived such a
lonely life. Of course, he had us humans to keep him company,
but there were no other dogs about the place to accept any of the
commands to sic 'em. So he had to be alert at all times and do
all the dirty work himself. He was so accustomed to the word sic
'em, and he had become so easy on trigger, he was off and away
before the full word was spoken. He didn't wait to hear the
"'em" part of the word, he didn't even need the "c" part, but
only the "si" sound, and he only needed to hear that part in a
whisper.
Now, that was all I said that day--just an almost noiseless
"si"--a mere hiss of wind through my upper front teeth. And I
remember, Old Scotch looked up at me as if to ask, "Did I hear
what I hope I heard?"
I looked at him and winked one eye and barely nodded my head
toward the other dog and smiled and very quietly--almost
silently-
-repeated, "Si-," and in a split second he was all over the other
dog like a crow on a Junebug.
After Papa had stopped the fight, Old Scotch looked at me with a
question-mark expression on his face. I smiled back at him just
to let him know he had not misunderstood me, and he came over to
me for a pat of approval, which I gave freely.
No one had heard the "si-" except the dog and me. It would be
our little secret. I certainly wouldn't tell, and he couldn't
tell. I gave him a few friendly pats; he licked my hand and
wagged his tail--the only way he knew how to say, "Thank you, it
was fun while it lasted." Then he went back to investigating and
making friends with the other dog.