FAX AND FIXION

Speaking of money.  Now there is something that we didn’t have a heck of a lot of.  I don’t remember any when we lived in the hill country and very little after we migrated to cotton country.  It used to be after us kids worked from daylight to dark, five and a half days a week chopping, picking or pulling cotton. 

Saturday afternoon after six kids and Mom and Dad had their bath.  Other way around Dad, Mom, then the kids according to their age doing the bath thing; the bath thing being each person, kids actually.  We weren’t thought of as persons back in those days.  Kids, that’s what we were.  Anyway each one of us waiting our turn had to climb into a tin container, a wash tub, that held about twenty gallons of water.  Normally the same twenty gallons were used throughout all of the bathing.  Yuk, yuk, yuk.  Damn, boy, wow.  Try bathing in the same twenty gallons of water that five people had just gotten out of.  I guess I had it pretty good.  I was number six.  It was my younger brother and sister that caught the really rough part.  They were number seven and number eight.  I still have trouble today getting into a tub of water and the tub I have today holds probably a hundred and fifty gallons.  Now remember, because I did “do it” I have an oversized Roman bath type of tub.  But you know something?  I have had it for about five years and I still have not taken a bath in it.  I shower everyday.  I say every day. 

Also remember how you got your money’s worth from this book when I told you earlier how you could avoid body odor, hemorrhoids, stinking feet and dandruff.  I have none of the above and I also spend no money on deodorants, although deodorants may sometimes be necessary; depending on the person.  But I don’t use any shampoo or odor eaters or Preparation H.  Keep you and it clean. 

Back to my story.  After working half a day, spending another couple of hours bathing and changing into our Saturday clothes we headed for town, strung out along a dirt road for about a quarter of a mile to the secondary road.  This road had a little bit of gravel added.  We made a right on this for maybe another half mile.  Now us kids used to like this part of the trip because a federal judge who got rather famous (later on) lived on this road.  You didn’t see him too often but his brother used to kind of wait out front and he would throw coins out into the road.  If any bunch of kids were to wander by then crack up as the kids fought over the money.  I used to think this was great because if you were one of the ones that came out of the wrestling match with a coin, you could have a nice treat when you got to town.

I don’t know if the judge’s brother did this for the kids or to the kids.  People used to talk about him saying he was kind of loose in the head.  We were warned to stay away from him.  I didn’t know why.  I can’t remember him ever doing anything wrong.  Just tossing out coins and cracking up as we fought to get them. 

Of course I was pretty naive as a kid.  I had no idea of the perverted people in this world.  That’s not to say this man was a pervert.  When I say naive, I thought shit and damn was really talking nasty.  I thought if someone was called a son of a bitch they were calling your mother a dog.  I thought if someone called you a bastard it meant your Dad was a nobody.  I once heard my mother, because a certain landlord would not let our cow eat out of the yard, call him a cock sucker.  To me a cock is a male chicken and for years I thought of him sucking on a rooster. 

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You''ve read books I''m sure where how when the Indians captured some of the fur trappers back in the old days, they would make them run the gauntlet.  Boy, oh, boy, I think I could have gotten away if they would have just given me any kind of chance to run anything, anyway, any direction.  You want to know how I got away?  I didn''t.  I didn''t get to run the gauntlet either, I became the gauntlet.  We going to kill us a honkey tonight.  Okay, mother f, take off your clothes.  Strange, you know the thought of rape never even entered my mind or theirs, I''m sure or I would have been.  If the same thing were to happen now days with the perversion that is rampant, just like the Bible predicts, you would probably be raped, cut, shot and killed.  thank goodness for small favors, I missed rape, shot and killed.  Cut, I got.  About two hundred times.  After my clothes came off they tied me to a light pole; one with a dusk to dawn light on it.  You simply cannot imagine how scared is scared.