The Badgertots

It’s Church Convention time at Johnny Byrd’s place near Wayside, Texas, called “Happy Convention.”  July 1946, summertime, hot days, a need to get cool in the evening if the wind might blow some.   We get together for four days again this year.   Like almost every year, David and me get to visit during this time.  He lives with the Mays’ out by Vigo Park, and I live at Copes’, close to Happy.   Foster, or Loaner kids, you might say.   We seldom get to visit each other at any other time, although Copes, at their old home place, used to live east of Tulia, on the edge of the Tule Canyon, there near by Mays’ place, about a quarter mile from the rim, before buying a farm and moving to Happy.  David and I choose which home to go to at night, since everybody will be back to the Convention Grounds at Byrd’s the next morning.   This is our only time we get to stay overnight, so we take turns wherever we choose to stay, on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night.

After the afternoon Meeting on Thursday, Mr. May has to be gittin’ on home because he has lots of sheep and they have to be penned up in the evening before dark to keep the coyotes from getting to them.  Usually, he goes home before the night meeting for this reason. We choose Mays’ for this Thursday night.  Since we leave the grounds about four thirty, this gives us ample time before dark to conduct this evenings’ study.  Arriving home at Mays’ we immediately hop on the John Deere and head for the canyon rim.

What should cross our path but six baby skunks traveling wherever baby skunks go at five thirty in the afternoon?  We need to study them closer!   I don’t at this time know just when baby skunks start to load up and arm themselves, but they do have a faint aroma, which seems ambient to the area.  Well, little baby skunks probably don’t have any ammo yet, so we proceed to investigate them.  You’d be surprised just how fast they are even when they are so little.  Then too, plowed ground isn’t so easy to run in when there are fresh clods and you tend to stumble somewhat when you are running bent over like we were.  We never did catch one of them, but we got close!  David got closer than I did!  This little feller must have gotten startled when we were kicking up clods and he kind of fired off a shot in David’s direction.  They weren’t but about six inches long, so why did them stripe-furred, beady-eyed little buggers already have ammo?

Well, seems like we had finished our study since David had done most of the lab work and we figured we needed to be gittin’ back to pen the sheep before dark.  Mainly, David’s eyes were beginning to smart and since his room was out in the old stone well house, there was plenty of water to wash up with.  That stuff don’t come off easily.  Fact is it don’t come off hardly any at all on the first washing.   Second and third scrubbing seems not much better.  David said his mouth was burning and I didn’t doubt it.  The little skunk, the animal, that is, had hit David in the side of the face, mouth, nose, and eye, so that it seemed like a pretty good load.   Mrs. May had a couple of crocks of sliced cucumbers for making pickles soaking in brine water, and keeping cool in the trough where cold water ran from the windmill, the only method of keeping food from spoiling during the summer.  That seemed like the only thing we could find to try to take the taste and burning away.  It didn’t work for very long and during the night, David’s face seemed to glow in the dark from the skunk spray.  He would inhale deeply and breathe out in an effort to cool his lips and tongue.  He didn’t know it, but when he exhaled, it kind of permeated the air in the room akin to the same way it smelled there at the rim of the canyon.  We didn’t get much sleep that night, rhetorically speaking, and since there were so many brine cucumbers to consume, I ate just as many as he did just to keep him company.  You might even refer to it as ‘Social Pickle Eating,’ since alone each of us might not have eaten so many.  The night passed, and that’s just about all, because the next morning the odor seemed just as acute as ever.