Wayne Holmes:
Rocky Comfort
TEN
Cottonmouths and Mad Dogs
Joe Madewell, Windy Maidenhead as some of his less work brittle neighbors liked to call him behind his back, was ordinarily too busy grubbing out a living for his deaf wife and their eight scruffy children to waste time at Osie store. But on the rare occasion when he was caught up with his work, he and his five tough sons showed up.
One rainy day when Dad and Fred and Jay and I arrived at Osie, we noticed Joe’s old flatbed Chevrolet truck parked east of the store. Inside, the Madewell boys, along with several others, were sitting on sacks of feed in the back part of the building where kids were expected to stay unless they had money to spend. The men sat on tomato crates or the few stools or chairs around the potbellied stove.
Most of the men wore similar clothes: solid blue denim or striped overalls, many bearing patches, faded blue chambray shirts; and badly worn ankle high work shoes. Young boys dressed much the same as their fathers, but all of them went barefooted. Older boys wore shoes, or not, according to their circumstances and aspirations. A few men wore black felt hats both summer and winter, but most of them wore cheap straw hats in the summer.
An occasional man, Buck Reavis for one, smoked a
pipe. Some of the others, including Clifton Hutchinson, who’d lost an
arm as a boy in a hunting accident, smoked roll-your-own Bull Durham
cigarettes. It was fascinating to watch
As far as I knew Dad didn’t smoke. Not that he was opposed to smoking or chewing, but he’d given up his tobacco at the same time he and Mama gave up their morning coffee. I never saw him smoke or chew or take a drink, but Ed Robbins said that when Dad was off in wheat harvest, or hunting and fishing with the men, he’d use tobacco as well as take an occasional sip of whiskey.
Some boys at the store got to buy a small amount of candy, maybe a penny or two’s worth. But Fred, Jay, and I knew better than to expect anything. When Dad paid off the bill he’d been running, perhaps once or twice a year, Emmit and Beulah generously filled a poke full of candy for us six kids to enjoy.
With few distractions at the store, I sat quietly on sacks of feed and watched and listened to the men. Their witty good-natured give and take as they whittled and spit out the back door or into the stove made me wonder why men enjoyed one another’s company, while men and women, or Dad and Mama anyway, either squabbled or were silent when together.
Joe Madewell sat spraddle legged on an up-ended tomato crate in the middle of the room near the stove, while five or six of the regular Osie loafers gathered around him. “I don’t want to interrupt anything,” Dad said, as he entered, nodding to the circle of men.
“Come on over here,” Joe said. “I was just braggin’ about how much money I used to make in the timber. I didn’t spend thirty-five years workin’ in the woods for nothin’. You boys may find it hard to believe, but I used to cut and hack a hunderd railroad ties a day. At a dime a piece, that bought a lot of groceries.”
“Ten dollars is a lot of money for a day’s work,” Buck Reavis said.
“It wasn’t just one day’s work,” Joe said. “I’d spend one day cuttin’ and hackin’, and two more days haulin’ and loadin’ the ties in a railroad car down at the roundhouse. Even so, a little over three dollars a day is good money. It’s a whole lot more than what some people I know make.”
“That’s right, Joe,” Buck said. “I sure don’t make three dollars a day haulin’ livestock, but it suits me better than hackin’ ties ever did.”
“To each his own,” Joe said. “The most money I ever made was loggin’ on the Osage.”
“How’s that?” Buck asked.
“When I was young and stout some of us used to
round up a crew and go up on the Osage and work ever’ fall and winter.
Up there in the middle of the state it was easy as pie to top trees and
then fall ‘em into the river. We’d make a big raft, then ride it
downstream to the
Jake Lemaster, a hard worker himself, spoke up: “I always wanted to fish the Osage, but I heard it’s full of snakes.”
“Let me tell ya about it,” Joe said. “One day a new kid in the crew had just shinnied up a big red oak and was toppin’ it when he must’ve done somethin’ wrong. We heard the tree crack and him holler and it looked like he was a goner the way his belt tightened up. But all of a sudden his belt broke and he fell in the river.”
“Lucky for him,” Jake said.
“That’s what we thought,” Joe said, “but he’d no more than hit the water when the biggest snake I ever saw struck him on the neck. In less than three minutes he was dead.”
“That was mighty quick,” Jake said. “Wasn’t you scared?”
“You bet, but the foreman always carried a twenty-two rifle, and he shot and killed the snake. We was still scared, but some of us jumped in with our cant hooks and peavies and dragged the kid and the snake out on the bank.”
“Why bother with the snake?” Dad asked.
“‘Cause it was so big. We stuffed it in a tow sack and weighed it with a set of stillyards. I know it’s hard to believe, but it weighed a hunderd and nineteen pounds.”
“A hunderd and nineteen pounds,” Dad mused. “Are you sure it didn’t weigh a hunderd and twenty pounds?”
“Yes, I’m sure,” Joe said, shifting his weight on the wobbly crate. “I wouldn’t lie for a pound.”
“Hmm,” Dad said. “That must have been a mighty long snake.”
“No, it wasn’t very long. It was five foot two. It was a chubby little thing.”
