It was reported that one rancher near Lamesa lost 500 cows that night from the cold and the snow.

On one side of our house snow drifted into a huge pile halfway up our windows. After it melted, the sand which blew in with the snow was at least two feet deep. That was the first time I can remember when snow was so dirty we couldn't make snow ice cream. However, there were many other times later on.

Here is another little rabbit story. On one occasion when Frank was home, he went rabbit hunting with the other four of us boys. We hadn't had much luck until almost sundown. By that time we were still about four or five miles from home and we came to another windmill and waterhole. There was a lot of sagebrush around the waterhole and jackrabbits began to hop up here and there. This place was so far from civilization the rabbits were not much afraid of us. They would hop off a way and stop and sit up and look back at us.

We all spread out and took a swath about the width of a city block and circled the waterhole one time-and killed more jackrabbits than we could carry home. We swung some of them over our shoulders, tied some to our overall suspenders and carried some in our hands. It was a long way home and we were plenty tired before we got there.

During our stay on the plains, tractors had not yet established themselves on American farms, at least not in our part of the country. Men were still raising fine work horses and looking forward to raising even bigger and better ones. A neighbor named Debnam bought the biggest horse I ever hope to see. A big man had to reach high to touch his nose, and few men could reach the top of his shoulders. He was one of the six largest stallions in the United States and he cost the man $3,600. By the time he was three years old he weighed 2600 pounds, and his feet were about as large as a cedar water bucket.

Now Papa needed at least four of those fine work horses but he didn't have the money to buy them, and he couldn't get the money. And farm tractors were almost unheard of before the late 1920s. However, there was a company that made an attachment to go on a Model T Ford car which was supposed to make a tractor out of the car. The manufacturers name for the "thing" was "Pull-Ford." Papa heard of a man who had such a contraption, so he went to look at it.

Now, the fact that the man was not using the gadget should have told Papa something. Moreover, the fact that he was willing to sell it at a bargain should have told Papa something more. And finally, when he went and looked at it and saw that it was practically unused, that should have been the final message to Papa.

But Papa wasn't listening good. He was a man in trouble. Dry weather and sand colic had claimed some of his best work horses. And he could buy this thing for a lot less than four horses would cost. Anyway he bought the attachment and made it fit on the Reo. I suppose he reasoned that a Reo owner had more sense than a Ford owner, and even if it was not a success on the man's Ford, he could make it do the job on a Reo.

Well, anyway he bought it and brought it home and a few days later he had it all rigged on the old car and ready to go. It didn't prove to be the best tractor in the world, in fact, it might compare with a modern tractor of today about like the Wright Brothers' first flying machine would compare with a superjet.

Anyhow it worked some. It took one to drive the car and one to ride the plow. It didn't replace the horse in the field half as well as the Reo car replaced the horse on the road. Yet it filled in somewhat when feed was scarce and horses were tired. This monster didn't have to stop and rest, just stop to get water and cool off. As a tractor it wasn't so hot-it only got hot.

We didn't spend all of our time at hard work on the farm. Come Sat.u.r.day afternoon, if we were pretty well caught up with our farm work, we would spend an hour or two in Lamesa.

I remember one time we were in Lamesa, when I was eleven years old. I had spent all my money except a dime. I wanted to buy a pocketbook to put my money in. There were four stores in town that sold pocketbooks and I went to all of them but it was of no use. The cheapest one any of them had was ten cents. Now, if I spent my dime for one, I wouldn't have any money left to put in it. And if I didn't buy one, I was apt to lose my dime. What should I do? That was a big decision for me to make.

I went back to each store time and again, hoping to find a five cent pocketbook I had overlooked before. But it just wasn't there. And I don't recall whether I bought a ten cent one or kept my dime.

Now you may ask, "If you can't remember whether or not you bought the purse, how can you remember it was on a Sat.u.r.day?" That's easy. Sat.u.r.day was about the only day we went to town. I was a big boy before I learned that there were people in town on other days of the week. I hardly knew that stores opened except on Sat.u.r.day.

I remember another time in Lamesa when a kid about my size was aggravating me. Now, we kids were taught not to fight. I grew up not knowing how to fight, not wanting to fight and thinking that boys who did fight were bad boys. And here I was, faced with the stark realization that I needed something I didn't have-the ability to make a bully leave me alone. I was about as big as he was, but I was afraid he had the know-how to fight in a way that could hurt a country boy like me.

I didn't want to fight the boy. I only wanted him to go away and leave me alone. But he had other plans. We went in and out among the cars parked by the curb. I was always in the lead, he was after me. Somehow I had hoped that I could lose him. But he kept coming back, pinching and hitting me a little harder each time. I really think my not fighting him encouraged him to get tougher and rougher.

Then he got me out behind the cars, out near their back wheels, and he was just about to really let me have it. People on the sidewalk couldn't see us. It was just him and me. I had to do something-so I hit him and ran. That proved to be the best thing I could have done. He came right after me. I knew he might hit me but he couldn't hit me in the face and b.l.o.o.d.y my nose-I had my back to him.

I jumped up on the curb with the bully right on my heels. The first man I pa.s.sed asked, "Is that boy bothering you?" Before I could answer him, the boy had turned and was going away. He didn't bother me any more. He probably thought the stranger was a friend of mine and that he had better leave me alone or else the man would get him.

On another trip to Lamesa I went with Papa one day into the back of a hardware store-back among the shelves of bolts and nuts and things. Way back there were stacks of silver dollars and half dollars and other coins, lying there on a shelf where the store was only half lighted. Papa and the clerk were around behind some other shelves. They couldn't even see me. It would have been easy to slip some money into my pocket and walk away. But I didn't, and I have wondered a lot of times just why I didn't.

There was no question but that I knew it would be the wrong thing to do. Yet I don't believe the moral aspect kept me from taking at least some of the money. That is to say, I could have lived with my conscience but I could not have lived with the condemnation I would have gotten from my family, once they learned about it. And I knew that somehow they would learn about it. Then there would have been the "dishonoring" of thy father and thy mother.

This would not have been a small thing, like talking back to Frank in the cotton patch years ago. That was an isolated case of one boy doing wrong and receiving his punishment. It was my punishment alone, it hurt no one else in the family and it was soon forgotten. But taking any part of the money from the store would have been altogether different. There would have been no way for me to take some of it, then take my punishment and not hurt my folks.

Until the depression years of the 1930s, merchants never fooled around with pennies. If the wholesale cost of an item was four cents, he would usually sell it for ten cents. Then he could sell the items at two for 15 cents and still make a good profit.

Well, Papa wanted to buy us kids some firecrackers but the war was on and they had gone from five cents a package up to ten cents a package. With six kids at home, that would put quite a strain on Papa's pocketbook. So while he was figuring how many to buy, my brother Joel began d.i.c.kering with the clerk.

"Two for 15 cents?" he asked.

"Yes," came the reply.

"Four for a quarter?"

"Yes, I guess so."

"Nine for a half dollar?"

"Well, yes, okay."

Papa bought the nine packages and we all laughed at how far that was from ten cents each.

Susie had gotten married about the time we moved to Lamesa. And with her away from home, Mama was always short handed in the kitchen, there being so many men and boys in the family and only one little girl still at home, and she was too little to be of much help. And since Mama's kitchen work extended to the milk shed, the henhouse, the vegetable garden, the wash house, the clothes line, the ironing board, the yard and a few other odd jobs about the place, she had to cut all the corners she could.

She never put our eating dishes up in the cabinet. After she washed them, she stacked them back on the dining table and covered them with a cloth. So, she didn't have to place the dishes at mealtime. We simply sat down and got our own plates and tools. And we took only the tools we needed. There was no need to have to wash a knife, a fork and a spoon when a spoon was all we needed to use.

We grew up not knowing there were different forks to use for different things. We used the rule of instinct in choosing the tool to use. That is, "If it's hard, use a knife, if it's soft, use a fork, and if it's wet, use a spoon-except in the case of mola.s.ses. You sop mola.s.ses up with a piece of biscuit."

To save time and effort, Mama also left certain foods on the dining table-the salt, sugar, pepper, syrup, honey, vinegar, pepper sauce and other such things. These were all covered with the same cloth that covered our dishes. We had no refrigerator. Nothing would spoil at our house, we ate it before it had time to spoil.

Mama needed help to wash the dishes after supper. But boys don't like to wash dishes. So Mama was in trouble-but not for long. She came up with an ultimatum: "You wash your own supper dishes or eat out of your same plates for breakfast."

This was a boy's dream come true-no dish washing. This was the beginning of my sopping my plate clean. We all did. We could lick our spoons as clean as any woman could wash them in a dishpan. And I seldom used any tool except a spoon. Plates were no problem either. When it comes to shining plates, a good, tough biscuit rind in the hands of a growing boy could just about put a soap factory out of business. And no matter what he sopped out of his plate, it added flavor to his biscuit.

When we were through licking and sopping, each of us would place our spoons on the table at our respective places, turn our plates upside down over them and take off for things more interesting. The last one to finish would help Mama spread a cloth over the entire table and the job was completed. Mama was out of the kitchen in no time at all. We had learned a long time ago not to take anything on our plates that we couldn't eat. Now that habit was paying off.

CHAPTER 8

MOVED TO JONES COUNTY; PICKED COTTON IN OKLAHOMA

The dry weather still prevailed, and in spite of all our efforts to earn extra money, we were getting deeper into trouble month by month. By the summer of 1918 we were about finished in our new venture. There was no grazing and no money for livestock feed. Cows and horses grazed the short gra.s.s, taking in sand with each bite. Sand clogged their stomachs and they died with sand colic. Many died but a few didn't.

Something simply had to give. We just had to try something else. After a long heart-breaking battle against the elements, we rounded up the remaining cattle and drove them to the railroad stockyards at Lamesa. That was a slow exodus. They were so poor and weak some fell by the wayside and didn't finish the ten-mile drive. Most of them did make it. I don't know where Papa sold them nor what he got for them. I know he couldn't have gotten much.

After that, we sold the smaller farm and got rid of the Buick car. Susie and Dode moved onto the large farm, and the rest of us moved to a farm near the community of Abbie, about nine miles east of Hamlin. We bought out a crop from someone in mid-summer. It, too, proved to be a failure-we made three bales of cotton.

In that year and a half we had lost most of our money, our cattle, quite a few of our horses and our best car.

After the crop failure at Abbie we had to try something else again. So we loaded the Reo car and went to Wichita Falls, Texas, where the government was building an aviation camp to train flyers for the war that was still going on. Papa hired on as a carpenter at six dollars a day.

Let me tell you about one night when some of us green-horn country boys went to downtown Wichita Falls with Papa. While he was attending to some business, we boys got out of the car and were looking at newspapers out in front of a drug store. It must have been a Sat.u.r.day night because the newsracks were full of Sunday funny papers.

We were keeping hands off and just seeing what we could see without touching the papers when a stranger came by and told us, "You boys can have all the funny papers you want. They only want the newspapers. Help yourselves to all you want."

Boy! We were sure pleased to hear that. I was beginning to believe that city life was much more interesting than the country life we were used to. The funnies were just what we wanted. And we were getting more than our share when a friend, Harry Stacy, came along and informed us that, "If you boys don't want to get put in jail, you better put those papers back in the racks and get in that car in a hurry." We did what he told us to do.

Harry was one of Frank's buddies. He and Frank were carpentering out at the aviation camp. As far as I was concerned, I respected Harry and I knew he had almost as much authority to spank us boys as Frank had. At least he was concerned about our well-being. We didn't know that a stranger would lie like that to country kids just to see them get into trouble.

Anyway, while Papa carpentered we lived in a tent-and it rained and rained and rained, week after week. Our tent didn't leak from the top, but it might as well have. Water soaked the ground and came up in our tent as out of an artesian well. Everything was wet. You could almost wring water out of the air in our tent.

Mama had taken about all she thought she could. She wanted to go home to our farm at Abbie. So Papa loaded us all up and drove all one Sat.u.r.day night. We arrived at the farm about daybreak. We hurried to get unloaded so Papa could drive back to Wichita Falls Sunday and be there ready to work Monday morning.