Part 14 (1/2)

During the war the price of her Gasoline was one of theallon There were no drive-in service stations then, only gas pumps on the curbs out front And of course they were all pumped by hand

One faras puain?” When they told hiallon That will getit over for about two seconds, he said, ”No, put in a half-gallon That will get me home and I ain't comin' back”

And food went up too Simpson and Jones ran a mercantile store in Lamesa One day a customer said to Mr Simpson, ”You know that quarter's worth of beans you sold me last week? Well, the sack had a hole in it and I lost two of them on the way home-and the other one had a worm in it”

We went to town about once a week, but oing hunting Joel was harrowing in the field one day, walking barefooted behind a harrow in freshly stirred soil The harrow ran over a rattlesnake, just a s or so

Well the snake was running for his very life-being tumbled and tossed this way and that way Joel saw the snake, so he ran way over to the right to avoid him About that same time, the snake tu for survival And he didn't care which direction he went, so long as it ay froht

Nohen the snake got tangled up with Joel's bare feet, there were about two or three seconds when it was hard to tell whether the boy or the snake was trying the hardest to get away from the other They both succeeded-momentarily But as soon as Joel could stop the horses and tie up the lines, he went back and demanded that the snake pay the supreme penalty Not that Joel didn't appreciate the fact that the snake had not bitten hiainst the snake It was just that, since the snake was a snake, he had to go

Earl, Joel, Clarence (that's enerally spoken of as the four boys in our fairl, she was sort of a different kind of link in a long chain of boys And Williaroup So ere the four boys

Looking back, I am aeruns and knives and rattlesnakes and wild horses and cows

For instance, we boys were roping and riding horses one Sunday in our horse lot We had one little mule colt about a year old that was a real pet, and at tientle and liked to be curried and petted And naturally we enjoyed feeding and petting hi and, in general, scaring the horses, and sooing got too rough for the little mule colt, he took off and jumped the fence Noe didn't want hiht we'd better get after hi wasn't necessary Before any of us could even get out of the pen, he was back at the gate, looking over it and wanting back in We opened the gate and let hiain

Of course we had neighbors on the plains, sohbor was the Nolan family They had four or five kids, and a reputation for stealing at times I was told one farmer missed some oats and corn froan feeding their horses oats and corn Most of us couldn't afford such feed for our horses, and the Nolans were poorer than the iven them the feed because they didn't want to have to carry it back home The Nolans explained that the hunters said the corn was to keep their horses fat and the oats were towolves

One of our roads to Lahbor One of the Nolan boys often walked to town for the htwith hion, and when they were near the Debnam home, the boy pointed way over toward some sand drifts and exclaimed, ”Look, I see a hao get it Only the tip of the handle could be seen It seemed quite obvious he could not have known it was a hammer handle from that distance unless he had seen it before withAnyway, he pulled it out of the sand and shouted, ”And there's a haht maybe he had stolen the hammer from someone and had buried it there so he could pretend to find it later

So in the cotton patch with the Nolan kids and theirthe haot the oats and corn”

What happened next tookto have an older brother whip you in the cotton patch when you yell to hiether a much more serious situation when you look up to see a h in the air and with fire in her eyes I believe to this day, if I had been wearing shoes, they h to have allowed her to hit oose The woman slammed her hoe dohere I had been, but wasn't any more

We didn't visit the Nolans much, especially for meals In fact, I think we only ate one ot after me with the hoe At the close of theup the few drops and ss of lass, explaining that there was no need to waste anything, she would use theback to the Nolans for awith all our other activities, we had to get a little book learning So we four boys went to Ballard School, three-and-a- half miles away It was a two-room school house but we had classes in only one room The teacher lived in the other rooirl, her two-year-old boy, and a pig The little boy needed attention periodically, you know, like bathroom attention Sometimes his mother took hiirl students took him And if you think the bathrooo to the bathrooo anywhere-he just used the bathroom wherever he happened to be at the time Nor did he seem to understand that one room was the schoolroom and the other rooht he was a ”people” like the rest of us And when his little brother and sister were in the schoolroo wanted to be in there too Needless to say, when he brought his bathroom activities into the schoolroo process as prescribed by the school board and the State Education Agency

Ollie Mae was not quite seven e boys started to school at Ballard in the fall of 1917 Maht Ollie Mae at horade Our little sister was deprived of all the higher learning we others got at Ballard

It wasn't all book learning at Ballard either One day a couple of girls had to ”be excused” In aback into the schoolroom with the news that there was a rattlesnake in their closet (In those days they were closets, not toilets And no one had ever heard of ”rest rooot out there as fast as possible, soh the doors and soht, but it was hard for us to settle back down to school work

Uncle Si us at that time and he was on his way to La by Ballard School e got news of the snake When he saw us leaving the building as we did, he was soard for discipline and order He thought ere getting out for recess and he was used to seeing kids ht line and stand at attention until the teacher said, ”Disht we told hiency He was relieved to learn that it was not always that way at our school We didn't dare tell him how nearly this procedure approached the normal at Ballard

On our Lamesa farm, quite a lot of our raw land had catclaw bushes on it When clearing the land for cultivation, ould cut the bushes off just under the surface of the ground and wait for strong winds to roll theether because of the claws on their branches, and often long rolls of the across the prairie Then they would collect against our fences and ould pitch them over the fences and let them continue on their way

And also, there were many inds on the plains-perhaps no more than in other places we had lived, but they werein the field one day when I saind co across the field about a hundred yards away froh it had hit one end of one of those rolls of catclaws and was rolling it along on the ground But a second look revealed that this was not the case The roll of bushes seeone All this took place within a short ten seconds or less

Then I realized that there had not been any catclaw bushes at all The ind, at its botto horizontally along on the ground The balance of it was standing upright The horizontal part quickly beca upright

Do you think I rushed to tell ? Goodness no! They wouldn't have believed er liar than I was thought to be already? I didn't even rown and had kids of rown I really believe to this day this little story is one of the reasons my kids think I am untruthful at times I don't really expect anyone to believe it I sort of wish I had never told it But it really did happen, and I hadn't been sucking the old sow, either