The Life of Me: An Autobiography

by Clarence Edgar Johnson

CHAPTER 18

BACK AT ROYSTON, WORKED AT GIN AND FOR NEIGHBORS

Throughout all these years, as our children were growing up, we tried to train them to work out their own problems, answer their own questions, and make their own decisions. One Sunday afternoon when the Willinghams were visiting us, Mary and Anita came skipping around the house to ask me if they could go to Hamlin in our car and get some ice to make ice cream. Anita was probably fifteen years old and Mary fourteen. I asked Anita if she had a driver's license. Of course she didn't have, but she could drive on back streets and be okay. Then I asked her, "And where is the ice plant?"

"It's on Main street, but we could walk and carry the ice to a back street."

"It's 14 miles there and 14 back. You still think it's all right?"

"Sure, that's not far."

"What if you have a flat? Can you put the spare on?"

"Oooh, I hadn't thought of that. We better not try it."

Now, if Anita had known at that time about the traveling I had done alone when I was not much older than 15, I think she might have argued that Hamlin was not nearly as far away as McCamey or the Gulf of Mexico or Denver. And if she had brought up that argument, I think I would have handed her the keys and said, "Good luck Be careful."

At that age Anita hadn't yet mastered the art of arguing. But she was willing and practicing. Dennis was going to town one night to a show or something and he asked Anita if she wanted to go. But she said, "No, Vera and Coy are coming over here tonight and I want to stay home and listen to Vera and Daddy argue."

She listened well and learned fast. I don't believe I have won an argument with her since that time.

There was always something happening on the farm, some good, some bad. One year weaning pigs got so cheap that I couldn't resist the urge to buy some of them and let them run wild about the place. At the Abilene auction sale, I bid on a bunch of the prettiest little black pigs I ever saw. They were selling by the pound. I usually bought the ones that sold by the head, because I didn't have much idea how much a pig would weigh out. But this bunch only cost $1.16 each. There were eight in the bunch. I took them home and turned them loose. Then I bought others from time to time, and we soon had lots of pigs running all over the place. Of course, when they got older, we put them in pens.

Ima ran over one of our pigs in her car one day and killed him. He was about a 25-pounder. We butchered him and he made such good eating, we decided that was a good size to butcher next time.

When Max Carriker learned that we had all those pigs running around the place, he asked about letting him take some of them and sell them. He had a Model A coupe with a pig box in the back end. We told him to come any time and take all he wanted. He sold them at five dollars each and paid me three dollars for the ones he sold. He brought back the ones he didn't sell each day and turned them loose again. He and I both picked up a few dollars on my cheap pigs. Our neighbors didn't know that the pig market had hit bottom.

A neighbor boy and Dennis were out in our pasture one day with their 22 rifles, hunting rabbits and snakes and whatever. After hunting for hours, they came running to the house all excited and out of breath, and told us they had killed something, they didn't know what it was, but wanted us to come quickly. We went and found that they had killed a bobcat. He was the first one we had seen or heard of in that part of the country, and it was the first one the boys had ever seen.

They had been up on Cedar Knob Mountain looking around, and there was that bobcat 12 or 14 feet directly below them, lying in the shade on a ledge. Apparently the cat didn't see the boys. They stepped back quickly and planned their strategy. One boy had a pump-gun, the other one a single shot. They planned to advance quietly to the spot above the cat, take good aim and both begin firing. The boy with the single shot gun carried an extra shell in his hand ready to reload as quickly as possible. Then they walked slowly to their vantage point and carried out their mission.

By the time the boy with the single shot gun had reloaded and fired his second shell, the other boy had emptied the magazine on his gun—all 15 shells, and the bobcat lay very dead. But they didn't know what it was that they had killed, so they didn't go near it, but ran home for help.

We skinned the cat to get his pelt, and would you believe it, we found two bullet holes—and only two—in his head, and none anywhere else. We believe that the boys killed him with their first two shots and missed him completely with all the others.

We lived on that farm 17 years, and if we had lived there 50 more, I believe something new would have happened the last day we lived there, as well as each and every week during that time.

One fall I got a job helping at the Royston gin. I had my welding torch and all my tools in a closed-in trailer. When I wasn't helping gin cotton I was repairing gin machinery. One Saturday they put me to helping load bales of cotton on trucks to be hauled to the Hamlin Compress. The trucks were large truck and trailer jobs. We stood up one layer of bales on the truck, then we stood up another layer of bales on the first layer. Then we placed another layer lying down on top of those two layers. Now, doing all that purely by main strength and awkwardness took a lot of energy and manpower. By the end of the day I was possessed with a lot of awkwardness, and all my manpower was gone. So I used my head.

At the close of work that Saturday, I took all my tools home, and Sunday after church I built an A-frame on the back of my tractor, tall enough to lift bales of cotton three-layers high up on a truck. The tractor motor did all the work. No man ever had to lift another bale of cotton as long as I worked there. The men laughed at me for being so lazy. After that they said, "Give Johnson the hard jobs, he'll make them easy."

Along with all our work, we had our share of fun. Clarence Clark was a farmer who lived about a mile from the Royston store, and he loved a good joke as much as or more than the next fellow. And he also liked to play practical jokes on other people. Nor did he seem to mind if one of his jokes backfired right in his face.

One day a bunch of us were sitting around outside the store waiting for the mail to run—gabbing and "spittin and whittlin," when a man drove up with a fairly good-looking used, wooden icebox in his pick-up. Clark didn't move from his sitting position, but asked the stranger, in a loud voice, "How much for the icebox?"

The man said, "I'll take ten dollars for it."

Now Clarence didn't need the icebox—he didn't even want it. He had one just like it, only better. So, his idea was to play around with the stranger awhile, exchange a few words, sort of horse-trade with him a bit, and then let him go on his way with his icebox.

He reasoned that if he offered anywhere near $10, the stranger might accept his offer and he would be stuck with a box he didn't want and wished he didn't have. But by any standard, no horse- trader is going to sell anything for half what he's asking for it- -leastwise, not without coming down slowly, a step at a time. So, Clark thought five dollars would be a safe offer. So, when the man said, "I'll take ten dollars for it," Clark didn't hesitate to say, "I'll give you five."

Nor did the stranger hesitate to say, "I'll take it."

Clark said, "You'll have to deliver it."

"Sure will. Where to?"

"About a mile. Follow me."

Clark drove his car and the man followed in his pick-up. As the man backed up to the back porch, Mrs. Clark came out of the kitchen and asked, "What have we got here?

Her husband said, "We've got an icebox."

"We don't need it. We've got one icebox."

"You're wrong, woman, we've got two iceboxes."

I don't know what they ever did with the old box, but I'm sure he didn't let it bother him in the least.

At the Royston gin, the house in which we stored our cotton was about 30 or 40 steps away from the office building. The door leading into the cotton house was on the far side, away from the office. The door opened to the outside, and the V-space behind the open door made a nice little outhouse for men, who, for any reason at all, preferred not to walk the long distance to the two- holer when all they wanted to do was stand and drain a load of water against the cotton house wall.

One day I was up in a farmer's trailer unloading his cotton into the cotton house when Clarence Clark came out from the office and stood half hidden, his front half that is, behind the aforementioned door, and began his little chore of getting rid of excess waste water. Whereupon, I seized the opportunity to play a practical joke on this practical jokester, Mr. Clark.

I went to the back of the trailer, leaned out over the tailgate so I could see around the corner of the cotton house and, looking toward the office, I said in a loud voice, "No, ma'am, he's not here now, but he was here a few minutes ago."

Of course, I was only pretending. There wasn't a woman within a half-mile. But, you know, my performance did exactly what I had hoped it would do, only more so. In a fraction of a second, Clark had put away his drainer before he had time to stop the flow of water. I could tell by the way he stepped out from his hiding place that dampness was already down beyond his socks and into at least one shoe. Then in about three seconds, when he realized what I had done to him, he looked up at me and said, "Johnson, I'll kill you for that." But he didn't. And I'm sure he felt better when he got home and got a bath and put on dry clothes.

Now, changing the subject, Anita came home from School one day and asked, "Daddy, why is it that, when kids at school tell a joke or a story, the goofy guy in the story is always named Clarence?" You know, I couldn't think of a good answer to give her, and I still can't.

During those years on the Royston farm, we witnessed the advent of cattle auction sales in our part of the country, and of course they led to other little happenings. I might as well tell about one or two of them right about here.

From our home it was only 30 miles to Sweetwater and 50 miles to Abilene. Those two cities together had at least three cattle sales a week. I was sitting at one of those sales one day, waiting for the cows to start selling, when they began selling a lot of odds-and-ends prior to selling the cattle.

There are times when these odds-and-ends can defy the imagination. Some of the items I have seen sell at such times were old saddles, new saddles, lariat ropes, milk goats, six bantam hens with matching rooster, three quart-bottles of screw worm medicine, a set of badly used harness, four weaning size hound pups, and many others.

Well, on this particular day, I was just sitting there being bored when suddenly here comes a sorrel saddle horse for sale. The bidding got off to a slow start and didn't speed up an awful lot. This gave me time to start thinking, but I started in the wrong direction. True, he was a good-looking animal—beautiful, not a blemish on him, tall and strong, just the horse for me.

Now, what I should have been thinking was, "If he's all that good, why isn't he bringing more money? Why aren't more men bidding on him?" I think I figured out the answers just about the time I made the final bid on the old horse. I think everyone there that day, except me, knew the horse, had owned him a week or two and had brought him back to sell to somebody like me, someone who had not owned him and didn't know about him. In fact, I sold him the following week. Only I didn't take him back to the sale, I sold him to a cow-buyer who didn't know him. And he took him back to the sale a week later.

Anyway, the bidding had only reached $20 when I offered $22.50. But just as I announced my bid, something told me I shouldn't have. And since no one would raise my bid to $25, nor to $24— not even to $23, I found myself with a horse I wasn't quite sure I wanted. I really think the owner had bid the $20 and waited for a sucker like me to raise his bid.

But at home the next day, Dennis rode the horse over to a neighbor's place and came back with a good report. He said the horse was lively, spirited, and altogether well behaved. I was beginning to feel better about my purchase, until a few days later when Anita tried the new horse.

Now, I'm not altogether sure she really wanted to ride the horse. It might have been my idea, or maybe it was Dennis' idea. One thing I do know for certain, it wasn't Ima's idea. However, there Anita was, up on the horse in our front yard, when the wind began flopping her neck scarf. And that was when the old horse began to come unwound.

I was holding the reins and managing to keep his front end fairly quiet and close to the ground, but his hind end kept bouncing up and down, getting higher and higher until Anita landed on the ground right by his front feet. That's when we learned that anything waving or flopping drove the horse crazy and made him pitch. He was not a flag-waving patriotic horse.

The man I sold the horse to learned the same thing the hard way when his hat almost blew off and he reached up quickly to grab it. He said he barely managed to stay on top, but got off as soon as the horse stopped bucking, and walked him to the barn. Next day he took the horse to the cow sale and auctioned him off.

Fortunately, Anita's fall off the horse didn't hurt her, but it sure scared Ima. And now, 40 years later, she still tells people how foolish I was for letting Anita get on the horse. But I say, "Why shouldn't she have ridden any horse she wanted to? After all, she was thirteen years old, and has been riding horses and cows for twelve years."

Ima insisted that she was going to rear her children correctly— protect them, see after them, teach them good manners, good moral standards and religious ethics. And the thought of all this brings to memory the time Anita was three years old, went to sleep in church one night, fell off the seat and broke her collar bone. Now, the way I see it, the moral to all this is, ride more bucking horses and stay away from church. At least, if your pastor can't keep you awake during his talk, sit on the floor.

There seemed to be no end to new experiences and challenges. When I was working at Carriker's river farm, one afternoon at quitting time, Calvin told me to let Dennis saddle old Pony Boy the next morning and ride him over to the river farm.

I asked, "Why not haul him in my trailer as I come to work?"

Calvin said, "He has never been in a trailer, can't get him in one."

It was a six-mile trip and I saw no need for the horse to have to go that far on foot when he could just as well ride. So, next morning I hauled him over in my trailer and Calvin was surprised. He wondered how I loaded the horse.

I told him it was fairly easy. First I tried leading him into the trailer just as I would any horse. He was almost through the loading chute when he decided to retreat. In fact, he retreated all the way back down the chute and out into the corral. Then I said to him, "Okay old boy, since you like to back so well, just go ahead and back."

I backed him across the lot until his tail hit the fence on the other side of the lot. By this time he seemed to be getting the "hang" of it and didn't seem to mind backing up. So I backed him along the fence all the way around to the loading chute, then up through the chute and into the trailer, and closed the tailgate. The entire operation didn't take more than a couple of minutes, and it saved Old Pony Boy a long, hard journey on foot. I really believe he enjoyed the ride, though he never mentioned it to me.

It seems like I mentioned before, that I had never lost a penny on a bad debt. However, there might have been a time or two when I almost did, but it was when I was farming, and not while I was in business.

Yes, this happened at Royston. Hobb Reed and Hester Hammitt each owed me two dollars. Hobb had promised to pay me his two dollars as soon as he got out his first bale of cotton. Well, he got out his first bale, then his second bale, and still hadn't made a move toward paying me. So one day, in the store, back by the post office, I asked him about it. He said, "Johnson, I'm not going to pay you until Hester pays you."

I asked him, "What if I told Bill Carriker I wasn't going to pay my grocery bill until everyone else paid him?" Then I added, "And besides, you promised to pay me when you got out your first bale of cotton, and you didn't."

Hobb asked, "Johnson, are you calling me a liar?"

I said, "Call it whatever you like, you promised to pay me and you didn't."

Then he told me, "Johnson, come outside here, I'll just whip you."

And I said, "Okay, but remember, after you whip me, you still owe me two dollars."

Then suddenly, he became calm again as he said, "Come over here to the cash register, I'll just pay you."

Thank goodness we didn't go outside while he was in a bad mood.
He was a lot bigger than I was and he might have half killed me.

While we lived at Royston, Papa had an old Chevrolet car that he was through with and he wanted to give it to Dennis. It was an old, old car, just had a seat and a pick-up bed, no cab at all, tires not worth 50 cents each, all leaking, radiator leaking, using oil, dripping oil, and no license plates. And besides all that, Dennis didn't have a driver's license. I didn't want Dennis to own the old car. But I saw later that I had made a mistake, and told the family so.

Looking back, I can see why I should have allowed Dennis to own the old car. But at the time, I reasoned: Dennis couldn't repair a flat, I would have to do it. With no license, he could only drive it out in the pasture. Thorns would puncture his tires. We had no money to waste on the old car. We had a car and two pick-ups, and Dennis had not shown any inclination toward repairing nor maintaining the ones we had. Besides, one neighbor boy had an old car like that, and one day he was driving down the road and the motor fell out. No kidding, the front end of the motor dropped down and stuck in the ground.

But who knows, this old car might have been just the thing to spark Dennis' enthusiasm and spur him on, all the way up to greasy hands and skinned knuckles. And it might have built up his confidence in himself. Anyway, I regret very much that I didn't allow him to own the old car and play with it. Some of my kinfolks thought I was sort of, if not altogether, cruel to the boy. They convinced me but it was too late. The damage had been done, never to be undone.

Years later, after I had made a lot of changes in my way of thinking, and had repented for many of my shortcomings, there came a time when a daughter of one of those same kinfolks wanted to own a saddle horse in the city where they lived. And there was a time when it looked as though the girl was fighting a losing battle with her mother, who was not altogether in favor of her owning the horse in town. The mother was finally getting a look at a situation similar to the one I had years ago, but from a different viewpoint—viewing her own pocketbook instead of mine. I sent word to the mother not to be cruel to her daughter as I had been to Dennis. I told her, "By all means, let the girl have the horse, regardless of the cost." The girl got the horse all right, but he cost a fortune in trouble, money and inconvenience.

During those last years we lived at Royston, Calvin Carriker built a new house at his River Farm and wanted to put a butane log in the fireplace. But he was unable to find an artificial log that would burn butane, they all burned natural gas. He searched everywhere, and finally brought home a gas log and asked me to change it over to burn butane. I worked on it in my spare time for several days, as well as some time that was not spare. I even went to junk yards and got parts that I had to drill and shape and alter until they would do what I wanted them to do.

After a good many days, I had it burning pretty good. Calvin stopped by the shop one day and left his wife, Nell, sitting in the car. Then, when he saw how well the log was burning, he called her to come and see it. She came in, looked at it and asked, "Calvin, is that the log you bought at Rotan?"

He told her it was, and she said, "Calvin, didn't you tell Clarence that the factory man said they hadn't been able to make a log that would burn butane successfully?"

Calvin said, "No, if I had told him that, he might not have fixed it. He didn't know it couldn't be done."

I remember one day one of Calvin's bulls got through the fence and into the pasture west of his barn. He saddled a horse and went into the neighbor's pasture after him. Well, he came back telling Max and me about a rattlesnake he had seen, but couldn't find anything to kill it with. He wanted the three of us to go hunt the snake and kill it. Max took a 22 rifle and Calvin and I each took a hoe.

It was early spring and the snakes had begun to come out of their dens in the heat of the day. The grass was short but we took no chances. We walked side by side, very slowly, and watched closely. We soon found our first snake, lying at the mouth of a hole, which was about like a hole a badger might have dug. We stopped and stood motionless, whispering plans of what we should do—or at least try to do. We decided that Max was to shoot the snake, and in case he missed, Calvin and I would cut him to pieces with our hoes. Our idea was to hurry and try to keep him from escaping into the hole. Well, we got all set, Max slowly raised his gun, aimed, and fired.

We still don't know whether or not Max hit the snake. We do know, however, that the snake went into the hole, along with four or five or six others. Who knows how many? It all happened so fast. We just stood there—frozen in our tracks, trembling, scared and surprised. We had not seen any except the one snake lying near the opening of the den. We quickly looked down around our feet to see whether there might be others that we had not seen. If there happened to be one behind me that wanted to get into that hole, I sure wanted to jump aside and let him go by.

It was some time before we regained our composure. We were well aware that we must be more cautious and watch more closely than we had been. Then we walked forward, more slowly, closer together, almost stumbling over each other. We walked about 100 yards, moved over a way and took another swath coming back the same 100 yards—and killed 27 rattlesnakes. There were others, to be sure, but we had had enough for one day. And somehow, hunting rattlers was not as alluring as it had been an hour before. We planned to go back some day, but we just never did get around to it.

All my life I have seen cattle round-ups, but people always seem to do things the hard way. And that wasn't for me. A cattle round-up at our Royston farm was unlike any other round-up in the world, so far as I know. We had saddle horses but we hardly needed them. Our cows were in the habit of coming into the feed- lot to eat bundled feed. By simply closing the gate behind them, the round-up was ended. The work we had to do next would take a little more time than the rounding up did. But it was easier and faster than any system I have ever seen.

At least once each year, we had to brand all the new calves, those we had bought as well as those we had raised. We had to reduce the little bull calves to steers, vaccinate all young cattle against blackleg, both young and old had to be vaccinated against some other disease—I have forgotten what it was called, and I'll bet a quarter we farmers didn't call it by the same name that veterinarians called it. And finally, all calves that had not been dehorned had to have their horns cut off. I remember one time we had 25 cows, a large bull, and 55 calves to work. That meant 135 vaccine shots, 30 to be branded, about 20 to be dehorned, and maybe 15 little bull calves to be worked on.

Anita was big enough to keep a fire going and to keep branding irons hot and to hand them through the fence to me. Dennis was big enough to help drive the cattle into the stanchion, hand the vaccinating needles to me, bring in more cattle from the feed lot, and turn out the ones we were through with. I was big enough to catch the cattle in the stanchion, vaccinate in the shoulder with one needle, in the hip with another, brand a Lazy-J on the left hip, cut off their horns, and work the little bull calves.

We never fooled around with a chute because we found that cattle were reluctant to enter a chute. That would be too slow and too much work. Instead, we used a stanchion that was installed permanently between two small pens. It opened large enough for the largest bull to go through and it closed small enough to hold the smallest calf. And it wasn't all that expensive. It probably cost me $1 for second-hand lumber and 50 cents for a rope to pull the top ends of the bars together.

It was easy to get the cows to go through the stanchion since it formed a gate between the two pens. Our milk cows passed through it every day. Most any cow or calf would be glad to go from one pen to another, especially if there were some cows in the other pen.

The system was fast, and by far the easiest I have ever worked with. We three did the 80 cattle one morning but finished a little late for dinner. We sat down to a one-o'clock meal instead of a twelve-o'clock meal.

I mentioned before that we sometimes cut feed for the public. At first, Ima went along to drive the car. But later on, I build an iron "basket" at the back bumper of the car to carry the front wheels of the tractor. Then I could drive the car and trail the tractor and the binder, and Ima could stay home. One patch of feed was 50 miles away in Kent County. Where the road was so sandy that the car couldn't pull the tractor and binder, I would crank the tractor motor and let the tractor push, with no driver on it. And we learned that low air pressure in the auto tires would allow it to go most anywhere in sand. We parked that Buick on top of nearly every sand hill in Carriker's big sand field.

When the binder needed a repair job underneath, we threw a chain over the top of the binder and hooked one end to the frame and the other end to the tractor. Just a little pull with the tractor would roll the binder over for easy access to the underside.

By the end of World War II, our old coal oil cookstove was pretty well rusted out and was looking like a reject from a junk heap. Ima was looking forward to something better. In fact, she knew exactly what that something was, a new butane range. She and I went to Stamford one day to inquire as to whether we would be able to get a butane tank and how much it might cost. We got this information from the appliance dealer. He could sell us the butane and tank, but we might have to wait a year for a permit to buy a stove. He told us we might go to the ration board and find out. Now, I knew we couldn't get a permit from the Stamford board, because that was in Jones County and we lived in Fisher County.

The ration board was only a short distance away, so I went over to ask a question or two. But the woman in charge ignored my questions and, very undiplomatically, ordered me to, "Sit over at that table and fill out this form."

I filled out the form and presented it to the not-so-friendly woman. She looked it over, mumbled a few words, which I couldn't understand, placed another paper before me and said, "Sign here."

I still wondered how long I might have to wait for the lady to answer a simple question or two but by this time I was afraid to ask. I sure didn't want to make her mad, she might never answer my questions. So, when she told me to sign, I lost no time in signing the paper. I didn't know what I was signing and I didn't much care. I only hoped that she would answer my questions when I got through signing all the forms she kept handing me.

When I finally got through signing all the papers and gave them back to her, she still wouldn't talk to me, but she gave me a certificate which would allow an appliance dealer to sell me a butane cook stove without either of us being subject to confinement in a Federal Penal Institution.

I went back and showed the certificate to the appliance dealer, and he was really surprised as he asked, "How did you get that? I have customers who have been waiting a year for one and are still waiting. Some of them would be glad to pay you $100 for it."

I told him I just filled out some papers, and the nice lady gave it to me.

There was no need to lie in filling out the forms. I told the truth all the way. One question I had to answer was, "Where do you live?"

My answer was, "On a farm near Hamlin."

If it had asked, "In which county do you live?" I would still be waiting for the certificate. The lady and Hamlin were both in Jones County. I lived in Fisher County.