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.