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.