At the same time, Papa got involved in trucking and there were times when his services were needed on Sundays as well as during the week. He just simply couldn't get it all done during the week. It became a real emergency when one of his customers had to have his goods hauled on Sunday so that he could begin his work on Monday morning.
We all know that it is perfectly all right to help the scriptural ox out of the ditch on Sunday. And when a trucker helps the ox out on Sunday, and receives good pay for doing it, he soon gets in the habit of wanting to help the ox out every Sunday. It even comes to the point where a man might push the ox into the ditch on Saturday in order to get to help him out on Sunday, for pay of course.
If I wanted to try to justify our working on Sundays, I might mention that it was hard to make ends meet even at that. We lived three years in Hamlin before we gave up the old kerosene lamps and moved up to electric lights. Even then it took some planning. The meter deposit was three dollars and we spent five dollars for a bunch of used insulated wire and light fixtures. It wasn't easy to get eight dollars ahead in just three short years, but we did it. We still didn't have screens on our windows, nor did we have an icebox. I took some scrap lumber and built an icebox just large enough to hold a dime's worth of ice, a pound of butter, and a quart of milk. The ice would last two days. Most of the milk stayed in the milk cooler on the back porch, with damp clothes spread over the containers. It would have cost too much to refrigerate all the milk.
When I was 13 I made the interesting discovery that a flashlight consisted of nothing more than two cells, a bulb, a container for the cells, and some kind of switch. I couldn't afford to buy a flashlight so I made me one. I used a radiator hose to put the cells in, a copper wire for a bulb holder, and I pushed the bulb down against the center post of the cell to switch the light on. I was beginning to learn a little about electricity. This was the beginning of my knowledge of how to wire our house for electric lights. Yes, I did the wiring; we couldn't afford to hire it done.
Shortly after we moved to Hamlin there was another new adventure in our lives. It involved a little detour to Gorman, Texas, to do some road work. You remember the truck that Papa let Frank use to go everywhere and haul whatever people would pay him to haul. Well, by the time we landed in Hamlin, Frank was getting tired of hauling everything for everybody. So Papa inherited one good used truck from one tired-of-trucking boy named Frank. Papa also had a friend named Marvin Hood who was building a paved road near Gorman. I think it was generally understood that Marvin could use some of us if we would come on down to his camp. We needed to work—for pay, that is—so we took the truck and an old Dodge car and went to see Marvin.
Sure enough, Marvin could use us four boys, and Papa could haul supplies in his truck. We lived in a canvas tent in a pasture about a half-mile from the rock quarry from which they were getting rock for the road. Albert became waterboy; Earl was powder monkey, in charge of all blasting. Joel operated a road grader which was pulled by horses. I fired a steam boiler and made steam for a steam drill to drill holes into the earth. And into these holes Earl would put his dynamite and blasting powder, which, when set off by a fuse and blasting cap, excavated the rocks which were crushed and then hauled and placed on the road which Joel had smoothed so perfectly with his little grader. We were doing so many things for Marvin, I wondered how he managed before we got there.
Marvin paid his hands three dollars a day and they paid him one dollar a day to eat at his cook shack. We didn't eat there; we could eat much cheaper at our tent. There were two men cooking for the crew, but they got to drinking so much and cooking so badly that Marvin was losing some of his workers. He had a problem. So Marvin came to Mama and asked her to cook for him. He hired a farm woman to help Mama and together they cooked for the men. And Marvin let our family eat at the cook shack at half price.
As usual Mama wouldn't throw out any food if it could be used in any way. She took the left-over biscuits and made coldbread pudding out of them. At first the men were reluctant to sample the dish. But after getting a taste of it, most of them asked for more—and they called it "make-'em-eat-it."
Sometimes Earl would find a can of powder that had been wet or had sweated in the can and was lumpy. He was told to pile those cans out behind the mule barn and not try to use the lumpy powder. Well now, that pile of 12 or 15 cans of blasting powder, which no one wanted, seemed to me to be an excellent source of fun, as well as research material. So, unbeknowing to all others, I toted a can of the stuff home to our tent one day. Then I decided that Papa might frown on the idea of my having 50 pounds (or maybe it was 25 pounds) of powder about our tent, especially if he found it hidden under his bed, so I thought I had better do a lot of experimenting in as short a time as possible, before anyone else came home. I felt that any one of my brothers would scold me for taking a can of powder home to play with. And I was sure he would not be able nor willing to keep such news to himself. I'd better work fast and let it remain my own little secret. After all, muzzleloading a rifle was child's play as compared to playing with 50 pounds of blasting powder. So I'd better try to get by with this powder as I had gotten away with other secret adventures—all alone. How I longed to share some of my good times with my brothers, but I didn't dare try. Such secrets can only be kept by one person. A partner would be sure to spoil things.
Sometimes a kid's reasoning without certain knowledge can lead to trouble. I reasoned that, since a big stick of wood burns slower and longer than a small stick, a large rick of powder would burn more slowly and thereby afford more pleasure and excitement. I even envisioned me walking along beside the burning powder as it wiggled and twisted here and there, as a snake would crawl across the pasture. I remembered the matches I had stood up in the sand at Grandma's, and how the flame had leaped from match to match until it reached the last one. And that's what I wanted to do with a string of powder—light it at one end and watch the flame slowly travel to the other end. I had plenty of powder so I piled it up into a rick about two inches high and as long as from here to yonder.