other needs of our family.
My daydreaming was interrupted when Fred said, “Hey, close the window and get to bed. We got to get up early tomorrow morning and go to church. They’re introducing a new preacher and we’ll probably be stuck in there till the cows come home.”
Our last preacher had lost his position for drinking on the job. We had heard he was over in Mississippi, had himself a new church, and was dealing with his demons quite well.
I closed the window and slid between the sheets and pulled a quilt up over me. It wasn’t long before my brothers began dueling like two bull frogs with their snoring.
I pulled the covers up over my head and fell into a dream world where trees were never cut down and where your daddy never had to go off to some island we had never heard of.
Some time during the night it got colder, and I pulled an extra quilt up over myself and went back to sleep wondering what the morrow would bring, other than having to go to church.
I liked the new preacher right off. When we walked through the front door of the Center Point Road Baptist Church, he grinned, tousled my hair, and gave me an assuring wink.
Once he got started preaching, I was happy to see he didn’t rant and rave like the old preacher. He didn’t stomp around, point fingers, yell amens, or work up to a fever pitch.
His name was Brother Earnest Hillsboro and he said he had fought over in Germany during the great war we were attempting to recover from.
I don’t think he liked war too much because he talked about it a lot while he preached and he concluded his sermon by saying, “War is always about young men fighting and dying while old men talk and plan. Perhaps one day if the young men could withstand the enticement rendered by the rhetoric and reject the call to arms, no one would die, no one would have to grieve over lost loved ones, and the horror of war would cease to be.
“However,” he continued, “young men believe they are immortal and old men can’t stop talking, so the wars go on while the children, the women, and the innocent suffer its consequences.”
The church was so quiet you could have heard a gnat’s wings buzzing.
Fred and I usually played some subtle game to pass the time in church, but when I glanced his way, I saw that he, too, was absorbed with what the new preacher was saying.
Brother Hillsboro took a deep breath and continued, “Yet when evil raises its ugly head, who can defend us better than the strong young men, and who can plan better than the wise old men who have fought and survived wars themselves when they were young men?”
Everyone in the congregation sat frozen in place waiting for the preacher to answer his own question.
“The answer eludes us. We can only hope and pray the young men stay strong and brave, and that the old men are wise and resourceful. The truth is, there is a far better King than anyone leading an earthly army. All we poor mortals can do is pray, have faith, and praise Him.”
The new preacher was a big hit. After he had dismissed the service, I noticed that all the adults gathered around him outside the church, shaking his hand and telling him how much they had enjoyed his sermon.
Fred and I sat on the running board of Uncle Curvin’s old pickup truck watching everyone mill around in their Sunday finest.
“I think everybody likes the new preacher,” I said.
“Yeah,” Fred replied. “He’ll be eating free fried chicken dinners for a month of Sundays.”
Uncle Curvin took us all home, and Fred disappeared shortly after that. He didn’t tell me where he was going, but he said to meet him out by the stump later.
I had just about forgotten his request, but I was out at the stump digging around with my hairpin attempting to get a speck of meat out of a hickory nut when I heard the ruckus.
It wasn’t like anything I had heard before either. It was coming from the thick woods toward the trail which led through them to Friendship Road, and it was a combination of sounds. At first I thought it was a wild pig because of the grunting, scraping, grinding, and rustling racket.
Little chill willies jumped up all over me, but I forced myself to venture into the edge of the woods to investigate. When I saw what it was, I just stood there, my feet frozen to the ground.
Chapter Two
It was my brother dragging a long piece of lumber through the woods, a two-by-six pine board!
“Well, don’t just stand there gawking,” he said. “Come help me. This thing is mighty heavy, and I got splinters in my hands from dragging it.”
“Where did you get that thing?” I asked.
“Found it about half buried back behind Miss Lena’s Store where the sawmill used to be.”
“How long do you ’spect it is?”
“I stepped it off and it’s about twenty-four feet.”
“What you planning on doing with it?”
“We gonna put it on that stump and make us a spinning jenny.”
“I never heard tell of such a thing. What’s a spinning jenny?”
“I’ll tell you later. Right now I need you to grab a holt and help me drag this thing the rest of the way to the stump”
By the time we got to the stump, I was marveling at the feat my brother had accomplished by dragging that big board all the way from where the sawmill used to be. But he was almost three years older than me, and real big and strong for his age.
“What now?” I asked.
“You pick up the other end while I pick up this end and let’s lay it across the stump so the same length of board hangs off each side of it.”
After we did that my brother walked a circle around the stump and the board studying it all the while.
“So what’s it supposed to do?”
“Can’t you see? We got to drill a hole in the very center of that board and attach it to the stump so it will spin around without it coming off.”
“How we gonna do that?”
“I ain’t figured that out yet. You don’t do nothing but ask questions; why can’t you come up with some answers?”
I thought about it for a little while and it came to me. “After we drill a hole in the center of the board, we have to drill a hole in the center of the stump, drive an iron bar or something into that hole, then just drop the board on it so the iron bar goes through the hole in the board.”
“Hey! That’ll work, but where we gonna get an iron bar?”
We had an old Radio Flyer wagon that we had worn the wheels off pulling it through the woods and fields
