“I ain’t getting back on that thing,” I told him.
“Aw, come on,” he implored. “What it needs is something on the board, kind of like handle bars on a bicycle, for you to hang on to.”
“I don’t know—that thing was flying!”
“I know it was. But I’m gonna nail a strip of wood on each end of the board so you can hang on with both hands, and I promise we’ll go easy until we get the hang of it.”
It didn’t take us long to find two strips of hickory, strong and straight, from the woodpile. In the shed we took our father’s hammer and pulled four rusty, but serviceable, nails from a board on the shed’s exterior.
Once again, I held the board steady while my brother did his work. He drove two nails through each of the hickory strips and into the board, leaving room to sit on the end and hold on with both hands. I held the board up while he clinched the points of the nails underneath; then we stood back and surveyed our work.
Suddenly Fred stepped forward, put both hands on one end of the board, and said, “Stand back. Let’s see how fast it’ll go with no one on it.” Then he slung it as hard as he could.
That board took off like an electric fan blade. I leaped back in alarm as it whipped around going, “whoosh-whoosh-whoosh.”
It finally stopped and we stood there in awe. “It went around twelve times,” I said. “I counted them!”
“Now that’s a spinning jenny,” Fred said, all puffed up with pride. “Let’s give it another try.”
“Are you plain crazy? I’m not getting back on that thing. Next time it’ll probably sling me way off yonder into the woods.”
“All right, I’ll tell you what, let’s just get on it while it’s sitting still, push it along real easy with our feet and kind of get the feel of it. You’ll try that, won’t you?”
“Yeah, I suppose I’ll try it like that.”
We each headed toward opposite ends of the board. “Remember the rules now,” Fred instructed. “We both get on and off at the same time.”
When we were seated and had firm grips on the handles, Fred said, “This feels a lot better with something to hold on to, don’t it?”
I had to admit he was correct. “Uh-huh,” I nervously replied.
We used our toes and the balls of our feet to get it moving, and I was amazed at the ease with which the board moved around its axis on the stump.
After a few turns, Fred said, “What do you think? You want to try it with a running start again?”
I did feel much better about the thing now that I had something to hold on to, so I agreed to give it another go.
We were both running hard and fast when Fred shouted out the signal to get on board. As soon as we jumped on, the spinning jenny seemed to have a power source of its own as it whipped us around the stump. I hung on for dear life and felt as if I would be lifted off the board and laid straight out in the air and slung off out into a nearby tree top if I dared let go of the handle.
When the jenny finally slowed to a stop, we dizzily stumbled off the board and collapsed breathlessly onto the ground.
Fred was the first to speak. Between heaving breaths, he said, “That was great! I can’t believe how fast it went! Did you count the times we went around?”
“No, I was too busy trying to hold on. But I guess at least fifteen.”
Fred sat up and yelled out to the world, “We got us a spinning jenny!” Then he turned to me and said, “You ready to go again?”
“Shoot yeah, let’s see if we can get it going faster this time.”
The spinning jenny turned out to be the best thing my brother had built or invented so far. And for a while it was the number one thing on our list to do when we got home from school and on every opportunity we had on weekends. But then it turned into a nightmare.
Chapter Three
The word got out about the spinning jenny and it wasn’t long before our cousins, our friends, and their cousins were all coming in droves.
We had discovered that if two riders got on, and a third person, preferably a strong and fast one, pushed the board around as hard as they could and jumped clean at the last second, then the spinning jenny would sling all but the most tenacious off the board, making it a contest to see who could stay on and who would be slung off.
It was used so much a round trench was worn in the ground underneath the ends of the board.
Soon there were crushed toes, skinned elbows and knees, heads conked when someone fell off instead of being slung off, and fights over who was going to ride it next.
Fred decided we were going to initiate a charge to ride, but before he could implement his toll, one of our cousins broke an arm.
Her parents, along with others, descended upon our momma with numerous complaints until one Saturday afternoon she marched out to the spinning jenny with my brother Ned and had him pull the plank off the stump and deposit it under the house.
And that was the end of the spinning jenny, which was all right with me. The thrill of it had diminished, and the only thing I regretted was that my friend Poudlum Robinson hadn’t had an opportunity to ride it.
I hadn’t seen Poudlum for a while. That was because he was black and we didn’t go to the same school. Since the warmth of summer had faded, I had only seen him a couple of times on weekends over at Miss Lena’s Store.
The store was halfway between his house and mine, so we met there sometimes and had us both a peach-flavored Nehi soda and an ice cream sandwich. We used the money we had secretly stashed away back during the summer. It was the reward we had given ourselves after discovering an illegal whiskey-making operation and the bootlegger’s cache of cash in a hollow tree way back in the woods on Satilfa Creek.
Thanksgiving weekend was coming up and Poudlum and I had planned weeks ago to spend it camping out at a fishing hole on that same creek.
My momma wasn’t too keen on the idea, but when I came home from school with the first prize for the Thanksgiving Poem, she relented and gave her permission.
My fifth-grade teacher had assigned everyone to write a poem about what they were thankful for. We had to turn them in on Tuesday, and on Wednesday afternoon before we were dismissed for the long weekend, she announced she was going to recite the winning poem.
I just about fell out of my seat when she began reading my Thanksgiving Poem:
I’m thankful for dressing and gravy
And the boys serving in the Navy
I’m thankful for turkey and ham
And
