the time I reached the Mill Creek bridge, I was hot, thirsty, and my bare feet were burning from the sun-baked clay road. Off the road, down the bank, and underneath the wooden bridge, I stretched out on a big flat rock at the water’s edge and drank my fill of the clean, cool running water before I sat up and submerged my feet. The taste and feel of the water quenched my entrepreneurial spirit and I decided to quit for the day. I had never gone home with six papers before, but I did have the money Mrs. Blossom had given me.
Mrs. Blossom was the first customer on my route each Saturday morning and she always bought a paper. Her husband ran the sawmill and they lived about a hundred yards from Miss Lena’s store. After pulling the Grit papers out of our mailbox this morning I had inserted them into my bag and walked directly across the road to her house. Once I was on the front porch, I knocked and, as usual, yelled through the screen door, “I got your Grit paper here, Mrs. Blossom.”
To my surprise, rather than appearing at the door with my nickel, she yelled back, “Come on in—I’m back in the kitchen.”
I opened the old squeaky screen door and walked through the living room into the kitchen. To my amazement, she was sitting with great piles of money spread all over the table. There were paper dollar bills and a stack of coins in each pile. It was more money than I could imagine. She noticed the wideness of my eyes and said, “That’s the payroll for the sawmill workers. Did you have breakfast this morning, Ted?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I replied.
“What did you have?”
“A biscuit with fig preserves.”
“Well, I’m sure you have room for a little more,” she said as she pulled out a chair from the table. “Sit down here and eat this fried chicken leg. Mr. Blossom loves fried chicken for breakfast, but he wasn’t too hungry this morning.”
Hungry or not, I would never turn down a piece of fried chicken. Mrs. Blossom chattered away while I was eating. When I finished she handed me a rag to wipe my greasy fingers and mouth, then she placed a stack of envelopes on the table and said, “I have a job for you, Ted. There’s thirteen envelopes there. I want you to stuff each one with a separate stack of money, lick it and seal it, but before you do, take yourself one nickel out of each stack.”
I had wondered why there were thirteen envelopes because as far as I knew only twelve men worked at the sawmill. Now, as I sat on the rock under the Mill Creek bridge counting my money, I also wondered why Mrs. Blossom had been so generous to me. I was to find the answer to both of my questions later that day at the sawmill.
Staring at the neat stacks of pennies, nickels, and dimes next to me on the rock, I realized it was the most money I had ever had. There were fifteen pennies, three dimes, and fourteen nickels—a dollar and fifteen cents. I reached inside my canvas bag and retrieved the return envelope and carefully inserted the forty-five cents I owed for the papers, using the pennies and dimes because they were the smallest and stood a better chance of getting lost if I kept them. Then I carefully inserted my fourteen nickels in the watch pocket of my worn mail-order jeans from Sears and Roebuck. I was having one more drink of the clear, cool water from the creek when I heard a car coming. I quickly sat back up on the rock, tilted my head back and enjoyed the eerie feeling as I watched and listened to the big heavy wooden boards of the bridge move, creak, and rumble when the car crossed over my head. While waiting for the dust to settle I gave my feet one last soaking before leaving my cool sanctuary, knowing that if I didn’t dally I could be back down the road and at the sawmill in about half an hour.
A few minutes later I passed the road which led to my Uncle Curtis’s house. I was tempted to stop, but the lure of the sawmill was too strong. Up the hill and around the bend I passed the Center Point Baptist Church and dreaded that tomorrow morning I would be suffering inside it. It would be extremely hot and the only relief would come from a cardboard fan with a wooden handle like a big Popsicle stick and a picture of Jesus on it. Before the service, the women would congregate in the churchyard and talk about their vegetable gardens, their chickens, the price of sugar and flour, and dozens of other subjects of no interest to me. The men would talk about the price of timber and the crops in the fields. My father never went to church; in fact the only time I ever remember seeing him in that church was years later at his funeral, and of course he wouldn’t have been there then if it had been up to him. Tomorrow morning while I was sitting in there sweating, he would probably be sitting in a cool hollow in the woods hunting wild turkeys.
The service would officially get under way when Addie Brooks, without any sheet music, started playing the old upright piano and everyone stood and began singing, “Shall We Gather At The River.” As soon as the haunting notes of the hymn faded away, the collection plate would be passed and my mother would watch me closely to make sure I put in one of my hard-earned nickels. Then the preacher would start ranting and raving and praying for what seemed like an eternity. I would be praying too—for him to please shut up so I could get out of there and get out back to the pump for a cool drink of water.
But that was tomorrow; today I was heading for the sawmill. Before I got there I passed the cotton field of my Uncle Curvin, Uncle Curtis’s twin brother. The plants were taller than me and turning brown. The hard green bolls were beginning to burst open. In a week or so I would be out there pulling the fluffy white fibers out of their prickly bolls. Uncle Curvin had promised me last year that I would be big enough to pick this year. He paid a penny a pound. I would be out there making a lot of money real soon.
Miss Lena’s store came into view and I slowed to time my prohibited entrance into the sawmill. I passed Mrs. Blossom’s house and the store, looked up and down the road to make sure it was deserted, and darted into the woods. After a short distance I doubled back and came out of the woods in the area where the logs were unloaded from the trucks. There, behind a huge mound of pine logs, I was hidden from view. On the ground in front of me was a peavey, a big wooden lever with a metal point and a hinged metal hook near the end. The men used this tool to handle the logs. I reached down and grasped the big round hickory handle and lifted it off the ground while I contemplated moving one of the great logs. When I felt the full weight of the peavey and studied the jumbled pile of timber, I dismissed the idea, knowing I could get crushed like a bug if the logs started rolling.
Not so with the neat stacks of lumber. I could climb up the back side and peek over the tops toward the road. I tried this on several stacks wishing I could stand on top and see how far I could see, but daring not for fear of being spotted from the road. The stacks were different every week, in size and types of cuts, because trucks came on Mondays to haul the rough-sawn lumber away to another mill where it was planed smooth into a finished product.
After exploring each stack of lumber I entered into the bowels of the beast, past the motor and the conveyor belts, to the great round saw blade which they turned. I climbed down into the pit which housed the part of the saw which was below ground level and stood face to face with it. I reached out and touched the smooth shiny steel and pressed my fingertip against one of the sharp teeth and imagined how the giant blade would look and sound turning at full speed with me standing there next to it. That was enough to get me out of that pit.
Next, I ventured down the long wooden ramp where the slabs were disposed of. These were the irregular parts with bark on them which were cut away from the outer portion of the logs before they were sawn into lumber. The ramp had side rails about chest high to a grown man, and the rail tops were worn smooth as a kitten’s fur from the constant wear of the slabs being laid across them and pushed off the end of the ramp into the fire pit below.
The fire never went out. It blazed high all day and turned into a huge bed of coals at night and on weekends.
I stretched out on my belly, hung my head over the edge of the ramp, gazed down and wondered if the inferno below was anything
