My brother, Harold, was born in 1931. He was Dad's helper when
Dad was in his prime, and he says Dad was much a man. Afraid of
nothing, or nobody. When the well at the barn went dry, the mules and
other stock needed water. Dad climbed to the bottom of the well on a
rope. He lit a stick of TNT, climbed back out. BOOM! We now had
water. Once a mare with a colt were in the barn lot with the mules.
Mules don't like colts. The mules hemmed the colt up by that well,
and the colt jumped into the well to get away from them. Harold saw
Dad lasso the colt's leg, and he pulled it out. By himself. Later,
the mules caught the colt again, kicked it in the head, and killed
it.
Dad and Uncle Arthur had earlier gone in together and bought
some land in the Rover "Slashes," then Nimrod Dam was
built, and the government took the "Slashes" and other rich
crop land. The drought persisted. Soon it became hard to feed a
family. Years later, Dad showed me how to build quail traps and
rabbit gums, and described little tricks for catching fish when the
need is great. Those tricks stay within the family. I still use one
occasionally. He told me, "If a person saw a rabbit cross the
road, chased by less that two people, we knew times were getting
better." After the rains returned, I never again knew of a
Gillum eating a wild rabbit. Memories of bad experiences with rabbit
fever during the bad times lasted a lifetime. Much had been lost to
the Gillum farm, under Dad's watch, through no fault of his own.
Dad's solution to the situation was, just work harder and longer. The
depression mindset never left my dad as long as he lived. Never buy
food that we can grow, or reap from the forest. Buy flour, salt,
sugar. That will about do it. Borrow money as a last resort. Store
up extra food every year, the rains can go at any time. Always work
as hard as we can, every day, except Sunday.
A large building that was constructed earlier by John Wesley and
his boys for storing food they produced, for long periods of time,
was perfect for Dad's needs now. It was finished around1920. Dad put
a German coin in each concrete step leading down into the cellar. He
brought those coins back from WWI. Had it not been for the two headed monster, that building would probably have soon become obsolete, and
the Gillums would most likely have bought more and more of their
food, like most people of the time. But with these facilities in
hand, I think Dad just went back to what he knew worked in his
boyhood during the good times, and we stayed there. Grow and store
your own food. Living like the 1920's in the 1940's and 50's.
Everything considered, it was a good life. Everything, except for the
fact that we worked our butts off. All my siblings, and I mean every
last one, as they graduated from high school, found themselves
spreading wing and moving on
to the rest of their lives, far from that farm. This
large building had several different compartments, each perfectly
suited for its purpose. A smoke house was always filled with three
hogs we butchered each fall. Very little was wasted. The hogs
produced large tins of lard, lye soap, sausage, mince meat and head
cheese. The well cleansed intestines were even used for storing
sausage. Everything was used but the squeal. An insulated potato
house held hundreds of pounds of potatoes, with lime on them to
prevent rotting. Those potatoes had six inch sprouts on them by the
time we ate the last one in the spring. The woods were searched for
fresh poke weed, "pokesalit'," in the very early spring.
Mom later grew it in her garden. The cellar underneath held hundreds
of quarts of canned food put up by my mother as she labored over that
hot wood stove each summer. Sometimes close to eight hundred quarts
per year. Shelves above the cellar held many gallon cans of sorghum
molasses. The house was underpinned, and piles of sweet potatoes were
stored there. The barn held tow sacks full of peanuts.
All this, of
course, was done in the spare time, working around the really big
jobs of putting up enough hay and corn for the livestock. Plus,
working the money crop, mostly cotton. That money crop began to play
out on that overworked land, and a cotton gin became hard to find,
about the time I was born. I remember riding a load of cotton to the
gin only once. I must have been around two. In my memory, it seems
that gin just sucked my cap right off my head, but I don't believe
Dad would ever have let that happen. Power of suggestion, maybe. I
have dim memories of a man kidding with me, and he must have said
something to that effect. Cattle became, more and more, the main
money source as the cotton crop diminished.
Two milk cows
not only produced plenty of milk, but cream, butter, and cottage
cheese. During dry years, bitter weeds were about all that was left
for those cows to eat. That milk was bitter. A yard full of chickens,
usually ordered from Sears and Roebuck, or produced by our own
"settin' hens," produced plenty of eggs, and mom was a
master of wringing the necks (I remember seeing three or four
headless, bleeding chickens flopping about the yard at one time) and
producing a great Sunday change of pace meal, fried chicken. One just
never knew when the preacher would be dropping in for Sunday dinner,
and she was always prepared.
My older
brother, Harold, was at first the family wild meat provider. Fish and
squirrel, mostly. The deer had pretty well been killed and eaten
around Wing by then. I took over that job at a very early age. Harold
went off to college when I was about four, and although Dad was
usually far too busy working to teach me how to hunt and fish, Harold
helped me some. Dad gave me time and the freedom to wander the hills,
bottoms, and the river. I soon figured it out on my own. Never again
was Dad's family to be stalked by hunger, as when the two headed
monster prowled the land.
This was the world, and the mindset, that I was born into in
1944. The shadow of that monster was ever present, hovering over me,
until the day I also found myself spreading wing and
leaving the farm, in 1962.
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