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First, I built a big house out on the Datil ranch. I planned to raise chickens and turkeys out there.Rachel’s husband had been very sick. He’d been in the hospital in Socorro. After he died, Rachel was at loose ends, so she came in with me on the chicken and turkey business . Once we got this brood business going, we had several hundred turkeys and quite a few chickens. To heat the brooder houses we buried barrels in the ground and ran electric heat through them. The turkeys were getting up to a pretty good size when one morning I woke up to find the whole thing going up in flames. The brooder houses had caught fire from the wiring. I ran out there and threw out all the turkeys I could, and neighbors rushed over and helped. We saved most of the birds. They were contracted to a market inAlbuquerque,so we put them in an old barn that was on the place till Thanksgiving time rolled around. Then we had to kill and pluck and draw every one of them. For a couple of weeks I had all the women from miles around picking pin feathers out of turkeys. I had to come up with some way to freeze them.It was November and getting pretty cold, so we filled the stock tank and tossed them 19 ❙ TURKEY FARMING ❙ 120 ❙ ❙ TURKEY FARMING ❙ in and froze them in the water.Then when it came time,we chipped them out and loaded them in the truck and Rachel took them to Albuquerque and sold them. After the turkey adventure she decided to return to Texarkana because her parents were getting up in years.Rachel had been my gambler and my deer-poaching partner,but back in Texas she got religion through Oral Roberts.She was writing me letters every other day,trying to convert me. But I never put much stock in the churches. My religion was between me and the Man Upstairs.She gave up in about six months, but we’ve always kept in touch. I was alone out there on the turkey ranch when one night after I’d gone to bed a black widow spider fell from a viga and got under the covers and bit me on the leg. It was too late at night to go to the hospital . So I went in my office and wrote a note that said,“If you find me dead, this black widow spider was the killer.” I pinned the spider to the note so people would know what had happened to me. But I woke up alive next morning. My leg swelled up and got a little numb. It was sore for a while. The spider hadn’t solved any problem for me, I was still at loose ends. 121 ...

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