Bootlegger's Other Daughter

Living in a Wagon Shed

L iving in a W agon S hed – for a year or so after we had moved from Arbala, we lived on the land at Seymore in the old “dog run house,” called this because it had a long, narrow open hallway through its center with two rooms on either side. It had a tin roof and uneven board floors. It was old and freezing cold in the winter, and it looked as if it were about to fall down. It had no screens on the windows, just chicken wire covering them. In the summer, when we needed to raise the windows in order to catch a breeze, houseflies became a problem. During the summer of 1938, Daddy was able to borrow almost one thousand dollars to build a house using the land as collateral, thanks to a federal agency that had begun to insure loans for home building. He hired his brother, Azz, and his nephew, Allen, as carpenters. They could build the house for that amount of money, they said, only if we tore down the old house and used the heavy oak sills, most of which were still solid, and any other good lumber they could salvage from it. As it turned out, the inside walls were made of long, smooth pine and were also usable to “box” the new house. We had to have a temporary place to live while the old house was being torn down, so we moved across the road to the wagon shed. It was late summer. We hitched Old Kate, the mule, to a slide piled high with our household goods, and she pulled them across the road for us. My sister and I liked to walk barefoot in the smooth places that the runners of the slide made on the sandy road. Daddy hired two local men to help him tear down the old house. Lola Pearl and J. T. had the job of carrying off the old wooden roof shingles. My job was to stay out of the way. My brother and sister carried the shingles the shortest distance they could to dump them, just out of Daddy’s line of vision. A drenching rain soon made the dumped shingles wet and smelly, and Daddy made Lola Pearl and J. T. move them again—this time far away from the house site. The wagon shed, our temporary home, was built like a small barn except that it had no sides, and of course, it had no floors. The middle part was wide enough that the wagon could be driven under it for protection from rain. My brother, sister, and I soon discovered a narrow ladder built into one side of the shed. What fun to go “upstairs” to look at all the old stuff stored there from long ago. We found oxbows , hand sickles, shoe lasts, and grindstones: all stored up there on loose boards. Fortunately for us, before one of us came crashing through to the ground, Mama saw us, ordered us down, and declared the “upstairs” off-limits. Mama’s “new kitchen” was a narrow shed with a dirt floor on the south side of the wagon shed. It had no sides, but a big cedar tree kept some of the sun and wind from coming in on her when she was preparing meals on her new stove, a borrowed kerosene beauty. We had used a wood-burning cookstove in the old house across the road, but Daddy thought that stove would be too dangerous to use in the wagon shed. The kerosene (coal oil, we called it) cost five cents a gallon . Mama cooked not only for her family that summer, but for all the workers involved in building the new house. Daddy bought bacon so that she would have more to offer the workers at mealtime. That summer Mama had planted a nice garden filled with peas, okra, beans, squash, tomatoes, and turnip greens. All morning she gathered vegetables, washed them carefully (particularly the turnip greens, which she washed leaf by leaf several times to make certain there was no residue of sand left clinging to the underside of a leaf), and then cooked until noon. The food she had ready went into a warming oven over the stove. We kids were assigned the job of keepL iving in a W agon S hed 65 ing the flies away from the things...