Texas State Historical Association - My Texas

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Summertime on the Farm

There was an extra house on the back part of our farm near Ladonia, Texas, where hired help lived during busy seasons. Dad would drive to Sulphur Springs to get the family who had helped us for several years. In the spring, when weeds had to be hoed out of the cotton, Dad would put my sister Gwen out with the hired hands to "lead off," because she would walk fast and cut weeds neatly. The hired hands couldn't let this little skinny red-haired girl show them up, so they worked hard to keep up with her.

In the fall when the cotton was ready to be picked, Dad would put me with the hired hands. We usually picked about the same speed, but when we weighed our cotton and emptied the sacks, mine was as white as driven snow. The hired hands' sacks had unopened bolls, leaves, and even dirt in them. There was such an obvious difference in the contents of those first sacks. After that the others tried to pick their cotton as clean as mine was. Since we were paid for the number of pounds we picked, the reason for the heavy bolls, etc., was obvious.

In 1937 my brother Don was born. We had a family of hired hands that lived upstairs in our house. One young couple had a baby girl about nine months old named Violene. They didn't have a rocker, so they rocked the baby in a straight-backed chair. Since there were no rugs, the bumps of the chair legs hitting the floor were very loud to us below. That summer was extremely hot, and--of course--we had no air conditioning. Violene was sick and cried a lot. While her mother rocked her, in a sing-song voice she would say, "Violene, honey, don't cry." They finally took her to the doctor, but several days later she didn't seem to be getting any better. Mother asked if they were following the doctor's instructions. Violene's young mother replied, "Oh, yes! The doctor told us to keep her on a soft diet, so we've been feeding her bananas and bologna--that's the softest foods we could think of!" Cotton-picking season was over shortly after that, and they went back to their home. Poor Violene! I wonder if she survived.

Sometimes in those summer months our beds would be so hot at bed time that they were like lying on a bed of hot coals. It would be well after midnight before they cooled enough for sleep. Things were quite different then. We never locked our doors, and never had any fear of anyone breaking in to steal anything. With no fear of intruders, we started taking our mattresses out on the front porch. One morning about 3:00 a.m. Dad was sleeping closest to the edge of the porch and waked to find a dog licking his face. Now, it had to be a BIG dog to lick Dad's face at four feet above ground level. Immediately awake, Dad yelled for us to get in the house! From the tone of his voice, we knew something was terribly wrong, so it didn't take us long to obey. Dad grabbed his .22 rifle and climbed up in the swing, looking this way and that, but he didn't see the dog again. But suffice it to say we quickly moved our mattresses into the house. You know we didn't mind going to bed in those hot beds at night for several weeks. By that time the weather was cooling off anyway.

That same summer we three kids were playing in the yard and heard Dad yelling loudly. We looked up toward the field where he was using a riding planter to plant a late summer crop. He was standing up on the planter, whipping the mules with the reins to make them run faster. When Dad got close enough for us to hear him, he was yelling for us to get in the house. Mother got us into the house quickly, as Dad came tearing into the yard at breakneck speed. He had seen a strange dog running across the field with "slobbers" hanging from its mouth. There had been a lot of rabid dogs that summer, and Dad was trying to get to the house to protect his kids. A bite by a rabid dog was almost a sure death sentence.

A week or so later cousin Bill Rankin came to spend a week with us. He was about Gwen's age, ten or eleven, and thought a week in the country would be an adventure. His family lived in Dallas, had running water, an inside bathroom, and even an electric oscillating fan, so coming to our house was going to be "roughing" it. (We considered them to be our "rich" relatives, since they had all of those niceties. They even had a set of encyclopedias that intrigued me. I just couldn't imagine how Bill and his older brother Tommy could sit around the house doing nothing when they had that marvelous set of books that they could be perusing. I read them every chance I got.)

We were in the middle of gathering garden produce and canning it, so Bill was kept busy during the day, working and playing, and he was very tired when night came. The moon was full that first night. About midnight he woke us up, screaming, "The Devil's looking in the window at me!" He was terrified. Dad and Mom came running in and discovered that our cow was eating the grass outside our bedroom window, and her head was silhouetted against the bright moonlight. Her horns did indeed give one the suspicion that Satan himself was there. We got Bill calmed down, but he went back home the next day and never came back to visit again.

Lowell McCormack
Gainesville, Texas
Published: November 14, 2005