Growing Up Southern: January 5, 2018

My father augmented the income from our little country grocery in several ways. One that involved me was the sale of firewood. I’ve thought about that many a time during this spell of cold weather.

Mostly, it involved slab wood, which is the outer portions left over at the sawmill when they square the logs. I don’t know whether he paid anything for it or not. If he did, it wasn’t much, for the slabs were generally considered waste. He hired men to pick the wood up at the mill and haul it to a vacant lot beside our store. There he had a hand-made saw rig that would cut the slabs into pieces for burning in stoves. They were maybe a little over a foot long. I never knew exactly.

Sometimes, in the slow part of the afternoon, he would saw the wood himself. He rigged a monster bell on the side of the store from which he could hear the phone ring. This was back in time when the phone would ring until someone answered it or the caller became gave up. There was no answering machine to interrupt after two rings. He would saw until the phone rang or a customer showed up. Things were different back then.

When business was brisk, though, as cold weather approached, teamwork kicked in. One man would hand over a slab, one would saw it, and one would pitch the pieces into a pile. That’s where I came in.

He would sell the wood to folks who still heated their homes, and cooked, with wood-burning stoves. They were not the richest folks around by any stretch of the imagination. He sold it by the “rounded” pickup truck load. As a teenager, I delivered it. It was one of my early introductions to real poverty. Sometimes I would arrive, in frigid weather, to meet shabbily-dressed children waiting to rush the first pieces into their homes.

One of my favorite customers was a lady of indeterminate age who lived alone in the east side of town, an area inhabited mostly by “railroad workers.” She lived in a small, but well-maintained, shack just across the levee from the Arkansas River. She would meet me and supervise the unloading. She directed me in her best broken English, her long dress, partially covered by an apron, brushing the ground as she walked. I remember that she always clapped her hands and smiled when the last piece fell on the pile.

You would surely forgive me if I stretched the definition of “rounded load” for some customers. And I'm sure that there are still unpaid bills my father never collected for my deliveries. Business sometimes involved more than perpetually-increasing profits back in those days.

I never knew how these folks supported themselves. Under FDR's New Deal, some measures were passed to provide a measure of succor for the poorest of those among us. It couldn’t have been much. While home from college one winter in the late 1960s, I saw a piece in our hometown newspaper about a woman who lived on $300 a year. I’m not sure if it was true or not. If it was, shame on our species.

Probably, the only income for many in those days was from the government. I’m sure that, even then, there were those who considered them, including my “East-side Lady, as “takers,” and resented the taxes paid to assist them. These days, there are those who spend time concocting laws against them from, as Alistair Cook put it, “… a warm place on a full stomach.”

At least back then we didn’t demand that we be allowed to drug test the poor, or even those poor in spirit, as a condition for our Galilean-ordained love.