How to handle a tractor load full of young’ns
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grew up around the restaurant business with my parents and kinfolk owning restaurants in several parts of North Carolina. I honestly believe the reason my parents had children was for the free labor. I can remember peeling potatoes when I wasn’t being punished. I stood on a metal milk crate making milkshakes after Swain County High School football games until the early hours of the morning. My parents’ restaurant was located in the mountains of Bryson City, a small tourist town. On one side of town is Cherokee Indian Reservation and on the other is a community called Natahala, which is a Cherokee Indian word for “land of the noon day sun.” People who visit either fall in love with the area or they never want to return. During the summer months business was hectic at the restaurant. Many days we had sales in the thousands of dollars, and this was during the early 1960s when cheeseburgers were 25 cents and milkshakes were 75 cents. Back then there were no chain restaurants, and my parents’ restaurant was the fast-food place of choice. My parents owned an old house back in a rural community called Ela. My grandmother would come up during the summer and keep the kids: my sister, myself, a couple of cousins and distant kin, or as some would say, “a tractor load full of young’ns.” The old house was built out of aged oak planks and set on stilts that had a definite lean to one side. There was no indoor plumbing, and the only heat was from the woodburning cook stove in the kitchen. We had no air conditioning, but a giant oak and poplar trees gave relief from the summer heat. Our water came from a natural spring out back, and we carried it to the house. One of our other luxuries was the outhouse. Inside, the house had bare walls and linoleum floors. One room in the back had no entrance or windows, and as far as I remember you couldn’t get into the room. My sister and cousins would tell me that was where they put the kids who misbehaved. To this day I still don’t know what was in that room or what it was used for. I must have been a good kid because I never got put in there. In the quiet valley were several acres of land, a horse, cows, a barn and one big garden. The garden produced fresh corn, juicy tomatoes, green beans and the other typical garden stuff. But as a short kid, I always got the chore of picking the cucumbers. Cucumbers grow on the
ground, and snakes love to hide in their leaves. Let’s just say that short, fat boys can run fast because we are more aerodynamically sound! We went unsupervised all day, and our only rule was to be back before dark. Even though the front yard was barren of grass, on most sunny days we used a hoe and tons of imagination to fill it with preBy Howard Black tend roads and make-believe towns. Nearby were trees to climb, creeks to cool off our hot tired feet, and springs filled with delicious mountain water. A community tin cup hung on the tree, and no one ever complained about drinking after someone else did. If we got hungry, we ate blueberries, figs and strawberries that were never washed and always eaten with dirty fingers. As evening set in, we could hear my grandmother yelling loud enough to cover a country mile. We found our way back to find supper and hot baths waiting. Believe it or not, you can wash a tractor load full of young’ns in one tin tub full of water heated from the stove and tempered by the spring out back. After everyone was clean and fed, we would finally settle down to a choice of two black-and-white television stations. My grandmother would faithfully watch “Bonanza” and the “Lawrence Welk Show,” and we kids would watch “The Flintstones.” Whatever other shows there were I can’t remember. Out in the night air we heard the sounds of crickets and hoot owls. The only thing you had to worry about was an occasional thunderstorm or a bad case of the chiggers. Alcohol took care of mosquito bites. Poison oak got calamine lotion. The occasional scrape or cut got Mercurochrome. And if you were acting up or out of sorts, Grandma’s remedy was a good dose of Fletcher’s Castoria. Every time I go to Bryson City I ride up into Ela to see that old house. Someone bought the house years back and fixed it up, adding on to it and growing grass in the front yard. The place just doesn’t seem as large as it used to. But I still wonder about that room on the back side of the house—the one with no windows wind or doors—and I wonder if it is st still there.
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By the grace oof God and constitutionally guaran guaranteed, Howard Black pokes fun at the realities of life, politics an and human insanity. He live lives in Cherryville and can bbe reached by e-mail at how howardblack@birch.net.
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