Uncle Boog called my Daddy, Donnie, because he was his brother, but you would have to study awful hard to figure out how those two sheep came from the same flock. My daddy was a hardworking soul, and he was bound and determined that I grow up to be just as dedicated to a life of labor as he was. You see, he truly believed that it was only through hard work that a poor man could ever get ahead in life. He didn’t frown on learning. No, he thought education was necessary, but only so far as it provided another advantage to your hard work. So, school came first and then work. As far back as I can remember, I spent my mornings and evenings getting in firewood, taking care of various farm animals, and doing yard or garden work. Days I wasn’t in school, I cut firewood, burned brush, worked on one of the many junk cars sitting on blocks under trees in the yard with the hoods leaned up against their rusty sides and their engines hanging from the low limbs. Pretty much whatever Daddy was doing, I was alongside of him, doing my best to keep up. Few grown men could keep up with my daddy when it came to working, so, sometimes, I felt like I was in his way, but I never said anything to him or asked him about it because he never seemed to mind me being in his way so long as I was busy doing something. I suppose that is one way that Daddy and Uncle Boog were alike. They both liked to have me around. I don’t know why, but whatcha gonna do?
Yes, sir, Daddy was determined to work himself into being ahead. Ahead of what or to where, I never did figure out, but I do know this. If work was what it took to get ahead, Uncle Boog was never, ever going to get there. He was one of those fellers who was always around work who never seemed to be doing any of it. He could get chicken-catching and hay-hauling jobs all summer long, but the crews he got together did all the labor, and he never seemed to get out of his truck.
One time, he drove a semi pulling a flatbed trailer out to our farm so that we could load it with the common brown fieldstone found all over our property that construction people in Memphis were paying $80 a ton for right off the truck, not even stacked in pallets. Daddy, my brothers, and I loaded that whole semi-trailer to the top of the sideboards in one week, but I don’t recall that Uncle Boog ever picked up a rock. He did bring a check to Daddy two weeks after the semi took off loaded with our field rock, but I think Daddy told him that we wouldn’t be able to load the trailer again or something like that because Uncle Boog never brought it back. Then, the two of them didn’t talk for a long time. I think there was some disagreement about shares and who deserved to benefit the most. I don’t know.
Another time, Daddy and I started helping Uncle Boog cut firewood for a guy who had woodstoves in his chicken houses. That job was sawing, splitting, and stacking firewood from sunup to sundown as much as we wanted. It was nice not having to handle it twice, not loading it on the truck and unloading it somewhere else. It made it seem like only about half a job, maybe three quarters, but, even half was hard work, and Uncle Boog only hung around in the woods with us the first day that we started that woodcutting job until around noon, and then he took off in his big Ford truck without saying a word to me or Daddy. Daddy never said anything neither except, “He’s probably goin’ off to see Charlotte.” That’s all he said. Daddy understood Uncle Boog’s relationship with work pretty well, maybe even better than I came to know it, but I don’t think that anyone ever understood Uncle Boog’s relationship with Charlotte Perkins-Bugler, or, as I call her, “Aunt Charlotte.”
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