Bumps in the Road Part 3

At one desperate point, while Eddie was about the slow business of dying at Grandma Swain’s, Mettie gratefully moved her family to her brother Albert’s recently acquired farm, miles and miles from town. Red dust fogged up with the rare passing conveyance. In foul weather, the red dirt road was impassable. There was no possibility of the kids attending school since the nearest bus stop was ten miles away where the dirt road joined a hard surface road. School attendance was not mandatory at this time.

Mettie’s focus was on survival. Fortunately, in addition to the farmhouse he and his wife moved into, a battered, unpainted house was available for the poor band. Had Mettie not been in such need, he would have used it as a barn  Again, it was free. They could get milk and butter from Albert’s cows if Mettie helped with the milking. Albert’s wife, Mary, kindly passed along a hen with twelve chicks and young rooster. They could eat from Mary’s garden if she and the girls helped with gardening and canning. Of course they would! They settled in the hovel where wind sailed through the rickety walls and rain poured through the leaky roof. The uncles put the boys to cutting  and splitting wood for shingles, then set them to roofing.  A toilet leaned crazily out back, but the deep well provided cool,clean water.  Of course the rural farm had no utilities, no matter, since Mettie hadn’t funds to pay. Her brothers, Willie and Albert, did what they could to help, from plowing her garden, providing her a pig to fatten and slaughter in the fall. Willie traded a fine sow with a litter of pigs and gifted her bony milk cow.  Fortunately, when the old cow freshened, it was a heifer, ensuring Mettie would have a young cow to replace the old one at her inevitable  This was a Godsend.  A family without a milk cow was in trouble.

When Eddie eventually died in 1937, the four younger children qualified for seventy-four dollars a month Aid to Dependant Children. Mettie was able to move to a better house near town so the little girls could go to school. Mettie had a penchant for moving till the day she died. Daddy said she’d start crying and nothing would satisfy her till she got to move. No doubt, she had mood issues.

The same year the family got on “relief,” her eldest son joined Civilian Conservation Corp for which he was provided clothes, wages, food, and lodging for working on government conservation projects.  He was paid the princely sum of thirty dollars a month, twenty-five of which went directly to his mother.  Three years later, the second son joined.  The boys had never lived dressed or lived so well.  At thirteen, Daddy was six feet tall.  He was able to pass for fifteen, snagging a job on an nearby oil rig as a night watchman. He slipped home most nights to eat  a late supper.  All three boys had given up school long ago to look for work.  At any rate, Daddy said they couldn’t face the taunting of hateful kids over their bedraggled clothes.

My father is boy in front row holding hat

Eddie Swain