by Si Robertson
As soon as we started eating dinner, the front door opened and Maimey came running in. She looked at Momma and growled something I didn’t understand.
“What did she say?” Momma asked us. “I think she just said, ‘Harold is home.’ ”
A couple of minutes later, we heard a car door shut and then Harold walked in through the front door.
My brothers and I were dumbfounded. Nobody said anything as we looked at each other.
“Hey, I’ve been telling you I talk to her all the time,” Momma told us. “And she talks back to me.”
Finally, I believed her.
When Daddy worked as a driller, he was on the graveyard shift and some of his workers would occasionally come to our house before their shift. One night, one of our distant cousins, Wade Childs, was sitting in a dark green chair next to the fireplace. He didn’t know it was Maimey’s bed. Our front door was glass, so we could see through it from top to bottom. Wade was facing the door and saw the knob turning. Since it was nighttime, he couldn’t see Maimey because of her dark coat.
Wade must have thought a ghost was opening the door. His eyes got bigger and bigger, and then Maimey walked through the door. She walked straight toward him and sat in front of the chair. Then she started growling at him. She didn’t bark; it was only a low growl in her throat.
“Merritt!” Wade screamed. “Merritt!”
Mamma walked in from the kitchen and asked him what was wrong.
“I didn’t do anything,” he said.
“Oh, you need to get out of her chair,” Momma told him. “She’s telling you she’s ready to go to bed.”
Wade got out of the chair, and Maimey jumped into it. She sneezed and spun around three times before taking a seat.
Before Maimey started to snore, I swear I heard her say, “Sleep tight and don’t let the bedbugs bite.”
Whenever we went hunting and fishing, Bullet and Maimey were always with us. They were great at retrieving ducks, doves, quails, squirrels, or whatever other game we were hunting. But Maimey had more of a thirst for blood.
Every morning when we went outside to wait for the school bus, Bullet and Maimey would sit and wait with us. Bullet would lie down on the ground, but Maimey would run across the railroad tracks in front of our house and into a big mess of dewberry bushes. She wouldn’t be gone three minutes but always came back with a rabbit in her mouth. She did it every morning, Monday through Friday, without exception. Maimey would come back, lie down, eat the head off the rabbit, and leave the rest. Don’t know why she didn’t eat the body, but that’s what she did. Every day when we came home from school, Momma would tell us to get the rabbit carcass off the front porch. I knew rabbits liked briar patches, but I couldn’t believe how many rabbits were over there!
Bullet was named exactly right, because he was fast. He was like a cheetah chasing antelope running through the woods. Maimey was a bigger dog than Bullet and wasn’t quite as swift. Together, though, they were the dynamic duo and the greatest cat-killing team I have ever seen.
Bullet was adept at getting in front of a cat and keeping its attention while Maimey would sneak up from behind and pounce. She would break its neck before she was ever clawed. Bullet was fast, but he wasn’t as quick as a cat. There were several times he came home covered with cat scratches.
Our friend Tommy McKenzie’s grandmother Mrs. Wilson lived next door to us in Dixie. Purple jasmine grew over the back door of her house. When it bloomed, it was beautiful and you could smell the flowers all the way from our house. Mrs. Wilson also had forty Siamese cats. Now, I’m not much of a cat person, but I have to admit her cats were something to look at. Their coats had different colors, and she spent a lot of time grooming them.
Hey, when I left to join the army at nineteen, Mrs. Wilson had only two cats left! Bullet and Maimey killed nearly every one of them. The lone survivors lived at the top of a big walnut tree in her backyard. The only time we saw those two cats was when we looked up the giant tree. The two cats were always sitting at the tip-top of it. Talk about survivors! Those cats knew that if their paws ever hit the ground, they’d be goners.
Out of Mrs. Wilson’s forty cats, Maimey and Bullet killed thirty-eight of them! Mrs. Wilson would walk over and say to Momma, “I don’t know what’s happening to my cats. They keep disappearing.”
Fortunately for us, Mrs. Wilson was about half deaf. Whenever anyone asked her about living next door to us, she always said, “Oh, they’re the sweetest boys. They never make any noise. They’re the quietest people you’d ever want to be around.”
Hey, you know what they say: See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil!
“Once I reached down to pet a little dog and when I did, it was a five-pound squirrel.”
Redneck Pets
WHEN WE LIVED IN the log cabin near Vivian, Louisiana, there were two big hickory trees in the front yard. If you’ve cracked open a hickory nut before, you know there is a green nut inside. Once you crack the thick shell or it pops off once it’s ripe, the nut is as hard as a brick! My brothers and I had wars throwing those things at each other, and they really hurt! If you were ever hit in the head, it left a goose egg on your noggin!
Until we were old enough to get a BB gun or some kind of firearm, we made slingshots and used the hickory nuts as ammunition. We’d take the inner tubes out of old tires and cut strips from them to use as slings. We found trees with forked limbs and tied the slings to the limbs with string. If you wanted a six-gun, you used a limb that was about six inches long. If you wanted to be like Wyatt Earp and have a long barrel, you made it twelve inches. Then we took the leather tongues out of old shoes and put the rocks and hickory nuts inside—for easy storage and carrying, ready to fire from the slings.
We killed plenty of game with the slingshots, from squirrels to rabbits to blackbirds. We also made our own bows and arrows before we had rifles. We used thick reeds as our arrows, sharpened them, and then tied broad rocks to them for arrowheads. Anything that walked or flew was fair game! Momma raised chickens at our house, and they were always running around our backyard. One day, Phil and I were messing around in the yard with our bows and arrows when one of Momma’s chickens ran across the yard in front of us. Bad move, Jack! When the chicken made its way back to the other side, Phil fired an arrow and missed. On the second try, he hit the chicken right in the head.
Phil and I grabbed the dead chicken and went down to the creek that ran behind our house. We plucked the chicken, built a fire, and roasted it for lunch. We knew we had to eat the evidence before Momma found out! We never told Momma we killed her chicken, but she knew one of them was missing. She figured a fox or stray dog killed it.
Chickens weren’t our only casualties. We used to hunt squirrels with our slingshots and bows and arrows—they’ve always been my favorite game to eat. But one time we found a baby squirrel that was still in its nest. Now, even I have a soft spot in my heart when it comes to young critters. We brought the baby squirrel home and fed it with an eyedropper. Somehow, the squirrel survived and became one of our pets. It crawled up on our shoulders and nibbled our ears every once in a while. Momma even allowed it to stay inside and roam around the house.
We managed to keep the squirrel until the day Momma bought a new sofa for our living room. After we moved the sofa into our house, the squirrel crawled underneath it and wouldn’t come out. It ate a hole through one of the boards and built a nest under the cushions. Every time someone sat on the sofa, a spring popped him in the butt because the squirrel had pulled out all of the cotton. I’d never seen my momma so mad! Needless to say, the squirrel was banished from the house and never allowed to come back.
Being rednecks, squirrels weren’t our only exotic pets. One day, Momma sent Phil and me to the store to buy a gallon of milk. On our way, we saw a flock of pigeons sitting on the roof of a cotton gin. We looked around and found a handful of flat rocks—we called them sailers—to hurl at the pigeons. Sailers are the best rocks to throw; if yo
u throw them on water, they’re really good skippers.
“You throw first,” I told Phil.
“Nah, you throw first,” he said. “When you throw, they’re going to jump up and then I’m going to get me one.”
I wound my arm back like Nolan Ryan and fired a rock at the pigeons. I knew I was fixing to nail one because I’d found the perfect sailer. As the rock made its way toward the cotton gin, I could see the pigeons getting anxious and fidgety. As the rock started its descent, they got really nervous. It was like artillery falling from the sky. You know what they say about nuclear war: all pigeons are cremated equally! Just about the time the pigeons jumped up off the roof, my rock nailed one of them.
Phil and I ran to the cotton gin and picked the pigeon up off the ground. My rock had hit him squarely in the head and somehow twisted his head around. The pigeon was looking straight back! The rock snapped his neck, but he wasn’t dead!
We had a pigeon coop at our house, so Phil and I carried the bird home, along with the gallon of milk. I put the pigeon in the coop, where it always sat on the top perch, his chest facing our house and his head looking behind him. I named the pigeon Eagle. Every morning, I went to the coop to pet Eagle and feed him. When I took Eagle out of the coop and threw him into the air to fly, he flew straight into the ground and rolled over. How can you fly if you can’t see where you’re going? Phil and I used to throw him up into the air just for the fun of watching poor Eagle.
Now, we found Eagle before Bullet and Maimey, our family dogs, ravaged Mrs. Wilson’s prized collection of Siamese cats. One morning I woke up and went to the coop to feed our pigeons. As I walked down the hill, I was immediately struck with terror to see there had been a mass murder. There were blood and feathers everywhere in our pigeon coop! There were half-eaten carcasses lying on the floor.
I set out to solve the crime. It’s obvious that you can’t spell “NCIS” without “Si”—and that’s me! After combing through the evidence, I concluded the crime was a cat-astrophe! Out of twenty-five pigeons, Mrs. Wilson’s cats had killed every one—except Eagle!
Eagle was still sitting on the top perch, his chest facing me and his head looking the other way. The only thing I could figure was that the cats were superstitious and were afraid to kill him.
Or maybe Eagle had eyes in the back of his head and managed to fend for himself!
“When you were born and they were handing out brains, you thought they said ‘trains.’ ”
Book Report
AFTER JIMMY FRANK AND Harold left for college, Tommy, Phil, and me went everywhere together. We were inseparable. I’m not sure Tommy and Phil wanted to drag their little brother everywhere they went, but Momma didn’t give them much choice. If they were leaving to play football, going fishing or hunting, or going to town, Momma always told them, “Take little brother with you.”
Tommy, Phil, and I were like stair steps everywhere we went. Tommy always walked in the front, and he was about four inches taller than Phil. I walked behind Phil, who was four inches taller than me. Since I was the youngest brother, I always brought up the rear.
When Momma would get tired of us, she’d load us up in our Ford Falcon and drive to Belcher, Louisiana, which was about ten miles from where we lived and was where we went to middle school. She’d drop us off at the Red River levee and say, “Go catch us a mess of fish; I don’t want to see y’all until supper time.”
Basically, Momma was letting us know that she was tired of us and needed a day off. Hey, if I spent most of my adult life around five boys, I’d need a vacation every once in a while, too!
When Momma dropped us off, we’d follow the river back toward our house. We’d usually float down the river on a log for about five miles, get off where the river started to make an S-curve around a bend, and then walk the last two or three miles to our house. We were always exploring that river, like we were in a Huckleberry Finn adventure.
If we were at the river, we were usually fishing. We used throw lines on the river, and it was a three-man operation. We used a brick and nylon rope with hooks. We could make the throw line however long we wanted to make it, as long as it was short enough for us to control. We usually went with twelve hooks on each throw line. We cut a thick branch off a willow tree, and drove it into the ground. Then we tied the throw line to the top and bottom of the branch. Before we were ready to fish, two people had to catch live brim and carry them in a washtub full of water.
One of us was in charge of throwing the brick and rope into the water, making sure not to hook ourselves in the process. After we hooked ourselves several times, we finally used our brains and learned to make the rope between the last hook and brick long enough so it wouldn’t hook us. While one of us was throwing the brick into the water, somebody else had to hold the rope at the willow branch, making sure the throw line didn’t slap the water and knock the bait off the hooks. The third person was in charge of making sure each of the twelve hooks always had fresh bait on it.
Usually, we set out four or five throw lines on the river at once, so we’d have as many as sixty hooks in the river at the same time. Let me tell you something: there’s not a finer sight than seeing a willow branch shaking back and forth because there are so many fish on your throw line. We used to get so excited running to the lines, pulling in fifteen-pound blue catfish. We also caught Opelousas catfish and high-fin blue catfish. We’d come home with three washtubs full of catfish. It was fish-fry time! The whole neighborhood would come over to eat when they smelled the grease at the Robertson house.
We supplemented whatever Momma and Daddy bought at the grocery store with catfish, crappie, white perch, and the game we killed in the woods.
Our fishing trips became legendary among our friends. During high school, we were required to read a book, write a book report, and then stand in front of the entire class and give an oral report on what we read. I was prepared to give a report on The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. But when I stood up in front of my class, one of the other students said, “No, no! We’ve already read Tom Sawyer. We know Si and Phil skipped school last Thursday. We want to know what they did last Thursday!”
I looked at my teacher, Mrs. Jones, and asked, “Well, what do you think?”
“Tell them what you did last Thursday,” she said. “But know this: it better be good, because I am grading you on this.”
So I proceeded to tell my class what I did the previous Thursday.
Momma woke up early like always last Thursday and fixed us a good breakfast. But then she changed her mind and decided Phil and me weren’t going to school.
“I’m hungry for fish,” she told us. “I want y’all to go catch me a mess of crappie.”
Phil and I started jumping up and down. Any day at the lake was better than spending a day at school. So Phil and I sat in the front room of our house, looking out the window for the school bus with our noses just above the windowsill. The bus stopped right between the shrubs in front of our house, and the bus driver opened the door and then blew the horn. Momma walked out and waved her on.
Phil and I gave the bus driver just enough time to turn left at the end of our street, and then we ran out the back door to get our cane poles, washtubs, and bait. We jumped in the Falcon and drove fifteen miles to an oxbow lake on the Red River. We climbed into a boat that the man who owned the lake allowed us to use, and we were ready to catch some crappie.
But when we got out on the lake, there was a north wind of about thirty miles per hour. It was a bad day to be fishing on open water. The lake had once been a channel of the Red River, but now it was landlocked and there were no trees to block the wind. It was wide open, and we were paddling against winds of thirty miles per hour.
When we finally reached our favorite spot to fish, Phil and I realized a commercial fisherman had recently been there. We saw two sticks in the water, about one hundred and fifty yards apart, and we knew that was where he’d tied off his net. Phil and I threw our lines into the water right t
here, and as soon as our shiners hit the water, we each caught a pound-and-a-half crappie. By the time we had the fish in our boat, we were one hundred and fifty yards away from the sweet hole. So we paddled against thirty-mile-per-hour winds again, and then dropped our lines in the water and caught another fish. We looked up and we were one hundred and fifty yards away from the sweet spot again!
Finally, after about the third time of doing this, Phil said, “Hey, this isn’t going to work. One of us is going to have to paddle to keep us here while the other one fishes.”
Of course, I was the youngest, so I became a three-and-a-half-horsepower human trolling motor to keep Phil between the sticks.
Phil sat there and caught about seventy-one more crappie. We ended up with seventy-five crappies in our boat and then had one heck of a fish fry that night.
After I finished telling the story, all of the kids in my class clapped. One of my buddies said, “That’s what I’m talking about.”
I stood up from my chair and looked at my teacher. “C-minus,” she said.
“C-minus?” I asked her. “Have you lost your mind? Seventy-five white perch in thirty-mile-per-hour winds, and I was the motor! You’re giving me a C-minus?”
She looked at me and shook her head.
“Hey, woman,” I said. “I’ve got a news flash for you: That is an A-plus!”
“Hey, fear is a healthy thang.”
Unidentified Walking Object
THERE ARE ONLY A few things in this world I fear: poisonous snakes, losing my iced tea cup, not being able to take a nap, and being left alone in the dark. Hey, I’m man enough to admit that I’m afraid of the dark. I like the world better when it’s light outside; you can see what’s in front of you or, more important, what’s lurking behind you. I’m not actually afraid of the dark—I’m scared of what’s in it, Jack!
