Free Littlejohn by Howard Owen

noon. Even without a watch, Momma said he never missed by more than five minutes. He’d be hot and tired, and she’d have biscuits and ham and butter beans and rice and gravy. And you had better not of started eating until Daddy got there. When I was four, Lex was fifteen, probably just starting to be a lot of help in the fields. Gruff was twelve and was mainly supposed to fetch water and such. Connie was fifteen, too, of course, and she did as much around the house as Momma did. Century was ten. It was her job to fix the beds and shell peas and beans.
    Lafe was seven then. He was already in school, and he would show me the little red reader that the first graders used. They only went to school from late fall until planting time back then, and only Lafe and Century finished all eleven years. I’d look at that reader and see all the letters, and I couldn’t wait until somebody showed me the secret thatwould make all them lines and circles and squirls mean something.
    It didn’t take but thirty-six more years for that to happen.
    Daddy didn’t have much time for us until after all the crops was in. He’d lay down for a hour after dinner, then go right back out to the fields again, taking Lex and Gruff with him. He’d be covered from head to foot with old blue overalls and a brown long-sleeved shirt and a straw hat. He had great big hands, the only part of him that the sun got to, and they was covered with freckles and moles and skin cancers that Doc McNeil’d cut off once in a while.
    At night after supper, Momma would read to us from the Bible. Sometimes, right after a specially good revival meeting, she’d decided that we ought to be better Christians, and we’d have this big prayer, while we was still at the table. Everybody would have to say something, and it had better of been good, or Momma would make you read the Bible to her for half an hour while she washed dishes. One time she caught me slipping collards back into the bowl during prayer, because I couldn’t stomach collards, and she like to of wore me out.
    Daddy was old when I was born. I can remember him at seventy-five, still out there plowing, except by that time, Lex and Lafe and me was doing most of it, along with Rennie Lockamy’s family that had took over the old cabin where Aunt Mallie and them lived. Rennie’s folks claimed to be Lumbee Indians, and we was charitable enough to let them be what they said they was.
    Gruff went off to World War I and never really did live here again. He come back long enough to help us paint thewhole outside of the house in the summer of, I reckon, 1920, then headed south. He made a good life for him and his family in Atlanta, and he has lots of grandchildren living all around there today. Gruff was one of those folks that seem to be born in the wrong place and has to go out and look for the right one. I reckon he found it.
    Daddy would tell us stories about the war, and I’ve heard Century say many’s the time that she wished to goodness she’d wrote down some of that stuff. ’Course, with Daddy, you didn’t want to take it as gospel just because he said it. Daddy could stretch things a little. There was no denying, though, that wooden stump from the knee down where he lost his left leg.
    He said he was at Gettysburg, but Sara told me years later that if he come home wounded when he was supposed to of, that he must of commuted to Pennsylvania.
    Sometimes, it seemed like to me that Daddy wasn’t sure himself where he was fighting during the time he was gone. The story he liked to tell the best, though, was about the Geddie boys spittin’ in old Sherman’s eye. At least, that’s the way Daddy saw it. The way he told it, we was always kind of hazy about what happened when the Yankees come to Geddie on their way back north. Sometimes, he’d say him and his daddy and the rest planned a ambush ahead of time. Other times, he’d say he just lifted his gun up and fired it and started all the trouble.
    They come