$5 AND A BAG OF CORN

© Copyright 1999 James David Pearce

          When Boweaver was six, he and his family lived two miles outside Ahoskie on the Aulander road, at a crossroads called "Poor Town."  It didn't deserve to be called a town, and it shouldn't have been called poor, as the farmers in the neighborhood were about as well off as any in Hertford County at the time.

          Some were beginning to feel a little prosperous with their acres of tobacco, a good-money crop well-suited to the soil of the area.

          Although Boweaver's daddy had spent most of his childhood on a farm, he wasn't really a farmer.  He was a carpenter and a builder of buildings, but when stories began to get around in the mid '20s about all the gold in the "golden" leaf, "Cap'n Fred" decided to lease a few acres and try his hand.  That's how they came to live at Poor Town.

          It wasn't a bad place to live, especially if you were six.  It was a big wide-open world of fields, woods, grapevines, blackberry bushes, rabbits, deer and even an old black bear that occasionally wandered from the swamp near the railroad.

          Right after Fred sold his first good crop of bright-leaf, he came home from town one day with a car.

          It was a gray Willys Whippet, with curtains on the back windows, hand-operated windshield wipers, a stick-shift and the solidest-looking four wheels anybody ever put on a vehicle.  The spokes on the rear wheels were solid oak, each a good two inches straight through.

          On Saturday afternoons, the family would get in the Whippet and go to town, where the girls liked to check out the dime stores and drug stores, and the boys liked to ride with Buck Jones at the Richard Theater.  The theater, however, cost a dime, and Fred tended to frown on "that kind of foolishness."

          On warm Sunday afternoons, he took his crowd to the river, where the kids had popsicles, rode the merry-go-round and waded near the shore.

          But such good times couldn't last forever, and after awhile the tobacco couldn't be sold for enough to pay for raising it.  People also stopped building houses.  By the time the country got around to changing presidents, things had turned really bad indeed.

          And the economy wasn't the only thing going bad.  The tires on the Whippet started going, too, and Fred was getting flats regularly on the excursions to the river.  He had to change the tires by the side of the road, take them home and patch them himself.

          One Sunday, one of the tires blew out completely.  There was no way to patch it, and no way to get a spare.  The next time there was a flat on the river road, Fred had to take it off, patch it and pump it up right there between the road and the ditch.  And that was it.

          The Whippet sat in the side yard, in front of the chicken pen.  One by one, the other tires expired.

          For a time, Fred would go out and crank the car just to hear it run.  But he never went anywhere else on it, and after a few months it couldn't be started even with the crank.

          One winter day, two men came to look at the old Willys and told Fred they would like to buy it.  They offered five dollars, but he said he didn't think he could let it go for that.

          Noticing the chickens scratching around for a bite to eat, one of the men said that maybe he could sweeten the deal with a bag of feed corn.

          So, in 1935, Cap'n Fred sold his car for five dollars and a bag of corn.  And they hitched two mules to it and hauled it away.