© Copyright 1999 James David Pearce
HOUSE IN THE FIELD
Along about 1939, when Boweaver was turning 12, he was quite skinny but had developed a little height.
Even though he personally didn't feel it, his daddy, Cap'n Fred, was of the opinion that he had reached an age and size that required him to act a little less like a kid and a little more worthwhile. He constantly was reminding Boweaver that if he didn't show a little more effort and enterprise, he was going to grow up to be somebody who wouldn't be "worth the dynamite it would take to blow him up."
Money was hard to come by, and Cap'n Fred welcomed any help he could get. When Boweaver was not in school, Fred kept him in tow like a puppy on a string and was forever handing him something to do, like straightening and sorting bent nails or sawing split-ends off old boards.
One day, Fred learned that Irey Parker, the farmer who owned most of the land behind the cemetery, was thinking about putting up a four-room tenant house.
He made a deal with Irey to provide all the labor to build the house for $500. Irey was to pay for all the materials and hauling.
Tenant houses in the '30s, new or old, were never mansions. There was no electricity or running water around, and no expectations of built-in kitchens or heating systems. They consisted of four rooms, a few windows, a front door and a back door, a small front porch and a roof. They never had all-around foundations, only brick pillars placed at strategic positions to support the main joists.
It still took some work to build one, and when Irey asked Fred who would be his helper, he pointed to Boweaver.
Cap'n Fred sub-contracted the brick pillars and chimney, and handed Boweaver a hammer and a hand-saw.
The two of them put up that house from bottom to top in five weeks. It was a pretty job, and when they nailed in the last window and nailed down the last shingle and stood back to admire their handiwork Boweaver probably was the proudest boy in Hertford County, because except for the bricks, nobody had put a finger to that job except him and his daddy.
And $500! For five weeks work, that was unheard-of income for a man and a boy in Hertford County in 1939. That figured out to $100 a week! The family even celebrated Christmas that year.
But they weren't going to do that well again.
Boweaver's daddy was getting old. He tried hard, but the best of his building days were behind him, smothered in the dust of the depression.
He talked one of his acquaintances into giving Boweaver a job as a printer's devil with the county newspaper. Boweaver accepted it, and spent his entire life at the new trade, but his heart was never really in it.
Every time he returned to Ahoskie, he would glance in passing at the old tenant house back in the middle of the field behind the cemetery, and be proud.
It's not there any more. There's a street there now, with several little brick houses.
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Little house in the field
c. 1960
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