(The following short story is a selection from my recently published book: "Alabama Stories".)
During his boyhood years, William Vernon Johnson always spent his summers with his father and the black hired hands working the flatland fields of North Alabama growing cotton, corn and alfalfa hay. By mid-April of each year, when the land had lain fallow after the spring plowing, Billy’s father and the hired hands would lay off the rows and plant the cotton and corn seeds that would soon cover the brown fields with a rich carpet of green for as far as the eye could see. By late June, when school was out, the young corn and cotton plants would be almost knee-high and Billy, his father and the black hired hands would then “cultivate” the plants by turning fresh earth over the weeds around the plants which, if left alone, would smother out the young corn plants. On one particular day in late June of 1951, ten-year-old Billy, his father and the two black hired hands were cultivating the corn plants when something happened that he would never forget.
Billy’s father always referred to the 15-acre field near the river as the “big cornfield” because, while he had two other fields, the 15-acre field contained most of his corn crop. On the days they would work the “big cornfield,” the black hired hands would take the mules and the plows to the field while Billy and his father would take their lunches and the pickup truck and meet them at the haybarn near the river.
On that particular day, the quartet had started working just after sunrise and, by 9 a.m., had “cultivated” almost five acres of lush, green corn plants. When work started, the sun had presented itself high and hot in the eastern heavens and, from all indications, it promised to be a hot, sweltering summer day. By late morning, however, the temperatures had cooled quickly and huge, black thunderheads began forming in the northern skies.
“We’re going to get some rain,” Robert Johnson told his son as he stopped at the end of the field to get a drink of water. “Might as well take your plow to the haybarn,” he added, “and go tell Rufus and Calvin to stop until we see what the weather’s gonna do. I’m gonna make another round.”
Obediently, ten-year-old Billy turned his mule and plow away from the field and guided it along a hedgerow to the haybarn. There he unhitched the mule and tied the animal to a sheltered feed trough. Some 50 yards away, Billy could see Rufus, the older of the two black hired hands, guiding his mule and plow to the end of the row.
“Rufus!” Billy called.
The black man turned at the sound of his name.
“Daddy said to stop plowing ’cause it’s gonna rain.”
The black man looked up at the sky. Then, wiping the sweat from his brown forehead, he nodded.
“We’ll be at the shed at the big oak tree,” the black man replied.
By the time Billy had returned from the barn to the feed trough with hay, the sky overhead was blanketed with black, rain-laden thunderclouds and huge drops were beginning to fall. As Billy looked up, he knew that rain would be coming down in bucketfuls any minute. With no time to waste, Billy threw the half-bundle of hay into the feed trough, then dashed back to the haybarn.
Finally, standing under the eave of the haybarn, Billy watched as his father hurriedly guided his mule from the field to the feed trough. By the time his father had tied his mule at the feed trough and started for the haybarn, rain was beating down.
“Damn!” his father said, taking his hat off and slinging the water off the brim. “What a rain!”
Some ten minutes later, Billy and his father were sitting in the doorway of the haybarn eating their lunches and watching the rain fall. In his lunch bag, Billy had his favorite food, a tomato and mayonnaise sandwich with lots of black pepper and lettuce. From the other lunch bag, his father pulled out a bulging cold chicken sandwich and wasted no time taking a bite.
As they ate, the father and son watched as the wild rabbits, who lived in the bushes and thick undergrowth along the river banks, scampered to and fro among the low weeds. By day, the rabbits would hide in the thick undergrowth along the river’s edge. By night, they would come to the barn and feed off the oats that fell through the cracks in the barn floor and walls. Usually, if someone was at the haybarn, the rabbits would scamper off and hide in the undergrowth. Then, when the barn was unattended again, they would return to eat their fill of grain. On that particular day, for some reason, several extraordinarily bold rabbits had ventured to the edge of the undergrowth and were feeding on the sweet green grasses that had sprung up along the river’s edge.
After his father had finished lunch, he reached into his lunch sack again and pulled out his favorite snack, a large red apple. Examining the apple, the father polished it on the sleeve of his blue workshirt.
“An apple a day keeps the doctor away,” he said. Then he bit a huge chunk out of the apple and began chewing. After a few moments of silence, the father turned to his son.
“Remember the old apple crate we put tools in last spring?” the father asked.
“Yeah,” Billy replied.
“Go get it.”
The son hesitated.
“What are you going to do?”
“I want to show you something,” the father replied. “Go get the apple crate.”
Billy quickly gobbled down the rest of his tomato sandwich, got up from the doorway and went inside the haybarn. There he found the old apple crate with the tools inside. Quickly, he set the tools aside on the barn floor and picked up the empty apple crate. Back at the barn door, he watched as his father began whittling three small sticks of wood. Within minutes, the father had expertly cut several well-placed notches in the sticks and together they formed a triangle. With that, Billy’s father ordered him to get the empty apple crate and follow him to the edge of the river.
“What are you going to do, daddy?” the son asked.
“We gonna trap a rabbit,” the father answered.
At the river’s edge, the father stopped and Billy watched as his father fitted the sticks together and used them to hold up one end of the upturned apple crate. As Billy watched, he could see that the carved sticks, when fitted together, formed a collapsible support for the upturned end of the apple crate. Next, his father sliced off a piece of the apple he had been eating and placed it on the pointed end of a stick which served as a triggering device. If a rabbit so much as touched the apple, the support apparatus would collapse and the apple crate would fall, trapping the rabbit under it.
“Now, let’s go back to the barn,” the father said.
As they walked, ten-year-old Billy could see that, high overhead, the sky had cleared and the sun had reappeared. Billy knew his father would want to return to the fields soon.
“It’s cleared off, daddy,” the son noted.
His father looked up at the sky.
“Yeah,” the father replied absently. “We’ll go back in a little while.”
Billy looked curiously at his father, not quite understanding. He had never seen his father not want to plow before. Despite this, the son obediently followed his father back to the haybarn and took a seat beside him in the doorway to watch their trap.
The first rabbit, longs ears upright and nose wiggling curiously, scampered up to the apple crate and sniffed briefly inside. Apparently suspecting some sort of trouble however, the animal didn’t venture any farther. Moments later, another rabbit which had also smelled the sweet apple fruit, ventured up to investigate. Suspecting nothing, the second rabbit wasted no time in scooting under the upturned apple crate and nibbling at the apple. Immediately, the flimsy scaffolding collapsed and the apple crate fell over the helpless rabbit.
“We got one!” Billy yelled gleefully as he ran to the captured prize. Through the cracks in the apple crate, Billy could see the trapped rabbit, a furry ball of fear and panic, lunging helplessly against the sides of the apple crate. With that, Billy’s father, with a burlap feed sack in hand, went to the apple crate. Carefully, the father slid the feed sack over the apple crate and the frantic rabbit lunged into the sack. With that, the father gathered the top of the sack and held it upright with the helpless rabbit inside.
“Now,” Billy’s father said triumphantly, “we got a trapped rabbit in a feed sack.”
As his father held the bag, Billy could see the frightened rabbit jostling around frantically inside. Suddenly, their attention was diverted by a call from across the field.
“Mr. Johnson!”
Rufus, the older black hired hand, was calling.
The father, still holding the feed sack with the flouncing rabbit, turned.
“It’s stopped rainin’,” the black man said. “We goin’ back to the field.”
Billy’s father looked up at the sky.
“Yall go on,” Billy’s father said. “I’ll be on in a while.”
Billy couldn’t believe what he was seeing and hearing. His father had never let a hired hand plow unless he was in the fields with him.
“Now there are several ways to kill a rabbit,” Billy’s father continued, holding the bag for his son to see. “The best way is to break its neck.”
With that, the father gathered up the space in the feed sack and trapped the rabbit in one corner. Then, grasping the rabbit inside the sack, the father placed one hand around the animal’s body and the other around its head.
“If you can get him like this,” the father said, demonstrating, “it’s pretty easy to break his neck.”
Billy was watching.
“Now if it’s a big rabbit,” the father continued, “and he’s strong, you may not be able to grab him through the sack to break its neck.”
Billy glanced back toward the field. He could see Rufus and Calvin following their plows along the rows of corn.
“If that’s the case, then you tie up the top of the bag and sling the rabbit against a tree,” the father said. “Like this.”
Billy then watched as his father showed him how to gather the sack at the top so it could be slung against a hard surface.
“It’s pretty easy to kill a rabbit this way,” the father continued, “but, when you do, you break some bones and it’s harder to clean.”
Billy--still not understanding the reason behind this demonstration--was listening.
“If nothing else,” the father continued, “You can always tie up the top of the sack and beat the rabbit to death with a stick. If you have to do that, always try to hit it in the head so you won’t break the bones.”
The father, still stood holding the bag, was looking down at his son. Inside the burlap bag, the rabbit was still flouncing frantically.
“You got all that?” the father asked.
“I think so,” Billy said thoughtfully.
Billy’s father smiled. With that, he untied the top of the burlap bag and dumped the frightened rabbit out on the ground. In a mad dash for freedom, the rabbit quickly darted across the grass and into the thick undergrowth along the river banks to join his brethren.
Billy’s father looked up at the sky. The sun was shining brightly and the skies were clear again. The father turned back to his son.
“Think you could catch a rabbit and kill it?” he asked.
Billy nodded.
The father smiled, then he turned away from his son and peered across the cornfield where he could see Rufus and Calvin following their mules along the rows.
“Let’s go,” the father said. “I want to get this field done today.”
With that, Billy and his father retrieved their mules from the feed trough and returned to the fields.
Billy never questioned his father’s impromptu lesson in rabbit trapping. He was well aware that his father had a great love for the outdoors and enjoyed all types of hunting, fishing and trapping. In later years, when Billy thought back on the incident, he dismissed the lesson as nothing more than a devoted outdoorsman teaching his son the art of trapping a wild animal.
In June of 1975, 34-year-old William Vernon Johnson was working as a sports writer for the Herald in Birmingham. Although he was a well-respected writer, the sports editor had said during a recent staff meeting that he wanted more in-depth features from Billy.
“Hard-hitting, colorful pieces,” the editor had said. “I want good solid human interest stories with a strong sports angle, particularly baseball and football.”
“How about an interview with the stepmother of a former major league baseball player?,” Billy asked.
“Who?” the editor asked.
“'Pig' Thomas,” Billy replied.
“Howard ‘Pig’ Thomas? The one that played catcher with the Phillies?”
“That's him,” Billy said.
“Good possibilities,” the editor said, “But I want drama, good quotes and lots of color.”
Many years before, Billy had heard his father talk about Howard “Pig” Thomas Jr., a Birmingham native who had played minor league ball in Birmingham and later played for the Phillies. He was nicknamed 'Pig' because once, during a game in Mobile, he had chased a farmer’s pig off the playing field. His father, Howard Thomas Sr., had played in the minors and had had major league aspirations, but had never made it in the big leagues. After drifting around the old Southern League for several years, the father finally gave up his baseball aspirations, got a job at a local car dealership and married Nellie Hardy, Billy’s father’s sister. That meant that Billy’s aunt was 'Pig' Thomas’s stepmother.
The following morning, Billy called his Aunt Nellie.
“Billy!” the aunt said when she heard his voice. “My goodness, I haven’t seen you since Robert’s funeral.”
Billy explained that he was working as a sports writer in Birmingham and wanted to come visit her and do an interview about 'Pig' Thomas.
“Why, sure…” she said, “I’d love to see you, Billy.”
Late that afternoon, Billy drove from Birmingham down to his aunt’s house in Bessemer. As always, she hugged him and seemed so happy and surprised to see him. Although he was a grown man now, she still made over him as if he were still a little child. Finally, after the greetings and small talk were finished, the aunt and nephew sat down to do the interview.
Of course, she remembered 'Pig', she said, and how he had made lots of money as a professional baseball player, but could just never seem to hold on to it.
“If 'Pig' had money, everybody had money,” his Aunt Nellie said, “and he would just give it away to his friends. He was too good for his own good.”
With that, she told several stories about Pig’s relationship with his father, how his heart had been broken when the Phillies dropped his contract and how finally, broke and deep in despair, he shot himself to death in a car one night in Tarrant.
Finally, after the interview, their talk turned to a discussion of his father’s childhood. When Billy was growing up, he remembered that his father had talked very little about his own childhood. Somehow, Billy sensed that his father didn’t want to remember those years because there were hidden pains and bad memories he didn’t care to relive. Despite this, Billy had always wondered about the details of his father’s childhood, so he plied his aunt for answers.
“When our mother died in 1909, she left behind five children ranging in ages from four to thirteen,” the aunt recalled. “Our father couldn’t work and take care of all us kids too, so he married a woman who had six children of her own. This meant there was a houseful of eleven kids and we had it pretty rough.”
“How do you mean ‘rough’?” Billy asked.
There was a pause.
“Didn’t your father ever tell you about our stepmother?” the aunt asked hesitantly.
“Not really,” Billy answered.
“Well, our father would go off to work in the coal fields,” the aunt continued, “and he would be gone two and three weeks at a time. Lots of times, there wouldn’t be enough food in the house to feed eleven kids, so our stepmother would lock us kids out of the house and feed what food there was to her own kids. One time, when things were really hard, she locked us out of the house for almost a month.”
“What did you do?”
“Well, the oldest ones could do some kind of work and take care of themselves, but the three youngest, me and your daddy and aunt Evie, were left at the mercies of the world.”
“Daddy never talked about that,” Billy said.
“Your father didn’t talk about it because we had some really hard times,” the aunt continued. “We borrowed quilts and slept under trees and in old houses.”
“How did you eat?” Billy asked.
“Your father would trap rabbits,” the old woman said. “He was the best rabbit trapper God ever made. If there was a rabbit anywheres around, your father could catch it and cook it.”
“You mean all you had to eat was wild rabbits?”
His aunt Nellie nodded sadly.
“We young kids would have starved if your daddy hadn’t known how to trap rabbits.”
With that, a bright light suddenly glowed inside 34-year-old Billy Johnson and his mind trailed off to early June of 1951.
******
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