Tag: Hobbs

Fifteen Cents

Posted on by Carlos Declan

Tom’s Store was right on the edge of town, where the dirt roads ended and paving appeared. It was a fair trek on foot.  Looking back, it seems remarkable that my mother would let me traipse off that far by myself. But truly, the worst that could happen was that I might come across a rattle snake, and I knew how to be wary of such critters. Occasionally a car or truck would come down the dirt road, and invariably it would be someone I knew. I thought I was hiking off to New York City.

The only thing that cast anything close to a shadow on going to Tom’s Store was dealing with Tom himself.

Tom was tall and thin. His face was craggy, lined and leathery. His hair was dark, wavy, flecked with gray, and he combed it straight back. He always reminded me a little bit of what I thought Abraham Lincoln’s evil twin brother would have looked like if he had had one.

Tom never smiled, never laughed, and absolutely never participated in small talk with kids. I observed him interacting with adult customers in his store from time to time, and his expression softened as he exchanged bits of conversation. I had long concluded that Tom thought childhood was a waste of time and ought to be skipped altogether.

His dour attitude became exceptionally apparent if a youngster came up to the counter to pay for something and was even a penny or two short. Now, if your parents had called ahead and authorized the purchase Tom would just ‘write it on the wall,’ as they used to say. Your folks would take care of it later.

But if you were a sprout buying what was clearly kid stuff, like a cola or a chocolate bar, well, then if you came up short, you just came up short. Tom wasn’t writing anything on the wall. Your soda went back in the cooler and the candy bar returned to the shelf. That was the end of the story. Very humiliating. I’d seen him do it. Consequently, I never went into the store without being certain I had the money to cover my purchase.

It was a small store. When you walked in the door, the check-out counter, behind which Tom was always seated, was to your left. After coming through the door, you could either walk straight ahead down the aisle that presented in front of you, or turn left, walk toward Tom a few steps, and turn right to pass down the one double shelf that ran the length of the store. In addition to Tom, the coolers lined the far-left side of the store.

A lot of my buddies would go in and proceed straight down the aisle in front of them. They would go all the way to the end of the store and double back around to the cooler. They would pick up their soda and then present themselves to Tom to pay out. This meant they had to deal with being close to Tom only once.

I could understand this. There was something about being real close to Tom that was intimidating. You could feel the beam of his eyes on you the whole time you were in the store. The closer you got, the more his eyes kind of made your insides jiggle. But he seemed to give the kids who avoided him an extra fierce and disdainful gaze that I didn’t like. He would tilt his head ever so slightly to the right as he watched them cut a wide berth around him.

On the other hand, when I came through that door, turned left, went straight toward him, and then turned right in front of him, he wouldn’t tilt his head to the side. He would just look straight at me and nod ever so slightly as I went by. I’m not saying it wasn’t scary, but it felt a little better. More respectful.

One day I walked through the front just like usual. The little bell attached to the top of the door jingled out an alert. He looked up and, predictable as the rising sun, fixed his eyes on me as I approached. I met his gaze. He nodded.

The issue occupying my mind at that moment was whether to add a Dreamsicle to my intended purchase of an RC Cola. I finally decided that the RC was enough. I was going to amble over to the park after my stop at Tom’s. Toting along an ice cream bar in one hand and a soda in the other seemed a challenge to my main goal: to look cool.

I put my soda on the counter and went for my change to pay up. Tom didn’t say a word. He knew that I knew how much the soda was. I got my coins out and handed them to him. He said, “Thank ya,” and hit the keys on the old register. The door popped open and he dropped in the money.

Suddenly, I got focused on a dime and a nickel laying out there on the edge of the counter, a little off to the side and out of Tom’s view. Fifteen whole cents!  In 1958, that was an amount worthy of some note. I was frozen with indecision for a moment.

When Tom looked up from closing the cash register, I was still standing there. He seemed a little surprised. And just like that, I knew what to do. I pointed with my index finger toward the coins.

“There’s some money there,” I said. “It isn’t mine.”

Tom leaned forward a bit and looked at the coins. Then he looked back at me.

“See ya,” I said, turned and went out the door.

The next little while, whenever I came in Tom’s Store, things were just like they always were, and he was just like he always was. Our exchanges at the counter were sparse and direct.

Finally, a day arrived when, despite my caution about never coming into the store without the necessary funds, I did just that. I got to the counter with an RC Cola and Snickers bar, put the items on the counter, reached in my pocket, and instead of encountering metal, found nothing but the soft cotton of my jeans pocket. Quickly I reached over into my left-hand pocket. I knew that was no use though. I would never put money there. I also checked my two back pockets and the pocket on my t-shirt. Nothing. Now I could see the money lying on the top of my chest of drawers.

I took a sigh, and collected the soda and the chocolate bar to return them to stock. Tom had been watching me as I went through all this pocket grubbing. “Change your mind?” he asked as I pulled the items towards me.

“No. Don’t have my money. Left it on the dresser.”  I now had the soda in one hand and the Snickers in the other. I was a couple of paces from the counter headed back for the cooler and the candy case.

“Hold on there,” Tom commanded. I froze. “It’s pretty hot out there. You look a little wilted. Go ahead and take that soda. The candy too. Give you a little energy.”

I turned and stared at him dumbfounded. “But I don’t have any money with me,” I stammered.

“I heard you.” And he scowled a little. “You owe me 27 cents. Bring it by next time you come down the road.”

 

Madrid New Mexico

The Windmill

Posted on by Carlos Declan

The view was breathtaking. To the west was our little hardscrabble oil and ranching community. To the east was the vast expanse of the sourthern edge of the Llano Estacado. Above and all around was a luminous aqua sky dotted with white puffy clouds. The air was clean and light as a feather.

I was five years old. I had climbed up to the platform atop the windmill at the back of our property. I really don’t know how I managed this.

There was a two-lane paved road that led east in Texas. I could see it inch its way along until it seemed to over the edge of the earth. There was little traffic. I would occasionally see a car or two and sometimes a truck coming toward town or leaving. The vehicles looked like ants moving in their orderly and busy way.

Back toward town there was a black top road that ran toward me. The paving expired before it got to our place, finishing as a dirt road.

Eventually a particular vehicle caught my attention. It was still far away, but I could tell that it was Dad’s truck. It was coming my way.

Mild curiousity floated across my mind. What was he doing? Was he coming home? Why?

And then he was there. He turned onto our property, drove the short distance up the unpaved trace, parked and got out. He didn’t seem in any hurry, and he didn’t head into the house. As a matter of fact, he did what he did most times when he came home from work.

He ambled around the backyard, where he and my Mom were working to encourage grass to make a stand against the sand and weeds that thought the land belonged to them.

He took his pocketknife and dug up the roots of the big grass burrs that proliferated. He would walk around cutting these things out of the ground, holding them carefully in his left hand until he had a kind of grass burr bouquet. Then he would go over and deposit them in the trash can at the back of the property.

He would return to work until he had another collection in his hand. This would go on for 30 minutes or so. It was a kind of decompression ritual. When he was finished he would go inside where my Mom would meet him with a cup of coffee.

But that is what he did at the end of the day. Here we were, a long way before noon, and I was peering down watching him digging grass burrs just like he did in the evenings.

I was puzzled. I sat on the edge of the platform at the top of the windmill watching my Dad as he moved quietly and deliberately. This was very interesting because I had never seen this activity from such a height or perspective.

I didn’t call down to him, and he didn’t seem to know I was there. Eventually, though, he looked up at me. “Well, hi, Shorty,” he said, a bit surprised.

Then his head went bacck down and he went on with his work. My attention moved back and forth between my Dad and the broad vista around me. I was torn: I always wanted to be with my father, but the view was fantastic. I’d never seen anything like it.

Dad began to gather a little bit of trash and some twigs to add to the barrel where the grass burrs were being collected. From time-to-time he would burn all the refuse, and I would ‘help’ by going around the yard and picking up other miscellaneous items as he tended the fire.

When I realized where this process was going, I swung my leg over the platform onto the first rung and started down. A fire was the final incentive.

He seemed to hardly notice that I had climbed down the windmill. He just went about getting the fire started in the barrel. I started picking up random twigs, and an old brown paper sack that had blown into the yard.

Wordlessly, I walked up to heave the items into the fire. I waited for his go ahead as usual. Fire safety was an important lesson I had learned.

“Toss it in from over there,” he said, gesturing toward the north side of the barrel so that I would be up wind of the flames.

As I was doing this, he stepped over to the ladder that ran up the entire length of the windmill. He reached up, and with his hand struck the inside of the 1″x12″ that served as a rung. Off it came. He followed suit until all the steps on the ladder were gone up to the top of his head.

He took the pieces of wood that had served as rungs and stacked them together. He had dismantled the low end of the ladder discreetly but quickly. And tending to the fire was consuming my attention.

“We’ll let that fire die down. I just wanted those grass burrs to get burned up,” he said, gesturing toward the fire. “Let’s get a hammer and get these nails out of these boards. This is good wood. We can use it for something else.”

When we were finished, the wood was stacked neatly inside the shed. The nails we had removed were separated into two small piles. One pile contained the handful of nails that were straight enough or could be straightened for reuse. The others were set aside to be discarded altogether.