Too Heavy to Heist

“You so little, a strong wind would blow you all the way to west Memphis! You better get up under the wagon and wait till those clouds built up yonder in the western sky pass over.” My cousin Ed tried to imitate the way the older men would lean back to wipe the sweat from under their old, battered-up straw hats.

Ed was a tall, strong 14, I was a skinny 10 at the time and felt like everybody else was bigger than I was and that they were always trying to make fun of me. Well, almost everybody. Po Tatum was the skinniest somebody I ever knew before or since. Po was so skinny he could hide behind a telephone with his overcoat on and have room left over.

Po acted as if he didn’t mind being skinny, but I minded. What I lacked in size and weight, I tried to make up in energy and quickness. I was quick with a quip, but it didn’t take too much for me to go to war either. I guess I took that part from my grandmother. So when Ed hit me with that West Memphis line, I was ready to go up side his head. But considering he was so much bigger than me, I thought it might be better to hit him with a quip than to give him an excuse to bust my lip. All I could think of to say to Ed was, “If it’s a wind strong enough to blow me to Memphis, then I’ll be there when I get there, and you’ll still be here . . . in this cotton patch . . . without no cotton to pick . . . ’cause the wind will blow it away . . .”

“Is that all you got to say?” I knew it was weak, but at that time I did not even know where or what West Memphis was. Ed and them laughed at me about that for years.

It wasn’t that I wouldn’t eat. It was nothing for me to stop by my grandma’s house on the way home from school and drink a quart of milk, eat half a fried chicken, two big scoops of potato salad, cole slaw, and sweet potato pie, and then to have a full supper when I’d get home an hour or two later. I’d eat a full plate and go back for seconds. My mother would tell me, “Boy, don’t let your eyes be bigger than your stomach.” Whenever she said that I knew I had to clean my plate, no matter how full I felt. But regardless of how much I’d eat, I stayed skinny. I was 30 years old before I started to gain any weight. At first I was glad to be putting on a little size. “They won’t be able to call me skinny any more,” I thought, so I kept right on eating everything I could get in my mouth. By the time I was 35, I’d gotten so big that I would’ve had to fight Muhammad Ali if I were a boxer. By the time I was 37, I was so big that when I’d lie down, my belly would stay up. At 40, I couldn’t even bend down to tie my shoes. That’s when I knew I was in trouble.

The weight problem slipped up on me. Being so much smaller than most everybody else when I was young, I went out of my way to try to prove that I was just as strong as anyone else. If my cousin Ed grabbed a bale of hay and tossed it up on the wagon, I was going to grab a bale of hay, too. Regardless of the fact that Ed had eight inches and seventy-five pounds on me, I’d try it.

Whenever my granddaddy caught me trying to do something like that he would stop whatever he was doing and help me out. When we’d finish, PopPaw would give me something to do that I could handle. “Remember, son, if it’s too heavy to heist, it’s too heavy to carry.”

I took it as an insult. It sounded like he was telling me that I was too small and weak to do a certain thing. I was bound and determined to do anything that anybody else could do. . . . It didn’t seem foolish at the time.

PopPaw was always saying things like that when he thought I was getting in over my head. One time I was helping him build a new hen house. I kept on begging him to let me cut a plank with the crosscut saw. I guess he got tired of my begging him cause he finally let me try.

First thing he did was make me get the tape measure and make some measurements. Then he made me check them three or four times. That got me upset, too. I was anxious to swing into action with my crosscut stroke. But no, I had to get me a tape measure and big L-shaped framing square and go back and forth from the wall we were putting up to the board I was supposed to be cutting, making notes and marks.

Despite my frustration I did what he told me to do. When I was a child, the idea of being rude to a grown person didn’t even come up in your mind. There were lots of stories about how our grandmother had backhanded many a child for no greater sin than “looking like they might have had” a rude idea run across their minds. PopPaw was as mellow as MomMaw was hot, but still, the idea of challenging his instruction never crossed my mind.

Finally, my measurements made and checked over and over again, I was ready to lop off the end of that two-by-four and a dozen more like it . . . or so I thought. That devilish piece of wood just would not cooperate. It did not want to be cut. The harder I pushed the saw, the harder it got to get a good clean bite on the wood.

Finally, PopPaw said, “Here, son. Watch.” He set the small, sharp teeth at the handle end of the saw near the cut mark I’d made on the wood. He let the saw make three or four little featherlike bites to get into the meat of the lumber. After a few long, soft, singing strokes, the pungent pine wood bent down from the saw horse like it was kneeling to pray.

I tried to make the saw sing its way through the wood like PopPaw did. But it was the next summer that I finally began to get the knack of it. We were patching some holes in the front porch with some tongue and groove flooring boards when the saw started to sing. “That’s it, son,” PopPaw coached from the side, “let the saw do the work.”

After we got enough wood measured and cut, we were ready to fit the tongues into the grooves to finish our repair job. I set my jaw and struggled to lift the hammer with one hand. Making ready to attack the nails with it, I held it by its skinny neck. “Now wait a minute son,” PopPaw said. “See if this hammer here don’t make a better fit in your hand. Grip it by the handle, tap the nail a couple of times to get it started, then all you have to do is lift it up and guide it so it falls on the head of the nail. Let the hammer do the work.”

I did as he said to do. It was like the nail melted into the wood. Later on that evening after another one of MomMaw’s meals, we sat on our newly finished porch rocking to the sound of crickets and katydids. I asked PopPaw why he didn’t tell me about letting the hammer and saw do the work last summer while we were working on the hen house. PopPaw thought about my question for a while.

“Well, Junebug,” he said, “when I was your age and used to hang out with my grandpa the way you’re doing now, he told me that you have to chop up a certain number of boards before you can get a clean cut and bend a certain number of nails before your hammer will drive straight.

“Last summer, it didn’t seem like to me that you was of a mind to hear what I was trying to say. I figured it wasn’t no point in me wearing my knuckles out knocking, cause it didn’t seem to be nobody at home. I couldn’t find a fit so I didn’t try to force it. You can’t solve a problem till you know you’re doing something wrong.”

PopPaw didn’t say anything else. After we’d listened to the creaking of our rocking chairs for a while, I said, “I think I get the idea, PopPaw. If it’s too heavy to heist, it’s too heavy to carry.”

“It seems so to me, son. That’s the way it seems to me.”