“Uh, we thought we’d be out there until Saturday morning, sir,” I told him.
Mister Autrey looked a lot like my uncle except he was black and Uncle Curvin was white. He wore overalls with a blue work shirt and a straw hat, and his face had that deep wrinkled look of doing hard work on the outside. “Y’all got enough grub to last you that long?” he asked.
“Yes, sir,” Poudlum said. “And we can live off the land if need be.”
That’s when Uncle Curvin put his two bits in and said, “They pretty resourceful boys, Mister Autrey, and ain’t a river or creek they hadn’t been up and down, so they ought to be able to stay out of trouble.”
My uncle was referring to mine and Poudlum’s recent experiences on the Satilfa Creek where we had encountered bank robbers and the Tombigbee River where we had been chased by the Klan and a mad Chinaman, who had committed a murder we had witnessed.
The mad Chinaman was Mister Kim, and he was in jail now awaiting his trial. According to Mister Alfred Jackson, our lawyer and benefactor, Poudlum and I would have to testify at that trial when it reached the court’s calendar. Mister Jackson had paid us a visit recently and informed us the case could go to trial sometime within the next two weeks.
Neither Poudlum nor I relished the idea of facing Mister Kim again. The last time we saw him he had been chasing us with his murderous blade, and we had barely escaped him.
Mister Autrey patted Old Bill on his head and said, “He’s a black-and-tan hound, ain’t he?”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“He’s a fine-looking dog,” he continued. “And I’ve heard tell he’s got some mighty fine hunting skills.”
Then he turned toward Poudlum and observed young Rip as he sat next to Poudlum with his tail wagging and thumping on the ground. “And I believe you got yourself a redbone hound, don’t you, son?”
“Yes, sir,” Poudlum answered as he reached down and stroked one of Rip’s big floppy ears.
“Well, if you boys can teach him half of what they say Ted’s dog knows, then he’ll be a fine squirrel dog.”
We turned our attention to packing our gear while Uncle Curvin and Mister Autrey walked off toward the barn, talking about peanut farming all the while.
Mister Jackson had allowed Poudlum and me to withdraw some money from the interest earned by investing the reward money we got after we found the money the bank robbers had hidden on the Satilfa Creek last winter.
With this money we had purchased back packs and a real tent. We had also been allowed to buy ourselves each a .22 caliber bolt-action, single-shot rifle. We had gone out on the Tombigbee River this past spring armed with nothing but boat paddles. But this time, for our trip into the forest, we had our rifles and first-class camping equipment including canteens, mess kits, and scout knives. Also, we had our dogs.
Mister Autrey had a well with a big iron pump over it. After a few pumps of the long handle, clear, cool water came tumbling from the spout. We held the mouths of our canteens underneath and filled them full. Afterwards we pumped some more and laughed as both dogs lapped at the big stream of water.
Then we got down to the serious business of packing our backpacks. We threw in some dry food for the dogs, and cans of beans, fish, and sausages, and some dried fruit for us.
We strapped the folded tent on the top of Poudlum’s pack and our two blankets on top of mine, and we were ready to go. Then, from down at the barn, Uncle Curvin yelled from the half-opened wide front doors, “Hey, you boys come on down here!”
With the dogs following behind us we made our way inside the dimly lit barn. Dust motes floated in the air through thin lines of sunlight filtering through the cracks. It was a huge barn, and the first thing I noticed was a large pile of foliage in the back right corner.
Mister Autrey noticed the direction of my gaze, and said, “Those are my first crop of peanuts, still on the vine. I let ’em dry here in the barn; then on rainy days we pick ’em off the vines. I raise two crops of ’em. We plant the first crop in the early spring, harvest it, and then immediately replant using the largest and best nuts as seeds.
“That second crop is busting up out of the ground already. Later in the summer you boys can come back, and instead of picking cotton, y’all can help me pull peanuts.
“Y’all will find it not nearly as backbreaking work as picking cotton. Go on over there and pick yourselves a sack full to take on your camping trip with you. You can roast ’em in your fire at night, or just eat ’em raw.”
We thanked him and settled down next to the pile of vines and began plucking the peanuts off them. “Some of these shells got three or four nuts in them,” Poudlum marveled.
While we were picking we could hear Mister Autrey’s voice droning on as he gave my uncle information on how to harvest and sell his first crop of nuts from where his cotton field used to be.
Poudlum’s family had done the same thing with their cotton field. “I shore ain’t gonna miss not having to pick no cotton,” he said. “How about you?”
“Naw,” I told him. “It wouldn’t bother me if I don’t never see another cotton plant, cotton sack, or even a field full of it.”
“But you know what?” Poudlum reminded me, “if it wasn’t for a cotton patch you and me might not have ever got to be friends.”
I knew that to be true, for we had indeed met while we were picking cotton last summer in my uncle’s field. The black people had been picking on one side of the field and us white folks on the other. But me and Poudlum had put a stop to that segregated picking and had been inseparable ever since.
“You want to let’s come back up here and help Mister Autrey pull his peanuts in a few weeks?” Poudlum asked.
“I reckon so. We’ll probably have to help Uncle Curvin, too.”
“I wonder how much you get paid for it?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t see how they could weigh the nuts and pay you by the pound like they do cotton, ’cause the nuts stay on the bush until they dry out. Most likely they just pay you by the day.”
“If they don’t pay right, we’ll just have to eat a lot of ’em to make up the difference,” Poudlum said as he cracked a shell and popped the nuts into his mouth.
After we had picked about as many nuts as we figured Mister Autrey intended to offer, we made our way back up toward the front of the barn and picked up on the conversation between Uncle Curvin and Mister Autrey as he was saying, “And it’s all because of the boll weevil. I tell you, Curvin, the boll weevil was a blessing in disguise. When he first come up here from Mexico and ate our cotton bolls, we just about all starved to death. But we outsmarted that nasty bug when we found out he don’t like peanuts, and on top of that we freed ourselves from the curse of cotton and the torture of planting it, plowing it, chopping it, and picking it.
“Now that old boll weevil is something we tell stories about. Somebody even wrote a song about ’em and called it ‘Just Looking for a Home.’ I hear tell there’s a statue of a boll weevil somewhere up in east Alabama. Imagine that.”
Mister Autrey stopped talking when he noticed we were listening to him. But then he started right back and said, “So you see, boys, the lesson to be learned here is that good things sometimes come riding in on the back of bad things.”
We thanked Mister Autrey for the lesson he had taught us, and for the peanuts; then we went out and began to attempt to find space in our backpacks for them.
We were eating the last handful that we couldn’t find room for when Poudlum said between bites, “I always got a little room in my stomach.”
That’s when I noticed Uncle Curvin watching us eat the nuts and I immediately felt guilty because I knew