Richard, the paperboy from The Red Scarf, Sept. 1944 # 3

Okay, I just know y’all is gonna think I’m some kind of a no-count kid criminal ‘cause me and Ears got into old man Odom’s watermelon patch. Well, none of it weren’t our fault…Shoot, I can tell you don’t believe that line of bull, so let me tell you a little bit more how it come about. You see, it was just before the fourth of July and we was minding our own business, just sitting on the breadbox at Echol’s Grocery, when he come a-sauntering up, spitting tobacco juice just everywhere. Heck, there was enough tobacco juice slobbering down his old brown, scraggly beard to choke a mule.
Heck, I can hear him now.
“Boys, y’all ain’t never gonna believe the watermelons I done raised using some newfangled water troughs. Big uns…some ill-go near 70 pounds and they gonna be ripe by the fourth.”
Well, I piped up; “Gosh Mr. Odom, let us put our money together and buy one.”
“Ha, y’all just a bunch of kids and these melons is being raised for some big money folks.”
“We really would like to have one,” said Ears.
“Huh? Don’t y’all get no ideas….”
He kinda took a good breath, gulped, snorted, and got all choked up, and good Lord in Heaven above, he coughed and it sounded like he was strangling then, hold your horses, he sneezed like some old scalded hog, and I thought he was gonna bust a gut. Shoot, it was like an nose and mouth explosion.
“Ahaaaa, Ohhhhaaaaa!…..Choooooo, AAAAAAAhahhhh….CCCChoooooo!!!!!!”
Listen, it’s hard to describe just exactly what happen, ‘cause before we could move, a spray of tobacco juice and all kinda other yucky stuff just came at us like a wave of brown spray, and we was blowed back almost off the breadbox covered with….well I’ll bet you can guess. Dang! He just walked into the store like nothing had happened, and we jumped off that breadbox hollering, trying to wipe that slimy stuff off…heck, we didn’t have no shirts on neither and that made it all the worse.
Course, that ain’t near all of what happened but I’m outta time….more tomorrow.