“However,” he continued, “young men believe they are immortal and old men can’t stop talking, so the wars go on while the children, the women, and the innocent suffer its consequences.”
The church was so quiet you could have heard a gnat’s wings buzzing.
Fred and I usually played some subtle game to pass the time in church, but when I glanced his way, I saw that he, too, was absorbed with what the new preacher was saying.
Brother Hillsboro took a deep breath and continued, “Yet when evil raises its ugly head, who can defend us better than the strong young men, and who can plan better than the wise old men who have fought and survived wars themselves when they were young men?”
Everyone in the congregation sat frozen in place waiting for the preacher to answer his own question.
“The answer eludes us. We can only hope and pray the young men stay strong and brave, and that the old men are wise and resourceful. The truth is, there is a far better King than anyone leading an earthly army. All we poor mortals can do is pray, have faith, and praise Him.”
The new preacher was a big hit. After he had dismissed the service, I noticed that all the adults gathered around him outside the church, shaking his hand and telling him how much they had enjoyed his sermon.
Fred and I sat on the running board of Uncle Curvin’s old pickup truck watching everyone mill around in their Sunday finest.
“I think everybody likes the new preacher,” I said.
“Yeah,” Fred replied. “He’ll be eating free fried chicken dinners for a month of Sundays.”
Uncle Curvin took us all home, and Fred disappeared shortly after that. He didn’t tell me where he was going, but he said to meet him out by the stump later.
I had just about forgotten his request, but I was out at the stump digging around with my hairpin attempting to get a speck of meat out of a hickory nut when I heard the ruckus.
It wasn’t like anything I had heard before either. It was coming from the thick woods toward the trail which led through them to Friendship Road, and it was a combination of sounds. At first I thought it was a wild pig because of the grunting, scraping, grinding, and rustling racket.
Little chill willies jumped up all over me, but I forced myself to venture into the edge of the woods to investigate. When I saw what it was, I just stood there, my feet frozen to the ground.
Chapter Two
It was my brother dragging a long piece of lumber through the woods, a two-by-six pine board!
“Well, don’t just stand there gawking,” he said. “Come help me. This thing is mighty heavy, and I got splinters in my hands from dragging it.”
“Where did you get that thing?” I asked.
“Found it about half buried back behind Miss Lena’s Store where the sawmill used to be.”
“How long do you ’spect it is?”
“I stepped it off and it’s about twenty-four feet.”
“What you planning on doing with it?”
“We gonna put it on that stump and make us a spinning jenny.”
“I never heard tell of such a thing. What’s a spinning jenny?”
“I’ll tell you later. Right now I need you to grab a holt and help me drag this thing the rest of the way to the stump”
By the time we got to the stump, I was marveling at the feat my brother had accomplished by dragging that big board all the way from where the sawmill used to be. But he was almost three years older than me, and real big and strong for his age.
“What now?” I asked.
“You pick up the other end while I pick up this end and let’s lay it across the stump so the same length of board hangs off each side of it.”
After we did that my brother walked a circle around the stump and the board studying it all the while.
“So what’s it supposed to do?”
“Can’t you see? We got to drill a hole in the very center of that board and attach it to the stump so it will spin around without it coming off.”
“How we gonna do that?”
“I ain’t figured that out yet. You don’t do nothing but ask questions; why can’t you come up with some answers?”
I thought about it for a little while and it came to me. “After we drill a hole in the center of the board, we have to drill a hole in the center of the stump, drive an iron bar or something into that hole, then just drop the board on it so the iron bar goes through the hole in the board.”
“Hey! That’ll work, but where we gonna get an iron bar?”
We had an old Radio Flyer wagon that we had worn the wheels off pulling it through the woods and fields hauling everything from water to watermelons. Since then it had been over in the shed just rusting away. “Why don’t we take one of the axles out of that old wagon in the shed?”
“But we been planning to put new wheels on it,” Fred protested.
“Yeah, we been planning to do that for two years now, and besides, we way too big to be playing with that wagon anymore.”
We headed to the shed where we extracted one of the axles from the disabled wagon, took our father’s auger and a large drill bit and a tape measure, and returned to the stump and the board.
After measuring and finding the exact center of the board, I held it steady while Fred drilled the hole in it.
I brushed away the curly wood slivers and said, “Now let’s get to that stump.”
We didn’t even have to measure to find the exact center of the stump. On the inside of trees there is a perfect circle for each year of its age starting from the center and working outward. The circles were still faintly visible on the old stump. I had counted them before and knew the tree had been eighty years old when the lightning bolt killed it.
Fred placed the point of the drill bit on the dot in the exact center of the stump. I thought the tree must have been just a little bitty fellow when that dot first appeared.I watched as my brother began drilling at the spot indicating when the tree had been born.
“How long you figure that axle is?” Fred asked after he blew the wood shavings from the hole he had drilled in the stump.
I placed the tape measure on it and announced, “It’s exactly two feet.”
“That hole I drilled is deep enough then. It’s four or five inches. We’ll drive the axle down about halfway so it’ll be real tight and still leave a foot sticking out of the stump to go through the board. Go get the ax off the chopping block so I can drive it in.”
The flat part of the ax made a chiming sound as it drove the axle deep into the stump. Fred stepped back and said, “Does that look like it’s about halfway?”
“Give it one more little tap,” I told him.
He did, and I said, “Whoa, that looks just about perfect.”
“All right,” he said, as he cast the ax aside. “Grab the other end of the board and let’s put her in place.”
After we had that accomplished, we stood back and admired our work. “What do you think?” Fred asked.
“Uh—I don’t know. How does it work?”
“Can’t you see? We each grab a hold of opposite ends of the board and start running in a circle. When