Episode Three - Third Grade (more or less)

I don't recall very clearly my third grade year, and I seriously doubt that it's because something traumatic happened. However, I do remember that we were living in the country near Lambert. I had made a change from Marks Elementary at some point during this year when my dad became a sharecropper for someone I don't remember.

We had no electricity in our house, so there were a number of coal oil lamps scattered around the place. Once when my dad had gone overnight to bring back a tractor for the landowner, my mother and I were on our own. She somehow knocked over one of the lamps, and we had a bit of excitement until she extinguished the fire.
The other big events that year were my picking my own sack full of cotton so I could have money to spend at one of the little traveling fairs/sideshows that came to Lambert. Most of the time I rode on my mother or dad's cotton sack while they picked, but I had made a deal with my dad to pick a sack full in order to get fair money. I think my bag was a 25-lb. size, quite a bit for a youngster anyhow.
The other bit of excitement that year was that the a newly- constructed stretch of road from Lambert to Marks ran very close to our place. My dad had an old Model A Ford, and he decided that my mother needed to learn to drive. So, he drove us up to the stretch of finished but unopened road and got ready to turn the car over to my mother. By the time of this event, I'd already bugged him to let me sit in his lap and steer and was becoming quite good at it, I thought. My mother was quite nervous but got into the driver's seat with my dad sitting beside her and me leaning over from the back seat to give suggestions to her. She managed to keep the car on the road for about a mile, maybe less, and her knees were shaking as she said, "I can't do this, Chick." I remember pleading from the back seat, "I can, Daddy, let me have a turn!" Of course he didn't. My mother got the car stopped and was out the door quickly before he could insist that she try again. I don't remember that she ever attempted driving after that occasion.
I do remember that every time we went from the delta to the Mississippi "hills" to attend Memorial Day weekend church services and visit with Daddy's family I managed to get him to let me steer, once even over the Mississippi River bridge at Greenville. Early on I made up my mind that I wouldn't be afraid of driving like my mother and couldn't wait for the time when I'd be able to drive by myself.
That annual trip to Eupora, Mississippi, was a great time for me because it meant spending time with my favorite cousins on my dad's side. We'd leave home on Saturday morning before daylight on the big journey and would arrive in Eupora around 3 or 4 that afternoon. Daddy would park on the main street - the only street really - where all the stores and their one movie house was located. Usually shortly after we arrived my folks would begin to see people they'd known or were kin to, and there would be loud, cheerful greetings and lots of comments about "little Alice Faye" and how she had her daddy's brown eyes. Some would even call me "little Chick," a nickname my dad had gotten in his youth. His nephew, the same age as my dad and a boyhood companion, told me later that it had something to do with my dad stealing a chicken from someone on a dare when he was a boy. I never did know for sure.
After buying some artificial flowers to take to the cemetery the next day, catching up with those who knew us from the past, and maybe even getting to go to a cowboy show at the theatre, we would drive to the cousins' house to spend the next couple of nights. If we were lucky my dad's cousin and his two boys would have been "grappling" for catfish in the Mississippi or some other good hole, and there would be a big black washpot ready with hot grease for frying up a mess of fish. Along with the fish would be homemade potato salad, fried potatoes, slaw, and maybe some of my cousin Mayford's fried pies, which I loved. The problem was saving room enough to enjoy them after all the other good stuff.
The cousins lived in a big white house with a "dog trot" down the middle of it. It had belonged to my dad's sister, Belle, who had looked after my grandmother after the death of my grandfather. My grandmother was very old when she died of skin cancer in that house. My girl cousins Ruth and Lily Belle slept in the front bedroom where my grandmother's casket had been placed (a custom that people practiced in those days) for a day or so before the funeral.
The only downside to visiting them was that I was also put in that same bedroom with them and still had a vivid memory of being lifted up by my dad to look at my grandmother in her casket when I was about five. Naturally, that was all I could think of that whole time I was meant to be sleeping in there. On a couple of visits I can remember that I wound up sleeping with my parents because I just couldn't handle it. My cousins laughed at me, of course, and tried to tell me ghost stories to upset me, as children are wont to do when they find someone's weak spot.
In spite of their teasing me, they were very good to me and took me to all their favorite spots on the farm. They let me draw up water from the well, pick apricots from the trees, and play with their puppies. The girls were a few years old than I was, and I enjoyed their attention.
I remember being pleasantly surprised when their mother Mayford announced she was expecting and hoping maybe my mother would make a similar announcement, but it wasn't meant to be. I was and would be for the rest of my life an only child, dependent on cousins for family connections. It had its advantages, but all in all I would discover later there were more disadvantages to having no siblings.