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come down here to Red Bay, and put on another just like it, and I went on toward the Ridge where I lived, and there was a horse-shoe in the road, and that horse-shoe carved a half-moon out of the other tire. Another tire, another $57.50. I guess it was partly because of the heavy load of timber I had on the truck...
"But that wasn't all! A feller out at the mill tore the back-end out of a truck for me. Then them big heavy loads ruined the brakes. The brakes was on the outside, remember? I ruined them things right and left, and I'd have to have them relined, and that cost like the devil! Yeah, trucks ruined me, and I didn't have sense enough to stop. I've got some checks-- cancelled checks over at the house—twelve-thousand-dollars worth, I lost on trucks."
He was asked about his stay in Jacksonville to cool his frustration: "I run a show over there, showed movies^ and them traveling show-people would come and show for me. The movies wasn't no good is right, but they were new then. I was there in 1903. I think—three years there. I taught Alvin all I knew about the show business—that's how he got started being an operator, and Earl too." Alvin is out in Texas, and Earl operates a moving picture machine in Corinth, Mississippi. Of course, the old man didn't have anything to do with the boys, as he was sawmilling and getting drunk his off days. He would be put in jail there in Red Bay, and you could hear him cuss a mile. But he says he never was a drunkard!
"I ought to have stayed there in Jacksonville. I was making money. I was contracting, too. I built more houses than anybody." He will show you pictures of those houses, and himself standing before the house, standing proudly, the huge, box-like affair in the background. "Jacksonville was the biggest place in the county then. Anniston wasn't anything. Jacksonville was County Seat. A company came in and wanted to manufacture in Jacksonville,
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but them old fogies wouldn't stand for it; they ma.de them stop, even after the company had dug a big place for a spurline to a railroad. The plant went to Anniston, and purty soon Anniston was biggest, and voted the county seat to themselves. I sawmilled the lumber that they built the courthouse with."
In the pause, Mr. Skelton was asked how so much of his hand had been sliced off—the forefinger and thumb was cut off close. Yet he skillfully rolled his own smoke, and pulled the yellow drawstring of his tobacco sack with the few remaining teeth in his mouth; the teeth, he explained, were all right, except they didn't match. "My wife is having her teeth pulled out, and she's a-grunting, because she won't be able to eat right for three months. I told her she'd have to hire somebody to chew for her." He grinned.
He told about the missing digits: "I was working out in Gladewater, Texas, when I got them cut off. It was in a hardwood mill, making shingles." He told of the enormous volume of shingles they produced. "I got them sliced off when I was feeding a rip-saw." He didn't tell then, but when the hand was cut, he took a needle and thread, and sewed the sl:in over the protruding bones, washed vdth whiskey, without calling in a doctor.
"My family? Half my family was big: my two sisters weighted three hundred pounds or nearly that apiece. There was two of my brothers little as me. There was seven of us all; some of us is dead. I am the oldest..." He stopped and said with pleasure: "We generally live to be old."
He was told: "A fellow as lean, flatbellied as yourself will live to be a hundred-twenty-five."
"We're all long-lived. I'm healthy." But sometimes he gets to coughing, while he drinks whiskey, cough-medicine, and cusses. He lies on the bed moaning and hacking away in his throat. How he looked lithe and young and tough—perhaps he is healthy. His belly is flat, his hips narrow, his feet small, his neck and jaws a clean, fried red.
Walking down the street, he said: "I'm right proud of my boys—all of them.
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I let them do as they please. I did all I could for them. Earl, he's a good job, and Alvin has done pretty nigh what he wants to. Two of my kids are dead." There was no sorrow in his voice. J. W. was killed a year or two ago; he was traveling with a show that put on moving pictures in schools, and he hurled his car head-on into another car, and the top of his skull was clipped from his head. He had heen a reckless driver, was crazy about cars.
"Trucks ruined me," said his dad again.
The boys are all, except Roy who married a prostitute, and hobos, born mechanics. They are wizards with pliers, screwdrivers, wrenches... They can do things with copper wire, screws, armatures, magnets... They talk and blow, and tell jokes that aren't funny. Early reads joke books in order to by funny. Roy married a prostitute, as said; Earl married a woman who fools him and Alvin never will marry.
"I'm right proud of my boys," said Mr. Skelton, leaving the postoffice. "I never could educate them like I wanted to, though." he said.
7/18/39 S. J.
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