When my family first moved there the kids from Futheyville were required to attend the city school in Grenada because there was no county school nearby. The nearest one would have been in Holcomb or Gore Springs, both of which were ten miles or more from Futheyville. We were the “redheaded stepchildren” in school. We were there, but no one really wanted us there. We were excluded from much of the extracurricular activities by the simple fact that if you stayed after school to play football, basketball, or some other sport, you would have to walk home by yourself, sometimes in the dark, and you wouldn’t get home in time to do the chores around the place. The result of this was that unless you were really good at something you were not encouraged to participate. Of course, if you were an “eventually to become professional baseball player” like a certain fellow who lived over near Worsham’s Store (That was about halfway between Futheyville and Grenada if you went the long way around.) arrangements would be made to see that you didn’t have to walk. I wasn’t, so I had to walk. Those city folks wouldn’t provide us a school bus. I guess they figured that they were offering us enough just to let us attend school with their children. Of course walking to school wasn’t all bad. That made it real easy to cut school. All you had to do was leave home headed toward school, and, during the three mile walk, just leave the road and head for the creek or the woods. There were several good places to do that, but my favorite was in the middle of the willows that grew along the side of the road as it approached Bogue Creek. Not only could I slip away there, but I could also pick up the fishing pole that I always kept there under the overhang of the bridge because it was such a bother to carry it back and forth. Of course, my parents weren’t quite as slow as I thought, and they soon picked up on what I was doing. Or then, again, maybe my sainted older brother or sister told on me. I wouldn’t be surprised. They always seemed to like school. That ought to tell you what kind of misery I had at home with those two “can-do-no-wrong” siblings to set an example for my parents to use in judging me. But, I’ll get back to that later. The road we walked to school was supposed to be gravel, but it was more sand and clay than gravel. Most of the time it was filled with ruts and potholes which the supervisor only graded out when he was up for re-election. It had brush hanging out over it for a big part of the distance we travelled because it went through swampy ground on both sides of Bogue Creek, which ran between Futheyville and Grenada. There were places where the sun seldom, if ever, touched the ground. There was even mold growing along the edges in some places. The only real joy of walking that road was the presence of light poles (That’s utility poles for you city folks.) along the way. These provided insulators for target practice with a sling shot. I got pretty good at breaking them with a well-place shot. Of course, my mother found out (more snitching by the sainted siblings, I suppose), and I had to relinquish another bright spot in my rather dull life. Momma didn’t just tell me to quit breaking the insulators; she confiscated my sling shot each morning as I left for school. Three miles is a long way when all you can do is walk. I never did like to cross Bogue Creek. It was spanned by a bridge that hung some forty-five or fifty feet above the water. The floor of the bridge was made of wooden planks (two by twelve oak) laid horizontally across the steel girders that served to hold the whole thing up. When it was first built, I am sure that it was a fine bridge, but, by the time I came along, it was somewhat less than fine. There were holes in which the wheel of a car could have gotten stuck or through which I could have fallen to the shallow creek below. Some of those holes were as big around as a number 2 washtub. That’s big, big enough for me to take a bath in. I sometimes had nightmares about falling through one of those holes and splatting on the sand or drowning in the water below. The water wasn’t that deep, but I figured that I would be knocked out by the fall. There I would be; stretched out in the water with no way to escape certain death. To keep car wheels from getting caught in the holes, the supervisor’s men had nailed broad runners for the cars to use, one runner for each set of wheels. That’s where we were supposed to walk. We did most of the time, but Buddy (That’s saint Buddy) took great delight in pushing me toward one of the holes and then grabbing me just when I thought I was going to make a big splash in the water below. Everybody (There were about ten or twelve kids who walked along with us to school each day.) thought that was so funny. Me and Buddy had several altercations about the situation. I won some and I lost some. Buddy was bigger than me at that stage of my life, and he was able to whip me even when I tried my best. Every once in a while, though, I would be so mad, or maybe, scared, that I would take it to him. The offshoot of all of this was that I hated the walk to school; I hated that bridge; I hated school.
Posted on: Sat, 31 Aug 2013 15:37:17 +0000