My Three Shadows: A Story of Boyhood Pranks, Wartime Horrors, and Second Chances

Contents

Mt. Olive, NC

High Point

My Youth

Basic Training

Vietnam

Recon Base

Dog Patch

The Bush

Death

Home

Home 2

PTSD

PTSD 2

Marriage

Jehovah’s Witnesses

Trim-Line

The Shed

I’ll kill you

Closing

Coldest House in North Carolina

My Three Shadows

Mt. Olive, NC

I always wondered what my Grandfather Roberts was like as a young man growing up and that is what inspired me to write this. I want my grandchildren to know and understand me, not from any other source, but from my own lips.

So, I will start at the beginning. I was born in Mount Olive, NC in a four room house in the middle of a cornfield, way back off the road. The doctor had to come out to the house to deliver me because Mom and Dad didn’t have the money for the hospital. That miserable day fell on Monday, September 1, 1947. The rest of my life has been a Monday. It cost $5.00 to have me circumcised so I was never trimmed.

My Grandfather Roberts owned that farm and sold it to R. Jones They then moved to the Bear Creek area. Grand Daddy Roberts bought Daddy a farm back off the road about 1/4 mile and he bought himself a farm about five miles back towards town from daddy’s farm. This farm is the earliest of my memories as a child.

There is one memory that to this day still haunts me, not for what happened but for what almost happened. It was the day we were picking up corn after the corn picker had gone through. The corn picker always left a large amount on the ground after picking. We would come along later and pick up the corn and arrange it into piles. Later, we would come back with the tractor and a trailer and throw the corn into the trailer. I was about four years old, driving the tractor, a Massey Ferguson, and I was holding one-year-old Doodle in my lap. Doodle fell asleep and slid out of my lap onto the ground. He was lying on his back and the large tractor wheel rolled up the straddle pinching his legs. I pushed the clutch down and stopped the tractor. I was too small to be driving a large tractor but on a farm, that is to be expected. Every one has to carry their own load, big or small. But to this day, I still wonder if it was really Doodle that fell asleep or if it was me. I have always felt like I couldn’t do enough for Doodle, but he wanted me to stay as far away from him as I could get. We were two different personalties. Doodle was the class president and I was the one always in trouble.

We had an old mule named Jack. I went to feed Jack one day, and as I dumped his feed into his feed box, he stepped on my bare foot. He wouldn’t move, just stood there and listened to me moan and groan until I got my hands on a broken tobacco stick and slapped him beside the head. Old Jack grunted and slowly lifted his foot off my foot and he never stepped on my foot again.

Great-grandparents

Daddy and Mama

Daddy had an old sow and she was giving birth. Every time she would have a baby, she would turn around and eat it. Daddy sat us on the fence and told us to let him know if she had any more. We were sitting there like a couple of crows when she had another pig. Doodle yelled out, Hey Daddy, she blew out another one! Daddy picked up the axe and ran over to where she was getting ready to eat her last pig. Daddy hit that sow right between the eyes with the blunt end of that axe. I thought he had killed that old sow as hard as he hit her. She dropped to her knees shaking her head. She never ate that last pig, but raised him.

When the pig got older, me and Doodle would ride on his back. The only way you could stay on was to grab one ear and his tail. When you were ready to go you would twist his tail. He would squeal really loud, like you were trying to kill him. He was a red pig, so we named him Red. When Red got old enough to take to the market, Daddy and Granddaddy took Red to the market in Clinton, North Carolina. Red was a great big boar. Just so happened that when they were in the middle of Clinton, old Red panicked, stood up on his back legs and busted down the back gate of the pickup trailer, and Red was loose in the middle of Clinton. They chased that hog in and out of one store after another. They finally caught that hog in the five-and-ten cent store. Daddy said that if he had a gun, he would have shot that damn hog deader than hell, right there in the fanciest store he went into. Red was finally loaded back into the truck and taken to market.

I remember as a small kid of about seven or eight wanting a swimming pool. The soil was sandy and easy to work and I dug me a large hole for a swimming pool. Then I tried to fill it with water and it pumped the well dry. I came home from school one day and Daddy and Earl were digging the well deeper. I never got a spanking but Daddy said he could have set the house into that hole I dug.

We had a goat named Billy. Me and Doodle decided to take a cardboard box, set some wagon wheels under it and let Billy pull us around the house. Then we got the idea to let Billy pull our six-month old brother, Stewart, in it. But I told Doodle, we’d better try it out first without Stewart in it. So we set a big rock in it and let Billy go. Billy took off so fast, it tore the box to pieces. It would have killed Stewart if he was in the box.

Let me tell you about Billy the goat. Daddy bought a new Plymouth and brought it home. He was so proud of that car -- his first new car. But every morning when you walked out the door to the house, you would find Billy running up and down from hood to trunk on Daddy’s new car. Now Billy had real long horns and our house had no underpinning. At three o’clock in the morning, Billy would run from one end of the house to the other end of the house, back and forth, back and forth. One day, Billy the goat got missing. Daddy said he ate some fertilizer we had in the barn and it killed him. I think there is a good chance that daddy was smiling when he found that goat.

That was the last goat my father ever let me have. I was 52 years old when I got my next goat and at 55 I was ready to get rid of them. I got them for the kids and grandkids. But We-Tona and the grandkids moved to Tennessee, and I don’t ever get to see Heath and his kids. My wife, Janie, bought the kids a horse to ride but he turned out to be mean, so no one ever rode him except Shana, Mady and Corey and that was very little. And when We-Tona tried to ride him, he threw her off and she flat out busted her tail. Even the horse thought that one was funny.

I remember in late summer around the middle of September I would go out looking for a good strong Muscadine vine. Then I would look for the grapes on the ground usually the hogs would have eaten them. I would eat the good ones on the ground, then I would climb that tree to the top where the good grapes were and I would sit there till I was full of the grapes. I would do this for the rest of the month. I didn’t weigh much more than a hat band so I could climb to the very tops of the trees, and swing and sway with the breeze.

When I was seven, my daddy bought the farm across from my Granddaddy Kornegay’s place (my mama’s daddy). It belonged to the Kornegay family. During the auction it got to the point that daddy was scared to bid any more. Granddaddy Kornegay told daddy to bid twelve hundred dollars and if he needed the twelve hundred he would give it to him to get that farm. Daddy made the bid and we had a new farm. Yes sir, we had bought us a farm right across from my Kornegay grandparents’ farm. A short time later, Granddaddy sold his place to Daddy too.

My grandparents had grown up poor and my mother was one of the poorest in her class. My grandfather, when the kids’ shoes wore out, would take an old metal shoe horn and two pair of old shoes and make one good pair out of it. In her eleventh grade pictures, mother and one other girl are the only two that didn’t have on shoes. That has always been something that has stuck in the back of my mind, going to high school with no shoes. I can tell you right now that before mama died she went through a lot of shoes.

Goshen Swamp

Old Mill Pond

The old homeplace had a swamp at the back of the farm. Everyone would, at the end of the day, would go fishing if they felt up to it. We were very regular at fishing, Goshen was a well respected swamp. When you saw a snake in the path you gave him the right of way. You didn’t tease or play with him unless you planned on killing him. One day Doodle and I went to Goshen to fish. We found this log that had been blown over for many years, so we walked out a little ways, then took and threw our hooks in. It wasn’t long before something hit my hook. As soon as the line tightened it went straight down and buried itself in the mud. I told Doodle, I’ll bet I got that old black fish that keeps breaking everyone’s line. Doodle slipped over closer to where I was as I was trying to pull this sea monster out of the water. I am pulling on this old reed pole as hard as I can pull, when all of a sudden here he comes. It’s an eel! I didn’t know what the hell it was, but it was no fish! Doodle yelled It’s a SNAKE! We started to run, slipped and fell in on the other side of the log. Doodle still got to the bank before I did. Scared me so bad that I fell in with the eel on his side of the log. One thing is for sure and that is that Doodle didn’t come in to save me or even ask if I needed any help. We were both scared out of our pants. We managed to get out with out getting eaten by that damn thing. We got back on shore safe and sound. I went back out on the log to get my fishing pole, very carefully I went out on that log. Got my line and started pulling that thing in, got it pulled in and it was an eel. At the end of the day we took the eel and the rest of our catch and marched proudly the rest of the way home.

Goshen Swamp

It was a Saturday afternoon and I decided to go fishing but today I decided to take the rifle, a 22 Remington. The swamp was so wet you had to roll your pants leg up to almost your knee and go bare footed, .If you wore boots they would dry rot much faster than usual. Well here I go, I have my reed pole, hoe, my can and my rifle. Here I am walking down this old dusty farm road when as I look straight ahead there is a black snake laying half way across the road. He is an old one. He stopped raised, his head, slithered a few feet towards me, then stopped again. This time I laid everything down, took careful aim, and fired, but I missed. All I did was get his attention. He raised his head and looked at me. I loaded again, took aim, fired and missed again. Never had I shot so bad in my life. Now that crazy snake was charging me, I cleared the chamber put another round in and I fired another shot, it missed. By now I couldn’t even unload the rifle I was shaking so hard. I finally get my last shot ready to fire. If I miss this shot I’ll have my hoe, that’s what I usually used any way. With that thought in mind, I dropped down on one knee took, careful aim, held my breath and squeezed the trigger and with that shot I killed the black snake, the Old Black Snake.

I gradually worked my way down the river, .I came to a spot that I had fished regularly with success. I took about ten steps out and heard the leaves scuffing over my head. I looked up and all I saw was a long snake that had a beautiful red belly. The damn thing fell right on top of my head and shoulders. I’ll never know how I did it with out getting bit. I grabbed the snake threw him into the water, slipped on the log and fell in with the snake. I wouldn’t be surprised if I hadn’t been running on water when I came out. Got my pole out of the water and quickly found another fishing spot. The snake is known in those parts as a red belly mocassin and they are poisonous.

I remember sleeping in that old house across from grannies. No heat but a lot of bed covers and a thick feather mattress. I would pull my covers back start at the foot of my bed and start running and jump into my bed, then sit up and grab the covers and pull them back over me. You slept with a stretched out sock or a toboggan to pull over your head, long-johns on your body, and socks on your feet to keep you warm. Every day mama would fluff up my bed and make it up for me. When I would jump in it would not cover me and that ruined the whole process of going to sleep. When mama would change the pot in the bedroom, she didn’t always put it in the same corner. I got up one night and raced to the corner that was supposed to have the potty. That is a real trick hitting the potty in the middle of the night. I started peeing, but I was 2/3 asleep, couldn’t find the pot but couldn’t hold it back because my bladder was about to bust when I tried to. When I finally finished, I realized that I had missed the pot. It was not until the next morning that I saw the pot was in the other corner. After that, I started looking where the potty was BEFORE I went to bed.

When I got up in the morning, Daddy had already started a fire. There was only one room in the whole house that had heat and that was the living room. The next warmest room was the kitchen. These old houses had the real high ceilings. The fire place had tobacco stains all over them where people would spit. Daddy was the only one that