A Valley Story Pt. 1

It was in 47, 48 and 49. 
I remember, we had a late freeze: it used to get colder in the Valley then.  We used to have seasons.  I remember, it was in 47, 48 and 49.  If you planted your crop too early: you'd lose it.  And it was an artform to time your seedin' just right.  Charlie Pickens, I watched him reach down and grab a handful of dirt and crunch it between his fingers and roll it around between his palms.  He could feel when it was right for seeding.  I guess some guys were reading Farmer's Almanac.  But if you didn't time it just right...

They used to plant citrus and sorghum mostly back then; before it was so blasted hot like it is nowdays.  It's just cotton now.  They can't breed it to resist bugs.  So they've engineered it to be impervious to bug killer. And weed killer.  The cotton seed comes out of a test tube and you can spray liquid killer all over the crop and not lose a single plant.  But back when I was a kid it was all mostly citrus around our parts.

One day we were out in front of Charlie Pickens', he had a girl, about me and my brother's age and she had a cousin over, and we were all out front carrying-on in the yard after church.  And all those cars pulled up the drive. All those men and my dad.  You see, there was an unspoken, unwritten justice in the Valley. This is just what men did. And Charlie knew it.

About a year or so before that day, they had all come up the drive like that after church.  All the men and my dad.  It was known that Charlie would get to drinkin'.  And he'd get mean.  The sheriff never could get Charlie's wife to say how'd she come to get a black eye or a busted lip and so on.  And so all the men came up the drive to deliver a message to a neighbor.  This is just what men did.

And Charlie swore that day that he'd stop drinkin'.  And he swore he'd stop beating up his wife.  And Charlie and all the men and my dad...they didn't do anything but talk that day.  But Charlie was in it now...up-to-his-eyeballs with the bank and his crops hadn't come in worth anything and he had stopped going to church. So I don't think those men believed what Charlie had been swearing to.

Sure enough, a year later or so, Charlie forgot all about swearing to anything and Annette Pickens showed up to church with a black eye.  And the elders of the church let the sheriff know that he needed to find something to do on the other side of town.

They were getting out their cars; sad looking...serious.  My dad walked right up to me and Ronnie and told us to run along home.  And we did.

I know they beat him up pretty good and drove him to the hospital.  When I was in high school I broke my wrist in football and the bone came right through.  And when the nurse was there at the side of my hospital bed she said she hadn't seen a break that bad since they had brought Charlie Pickens in that day.
Charlie never took another drink.  His farm had just been an embarrassment.  He almost lost the whole place to the bank.  But when he stopped drinkin'...he started really farming again.  And he was the best or luckiest farmer in the Valley.  He always had been; you see...he knew how to tell when it was the right time to seed.

He'd just feel the dirt in his hands.

Ten or so years later he had all new equipment, new combine and his place just looked great.  Everybody would follow Charlie's lead when he planted.  And we just weren't losing crops to the late freeze anymore. But also, it wasn't getting to be as cold as it used to get in the Valley.

But it was in 1947, 48 and 49 when Charlie had been drinkin'.  We had a late freeze all three years and we lost all our citrus after that.  Never got it back.  If you were to seed your sorghum and cotton right: you'd make it to market even if the citrus didn't pan out.  Still today, if you buy orange juice at the supermarket its Florida oranges.  Or Brazil.  But we never got the citrus back in the Valley.