Goodbye Tommy old friend

I have been away trying to to take care of some health problems,I have lost fifty pounds and my blood pressure is a lot better I have been able to cut the medicine in half. My diabetes is under control and I hope to be off the medicine for that by my next birthday, I am walking five miles a day and have removed all sugar from diet although I was bad tonight and had a chocolate chip cookie. Sugar, I do not miss all that much but I do miss my fried chicken and cornbread. But anyway I got some bad news yesterday a friend of mine was killed in a car wreck and during my walk tonight
he was on my mind. Tommy came to work with me at Loxley Brothers body shop when he was eighteen years old, I was twenty three. We became friends instantly. He and his wife became regulars at my house on the weekends playing cards.Tommy even took up hunting with uncle Ken,Dad and me. Even when Tommy moved on to anther shop we remained on the same bowling team and worked firework's shows around the fourth of July for several years after. Then him and his wife split and he disappeared for a while.
One of my favorite memories of Tommy was his first rabbit hunting trip with Ken, dad and me. Tommy was near Uncle Ken when he jumped a rabbit and pulled up his gun and fired at the rabbit, a clean miss. Uncle Ken quickly ceased the moment and said Tommy we do not shot at the rabbit on the jump we call the dogs over and get them started on the track and let them run the rabbit around. Tommy apologized and we moved on. A couple of hours later Ken and Tommy stopped for a cigarette break and while standing together a rabbit jumped next to them and Ken quickly swung his gun and killed the rabbit. Tommy said hey man you were suppose to call the dogs and let them run, that what you said. Ken looked at him and said hell Tommy you believe a word I said and started laughing loudly. Tommy shaking his head and I see that how it is.
On another hunt in January muzzle loading season for deer we were hunting together on my farm and I ran six or seven deer toward Tommy, they just about ran over him. I asked him why he did not take a shot? He said he did but his gun did not go off.
Later at dinner with uncle Ken, Tommy was telling the story to him . Uncle Ken said Tommy I know what you should have done, and Tommy asked him what? Uncle Ken said son you should have just throwed the gun over in the creek if it won't shoot. Tommy shaking his head and laughing with us.
I have not seen Tommy in over twelve years, the last time being the Friday afternoon he quit working for me I gave him his paycheck and he never returned from dinner. He did call me on the phone about nine years ago and apologized for walking out on me. Tommy said he was in rehab and was in the process of trying to get his life back together and wanted to talk to me we talked for over an hour. A day or two later I found out that Tommy had been arrested and had been living in a trash dumpster about three blocks from my house.
I have remained in contact with his ex wife thru the years and seen his two sons.
And the week he was released from prison his ex wife called me to let me know when he would get out and that I would probably be one of the first people that he contacted, but he never did. He was just forty two years old. I have often thought of friends that pass thru our lives. Friends that are apart of our lives for just a short time, and we may not see or hear from them for years at a time. But remain in our hearts and memories for all time.

The Garden of Eden

My grandparents Curt and Sarah Belle Brewer had an arranged marriage by the plantation owner, in Breathitt county Kentucky. Sarah had just graduated the 8th grade on a Saturday and he came in and told her and her grandmother that next Saturday she would marry Curt Brewer, they had never met.They married and had 11 children. Curt was a farmer and a logger he was a buyer of timber for the plantation owner. As he moved around he always had to rent a place with at least two house’s one for his growing family and one for his elderly father Esau and his step mother Elizabeth. Everywhere the moved the land owner always had rules on what livestock they could keep and what they could grow. This was during the great depression and times were hard.
My aunt Carmie has told me many stories thru the years as of today she is 89 years old and still remembers them like it was yesterday. She told me one night a beggar came knocking at the door It was way up in the night , they had been some killings at that time in Breathitt county also known as Bloody Breathitt. My grandfather asked him what he wanted and he asked for some bread crumbs for his children and wife but wanted nothing for himself .He asked my grandmother if they any they could give them she said she a little they could spare as back then they saved every scrap. They gave them what they had and told them they could stay overnight in the barn and they did.
In the summer of 1939 they moved to Baptist fork of the Stillwater creek in Wolfe County to a farm that Curt brother Willis Brewer had bought for the back taxes. It was 226 acres and a paradise to my grandmother. As my aunt Carmie tells me the only way to get to the farm was up the creek as there was no road, probably about a mile maybe mile and half. My uncle Ken was a baby at the time and when my grandmother got to the farm with him in her arms she thanked God for their home. You see this was the Garden of Eden to her. She was able to keep her chickens and ducks and grow whatever she needed for her family. But for some reason my grandfather hated it he also hated the ducks. you see the ducks get in the creek and they leave the water dirty with their feathers and oil and the work mules are fussy when it comes to drinking water I am told. One night my grandfather came in mad and told Belle pack up we are going back to Breathitt County. Now according to my aunt my grandmother was sitting at the dinner table sipping coffee from a tea cup with a broken handle she never looked up and no Curt my children and me are staying here I will write Willis in the morning he let us stay you can leave if you want to. Now this is the first and only time my aunt said that grandma had ever spoken up to him about anything. Well not another word was ever said about going back to Breathitt County. They purchased the farm with their second season profits 2700.00 dollars. They were not rich, by any means but they were able to produce everything the family needed with canning vegetables raising hogs and chickens and ducks for their feathers for beds and pillows and their eggs and meat.
I am not sure what year the road was put in but it was no longer after the war. The state told the people living up in the holler that if they would build the road the state would maintain it. So my grandfather Brewer Nathan Hatton and my grandfather Robert Lee Patton went together and hired a man with a dozer to build the road. Now the years after the war times were good my grandfather Curt had made a little money selling tobacco and sourghrom molasses as during the war sugar was rationed and hard to come by. And now they had a road he went into the timber business. Now it was my understanding that everyone wanted to work for him not only did he pay every Saturday but they got fed as back then it was customary they ate dinner {lunch for you city people} and they loved eating my grandmothers cooking. Things were very good until his death in 1956. The business just folded and my aunt and uncles were in the process of moving away to Dayton for factory jobs and now that Garden of Eden is now going back to the forest and the wild turkeys. Land that at one time had 3 houses and supported as many families; my grandmother lived there until the farm house burned down. My mother lived there with her when she was pregnant with me and after I was born we moved to Dayton. In later years she moved back to the farm in a mobile home that my uncle Ken purchased for her this was the early 70’s. I spent one glorious summer with her. She never owned a T.V. never listened to the radio. I can still see and hear her in my mind every morning she would sit in her rocking chair and comb out her long hair and put in a bun on top of her head, she would whistle and would rub my back and tell me how much I reminded her of my grandpa. My uncle ken and aunt Carmie tell me that I am more like him than anyone in the family. That summer I have some of my best memories of her she told me that when she first married my grandfather that she would walk into the woods with him in the evenings with him and sit while the waited on a squirrel to come into range for supper. One evening she was fixing supper and I walked by the stove and I asked her Grandma what are you fixing here for supper she said I am heating up some corn for supper for the leftover chicken from dinner, I said grandma these are peaches on the stove, she ahhhhhh. She was just about blind by this time but still stayed by herself must of the time she kept everything organized she knew where everything was. A day or two after that I killed my first rabbit, I was so thrilled and went running to show grandma, once I got there I said grandma I am going to go up to Uncle Arnold’s and see if he will show me how to clean him. She you do not need Arnold, come over and give me you knife and I will show you, you just have to be my eye’s, well she went to work and I want to tell you to this day that old blind woman to this day I cannot clean a rabbit as fats and clean as she did that day, all she asked was did she get all of its guts out, and said yes grandma. As I got older I found out that when any of the family went hunting and brought back any game that they did not clean it , they brought back to the house and she did all the cleaning. My aunt Carmie also tells me about when her first child was born my cousin Cindy that her milk did not come in and she asked the doctor what to do? The doctor told her to take the girl to Belle as she had just give birth to my father Porter just a couple of weeks later, it always struck me as funny that my dad and his older niece where breast fed at the same time.
The year my mother Pearlie Lived with her they became close friends. My sisters still say my grandmother was right when she said, right after my mother came upon a copperhead snake in the garden and she believed I would be retarded because the snake had scared her so.Even after my parents divorced she came of every year and would stay a couple of weeks with us. She once told my little dog that she was going to pinch off his nose if he did not stop barking as he did at night when she was going to bed as she would put on her night scarf overhead. My dad was dating another woman and was going to marry her and he was telling my grandmother about it one day when I was thought to be asleep and my grandmother told him now son you do what you think you have to do but I am telling you no one will take the place of Pearlie and those kids in there.
The last time I seen her it was about 3 weeks before she passed away she had moved back in with my uncle EC. In Campton Kentucky. Mom stopped and let us kids see her and she was telling mom about these headaches and little explosions in her head mom told her she needed to see a doctor and she said she would . she gave my baby sister a doll that she had, and was rubbing my back telling me how much I reminded her of Curt and that she would not be around much longer, I said grandma you will be here to see my son, she hugged me and said she loved me. She was gone just 3 weeks later she had been having a series of small strokes. I have in later years discussed her life with my uncles and aunts everyone always said how hard my grandfather worked and he did but she worked much harder you see my grandfather never worked on Sunday or If the weather was bad but she had 3 meals to prepare everyday she grew the vegetable garden and preserved all the food laundry on a wash board carrying water, not to mention raising 11 children. She once told my mom that sometimes she got so lonely in the holler by herself that she would wind an old clock for company to just hear it tick.