by
Jeannie Travis
I knew a Mr Carson when I was a little knobby kneed girl. Mr Sherman Carson. Didn’t start out Sherman, just liked that name and took it when he was a decidedly odd young man. Mama said he got to wondering how much it would take to feed a wife, so he put aside the same amount of food that he ate for awhile and decided he couldn’t afford a wife – never married. He was the fiddler at the neighborhood ‘Play Parties’ where my talented Mama played her guitar and sang Redwing, Great Speckled Bird, Beautiful Brown Eyes,and other songs.. She said everything Mr Carson played sounded like Soldiers Joy, but fiddlers were hard to come by in the country so he was welcomed.as much for his pixilated ways as for his fiddling ability…
When I knew of him he lived by himself in a weathered old house that looked like it had never seen a coat of paint, way back in the boonies beside a woods road seldom traveled by anyone other than a farmer getting to a back field. We had 3 ways to walk the 4 or 5 miles from Lambs, our one room schoolhouse. A favored route on winter days led us through the usually mud free woods that went right in front of Mr Carson’s house. We never caught so much as a glimpse of him, but I bet he could hear us chattering away and would stand back from the uncurtained windows and watch us till we were out of sight. I think we ran more than we walked. Our arguing, laughing and teasing probably brightened the dreary days of winter for him. There was a long thick row of buttercups in the Spring, I remember. Those cheerful yellow flowers were the only spot of color among the weeds and dead grass in his yard, and we looked at them with envy – but never picked a single bloom that I recall.That old man who chose to live in so lonely a place was a bit
of an ogre to us little ones.
One day when I was about 8 or 9, I wanted to go by Mr Carson’s but none of the others kids did, so I just casually took off through the woods. Walking that far alone didn’t bother me and I was a very small girl for my age. As I got closer to Mr Carsons house I happened to think someone said he had raised a crop of peanuts that year. we didn’t. I walked up and knocked on his door, and he came and stood there looking down at me from a great height, it seemed. He asked me in and I went in and sat down on one of the straight backed chairs and looked around. The floor couldn’t be seen for a layer of dirt, chips, etc. Not caked on dirt, loose dirt from years of not sweeping, I guess. I asked him why he had the table legs setting in tin cans, and he said to keep the ants from getting on the table. Under the circumstances, that seemed very sensible to me….
After a bit more looking around while we sat there in silence I told him I’d heard he had grown peanuts and could I have some, please? He didn’t say anything , just went in the front room and lowered a big square, deep split oak basket down from where it was hanging near the ceiling. Keeping them safe from mice, I suppose. As he went through all this he was mumbling to himself, maybe wondering how long that basket of peanuts would last if I came back and brought the rest of my family with me! He handed me a handful, for me, of the peanuts. I thanked him and went on my way. You can be very sure I ate every one of those peanuts before I got home, because even at that age I knew I had done wrong.
I didn’t tell anyone about that till I was a grown woman, then I told Mama and we laughed about it. The mind boggles at what COULD have happened. I imagine Mr Carson got quite a laugh out of it too. I couldn’t pronounce my R’s, and folks were always laughing at the weird things I said and trying to get me to talk. Gave me quite a complex, because I thought they were laughing AT me. This was back before my wee turned up nose, knobby knees, big feet, ears sticking out of my straight as a stick hair and so on all melded together into what folks say was a pretty young lady. As you know, I am no longer bashful, and have given talks on radio and in front of large groups, but folks still seem to think I sometimes say funny things!