(Photo: 1955 - Randy in cowboy hat, Papa Bonnell, Ricky, Ronda)
by Randy Reynolds
I'm eight years old, traipsing on a windless afternoon after my grandfather as he forces a manual plow through the hard-packed ground. I want to be like Papa. I want to do everything he does. "Papa, slow down," I whine. "Let me do it." He ignores me and I feel my sense of injustice rising.
Although he pushes the very earth before him and I have only myself and my pique to carry, his long, loping hardscrabble-farmer stride carries him so far ahead of me that I know he can't hear me anymore so I demonstrate my feelings by throwing myself to the ground. Rolling over and over, disturbing several of his newly-plowed rows, I get the cool red soil all over me, I lick my lips and taste it. Not bad.
I lie face upward, not sure if the cottony clouds in a bright blue sky are moving or if the earth is. Now I'm dizzy as well as angry, waiting for Papa to come back down the row and deal with me. If he'll only stop to listen, I can tell him that I want to plow, too; that I want to be like him. I think he'll be so honored that he'll turn the plow over to me and stand back to proudly watch me finish plowing his back yard and he'll go inside to brag on me to Mama Maude and, later in the week when my daddy returns to get me, Papa might tell him about it and Daddy might be proud of me, too. That feeling is what I live for, but it's hard to come by for a little boy who happens to be the oldest child in a large and growing family, and therefore the one who gets the least attention.
I fear that I won't be the man my papa is because I've heard him say that he started plowing when he was eight years old, the age I am this day, and nobody lets me do ANYTHING yet. Papa began with one mule and a plow stock as high as his shoulders. His daddy told him to keep plowing till twilight. Papa didn't know what 'twilight' was, exactly, having never heard the word before, so he plowed till it was good and dark, just to make sure he wouldn't get a beating for quitting too soon. That night his daddy took the plow reins and whipped him savagely for working the mule too hard and sent him to bed without supper. Deep in the night, his mama snuck over to the bed he shared with several younger brothers and gobbed lard onto the back of his shirt to loosen it from his bloodied flesh.
A half-century later, Papa Bonnell tells this story, and many others like it, without rancor, as if the whipping was no big deal. "Hell, I can't blame the old man for taking care of his mules better than his young'uns. He could always have more kids, but a good mule was hard to come by when cotton was five cents a pound."
I crawl over to the row that Papa's on and lie there watching him come toward me, pushing the plow, pulling it back, pushing again, pulling it back. He pretends he's going to plow right through me, and I roll to safety and sit up, licking more dirt from my lips, still liking it, feeling I'm a part of it somehow. Maybe that's what Papa feels. Maybe that's why he comes home from a hard day as a loom-fixer at the cotton mill and plows till twilight. All he says to me that day is, "Get up from there, you little skeester!" And he keeps going, herky-jerky, straight down the row, no time for foolishness.
(Bonnell Reynolds & his mother Chesty Collins Reynolds, 1980's)
(below: 1978, Five generations of Reynolds': Chesty, Bonnell, Gene, Randy, Kerri, Kristi)
