WHATS THE MATTER, CAN'T YOU TAKE IT

That danged old Hootie, he's been scanning my files again. And now he's been messing around in some of my story files. He picked this one for me to put on the blog. I never thought it was so good but he insists. He said something about dogfighting being in the news and wanted to have this one on record. And when Hootie gets that old whipped hound dog look in his eyes, well, I just can't say no, now can I? Anyway, here goes---



There were a couple of kids who lived about a half-mile on up the hollow from us. We could see their house from ours as it sat on a piece of land that had large crop fields all around it. Some years the fields were planted in corn, other years soybeans and in some years left idle for hay. The house was one of the newest in the hollow, but it was still not anything special or out of the ordinary. Our house had been built in the 1880s according to local history, their's probably in the mid-1940s (replacing one that had burned down, I believe, for there is history of a house being located there before 1900 and this could not be the same one, and housefires were fairly common back then.) But it did have regular siding on it and had a tin roof. Access to the house from the road was either by a footlog (no, I'm not going to tell you what a footlog was. Either you know or you don't. If you do, good for you. If you don't, ask someone else, it would take me three pages to explain all the types there were, and are.), or, around the curve in the road, turn left across a patch of ground, drive through the creek and up into the field where the house was located and on into the yard.

Both these kids (see, you thought I forgot about them, didn't you?) like to put on 'airs' that they had more, were better than, and so on. Uppity is what we called it. And really they had no reason to do so, their stepfather was a poor working stiff just like all the others in the hollow and lived paycheck to paycheck. He was a good man, easy to get along with and a pretty fair country talker (you have to have lived back then to know what that means.) The mother, however, was another case--a shrew if there ever was one. Kept her man beaten down all the time. You could tell the kids were hers, not his.

And these two kids were especially proud of their dog. This dog was a heavy, squat thing that was so ugly it was almost good-looking. And, admittedly, the dog had a pretty good record record of defending itself in fights with other dogs in the community. But it never came out of their yard. Every fight it had had was on its own turf and against foolish dogs that didn't look at the opposition before picking a fight.


Now, prior to this time, there had been some problems between these kids and one of my older brothers. The boy was a talker but not someone who would take physical action against anyone (what a nice way of saying he talked a good fight, but the stripe down his back was the purest shade of yellow.) The girl had tried out for cheerleader at the local high school, and had talked big that she would be the best cheerleader--no, that she WAS the best cheerleader that school had ever had. Too bad, she spoke a little early, she didn't make the cut.

And my brother, well, he lost no time in letting her know daily what had happened. He ragged and he ragged. Both she and her brother looked daggers at him and engaged in verbal warfare with my brother all winter and into the spring. Not only over this, but about other supposed faults they saw in each other. One afternoon in mid-spring, coming home from school, you could hear them, from all the way down at the bottom of the hill, arguing. My brother was taunting her with the then, in vogue, saying, "What's the matter, can't you take it? Can't you Alabammy shake it?" She was hollering and her bother was too, all the way up the hill to our house, and beyond until they were out of hearing distance.

The next day was Saturday, and on her way back from the grocery store, her mother climbed the hill to our house and knocked on the door. Mom answered the door and their mother began her litany of complaints, including the previous day's teasing. After listening patiently to her complaints for about ten minutes, our mother indicated it would be best for her to get off the porch, out of the yard and back into the road, or else risk life and limb , that she was in a most precarious position right then. Further complaints would not be wise, and she'd better get a move on before Mom did. Not in just those words, but she got her point across. The kids mother lost no time in doing just as Mom suggested.

Summer came and those two kids are walking down the road approaching our house on their way to the store,,or to visit relative out on the hard road, or who knows why they were going, they just were. And their dog, contrary to normal, has followed them and is in the field across the road from out house. And that was a dangerous place to be, for old Spot thought that was his yard, and he was defensive of his yard, to say the least. He was part blue tick, part hound, and, overall, was hell on wheels in a fight.In actual fact, there was not a dog in the hollow he had not fought and whipped--except theirs--it wouldn't come out of the yard and Spot was smart enough to not go into its own yard, just to prove a point. The other dogs in the hollow, the ones Spot had previously whipped, ran and hid when they saw him coming (they couldn't outrun him, either. Some had tried and had wounds for their silliness.)

Spot saw the dog and came off the porch running. The girl screamed and the boy ran after their dog, but it was too late. Spot was already there. He had intercepted their dog about 150 feet from our house in the field, near a run-down old fenceline. There was not so much of a fight as there could have been.Spot managed to catch their dog and stop him from running, then proceeded to pick him up and toss him around,catching him again and repeating the action. By this time we were all gathered around--at a safe distance.

Then suddenly, our dog was no longer just fighting, he was in it for the kill. He grabbed the other dog by the throat and refused to let go, even while being slapped by my older brother. Seeing that their dog would be killed in a minute or two, my older brother picked a fence post
out of the fenceline and began beating Spot over the head and shoulders, trying to get him to stop.

Finally the message got through to Spot to stop. He released their dog which immediately cut a course straight up the bottom toward his home. He made a good sized splash as he split the creek and was safely into the cornfield on the other side of the creek. Words were exchanged in the field between my brother and those two but as far as I know they never spoke another word after that to each other.

From that point on, none of that family would ever look our way when they walked past our house. Even meeting face-to-face in the roadway, they would separate if necessary when they approached us coming from the other direction in order to avoid eye or physical contact.

Their dog, never recovering from the fight, never left their yard again. The oddest thing--I was friends with their younger half-brother, he was a nice kid, but the family moved away a year or so later, to Ohio, I think. We never saw or heard from or of them again until a few years ago when I saw in the paper where the mother had died.


OK, Hootie, are you happy now? Oh, it didn't end the way you wanted it to? Well, that's the breaks, boy, that's the breaks.

HOOT HOOT HOOT