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Eskimos use refrigerators to keep food from freezing.
And Now You Do
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15:18, A wrathful man stirreth up strife: but he that is slow to anger appeaseth strife.
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These two brothers, Alton and Jack, actually lived about half way between Bazette and Kerens. I was by their place a couple of times with my dad and once by myself. I forgot the last name of the two brothers, so I am going to call them the Bradson brothers—Alton Bradson and Jack Bradson. I do not know anyone around Bazette or Kerens named Bradson, so there is nobody to get upset about it, at least I hope not. (If there is anyone by this name who has moved into the area since 1955, this story is not about you or your kinfolks!)
I knew the Bradson brothers because Daddy sold them hay for their cows and mules. They still farmed with mules even after just about all the other farmers had switched over to tractors. They seemed a little old-fashioned and never put in electricity, and still drew their water from the well with a bucket. They lived in a little unpainted shotgun wood house which was not much to look at. (A shotgun house has a central hall from front to back so you could shoot a shotgun through it without hitting anything.)
Everyone thought the Bradson brothers were a little odd. For one thing, they never came into town for anything—not for groceries, hardware, or even to the blacksmith shop. They just stayed out on the farm all the time, and you might see them out plowing or doing other farm work, but you would hardly ever see them up close. They just stayed away from people. They had a hired man from the black community of Ebenezer who would come by and get their shopping list, go into Kerens and buy their groceries and other stuff, and then bring everything back out to them. I did not actually know the hired man, but I recognized his wagon and two little brown mules when he tied them up in the square by the water tower. Like a lot of other Bazette people, the Bradsons always traded with Tramel’s, which was in the exact same building in which the Kerens Library used to be located before the new one was built.
The Bradson brothers never got married because their mother always told them they were too ugly, and that no woman would have them. They never really knew their father, and someone told me that he just up and left Mrs. Bradson and the two boys when they were just babies and left her to work the place and raise the boys all alone. I got this from Dad, and he got it directly from them. Besides being ugly, they could just barely read and write, and Alton could not sign his name, just make his mark on paper. They went to the Bazette schools when they were little, but I heard that their mother pulled them out of school in the third grade because she said they were too stupid to learn anything anyway.
They owned their own farm, which they got when their mother died. They only got in about six or seven bales of cotton a year for cash money. They also grew enough corn and hay to feed their cows, mules, pigs, and chickens, and of course they grew a garden. In other words, they were just scratching out a living like everybody else.
The only times when I ever really met them was when we sold them hay, or when we bought hay from them. We grew and baled hay down in the river bottom, so we generally had extra hay to sell, but sometimes we needed a little extra hay so we turned into buyers.
Anyway, once upon a time about 1955 I drove our little green Oliver 60 tractor with a trailer load of hay up out of the river bottom, past Rosie Hammet’s place, and took the back roads from the river bottom all the way west to the Bazette Road where they lived. (Not everybody knows it, but you can drive the back roads from the river bottom all the way west as far as Powell and never once get down on the highway, although you will definitely get your pickup covered with dust because it is just dirt roads all the way.) Our hay was baled up in rectangular bales, not the round ones you mostly see nowadays. Daddy was real happy over selling it because the Bradson brothers always paid cash, and we were getting $3.00 a bale, which was good money for a bale of hay back then—and actually not bad money even today.
I helped them unload the hay, and they were both hard, steady workers. Both of them were slender and tall, a good bit over six feet, and both had coal black hair. I kept trying to get a good look at their faces to see what it was that made them so ugly, but they would always turn away in the other direction if they saw me glance over at them. They were quiet and acted shy, like they were embarrassed for anyone to see their faces. They looked to be in their forties or maybe early fifties. Jack looked like the youngest one, and he did the talking. Alton was the oldest one, and he worked hard putting up the hay, but always just did what Jack told him to do. I think Jack was a little smarter than Alton, or at least thought he was. I could never quite figure out what was ugly about them. They just looked like normal people to me except they seemed sad, and they never smiled or made jokes.
Actually, I sort of liked them because they were so gentle with their animals. They had names for their barn cats and for all of their mules and cows. Alton, the one that did not seem quite as smart, would pick up one of the cats and carry it around with him and pet it. I watched Jack feeding the mules. It looked kind of silly, but he would call each one by name and hand feed them some oats, and he would scratch behind their ears while they were eating.
When we got the hay unloaded and stored in the barn, I got back on the tractor and took the empty trailer back home. When I talked to Dad about the Bradson brothers, he told me the problem was that their mother hated men, did not like the boys, and always told them they were ugly. Daddy said their mother would not let them go to school or even out to community events like the Bazette Cemetery Picnic in July. All she would do was just let them stay on the farm and work.
Sometimes I still think about the two Bradson boys, and how they always thought they looked so ugly. It always seemed sad to me that they just stayed out there on that little farm and never married, really never amounted to anything to speak of. I think Alton died a few years after this, and apparently Jack sold the old farm and moved off somewhere. Somebody told me they thought he bought a place across the river in Henderson County, so maybe he started growing watermelons. I never really ever heard what he did after he left, but I always hoped that maybe someone somewhere spoke a few kind words to him that might have made a difference. Both of them were good boys, and they deserved a whole lot better than they got.
Dr. Ivan R. Vernon
ivernon-ohio@att.net
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Average Score: 5
Votes: 8
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