The Sweet Husband

Big Business

The SH, the youngest daughter and her husband, and her daughter Heavan decided last night that Granny had been too depressed and their mission for the evening was having me in a good mood.

The fastest way in this house is telling tales about our childhood. My mother and dad had three sets of children, they married in 1925 and within 6 years had 3 little ones, then they waited six more years and had another child, then waited six more years and had 4 more, 3 of those lived and I was the youngest of that group of 3.

At the age of about 11 or 12, my brother Milton became very interested in crawfish. He would diligently go crawfishing in the ditches across the road from our house, bring them home and talk about how he was going to raise them and sell them and by the next morning they would be dead and he would just go catch some more, spending hours doing this every time it rained.

I would have been 5 or 6 and I watched all this, always quietly, because in our house from birth you were taught that children should be seen and not heard. We were also all taught to read years before we ever went to school, and daddy had a few magazines that would have articles about fishing in them, so I started reading them.

I figured out that you cannot end up with live crawfish putting them in a box, and Milton's method of catching them was too slow for me, those were the two things I knew for sure.

So the next time it rained, I drug out one of Mama's wash tubs then I went and looked at the ditch and what it had in it, and decided that if I put everything in the tub they had in the ditch, then the crawfish wouldn't know they weren't in the ditch and they would live.

So I added a little of the rain water, dug up grass with the roots still on it and floated that in the water, and added some rocks, then I took the yard rake and went to the end of the ditch away from where Milton was fishing with his bacon and string, and raked up about 2 dozen crawfish.

The first argument started because Milton caught 5 crawfish and I had 24. Then the next morning the fight started because mine were still alive and his were dead. I changed out the grass and the morning after that, they were still alive.

I spent mornings changing out grass and afternoons trying to convince Milton that he could sell my crawfish and I would let him keep part of the money.

All negotiations were going well I thought, until the fire.

I had quite a pile of dead grass stacking up from me changing it out every day, and mama told me to take it out to the field behind our house, and my sweet brother Milton told me that it would be faster, and would mean no trips walking out to the field if I just burned it.

So I went in the house, snuck out with the matches and looked around for Milton because suddenly he had disappeared, and then decided I didn't need him anyway, and set the grass on fire. As it spread across the back yard, mama comes flying out the back door, jerks up my tub full of water and crawfish and throws it and puts out the fire.

Fire and crawfish do not make a good combination for anything except dinner.

I was done with the crawfish business and the only thing that made me even smile when I thought of crawfish for a long time was the fact that after he took my tub and my idea the little brat was never able to sell a single crawfish.