....Continued See The Small Children ....

Never really liked kids much; didn't like em when I was one, didn't like em when I was all growed up. Mama use to say kids was a nuisance, had a bathe em, would smell if ya didn't and momma knew, she was smart like that; ya hadda feed em, check their teeth and they made a lot a noise, momma always said and she was right like that. It was always very quiet around the house, momma made sure of that because she said daddy needed his sleep, he worked real hard during the days and just as hard getting those corks off the whiskey bottles during the evening time.

Daddy was the ice man for everybody in the town; he was real nice to all the ladies where we lived when he would deliver their ice in that big truck of his. Sometimes he was nicer to them than he was to me and momma, and those ladies ~ well they sure did a lot of smiling at daddy. Momma didn't like those ladies, she never made any friends with those neighbor ladies as she called them. She use to say those ladies were dirty rotten pigs, and the only reason they smiled at daddy was because he was so handsome, and that they had married dirty - no good men, and daddy was a respectable kinda man and they was jealous that they didn't have a good man like momma did; but daddy well, he did a lot of smiling back at those ladies and sometimes when I would go delivering the ice with him in his big ice truck, sometimes he wouldn't finish work until way past eight o'clock, when we was supposed to be finished around four on a early day and five on a later day.

I hated those late days, because you never knew when they was going to happen; it seemed hard to plan a day. In the wintertime I hated it because I missed ice skating down the creek with all the kids. In the summertime, sometimes we'd go for a swim after baseball.

Anyways it always seemed after one of those ladies, one in particular named Mrs. Cumberlink, usually the one that smelled so nice, sort of like the lily of the valley that growed in mommas garden, she would ask daddy if he would step inside and take a look at her icebox; it often seemed once he got inside Mrs. Cumberlink's icebox that he would poke his head out and say to me, "boy wait in the truck"; I'll be out in a little while; sometimes I would be out there in the truck bout an hour. It was on those days when daddy and I would finally get home that our house would be smelling like smoke and momma would be down on her knees rocking back and forth with her fingers shaking, clasped round her rosary beads saying over and over forgive him lord, he knows not what he does, he is a good man; and there would be our dinner black as coal in a pot on the stove, and I would most times miss whatever was going on at the creek that day.

to be continued ....