Generations and Other True Stories Read Online Free Page B

visit with those who had befriended him in the days when he and his mother and his eight brothers and sisters were living on the brink of starvation in a country town where nobody else had much, either.
    Neil Williams, who still lives in a white frame house about a mile from where Audie was born, worked beside him in the cotton fields when they were fifteen or sixteen years old. “Those rows were only thirty-six inches apart,” he says. “When you’re hoeing cotton up and down them all day, you get to know each other pretty well. Audie and I even had to share the same bed in the upper story of that old farmer’s house.”
    The historical marker is incorrect, Mr. Williams says. “Audie never got to the eighth grade. He had four years of schooling at Celeste and one over there at Floyd. Then his daddy run off, and Audie had to quit school to take care of his family.”
    Emmett Murphy—a “drinking man,” they say in Celeste—simply went away one day and left his wife and children to fend for themselves. Audie, who was about eleven at the time, became the family’s chief breadwinner.
    â€œHe really come up the hard way,” Mr. Williams says. “I mean, just really hard . The Depression was on during the time we was growing up, and not anybody had any money hardly. But the Murphys was as broke as the Ten Commandments. They actually didn’t have enough to eat sometimes. A fellow I knew had a turnip patch. One winter, when the ground was froze, he looked out the window and saw Audie out there with a short-handled grubbing hoe, trying to dig some of them turnips out. His family was living in a boxcar at the time.”
    The blackland prairie of Hunt County was cotton country in those days. Little one hundred-acre family farms surrounded Celeste, and the farmers raised enough cotton to keep four gins busy. U.S. 69, the town’s main street, was lined with grocery and drugstores, cafes, gas stations, a couple of honky-tonks, and four doctors’ offices. When the 1940 census was taken, 730 people lived there.
    â€œIt was a good little town,” says Bill Caldwell, who grew up in Celeste but lives twelve miles down the road in Greenville now. “We had a hardware store, a washateria, a cafe. There was a place that sold coal and grain. There was a couple of hotels.” They all huddled at the foot of a tall water tower in the town’s center. “Celeste was poor, but everybody seemed happy,” Mr. Caldwell says.
    Neighbors gave milk, eggs, butter, and chickens to the Murphys sometimes, and Audie worked for whoever would hire him to do whatever needed to be done. In his spare time, he wandered the prairie with his single-shot .22 rifle, hunting squirrels and rabbits for the family table.
    â€œAudie could hear a squirrel walking two miles away,” says Mr. Hackney, who often accompanied him. “He was an excellent shot. You know them Big Little Books kids used to have? Me and him would hold them up and shoot them out of each other’s hands with our rifles. That was real stupid, but neither one of us ever got shot.”
    Audie loved guns, his friends say, and would play dangerous pranks with them, firing over people’s heads or near their feet to frighten them. “He always had some kind of firearm close by,” Mr. Williams says, “and he didn’t seem to fear them much. My daddy taught me when I was a small boy to respect those firearms as dangerous. Audie didn’t seem to think they were. He was a good shot, though. He never hurt nobody.”
    Mr. Caldwell remembers buying a revolver from Audie when he was only twelve years old. “My grandmother had died, and they split up the inheritance,” he recalls. “I got ten dollars as my part. Audie had this old pistol that he had gotten somewhere, and I paid him my inheritance for it. Then I got afraid my dad was going to find out about it. I tried to find somebody to