Hey Guess what....ITS Friday! AGAIN!

Busy week here on Schooner Creek, I had to work an extra day and I've gotten far behind. I spent most of the day playing catch up, except for the hour I spent on the lake trying to find a fish or two. No fish, however I did manage to get my self soaked to the skin. That's another story.

Today while I was getting wet from a nice downpour. I remembered back to a time when I was growing up. My Dad like frog legs and we would spend hours walking from farm pond to farm pond down in Texas County looking for bull frogs. On one particular outing we got caught in a rain. Now it wasn't just a gentle little drizzle, it was a regular down pour. One so hard that your sight distance went to zero and you had to point your nose to the ground to get a breath. We were on a farm that Dad said used to belong to a man named Andy Walling Old Andy was long gone of course, and his being dead did little to keep my Dad from telling me and my brother just how mean old Andy was. Dad went to great length telling us how he would beat his dogs, his mules and not feed his chickens. We were walking towards an old house during this tale, Dad kept it up saying that Old Andy was hated by all the folks in the community cause he would not doctor his hogs. Back in those days Texas County was still free range. Folks let their hogs run loose during the summer and then would have a hog roundup in the fall. Anyway, old Andy's hogs were always sick and spreading the illness from one group of hogs to another. Dad said that he always wore and old leather coat with a sheepskin lining. He would wear that coat in August when it was 100 plus degrees. He never took a bath and folks could smell him coming long before they ever seen him if the wind was right.
We got to the old house and went inside to get out of the rain. Now keep in mind that at 13 years old I thought I was pretty tough, except when it came to goblins, ghosts and ghouls. I would not watch the epics like Frankenstein, Dracula and the Wolfman just because I never seen any value in these movies. I would climb into a cave, but had to hide behind the couch to watch Dracula bite some unlucky person neck. I had no issues tackling someone twice my size if they wanted to fight, but to watch the stiff legged walk of a seven foot monster was out of the question.
Now getting back to my story. Dad continued to tell of events where in old Andy had beat a kid or starved a dog, he finally ended the story by saying that old coat must have been buried with him because no one had seen it since. The rain was beating down on the roof and we had to watch were we stood because with every little gust of wind the roof would spring a new leak. It was one of the shifts to stay out of a drip when I looked up and hanging right there on a nail on the wall was that old leather coat with a sheepskin lining.
I hit the door faster than a bolt of lighting. I did not stop or look back, as for as I was concerned being out in the rain was a whole lot better than standing in that old house with the windows broken out, wallpaper pealing off the wall, and that old coat Andy Walling had been buried in hanging on the wall.
I'm a lot older now, my father still laughs out loud when he tells this story. Me, I still feel the goose bumps on my arm when I think about looking up and seeing that coat.