'He Didn't Get In No Hurry To Go'

"In our house, there was no fighting. There was no cussin'. Daddy said what he had to say and everybody respected what Daddy said. Of course they may go off the next Saturday night and all of them get drunk and get in a ditch and get their cars stuck in the mud. But Daddy would take his wagon and his mule and go get them, pull them out of the branches and bring them home.
"I remember one time, there was an old peg-legged man that lived up here at the top at the mountain. The old feller, well, he was pretty much an outsider. He walked everywhere he went, and he had this wooden leg. It was just a stick sticking down that he walked on. And he walked a lot, up and down by the house.
"And I won't never forget one evening, he was coming up the road, and it was coming up a storm. He was coming by the house and Daddy called him. And Daddy didn't call him Peg Leg. John Davis was his name. He said, 'John, come on by and get out of this weather.' It was beginning to lightning real bad. Well the old man come on up and sat down on the edge of the porch. And Mama, she had always scared us kids with everything from the devil to the Grancy Greybeard, Peg Leg, and everything else. So it scared us to death and we kind of backed up, backed off of him.
"That cloud lasted a long time. When it come suppertime, Mama put supper on the table, and Daddy told that man to come on to the table to eat. And he come in and he sat down with us and ate. Well, he didn't get in no hurry to go. And when it come bedtime, Daddy had Mama fix him a bed and put him to bed. And so he spent the night.
"I remember it just tore Mama all to pieces. She got up the next morning, she drug that mattress out, she stripped those beds, hung everything out on the line, washed them, hung them out on the line, put her mattress outside. Because she just felt like he had body lice and everything that was wrong that could be wrong. She couldn't hardly stand it because he spent the night.
"But that's the type of person Daddy was." -- Mildred Bishop Munroe