Adios, amigos

For a long time after that, the cowboy hat and particularly the boots became a constant for me, much to my aunt Phyl's chagrin. In my mind, they defined me; I was going to be a cowboy because cowboys were tough and unemotional and could shoot their way out of any problems they had. As I continued to grow (and the boots didn't), she made repeated attempts to first talk me out of them, then to snag them at the rare times that I wasn't wearing them and discard them. I always found them and, though they were by now breaking out at the toes and wearing thin in the sole, I insisted on wearing them. I didn't care that they hurt my feet; after all, a cowboy doesn't worry about such things.

One bright late-summer day, my brother and cousin and I were outside playing as we usually were. I don't recall if we were playing hide-and-seek or war, or some other childhood game that involved running around and yelling. I think it must have been war, a perennial favorite, because we were tearing around like nuts from place to place. We roared around the woodshed, raced up over the hillside, up around the barn, and back down the hill towards the house. At some point, my brother got to thinking it would be dramatic to run up and jump off of a pile of old lumber that lay out on the hillside.
Now, we had been warned away from that pile by my uncle, because it was rotten old wood and full of nails, but it looked OK to us. So, up and over the top with my brother, shouting all the way! Right behind him ran my cousin, and over the pile he goes. Bringing up the rear (being youngest and smallest), I raced for the pile and clambered to the top. When I got there, I realized that for some weird reason, my foot wouldn't move, and that it was starting to hurt. So I started yelling for my brother and cousin to come back, and they started yelling back for me to come on, unaware that anything was amiss. Finally I convinced them to return and find out why my foot wouldn't move. My brother tried to pick it up, and that's when we realized that I had stepped on one of those old rusty nails sticking up, and had nailed my foot to a board, right through the sole of my boot. Right about then was when I realized that it really hurt, and I set in to howling for all I was worth. Try as they might, my cousin and brother couldn't pull the board off of my boot right away, and it was finally decided that Brad would stand on the board while Fred (my brother) wrapped his arms around me under the armpits and lifted. Finally, the nail came out of my foot, leaving the sole of the boot behind still firmly nailed to the board.

The two of them tucked their arms under my shoulders, and down the hill we went, me yelling and bleeding the whole way. When we finally got to the house, my aunt met us at the door, having heard the mayhem and wondering what sort of mischief we had gotten into this time. She sat me down, and after talking me into calming down, proceeded to pull what remained of my boots off of my feet. She looked the hole in the bottom of my foot over, and then pulled out that old standard in the farm arsenal against germs, the peroxide bottle. The next half-hour or so was spent with me hollering every time she poured it in, and grimacing the whole time it boiled away at the rust and dirt in the wound. When she was content that it was finally clean enough, she bandaged my foot up, and told me I had to stay in and wear my slippers for the rest of the day. I didn't argue too much, because we had all been summarily reminded that we shouldn't have been on that lumber pile in the first place and I knew we would be in the doghouse with my uncle when he found out about it.

By the time I could get out and play again, both the boots and the lumber pile were long gone.