Chapter 70
Witches, ghosties and hob goblins will soon come out of the dark to ring our doorbells! And like we do every year, we’ll treat them knowing that a trick will surely follow if we don’t!
Way back when, the tricks were more prominent than now-a-days. One friend we have told us about his pranks down in a southeastern Oklahoma town. Seems this one man got just plumb out of sorts when the boys knocked his outhouse over ever Halloween.
So, this one year he built a brand new two-hole—he was getting up in society—and he had that bugger bolted down to a concrete slab foundation.
Wasn’t no high school punks going to turn HIS outhouse over!
They could huff and puff ’til their lungs until their lungs exploded but HIS little building WOULD stand!
The boys watched amusedly as he built the little jewel, then went to Sears and Roebuck, and bought them a nice long chain.
On THAT night while the owner snuggled down smugly in his feather bed, the boys wrapped the chain around his outhouse and fastened the ends to the freight train which had stopped right behind the house.
Sometime near dawn the train left town and three guesses what went with it.
The owner didn’t possess much of a sense of humor.
He didn’t even think it was funny when the townspeople asked him how he might have felt if he’d been putting one of those holes to use.
Now, when I was growing up, we didn’t have very many outhouses.
But we did have lots of cheap toilet paper—that was before the days of “Don’t Squeeze the Charmin”—and lots of people have really enjoyed the job of picking the dew-soaked stuff off their gift-wrapped houses.
However, our favorite trick, being the farm kids we were, was to gather up nice fresh cow chips, pack them into a brown paper bag until they were about half full, and then go callin’ on our acquaintances.
We put the smelly bags on a porch, set them on fire, rang the doorbell, and ran like the devil was hot on our trail.
It never failed; first, the porch light would come on, then the door opened and quite suddenly someone would throw open the screen door and commence to STOMP out the flames.
And the words we heard bellowed to the top of that person’s lungs when he sunk his leg down to about half-knee deep in those chips would’ve burned the devils’ ears if he would’ve been close behind us!
I don’t have an outhouse. Besides the train tracks are way across town.
I do have a little red fire extinguisher if burning bags are left on my porch.
And Charmin’ makes terribly expensive gift wrappings.
So, what am I worried about? I think it’s got something to do with an old adage my grandmother used to come off with…
something about reaping what you sow!!!!