Roy Exum: It Was Our Tool Shed

  • Tuesday, October 13, 2015
  • Roy Exum
Roy Exum
Roy Exum

Some said the huge beams had been soaking in creosote for two or three years when the men finally stacked them to dry. They were long, about 20 feet each, and thick – maybe eight inches. I remember they were 14 inches wide but the biggest thing I remember was that it was the ugliest lumber I ever saw. They cured the beams for one entire hot summer in the Tool Shed, a huge building bigger than an airplane hangar that sits about 100 yards from the Big House, so I was standing with my grandfather and my mother the morning the men hoisted the first one with a backhoe and positioned it in front of a massive planer that was taller than I was.

My grandfather and my mother were really excited but I thought the whole thing was squirrely.

With a screech the planer motors turned on and, with the bucket of the backhoe slowly pushing the timber forward, the racket grew into a high-pitched and deafening scream as the wood met the blades and buckets of sawdust poured. When the wood came out of the planer, about a ½-inch thinner, it was the most beautiful piece of golden-hued oak I had ever seen and, in time, it would be one of the rafters on the new extension of my family’s house.

I distinctly recall the metamorphosis because I was just a small kid and was awed by how a huge, ugly, stinking timber could, within seconds, turn into the most beautiful wood I had ever seen. I’ll never forget that day. That’s the first thing that went through my mind early Sunday morning when the call came that my family’s tool shed, the center-point on our McDonald Farm, was totally engulfed in flames.

The tool shed, where each day would literally begin and end on large farms like ours, had stood for years, easily over 75 or 80. The massive building, with thick steel girders to support the roof, was about 150 feet long, some 75 feet wide, and big enough to store our tractors and trucks and lawn mowers and all else we needed to protect from the weather.

For the most part the floor inside was well-packed dirt but up towards the shop, where there was every kind of ball-peen hammer and socket wrench you ever saw, there was a concrete pad that extended out the door where the hydraulic vehicle lift was off to the side. The tool shed had air compressors, grease guns, tire-changers, grain humidifiers and lots more, not to mention the farm office.

Back in the day, there was a huge pot-bellied stove, circled by a dozen or so chairs, and in the wintertime that's where all the men – and my brothers – would eat dinner (they call it lunch now, back then the late meal was “supper.”) It had big windows looking out the west side that were later blocked by the grain elevators, which came later, but there was no way it was ever cool in the summertime, this despite the big fans on both ends.

Huge sliding doors, about 20 feet high by 12 feet wide on each half, would stay open on both ends of the building most of the time. That was a good thing because until I was about 10 I couldn’t budge them. Long before that I knew every inch of the place because a kid never had as much fun piddling with all sort of gadgets like mower blades, chain saws and such when we weren’t chasing mouse-hungry snakes out of the empty feed sacks.

I guess I was about eight when my grandfather saw me sneaking a drive on a Ford 3000 tractor around the tool house. The men had showed me enough to start it, clutch and gear, and Mr. Elmer Pettyjohn, who used to let me sit in his lap when he drove the eight-gang mowing tractor, taught me to steer before I wore long pants. I knew I was in trouble when I saw Pappaw’s car coming so I killed the switch and waited for my chewing.

But, no, he walked up to the tractor and asked me if I was scared on the machine. I told him “No sir,” that it was easy, once I learned how everything worked, and he nodded just so. “I want you to be able to drive anything on this farm, but safety is the most important thing. Never try anything silly,” he said, and then yelled at Virgil, our farm manager at the time, to give me a “key” (which fit almost every tractor we had.) Lordy, I felt like I just been handed a diploma.

Man, that fire Sunday morning destroyed a good bunch of equipment, but will never dampen the memories of the years I grew up with my brothers and my cousins. I’d like to say the fun stopped on my twelfth birthday, when my grandfather said no more Saturday movies or burgers at George’s on Cherry Street unless it was on my dime. That day I started work for a buck an hour and the truth is the fun was just starting.

The rules, I have written before, were real simple. You were expected to be the first on the job and the last to leave. You never left a cluttered work space. You put every tool, shovel, and wheelbarrow where it belonged at the end of the day. You never left a vehicle without a full tank of gas and you double-checked every gate you might have opened.

You never, ever quit in the middle of the day unless it was “authorized” and it was Carl Tallent, the genius carpenter, who would always say, “Measure twice. Cut once.” If it rained and there were three older men, you rode in the back of the truck. In the rain. You were expected to drink from the water jug last and always pick up the heaviest side of a load.

It was never said, but the real goal was to out-work everybody else. Don’t wait to be told what to do; look around for what needs to be done. And that failing, get a broom. Don’t you see, the tool shed was where I learned everything. The life lessons I treasure to this day were incredible and Preacher Craun said one day that anytime a man cussed it was a self-admission of ignorance.

Within a couple of years it seemed like I had a dozen teachers who loved to explain how everything worked. Mr. Elmer Pettyjohn, who was black and almost a second father to me, taught me the most. “Sonny boy, a smile and good manners never go out of style,” and “Never go to bed in a fret.” Elmer, believe it or not, even taught me how to hoe a garden and, in a further believe it or not, there is a definite art to it. Don’t learn and you’ll beat yourself half to death with that hoe.

My brother Kinch, who was bad about raw-hiding darn near anything, took a turn too fast one day in a hay truck with a 16-foot bed. I got a John Deere and we righted the truck, which was hardly hurt save the left mirror, and I promised not to tell. The rest of the day and almost all of Sunday he scoured the countryside looking for a mirror and, by jigs, he found one and bolted it on before he was ever caught.

Another time a cousin was out in a Jeep and he saw a new “hill” he hadn’t seen before so he went scalding up and over, learning real fast there was a new pond that had just been built on the other side. I got a John Deere and a logging chain and, when we got to the pond, there was just about three inches of an antenna sticking out of the water. “How are we going to get a chain on it?” he asked and was told, “Ain’t no we; you are.” That boy must have come up for air a dozen times in that cold water before he ever hooked the axle. Then again, that’s education.

I was out by the pool one afternoon when another cousin came to ask if I would help him get the Jeep started – we must have had a string of a dozen open-top Jeeps down through the years – and when we drove about a mile where he left it, the starter wouldn’t kick. I opened the hood to find a piston-arm sticking through the side of the engine block so I got the John Deere and the chain and he got to steer his red-faced self all the way back to the tool shed behind that tractor. I didn’t pull him fast, either. That’s education.

There isn’t any question we will build something to hold all of the machines we’ve got and, in the end, a new facility will be pretty nice, but there is nothing like a fire on a farm to rekindle memories. I’ll tell you that. The worst thing that can happen on any farm is not a drought or pink eye. It has been and will always be a fire and, praise God, no one was hurt in this one.

We’ve been through worse struggles and, while sometimes it’s been a pretty stiff test, our farm – one of the largest in East Tennessee -- has fared pretty well since our ancestors first settled on our place in 1821. Don’t dare think we aren’t saddened by our great loss, but I can remember years we’ve been pretty blessed and in the end things always seem to even out, maybe with the edge toward the good. But it’s like every farmer that has ever been knows to be true: “On the field of opportunity, it’s plowing time again.”

royexum@aol.com
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