Another Seven Years

When I was a young man growing up on the farm, a guy named Joe worked for my Dad.  He was larger than life in so many ways.  He spoke Cajun French and taught me quite a few words - some I remember today and some of them he probably shouldn't have taught me and aren't fit for polite conversation.  He always had a big wad of chewing tobacco in his mouth.  He would mix Levi Garrett with Five Brothers Pipe Tobacco, stick it in his cheek until it was gone.  Serious.  I rarely saw him spit.  He would teach us things like how to be a man, how to be tough, how to work hard.  

He drove an old Ford pickup truck that had a big rusted spot on the door because he would drive with the windows down resting his wet, sweaty arm out the window.  His truck had a spare tire in the bed with a bunch of empty Dr. Pepper cans and assorted tools in the back.  Riding with him, you'd hear the crinkle of aluminum cans moving because he would pick up numerous turtles in the ditches and they would climb slowly around in the bed seeking to escape.  He'd drive to a country store and come out with a honey bun and a Dr. Pepper for us.  

We would laugh and joke throughout the day teasing each other, making a hot, miserable day bearable.  When we did something wrong, he wasn't afraid to give us a good cussing.  In the rare occasions when we did something right, he'd praise us and would be proud of us like we were his kids.  He was very good to us, and I remember him fondly.

I was thinking about him this weekend.  Russ and I were working on a project Saturday at the church that involved moving dirt and working with shovels.  Working on a rice farm, you use a shovel every day.  We would go walking through the fields and cut levees with Joe when it was almost time for harvest.  Cutting levees is a tough job.  Now tractors do it, but back then, we did it with shovels,  He would get on the top side and I'd get on the bottom side and we would cut a ditch in the levee to allow the water to flow from one cut down to the next lower one.  We would continue so on and so forth until we had cut all the levees and the water flowed on out of the field so that the land could dry for harvest.

Inevitably, working together with shovels, he on the top side and me on the bottom, facing each other, our shovels would hit.  "Oh, no!" he'd say, punctuated with a term of endearment that isn't appropriate to write in this day and time, "You know what it means when our shovels hit, don't you?"  "It means we're gonna work together for another seven years."  My son, Russ' shovel and mine hit this weekend.  I instantly thought of that, and I told him the story of what Joe said it meant.  (I hope Russ and I work together for much more that seven more years.)

The old Cajun Creole superstition about working together another seven years didn't turn out to be true for Joe and I, sadly.  It's been a number of years since Joe died.  Dad called me and told me that Joe was driving the tractor and had a stroke and died.  We miss Joe!  The lone shovel stuck in the dirt in the photo above is my memorial to him and his memory.  I still smile when I think of the good times we shared.