Ask farm-raised folks of my vintage what extreme cold is, and they’ll tell you it’s a swipe across the face by a cow’s cocklebur-clogged tail when you’re milking her on a freezing winter morning with nothing between you and howling winds but a barn’s tin siding. Ask what extreme heat is, and they’ll say: loading hay in summer.
At five o’clock, Boss, my father, opened the bedroom door. “Hay time, boys, git up.” Only an hour earlier, my head hit the pillow. It was the summer after high school graduation, and nightly my pals and I were burning life’s candle at both ends.
As Boss’ pickup bounced toward the field, I lay in back, groaning. Everything about me hurt, even my hair and fingernails. I glanced at my younger brother, a tall, barrel-chested lad with the same tendency toward giantism that afflicted Boss. Clear-eyed, well-rested, munching a Moon Pie, sipping an RC cola, he couldn’t wait to flex his bulging muscles tossing eighty-pound hay bales.
Resembling a malnourished mannequin, I weighed 115 pounds. Even my name, Junior, was diminutive. The standard joke was, “Junior’s so skinny he can’t go to pool halls. Folks mistake him for a cue stick and chalk his head.”
Countless rows of bales lined the hayfield. Boss straddled the tractor hooked to a flatbed trailer. Glaring disgustedly at me, he growled, “A-a-ye Gosh, this’ll teach you to cavort all night with heathenish banshees when you know there’s hay to load the next day.”
Words cannot describe that torrid day. The sun beat down on us, not the slightest breeze rustled, marble-sized sweat drops went nowhere, the humidity being of the same consistency. As Boss followed a row of bales, I could barely keep up. He wouldn’t wait, and kept murmuring, “a-a-ye gosh, this’ll teach him, a-a-ye gosh.”
I lifted a bale waist high but dropped it … on an unseen mound beneath it. Exhausted, I plopped down on my back atop the bale to doze a few minutes.
Ants are a curious race. Far more disciplined than human armies, they communicate in formic, the caustic acid in their bite that sends creatures a thousand times their size fleeing in pain. The hay baler had regurgitated the bale I lay on right smack atop a fire ant mound!
I had no inkling that Generalissimo Ant and several divisions of angry, pincer-jawed Lilliputian soldiers were quietly covering every square inch of my near-comatose body.
Word went forth in formic: Attack! Simultaneously, mini-battalions of berserk bronze brutes bayoneted my beleaguered body. Levitating, hallucinating, then motivating, I streaked past Boss, screaming, stripping, slapping in frenzied formic fandango, and plunged into a canal at the field’s edge.
As I swirled about in the muddy water, watching for water moccasins and dodging rafts of floating fire ants, I heard Boss and my brother snickering above me.
Shaking his head disgustedly, Boss said, “A-a-ye gosh, boy, it’s sho’ nuff been a bad day for you … but a fine day for fire ants.”
Jimmy Reed is an Oxford, Mississippi resident, Ole Miss and Delta State University alumnus, Vietnam Era Army Veteran, former Mississippi Delta cotton farmer and ginner, author, and retired college teacher.
This story is a selection from Jimmy Reed’s latest book, entitled The Jaybird Tales.
Copies, including personalized autographs, can be reserved by notifying the author via email (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)).
