My First Short Story "Dick Head"

Dick Head
This title may appear a bit odd to begin with but really it is the Name of my first cousin on my Daddy’s side. Daddy had a sister named Lou. She married a man by the name of Frank Head. They had a son and they named him Dick. The first funeral I ever remember going to was for that sister. I don’t know how old she was or how she died but I do know that Daddy was carrying me in his arms as we passed by the casket and he leaned down and kissed her and that was way too close for me. Guess that’s why the memory stuck. I think I was around two years old.
Daddy was from a large family and we traveled around and stayed with them all one time or another. That sister must have been quite a bit older than Daddy because he and Dick were around the same age. When I was four or five we made a trip to California with the Heads. Dick and Opal and their kids. Daddy had a 1940 Chevy pickup and The Heads had an older flat bed truck. Both trucks were black. In fact I think all trucks were black then. We may have been in the migration from Oklahoma to California just a few years later than the dust bowl story. Still we were making the trip out to work in the fields picking strawberries, cherries, green beans and anything else that needed picking.
There were four kids in our family and the Heads had six kids so all together we were traveling in a group of fourteen. Me and my little brother rode in the cab with Mother and Daddy and the two older kids rode in the back. The Heads had a couch and a bed on the back of their flat bed truck. That is where their kids rode. Most of the time we followed them just in case someone fell off. We would stop along side the road before dark. Build a camp fire and Mother and Opal would fry potatoes and onions and make pan cakes and we would all eat and talk about what we were going to do with all the money we would make in California. I believe we took the southern route that trip because we would have frozen had we gone over the Rockies besides that was my first experience with cactus and those stickers that grow in south Texas and Arizona. Goat heads and cactus, natures most painful way of saying don’t go there. Dick Head had six kids and two of those were twin boys. Their names were Ed and Ned. Ed Head and Ned Head. Needless to say the Head family was not the sharpest cheese on the cracker. Opal was hair lipped and hard to understand and done a lot of screaming and crying. She mostly cried as she picked goat heads from the feet of Ed and Ned. ‘Lord let us make enough money to buy these kids shoes before my fingers are completely ruined’ ‘Lord keep the snakes and stinging scorpions off the mattress tonight” ‘Lord let these potatoes last till we make California.’ Now all this was translated to me by Mother as we laid in the back of the pick up truck on our own mattress. We would laugh at the weirdness of that family and thank God we had shoes. I don’t know how long It took to make that trip or exactly what year it was. Somewhere between 1948 and 1950.
Daddy was a carpenter and quite skilled. A trade he learned from one of his older brothers. He often worked just long enough to re supply the box in the back of the truck with potatoes onions and flour and get money for gas and we would move on. Dick Head was his helper. We would have camp set up just off the road outside whatever town they found work in and that is where we stayed until they came back. The women the kids and the flat bed truck that no one knew how to drive. Daddy liked to drink and so did Dick. There were several times that they would celebrate their new found fortune by getting drunk and returning to camp in the middle of the night after payday. It is probably a good thing I couldn’t understand Opal because her voice would carry like the wind across the desert in the middle of the night. By the time we got to California Mother so wanted to never see those people again.
We got to Bakersfield and that is where we had other relatives. There we stayed in a house with electric lights. That in its self was scary. The very first night we were there they had an earth quake. The light bulb was hanging from a cord in the ceiling and it began to swing back and forth. We were scared silly and didn’t know what to do. How do you take cover from an earth quake? Luckily it was minor and only lasted a few seconds but needless to say we didn’t sleep much that night.
Daddy found work for the entire family our first day there. Picking strawberries. We moved to the farm and he quickly built us a shack out of scrap boards and an old tent. We would stay and work on the farm but the Head Family moved on to other relatives in northern California. They were headed to grape country. I don’t recall seeing any of them again until 1991.That year Mike and I went back to Bakersfield on a pipeline job and Ed was in the phone book. He was about ten years older than me and had totally different memories but they too were about poor migrant workers who drank too much and drug their families through hell. Drinking men with good women to cook and care for the kids.