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“MY
FIRST CHAW” It
was August and the sun was blazing hot. The gravel street on the “Mill-Hill”
in Longview, North Carolina was coated with a powdery layer of dust. Jerry Hill
and I were sitting on an old abandoned pig pen roof on a vacant lot. A mulberry
tree shaded one corner of the tin roof but the part that wasn’t shaded was hot
as a wood stove in January. We
sat there discussing various youthful interests such as frogs, caves, spooks and
fast bicycles, among other topics when Jerry reached in his pocket and pulled
out a lump of dirty looking brown stuff and said, “Want some?” I said,
“What is it?” He looked at me with a making fun kind of look and said, “I
bet you ain’t never chewed no tobacco.” I said, “I have.” “Oh yeah?
Well why’d you have to ask what it was then?” he replied. The
conversation continued with a few more “have” and “have nots” and the
next thing I knew, Jerry was splitting the plug in half with a rusty old pocket
knife and I was stuffing it into my mouth. The
taste wasn’t all that unpleasant except it burnt my tongue a little and before
long, I was reared back spitting like a pro. Well, maybe not exactly like a pro.
It seemed there wasn’t enough room in my mouth for the one-half plug of
tobacco and my tongue. Each time I’d go to spit, I’d end up swallowing most
of the ambeer. At
first I done a lot of chewing, but after a while, I was content to try not to
mash it anymore than I had to. Jerry was talking and carrying on when I started
feeling a little “woozie” (as Mom would say). Slowly I watched the mulberry
tree move all the way around the pig pen. Jerry’s voice seemed far away like
he was talking through a tube or a culvert. Somehow I managed to stretch out on
the pig pen roof and hang my head over the edge. My hands were gripping the
metal edge of the roof so hard that I bet I left dents on that metal that even
recycling couldn’t cover up. As I opened my mouth to release my cud, Jerry was
taunting me for being sick. I’ll say this for tobacco chewing, it put me in a
state of mind where not even taunts from Jerry Hill mattered. It made me sick.
Now I don’t mean sick like the cold or the croup. I mean sick like you might
not live through it! I never knew a pig pen could spin around so fast and only
my grip on the edge of the roof kept me from being slung from there to Hickory.
While the pig pen spun and the mulberry tree jumped up and down, everything in
my world went crazy. Death seemed eminent and not totally without merit. My
first encounter with tobacco chewing lasted a long time and to this day, the
four hours I lay on that dusty old pig pen roof seem like at least a week. My
entire body was drawn and quartered by the power of ambeer and so help me, the
ten year old that climbed off the roof at sundown that day was glad to still
have his insides left because there were a few times up there that he figured
they were gone for good. When
I stumbled in the door of the house, Mom took one look at me and told me to lay
down while she fixed a “mustard plaster”. This was Mom’s cure for
everything and at that point, any more torture would have been unbearable. I
“fessed up” about tobacco and she and Dad thought it was funny and “Maybe
that’ll teach you a lesson, boy,” was the extent of their sympathy. They
were right. To this day, you couldn’t pay me to chew tobacco on a hot, dusty
pig pen roof in August! Back to The Mountain Laurel Home Page
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