Thirty years ago, I was sixteen years old. To rid themselves of the onerous burden of dealing with an annoying teenager, my parents would often send me off to be with the grandparents for extended periods.
My grandmother made me bib overalls. Out of 28 ounce denim. To give you some idea what that’s like, regular jeans are made out of 12 or 14 ounce denim. Wearing grandmas bibs was like wearing an iron truss. Until you’d worn them in a bit, you couldn’t sit down without a blacksmith, and the chafing was nothing but horrid. I learned to wear two pairs of underdrawers in the summer to prevent the family jewels from turning into mashed potatos.

Anyway, that summer I was finally big enough to plaw, and plow I did, all damned day, for weeks. I plowed with the ol man’s ford 8N, and in gramma’s garden, one of the horses. We were also allowed to keep our 22’s with us, to shoot what squirrels we could find, rabbits, the occasional fox or other varmint, and crows were always fair game.

The old man had a still. He was a cheap bastard, and gas had gone up to over a quarter. So he made shine, not necesarily to drink but to run in the tractor. See, the hogs still ate the mash after it had been fermented out, and they loved it, or seemed to. They also seemed to fat up faster. And the old man got the additional benefit of several hundred gallons of alcohol a year. Which ran in the tractor and in the farm truck. Now, if there should happen to be a petcock in the fuel line, and if a guy should happen to stop and lean on the old man’s truck and sit a gallon milk bottle on the ground, and open that petcock, talk to the old man for a couple minutes, then close the petcock, grab his bottle, and walk away, now that couldn’t do much harm, could it? The old man himself never touched the stuff.

Anyway, the point of that story was to tell you this one.

One fine summer day I’m driving the tractor and think to myself “I’d better fuel this bastard up, I have a lot of work ahead” so I take off towards the tank, sitting behind the shed in the ground. I pull the hose up and pump shine into the tank of the still-running tractor, futs with the carb a bit to make sure the mixture is still good, then roll up the hose amnd hop on the tractor, take off toward the field. About 200 yards on, I noticed my leg was warm. See, alcohol burns with almost no perceptible flame, and I had been on fire for several seconds without knowing it. The heavy denim kept the heat from getting through until I was already on my way.

At this moment, I have a brief flash of crystal clarity the likes of which you rarely experience:

I am on a tractor driving full bore into a field. I have kitchen matches and 22 shells in my pockets. My leg is on fire.

I hop off the tractor and shin out of the bibs, and take of running toward the farm house. The tractor continues blithely oni it’s way, the kitchen matches are ignited by the alcohol flames, and 22 shells are pop-pop-popping as I run, and all I can think about is how embarrassed I am to be running in broad daylight wearing two pairs of underdrawers and how my ass is gonna hurt when the old man tans it.

Thirty years ago this year, man and boy.