Shared Fortunes (eBook)

Don Campbell (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2022 | 1. Auflage
200 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
978-1-6678-7780-8 (ISBN)

Infos

Two 8-year-old boys make a childhood pact to share all their worldly goods as long as they both shall live. Their bond continues as they progress through all life's phases, surviving multiple challenges of ridicule, derision, theft, and fraud. When the ultimate assault threatens to destroy the pact, will the two men's partnership come to ruin in the courtroom?

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This account is not merely a coming-of-age story. Two 8-year-old boys from a small town solemnly vow to share all their worldly goods for a lifetime. It was a pact certain to fail with the passage of time - or was it? Their vow was refined over time, but resisted attacks from multiple sources: skepticism, derision, ridicule, theft, and fraud. The agreement that no one thought could last became a life-long bond between two disparate individuals who pursued very different careers. Separated by geography, personal relationships, ambitions, and women, the men stayed close through their childhood pact. When the final, ultimate assault comes, will they be destroyed and ruined? It is a story of friendship, partnership, trust, and reliance between two individuals through all of life's phases, culminating in a critical joint courtroom effort to save it all.

Textauszug

CHAPTER 1

Just after turning eight years old, I made a most earnest agreement with my friend from one block down the street. We didn’t take a blood oath, make up a secret password, designate a lair retreat or any such things, but it was a solemn undertaking nonetheless, or at least involving the highest level of solemnity to which persons of our age could reach. We would for all our lifetimes, it was agreed, share all our worldly goods on a fifty-fifty basis. Looking back at that simple commitment, I now realize we were not the only pair of friends in the world to make such pacts; but at the time we thought we were unique. Certainly, we had never heard of others following similar paths. Actually, we took great pride in our deal, thinking it made us appear to be the greatest of all good friends in our town and in our school. What we didn’t realize or appreciate was the total skepticism with which most all adults looked upon our “lifetime” plan. It probably would not have mattered even had we noted the skeptics. It likely would have provided us with even more resolve. Both sets of parents were among the skeptics, but they didn’t really object or intervene in any way; like most others, they figured it wouldn’t last long, so what was the harm.

My name is Adam Jay Carter. I have never had a nickname that lasted more than a few days, so I have always been referred to as Adam, which has always suited me just fine. My friend, with whom I had made the lifetime agreement, was Royce Halwell. He had many lasting nicknames over the years, but Roy was not one of them. He really didn’t like being called Roy; and I never did. He had moved to my hometown barely a year earlier when his father, just returned from armed services duty in Europe, moved his family to take a job at the new factory in town, Superior Trailers. Royce and I were almost exactly the same age, just under a month apart, and we hit it off immediately after first meeting in that summer of 1955. Right away we started spending all our free time together. We went to the movies, watched TV, played games and read books—mostly comic books at that time—together. We traded bikes on a weekly basis, for a time, until it became impractical to do so. We would even trade clothes from time to time. Before long, that sharing became unworkable because of our size discrepancies, which became more and more pronounced as we grew.

Royce became something of a string bean, shooting upward in height without a corresponding growth to the rest of his body. On the other hand, I couldn’t seem to grow at all and what little growth I experienced in those early years was more outward than upward. Not that I got fat. Neither of us ate enough to make that happen, but I headed toward a kind of stockiness, whereas Royce just got taller. Our physical differences made trading bikes too much of a chore, so, for a time we rode double on Royce’s bike. He would sit on the bike seat as usual while I rode on the bar between the seat and handle bars. Both our feet were on the pedals, mine on the inside and Royce’s catching the outer edges. We could—and did, occasionally—take both bikes to wherever we were headed, but it seemed more in line with our agreement to share a single bike.

Throughout the early years of our friendship and our agreement, things worked pretty well. We scrupulously accounted for all money, mostly coins, that came into our possession, of which there were precious few. Neither of us received an allowance, so most of our money came from some enterprising exploits of our own. In addition to picking up change from running some errand or other, we managed to keep ourselves in coins by becoming a little imaginative. In the fall, we would forage underneath the football stadium on Saturday mornings after Friday night games, picking up a surprising amount of money that had slipped through the open spaces in the bleacher seats. We also collected discarded soda bottles and returned them for the deposit money. In those days, when you bought a soft drink, in addition to the money paid for the drink, a deposit was required for the bottle. One could get the deposit back if the bottle was returned in good condition. As I recall, the deposit amount was three cents, so if we collected 10 bottles and returned them to a local grocer, we became richer by 30 cents.

One of our biggest revenue producers came around for only one week each year. The county fair of Beresford County was held each year in my hometown of Desmond, the county seat, so Royce and I would travel to the fair grounds early each morning of that week and scavenge for dropped coins and the occasional dollar bill. For whatever reason, fair-goers seemed to be more than a little careless in seeing their change make it back into their pockets or purses. Royce and I were not the only scavengers, but we were almost always the earliest. Local ne’er-do-wells and fair workers were competitors for the lost treasures, but they tended to arrive much later than us.

One morning on about the third year of our fair grounds pursuits, we were just about to tally up our loot for the day when we were accosted by a man dressed like a homeless person or wino, challenging us to turn over our findings to him. It only took a short glance from Royce to realize what our strategy should be—run. Surely, we could outrun this disreputable-looking, haggard and run-down old dude. And we could have, of course, in a straight match-up. But after running for a bit around tents and booths, we turned a corner and ran smack into the man who hooked us both around our necks, one under each surprisingly strong arm, and continued to strangle us as we reached into our pockets to empty all the cash on the ground. Before letting us go, the man said “You kids need to get on your bikes and head home to your comfy houses and worried mommas and leave these fair grounds to me and a couple of my friends who actually need this money. And don’t come back tomorrow or ever again.”

Frightened beyond any prior experience, we decided to forego this particular source of revenue for good. Later that day, while reliving the incident in my head, it occurred to me that the man we encountered was not some wino sot or lay-about slackard. The way he carried himself, the clarity in his eyes and the strength in his arms all suggested otherwise. Perhaps he was just a man down on his luck, someone who had made a bad choice somewhere along the line and who, through no lack of trying, just found himself without options. I also wondered if something like that could happen to me, or to Royce. When I raised the point with Royce, he just shook his head and said, ‘there is no way we could wind up like that. We are both too smart and too talented to let that happen. Besides, we are going to do great things when we grow up. I’m not sure yet what it will be, but we are going to do something brilliant. And whatever fortunes await us, we’re going to share them.”

Although somewhat reassured by Royce’s confidence and his comments, I still left the question open. And I never forgot that man’s face; nor did I ever quit wondering if I could wind up like him.

There were many cotton farms in Beresford County at that time, some of them closely abutting the town limits and within easy reach of the pair of us on bikes or even on foot. Depending on the season, we would regularly sign up for cotton picking duty, chopping cotton (a complete misnomer because you didn’t actually chop the cotton, but the weeds in the rows) and pulling bolls. All of those jobs were difficult and back-breaking by their very nature and neither Royce nor I had the stomach nor the stamina to do them for even a full day. But we did what we could, weighed ourselves out and received a few coins in return. It still amazes me today to think of those people who did work at those jobs all day and for weeks at a time, dragging 100-pound sacks of cotton behind them as they worked up and down the seemingly endless rows. Working on Saturdays, we would often pick, pull or chop in the morning, earning ample money to catch the afternoon double-feature movies in town with enough left over for a soft drink and an all-day sucker.

Pecan trees were also plentiful in and around Desmond. A particular pecan tree will normally only drop its fruit every other year, information learned soon enough by me and my partner. But there were enough trees to provide plenty of nuts each year for a couple of hustlers like us. We tried to harvest our crops from trees running along roadsides so as not to run afoul of land owners who wanted to keep their pecans for themselves. We learned of other prolific trees on land and in yards where the owners were happy for us to clear out unwanted droppings. A number of owners would actually welcome us, asking only that we fill a small sack for them before picking up the rest of the crop for ourselves. The pecans could be sold to local grocers, retail sellers at road side stands and at various other locales.

Soon, it became known that the two of us were available and reliable for doing various other odd jobs around town, such as painting fences and porches, washing windows and mowing yards. We even considered buying a lawn mower and marketing ourselves as full-time yard men during the summer months, but discarded the notion as too cliché for our tastes. To be sure, we had never heard the word ‘cliché’, at that time, but its meaning would have exactly described our feelings about yard work. The same could be said about taking on a newspaper delivery route, which we also considered doing at one point. Those undertakings seemed to show up as jobs for kids in many movies, TV shows, comic books and other children’s...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 16.12.2022
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• ISBN-10: 1-6678-7780-1 / 1667877801
• ISBN-13: 978-1-6678-7780-8 / 9781667877808