My first ten years in Winfield were good ones. In 1952 life was pretty simple as I spent countless hours playing in the cool dirt under Granddaddy�s porch or watching fireflies in the stillness of sultry August twilights. Life was warm, and I was suspended in the misty fog of my own imagination. There were so many good nights and happy dreams in the smell of the damp, musty straw of the evaporative cooler that hummed in the window beside the bed. I�d awake in the summer to the smell of chinaberries and the sweet fragrance of cape jasmine and the honeysuckle that covered the back fence. My innocence, however, was not to last.
I was pretty sure that every other ten-year-old in Winfield, but me, had a BB gun. Daddy finally agreed, after a long lecture on the responsibilities of owning a gun, to pay half the cost of the Daisy BB gun that I�d been eyeing at Beck�s General Mercantile Store. Since the gun was $6.00, I had to find work to pay my half. Fortunately, Mr. Emory May, a farmer and small rancher just north of town, needed temporary hired hands to transplant Bermuda grass from one pasture to another. Despite his reluctance to hire a ten-year-old, my persistence paid off, and at eight o�clock the next morning I pedaled my bicycle the three miles down the blacktop road to Mr. May�s farm. The work wasn�t hard since all I had to do was walk alongside the trailer he pulled behind his tractor and place the small squares of grass in the new pasture. He had agreed to pay me 50 cents an hour, so at the end of the day when he gave me four crisp dollar bills and told me that he could finish the next day without any additional help, I was proud and pleased and a little relieved. I had enough money to pay my part for the BB gun and have money left for several boxes of BB�s. Besides, I was a cowboy at heart and working as a sodbuster would have been a burr under my saddle had I had one.
The next morning I was up early and waiting on the sidewalk when Mr. Beck came to open the store. I was a proud young cowboy when I walked out with my Daisy air rifle and three boxes of BB�s. For three days, I wandered the pastures and creek bottom north of town, searching for the marauding band of Indians who had massacred my family and for the rustlers who had run off my imaginary herd. I took some of Mama�s clothespins and stood them around the backyard pretending they were bad guys and dispatching them with ease from ambush.
Eventually, the time arrived that I felt some primal need to satisfy my urge for real blood. Sitting on the back porch cradling my air rifle, I suddenly heard the slightest fluttering in the plum tree just across the hedgerow. Quietly cocking the lever on my rifle, I moved slowly toward the sound and parted the leaves on the hedge. Not more than ten feet away was a bluebird. As I sighted in the tiny bird and my finger found the trigger, I hesitated for a long moment. Then something inside me felt the need to squeeze the trigger. My aim was true, and the little bird toppled from the tree.
Crawling through the hedgerow, I could hear a faint squeak and the slight rustling of tiny feathers. I was beginning to feel sick when I reached the bluebird and it looked up at me with pain and questioning in the half-open eyes. Gently picking it up, I cried and took it to my room, hoping the wound was not fatal. After an hour or so the little bird closed its eyes, and the small feathered body became still. Before taking it outside to bury, I closed my eyes for a moment, too, and then I put the air rifle away. I never killed again.
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