Down Memory Lane

Here's an excerpt from my Unpublished Memoirs, One Place and Another, Reflections of a Childhood in the Country and Life in the Navy:

One of my uncles came calling on us one day. He came into town to help someone do some haying or such and stopped to chat with my mother with his two horses in harness. After a short visit, he said he was headed on home. My brother and I (about 6 and 8 years old) begged him to let us ride the horses to his house. He must have grown tired of us begging him for a ride, since we always did when we saw him with a horse. He said, "All right you little devils, you asked for it" and boosted us on to one of the horses. We started off to his farm a couple of miles south in clay basin, happy as we could be. After about a mile, our little hind ends began to get sore from riding bareback and we asked him to let us down, we'd had enough. He said, "No sir. You've been asking for this a long time and you're going to ride right there all the way home."

Another quarter-mile and we were really sore, but he still wouldn't let us off. "You stay there 'til we git home, or I'll whip both of you good," he threatened. We finally made it to his house, but we didn't hang around after he took us off the horse. When we were out of sight of him on our way home, we checked our bottoms and they were blistered and painful.

When we reached home, my father said, "Serves you both right for begging him to let you ride. You should know better than that."

We never asked to ride his horses again and we never forgot his cruelty either. There was some bad blood betwixt my uncle and my father for some reason unbeknownst to us. Now, looking back on it, I think it was the fact that Uncle _______ had his eye on my mother for romantic reasons. In later years, some of the comments from the uncle made it clear to me that it was a fact, him having the eye. He was married to my mother's sister and later on after my aunt and my father had passed away, he married my mother.  After the marriage, he was a little more civil to us as grownups, but I always detected a feeling of dislike for my father that carried over to us.