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Chapter 9 from my book.

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Pops

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Life of a RedNeck Injun, chapter 9.
I need to tell you some background. My father (Chickasaw) married my mother, a proper Irish Lass. He was a 1930's-1950's gangster type were all is friends and pardners were mafia. The family was very wealthy until in 1946 when the IRS came after my father and his pardners. Took all of my fathers money to stay out of jail. One pardner wanted to keep his money and served 10 years. So we would have been homeless if it wasn't for a 100 acre farm that my grandfather owned out a mountain ridge 7 miles from the nearest road without electric, plumbing or anything else. Not much of a house with 1/2" cracks in the walls and floors with newspaper glued over the cracks. The farm was just about 2 miles from the hollow where his family hid out to miss the march to OK in 1837. We moved out to the farm in May of 1947.
Chapter 9
In the summer of 1953, my father give me and my brother ( really my first cousin, his parents died when I was 8 years old and he lived with us ) instructions before leaving for Pittsburgh, Pa , on a job that he wanted us to do and have finished when he came back home in the next month. He wanted a water cistern built off the side of the rear porch of the house. He wanted it 20' deep, with a 3' dia opening on top and 12' wide in the middle. He wanted a rock wall layed up with stone from the solid rock to the top and all of it plastered with concrete morter 1 1/2"-- 2" thick. He bought a case of dynamite and lots of caps and fuse and left for Pittsburgh.

So 3 of us started to work, me, Junior (my cousin) and another boy , Carol, that lived about 1 1/2 miles away. I was 12 1/2 year old, Junior was just under 16 years old and Carol was 16 years old was let lose with all of that dynamite and with no instructions except to get the job done before I come back home by my father. We went to my father's cousin about a 1/2 mile away, he knows how to do most anything and ask he if he knew anything about using dynamite. He ask, what do you want to know? and we told him everything. First he said to take 12" of the fuse and time the burn so you can know how long of fuse to use to go to a safe area away from the dynamite when it goes off. Then you take the cap and fuse and etc, etc. We hit solid rock about 6-7' down. Grandfather had a star drill and a hammer. For some reason Grandfather kept busy working on something out at the barn that kept him busy for several days. We drilled a hole for the dynamite about 24" deep in the center of the bottom. Dad's cousin told us to just use 1/2 stick at a time, but we wanted to make sure we done a good job so we wanted to add more. We had a discussion on how much to use, and decided that more would be better. A full stick on top of the 1/2 stick and another stick wouldn't hurt anything.
Grandfather had tore the old back porch off and we decided to use a piece of the flooring to cover the cistern hole to keep any rocks from flying up. It was about 8'x 12' of thick oak wood and very heavy, we pried it up and rolled an old round fence post under it to move it and be able to swing it over the hole quickly. We put a latter down in the hole and voted who was going to light the fuse. Somehow I got voted to light the fuse, I think the voting was rigged somehow. I went down in the hole and lit the fuse, they got the latter out and swung the porch flooring over the hole and we ran out to the end of the garden and over a bank out of sight and waited and waited for something to happen. How what do we do? About that time a bomb went off, the porch flooring went about 25' in the air and it started to rain rocks and we hungered down hoping not to get hit by a large one. When the porch flooring came down it missed the house but the tin roof of the house was covered with small rocks. The next thing my mother came running out of the house and ran away from the house, Oops, forgot to tell her. By the time my father came back home a few weeks latter we had the cistern finished and he was proud of the job. I always wondered what my mother told him. We ask, but he would say anything.
 
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