I couldn’t go home because there was a quarter inch high lump on my forehead where I had been hit with a BB. It wasn’t an accident. We shot at each other playing war, Brother Dave, me, and our new friends in town.
[After Dad was forced to sell the farm we moved to an apartment in Gadsden, AL, in December, 1951, when I was nine years old, and lived there a year and a half before moving to Charlotte.]
Sometimes we fought in the woods next to the apartments, sometimes we fought in an old barn and horse stalls across the street. That’s where we had been playing that day, pretending we were fighting house to house. I had been hit in the head at point blank range.
Brother Dave and I had our own BB guns, bought with money from our paper routes, but we couldn’t take them home. We hid them in the barn across the street because we knew Dad wouldn’t let us have BB guns, much less let us shoot at each other.
Lucky for me he was late coming home again that night. I waited as long as I could before I went home myself, to give the swelling time to go down some. When I came in, I waved to Mother, said I didn’t feel good, went directly upstairs to my room, got in bed, and stayed there.
It worked. They never found out about the BB battles.
Postscript: We finally quit shooting at each other after a BB hit one of my friends in the soft, meaty place between his eye and nose. No real harm done, but it scared all of us.
Coming Friday: You Parked Where?!