Month: March 2018

Blow In Their Ear, Carefully

Jimmy Collins, a Robbinsville man who had hunted wild boar and bear in the North Carolina mountains all his life, was sitting at a table before dawn one cold, fall morning collecting money from hunters who had hired him to guide them on a boar hunt.

One of the hunters, who was from Charlotte, said to Collins in a friendly sort of way, “Here’s your money you old son of a bitch.”

Collins, who was not nearly as big as the other fellow, stood up, and spoke to him calmly, like he was he was instructing a child:

“I’ve been around you city people and I know how you talk,” he said in a slow, mountain drawl.  “But if you cuss me again I’m gonna knock your head off.”

* * *

Jimmy Collins
Jimmy Collins and his pit bulls.

The night before I had been in Collins’ home to interview him for a story I wrote about that hunt for The News & Observer.  We got to talking about pit bulls, completely fearless dogs whose job it is to catch and hold a wild hog after the tracking dogs, hounds, cornered it.  Pit bulls have powerful jaws and when they grab a hog, by the ear or face or throat where the hog can’t bite them, they will not let go.

So how do you get a pit bull off a hog after the hunter shoots it, or cuts its throat?

This is what Collins told me:

You grab the dog by the collar and twist it until he  starts to choke.  Then you lean over and blow in his ear, which they  don’t like at all.  When the dog lets go and turns to bite you, you pull him off the hog.

Collins also told me that he used to hunt hogs with a rifle.  When that got to where it was no fun, he began shooting them with a pistol, between the eyes at point blank range.  And when that got to be where it wasn’t fun, he began climbing on the hog’s back and cutting its throat.  He said you grab ’em by the ear with your left hand and cut with your right.

But you better remember: Keep your left arm straight and your elbow locked.

When you cut him, Collins said, the hog is liable to jerk his head around to bite you.  If you keep your elbow locked and your arm straight the hog will push your body away from him when he turns his head.

Was this man for real, or was he pulling my leg?

I found out.

Just after dawn the next morning, when his pack of dogs cornered a hog, Collins pulled out a pocket knife offered to let me cut the hog’s throat. Except for two pit bulls, who had the hog’s head in a death grip, the pack was in frenzy, running in and out, biting, barking, growling. They were all over that hog, in a complete frenzy.

I declined.

Collins cut the hog’s throat, keeping his arm straight, his elbow locked. And then he twisted each pit bull’s collar, choked him a little, blew in his ear, and pull him off the dead hog, just like that.

Coming Monday: Two Poodled

 

 

Speaking in Tongues

At the end of the first song the song leader said to me, “Would you like to join the singing class?

I had never been to William Shelton’s church, a Primitive Baptist Church up in the mountains near Walnut, North Carolina. I did not know that if you wanted to sing, you were supposed to go down front, up on the platform, and join the “singing class.”

I said “Yes” and I got up from my pew, went down there, and sang with the singing class, sad songs mostly, about toil and hardship and sin.

I’m a Baptist, too, but I had never been in a Baptist Church like this one.

  • In Sunday school the leader read a chapter from the New Testament while we listened. No one said anything. Everybody then took a turn reading a few verses until we had read the chapter again. Then the leader read it a third time. That was it.  Sunday school was over.  If you wanted to know what it all meant, ask the Holy Spirit.
  • When we went back into the sanctuary William and some other men were sitting together in chairs on the platform, off to one side of the preacher. They were the “Amen Corner,” something I’d heard about all my life but had never seen. When the pastor said something they really agreed with, one of the men, sometimes two or three, would say in a loud voice, “Amen!”
  • Just before the sermon the preacher and everybody else prayed in tongues. Everyone in church, it seemed like, was praying, loudly, at the same time.
  • The pastor preached in a sing-song voice, the kind I used to hear on country radio stations, slamming his open hand down on the lectern and stomping his foot to emphasize his points. And when he began to sweat, he wiped his forehead with a white handkerchief.
  • At the end of the sermon, the preacher stood in front of the congregation, about 100 people, and the men in the “Amen Corner” filed by, hugged him, and then took their place beside him, hugging each other as they formed a line. And then the whole congregation did the same thing. Before it was over everyone in the church, including me, had hugged everyone else in the church.

And then the church bells rang and it was time to go home.

When we got in William’s pickup truck I didn’t say a word. Neither did he, at first. The service was so unlike anything I had ever experienced I didn’t know what to say.

We rode a couple of miles and then he broke the silence.

“I’ve been to Mary’s church in Charlotte,” he said, referring to his daughter, Mary Sue Porter. Her church, First Baptist, is about as mainline as they come. “I know my church is different.”

That was all that was said.

Coming Friday: Blow In Their Ear, Carefully