The Untied Hand

I did not witness the following event, it was before my time. I did know the people involved though. It is a simple story of one seemingly harmless act. But the bottom line of the story is how his action truly defined the man. I guess we could all look at our lives in retrospect and see how some very simple actions really tell the in depth story of our lives.

It was Winter and on the farm that meant time to "strip tobacco". Up home we raised Burley tobacco and cut the whole stalk and hung it in the barns to dry and cure. After a couple months you got the tobacco down and stripped the leaves off the stalks and sorted it out by grades. When you had about 15 or so leaves of the same grade (enough that you could just barely still hold them in your hand) you took the last leaf and wrapped it around the stems of the rest of the leaves and bundled that "hand" together. The hands were put in piles of 100 pounds and that was how it was sold at the tobacco market.

So, anyhow, my Dad was home from the Navy on leave. He wanted to go hunting, but the farm work took priority. After they had worked a couple hours, my Grandad was not getting much productivity out of my Dad. So he relented and told Dad to go on hunting. Dad said he didn't know where to go, since he had just flown in from overseas. So my Grandad turned to an old friend of his named Raymond Prince. Grandad asked him if he could take my Dad someplace to kill some rabbits.

Prince didn't say a word. He set down the loose tobacco leaves he was holding and grabbed his coat and out the door he and Dad went.

Prince (as my Grandad always called him) was a poor man. Worked for other farmers all his life. Most of the meals for his family was produce from his employers' gardens and meat that came from his hunting. He worked because he had to, but he hunted because he loved it.

When the opportunity arose to hunt instead of work, he didn't even bother to tie off that last hand of tobacco. He was gone hunting.