He told me he lost his arm as a child when he fell into a pot of lye soap his mother was making. I never really knew if he was telling me the truth, and for sure I didn’t understand how it could have happened. There was nothing from his shoulder down, and he would have had a terrible time keeping the strap of his overalls in place had he not twisted them in the back to keep the strap from slipping off his shoulder. His superfluous khaki shirtsleeve was tied in a knot to prevent its entanglement in the farm equipment.

There seemed to be no limit to his ability to live his life with one arm. As an only child with little entertainment but to carry a book to the hay loft and read, I was usually at his heels. He allowed me to watch incredulously as he created a furrow in the leg of his starched blue overalls that would allow him to place a cigarette paper there to receive tobacco from the Bull Durham sack that he opened by pulling the yellow string with his teeth and his one hand. Filling the paper sparingly with tobacco, he then carefully lifted it to his lips, shaping it into a cylinder with deft fingers and thumb. He licked one edge to make it stick together and then leaned back against the porch post, put the finished product in his mouth, took a match from his Prince Albert can, and struck it to light his waiting cigarette.

Attaching cultivators to the Farmall B tractor came just as naturally to him as rolling the cigarettes. One leg braced the equipment while the one strong hand assisted. I never saw him fail to accomplish what he needed to do with the farm equipment. Daddy often helped him attach the mower because it was more cumbersome than the cultivator, but now I know he could have probably done it by himself.

If something needed to be done, he just did it. Killing hogs was another thing he just did. He would build a fire around the big iron wash pot, and he and Daddy would remove the coarse hair, then carve the hog with razor sharp knives into choice cuts of ham and bacon. The smokehouse awaited the salted, carefully prepared and cloth-wrapped meat. Leftovers were cut into just the right size to fry cracklings for cornbread and render for lard. Daddy seasoned the sausage meat complete with the prized pork loins, and they would grind it for Mother to fry the first test batch. Her light buttermilk biscuits, first cooked briefly on top of the stove on a hot cast iron baker to assure a crust on the bottom, were then quickly transferred to the broiler to put a crust on top for the perfect accompaniment to the sausage and red-eye gravy. I don’t suppose anything has ever tasted that good since. When the flavor was perfect, the sausage was ground and some was sold to select customers.

Jody could pick cotton with the best of them, and few brought more to be weighed at the end of the day. I watched him throw a long cotton sack filled with the fruits of his labor upon a full wagon to be taken to the gin in a neighboring town by my mother and me that evening. He was a hard worker, and any doubt of his ability as a farm hand was quickly discredited.

Josie was Jody’s wife, his travel guide and driving instructor. She agreed with everything he said with a confirming, “Tha’s right, Jody.” They would head south on the same long Sunday afternoon trek every week to visit relatives with Jody driving the ancient two-toned blue pickup truck with wooden sideboards. He said he never drove faster than twenty miles an hour; he said that was fast enough. He told us that when they got to the first town with traffic lights Josie would tell him to just go on when the light turned red. She said it was just a Christmas light, and he would ease on down the road. They lived a charmed life and always returned home unscathed.