A Freight Driver's Tale

Thomas Warner was just eight years old that day that he rode into Buford in the wagon with his father. Thomas was happy because going anywhere besides their farm was something he considered an adventure. It was a way to get away from his two older sisters and to avoid being sent to the chicken house for an egg or two that his mother needed for something they were baking. Thomas didn't know why his father was going to Buford because all his father had said was that Thomas would enjoy the trip.

Thomas was surprised when his father drove all the way through Buford and finally pulled the wagon over in front of "Ronson's Blacksmithing and Wagon Works". He knew enough about blacksmiths to know they made shoes for horses and fixed broken farm equipment. The two horses hitched to the wagon, Jake and Joe, were shod but they'd had their shoes changed only two weeks before and they didn't need shoes. There was nothing in the back of the wagon, so his father hadn't brought anything for the blacksmith to fix.

After Thomas' father had set the wagon brake and wrapped the lines around it, he got down, but told Thomas to stay in the wagon. He walked through the big door of the blacksmith's shop, and Thomas saw him talking to Horace Ronson, the blacksmith. He saw Horace nod and then he and Thomas' father walked back out and to the side of the building.

About ten minutes later, Thomas' father came back to the wagon and unhooked Jake's and Joe's trace chains and hooked them to the trace carriers on the harness hip straps, and then unhooked the neck yoke from the wagon tongue. His father unwrapped the lines from the brake lever and then said, "Thomas, come down off the wagon."

Thomas climbed down and walked to where his father stood. His father handed him the lines and said, "Thomas, walk 'em out."

Thomas knew how to do that because he'd watched his father do it since he could remember, but he'd never done it himself before. He looked up at his father and his father nodded.

"Just tell 'em to giddup and they'll go. Keep a little pull on the lines so they know you're behind them."

Thomas pulled the reins snug, took a deep breath, and then yelled, "giddup", like he'd seen his father do. He was amazed when Jake and Joe started walking away from the wagon, amazed enough they almost pulled him off his feet. He recovered though, and walked behind them until they were clear of the wagon tongue. He pulled a little harder on the reins then and yelled, "Whoa". Jake and Joe stopped.

His father smiled then.

"Not bad for the first time. Now drive 'em around beside the shop."

Once again, Thomas yelled, "Giddup", and followed behind the horses when they started to walk. They'd passed the corner of the blacksmith's shop when Thomas saw the wagon sitting there. He pulled Jake and Joe to a stop and then just stood there looking.

It was a new wagon with a red undercarriage and a green box with yellow pinstripes on the wheels, spokes, and the panels on the box. On the center panel on each side was painted, "Warner Farm".

Thomas turned to his father.

"Is that why we came to town?"

His father smiled.

"Part of the reason. Think you can get them over the tongue so I can hitch them up?"

Thomas didn't answer because he was trying to remember seeing his father do that. What his father usually did was to hitch them one at a time. He'd never seen him put both horses on the wagon at the same time.

The only way Thomas could figure out to do that was to turn Jake and Joe so they were in line with the tongue and then back them up. He took another deep breath and then yelled, "Giddup".

When Jake and Joe were about even with the wagon tongue, Thomas pulled on the line in his left hand and yelled, "Haw".

Both Jake and Joe started sidestepping to the left then. They were still going forward a little, but mostly they were just turning in place. Thomas followed them and when he had the wagon tongue at his back, he yelled, "Whoa". After Jake and Joe stopped, Thomas pulled back slightly on the reins and yelled, "Back". Jake and Joe started backing up.

Thomas kept them walking backward, using the lines to keep them straight, until they stood on each side of the wagon tongue. Then he said, "Whoa" again, and looked up to find his father standing beside him.

"Thomas, how did you figure out what to do?"

Thomas shrugged.

"That was the only way I could see to do it. The wagon's too close to the shop to drive them over the tongue and then turn them."

"How did you know how to back them up?"

"I watched how you do it when you want to back up the wagon."

His father smiled then.

"You did good. You just stay here while I hitch them to the wagon and then we'll be on our way home."

When Thomas' father had hooked the trace chains to the trees on the evener and then hooked the loop on the tongue to the neck yoke, he told Thomas to get in the wagon. When Thomas was in the seat, his father handed him the lines and then climbed up beside him.

"Thomas, take us home", was all he said.

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Thomas would remember that day until the day he died. He'd felt grown-up. He was driving two horses hitched to a wagon, two horses he knew could run away if they wanted to. They didn't. They just plodded along down the dirt road toward the Warner Farm.

When it was time to turn into the lane to the farm, Thomas pulled a little on the line in his right hand, and then yelled, "Gee". Both horses turned into the lane at the right time, and a few minutes later, Thomas pulled on the reins and yelled, "Whoa".

Thomas' father was smiling as he started unhitching Jake and Joe. Thomas was fairly bursting with pride. He figured he was a man now, and would start doing a man's work on the farm.

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After Thomas learned a lot more about driving horses, he realized that driving Jake and Joe from the blacksmith's shop to the farm where he lived wasn't really doing anything. Jake and Joe were the two horses his father used as wheelers, the two horses closest to the wagon that were strong enough to back up the wagon. They were also the calmest horses his father had.

They knew the way home, so all he'd really done was hold onto the lines, but it was that day that Thomas decided his future would be in driving horses in some way or another. It made him feel powerful to know he was controlling such strength. Thomas' father had recognized that drive in his son and began teaching him how to drive horses, specifically how to drive more horses than just two.

Thomas' father plowed with a two-bottom riding plow, and he used six horses to pull it through the field. The horses, Jack, Joe, Blue, Jim, Bess, and Belle were hitched three and three to the plow. What that meant was that Jack, Joe, and Blue were hitched side to side, and Jim, Bess, and Belle were hitched in front of them also side by side.

That complicated driving them for two reasons. The first was that the tongue on the plow was only between Jack and Joe. Blue, the tallest horse of the three, walked in the furrow and was only connected to the other two by the jockey stick between his bit and Joe's bit, and connected to the plow only by his trace chains connected to the evener. It was the same for Bess, Belle and Jim except they weren't connected to anything except for the trace chains and evener on the plow tongue that connected them to the three horses behind them.

The second reason was that while the rear three horses hitched abreast were controlled by two reins, the front trio of horses had a second set of reins. This was necessary because the front three horses would reach the end of the field before the second three and needed to start turning. The second three had to keep going straight until the plow was raised and ready to turn. That required the driver to control the front team separately from the rear team.

In order to teach Thomas how to do that, his father built a rack in the feedway of the barn, the aisle that ran down the middle of the barn between the stalls on each side. The rack had four wrist-sized sticks that pivoted in the center and were weighted so the top of each stick rested on the wall. To the top of each of these sticks, Thomas' father attached the spare set of lines he had. The idea was to keep enough tension on each stick to keep it upright, and then to learn how to make each stick individually rock back with a pull on it's line. Thomas' father said it was called a "line board" and he built it to teach Thomas how much pull was enough to guide the horses and how much pull was too much.

Thomas soon learned it was more complicated than it looked. He had to hold two lines between the fingers of his right hand and two more between the fingers of his left hand. Movement of the sticks was done by moving his body and hands in the direction required to tighten the rein on one stick while leaving the other still upright. Too strong of a pull on a line meant the bottom of the stick would hit the wall with a dull thud. Too weak of a pull wouldn't move the stick enough.

Thomas found the weight of the leather lines to be a problem as well. They were almost twenty feet long so they'd reach from the wagon seat to the first horses, and they were heavy.

Any time Thomas wasn't doing something else, he'd be in the barn and practicing with the line board. It was two months before his father watched him one day and said he was ready for the real thing now.

It was time to harvest the corn crop by then, and Thomas' father had him drive the wagon through the cornfield while he picked the ears from the stalks and tossed them into the wagon.

Thomas had felt proud that day too. He was driving just four horses instead of six, but he felt just as proud. It made him especially proud when the wagon neared the end of the row of corn plants. Thomas had spoken to the lead team of Bess and Belle and used a slight pull on their lines to start them turning before the rear team reached the end of the row. His voice wasn't the yell he'd used at the blacksmith's shop. It was the calm voice he'd heard his father use when directing horses.

"Bess, Gee, Belle, Gee."

Bess and Belle started sidestepping to the right. As soon as the wagon was out of the corn, Thomas did the same to Jack and Joe. The two teams soon had the wagon perpendicular to the corn rows. Thomas pulled back on all four lines and said "Back." Jack and Joe moved back into the harness breeching and the wagon began moving backwards. When Thomas judged the distance right, he sidestepped all four horses to the right again to line them up with the next corn rows, and then started back through the field.

Driving horses got more complicated once winter set in. Thomas' father cut firewood during the winter and wood was heavy, heavy enough his father hitched all six horses to the bob sled he used to bring the logs out of the trees, but they were hitched into three teams of two horses each for the bobsled. Thomas went back to the line board with six lines now instead of four.

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By the time he was twelve, Thomas could drive any hitch his father used on the farm, be that a team hitched to the wagon for a trip to town, four horses hitched to that wagon two teams of two, six horses on the plow and disc hitched two teams of three, or the six hitched to the bobsled hitched three teams of two.

It was then that Thomas and his father began training horses to work. Bess and Belle had given his father six more horses over the years, and four of them were old enough to train. Two years after that, Thomas' father used six horses to plow a field and Thomas followed behind him with six more horses hitched to the disc. What had taken his father two weeks work to prepare a field for planting now took only one week.

They worked together after that doing all the work that had to be done on a farm. When grass needed to be mowed for hay for the winter, Thomas' father drove the sicklebar mower and mowed the grass. Thomas followed him with the hay rake and raked the hay into neat rows so it could dry. Once dry, it was put up in the haymow of the barn using a grapple and a hay trolley moved by horses.

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By the time he was eighteen, Thomas knew he loved horses whether he was caring for them or driving them, but also knew that the rest of farm work wasn't something he enjoyed. It was the same thing, day in and day out, year in and year out -- plow, disc, plant, cultivate, and then harvest. There was no need for him to stay on the family farm either. His two sisters had both married the sons of farmers and they were helping his father.

One day after the spring plowing was done, Thomas noticed that Jack had a loose shoe and pointed it out to his father. His father watched Jack walk, nodded, and then told Thomas to take both Jack and Joe to the blacksmith's shop. An hour later, Thomas was driving that same wagon with the red undercarriage and green bed into town.

The blacksmith was busy with another team, so after telling the blacksmith what he wanted, Thomas unhitched Jack and Joe, piled their harness into the wagon, and turned them out into the pen behind the blacksmith's shop. The blacksmith said he'd probably be done with them in a couple hours, so Thomas took a walk around the town.

What caught his eye was a wagon drawn by six horses backed up to the back of the General Store. That wagon was unlike any Thomas had ever seen before.

It looked like a normal farm wagon, but instead of one set of sides fastened to the wagon bed and another set of sides held in place by stakes in brackets on the first sideboards, this wagon had sideboards that had to be at least four feet high.

The horses were different too. Jack and Joe, his father's wheelers each weighed about fifteen hundred pounds. The two horses in the lead team looked that heavy to Thomas, and the two horses of the wheel team looked like they might go at least two thousand. The center team, the swing team, was a little lighter than the wheelers but heavier than the lead team. Thomas walked up to the man standing beside the wagon waiting for the two men from the general store to unload his wagon.

Thomas introduced himself and stuck out his right hand.

"Mr., that's a real nice team of wheelers you got there. How much do they weigh?"

The man shrugged.

"Damned if I know. All I know is they're big enough to back this bitch up when she's loaded to the top."

Thomas was a little confused that a driver wouldn't know how much his own horses weighed even if it was just an educated guess.

"You don't know?"

The man spat a glob of brown spit on the ground.

"Them and the wagon are owned by Giddings and Jackson Freight Haulers. I jest drive 'em an' deliver what they load in the wagon to wherever it's supposed to go."

What the man said interested Thomas, because he hadn't known that there were any companies that hired drivers to drive freight wagons.

"So, you just drive from place to place? Who takes care of the horses?"

The man spat again and then wiped his mouth on his sleeve.

"I feed 'em and water 'em if I'm on the road overnight and there's no livery stable on the way. After that, they go back to Giddings and Jackson. They got a man there that cleans the horse shit out of the stalls and makes sure the horses are in good enough shape to pull the next load."

The man grinned then.

"I go to the saloon and have me a couple drinks. Then I go back to the bunkhouse and sleep...well... unless one o' them saloon gals is in a agreeable mood. Then I do me some ridin' instead of drivin'."

Thomas thanked the man and then walked back to the blacksmith's shop, but he was thinking. He'd never considered the possibility of making a living by driving horses, but this man evidently was. The only job working with horses Thomas knew about was working in a livery stable. Men who worked at the livery stable did clean out stalls and brushed and took care of the horses, but once in a while they served as carriage drivers too. They also trained horses the livery stable owner bought that were still learning how to pull a carriage or a wagon.

Thomas had been thinking about asking the owner of the livery stable in town if he needed any more help. After talking with the freight wagon driver, Thomas was now thinking of going to Giddings and Jackson and asking if they needed any more drivers. The man had said they were located in Hodges, just ten miles from Buford.

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Hannah Wilson Fullbright wasn't shedding tears as she stood and watched the men lower her husband's body into the ground. She didn't sob when they began shoveling the dirt back into the hole. When they packed the remaining soil into a slight mound, she was frowning, but she still didn't cry.

Hannah didn't cry because she wasn't sad that her husband now lay under the ground of the cemetery at the Baptist Church in Holly. What she was, was mad at most of the world including herself, but mostly she was mad at Jason, her dead husband.

Her mother had tried to warn her, but Hannah had a stubborn streak to her personality and she ignored what her mother had said.

"Hannah, you're nineteen and a woman and I'm not going to tell you what to do with your life, but those Fullbright boys were always in some sort of trouble when they were growing up. Thought since their father was the town banker they were better than anybody else. Stands to reason they'd think that because he gave them everything they ever wanted. Each one got his own carriage and horse on his fifteenth birthday and after that, they were always into mischief of some sort.

"That's what you'll be marrying if you marry Jason. You need to think about that before it's too late. You wouldn't be the first bride to change her mind and you won't be the last."

Hannah ignored her mother because she already knew how Jason was. He was really selfish about everything, always taking the path that would be the easiest for him or that would get him the most money. He was also selfish about her and she liked that. Hannah was a pretty woman with a nice figure, and if Jason even thought another man was looking at her in what he called, "that way", that man would soon be made to stop. That made Hannah feel safe.

She really thought that once they were married, Jason would do what his two older brothers had done. He'd start out in the small business his father had bought for him in Holly, and then grow that business until he was a wealthy man. Hannah would be his partner, keeping his house spotless, cooking his meals, and having his babies.

After the wedding at the Baptist Church in Heyworth, Jason and Hannah got in his carriage and drove the twenty miles to Barrington where they spent the night in the hotel. It was that night that Hannah truly became Jason's wife. She hadn't felt much except for the one, sharp pain her mother told her to expect, but in Hannah's mind, that pain marked her transition from a girl to a married woman.

From Barrington, they drove to Holly and moved into two rooms in the back of the store with a sign on the front that read, "Fullbright's Merchantile". Hannah settled down to make the two rooms into a home.

For the first month, Jason seemed to enjoy running the merchantile store. He was happy to be out on his own, or so it seemed to Hannah. Things began to change after that though.

The first warning that Hannah chose to ignore was when Jason said they needed a new carriage. Hannah didn't think they did, but she did ask Jason why. His reply should have told her that Jason hadn't really changed, but it didn't.

"I'm the owner of the only store in Holly that has everything you'd ever want, and yet, I drive around on Sunday in the same plain old carriage I've had since I was fifteen. A storeowner should be showing everybody in Holly that he's different from them."

Hannah had tried to discuss the matter.