The Real Rattlesnake

One day the boys did kill a big rattlesnake.  And prankster Chuck thought of playing a trick on James.  He was an older black man who lived with his wife in a small house on the backside of the Haven property that faces Short Street and the railroad tracks.  And he worked in the rail yard. 

An Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnake

One of his jobs was to dump the coal out of the bin through the shute into the trains.   The boys thought it would be a grand idea to scare James with the snake.

They climbed up the ladder on the side of the coal bin, and coiled the dead snake in the top of the bin.  When the next train came through, James jerked the rope to open the shute to dump it, and some of it got hung up, and James had to reach up inside with a rake, and tug on it to get it moving again.

Needless to say the snake fell out barely missing James, landing at his feet.  Scared him so bad he danced a jig trying to get out of striking distance, but when he overheard the boys laughing in the bushes he realized the snake was dead he knew the boys had done it.  He said “I’m gonna git them boys, one of these days I’m gonna git em.”  He also knew Chuck had been the ring leader.

I remember another one of the stories Chuck told me about his Dad and James and a bunch of boys moving a house from across the other side of the railroad tracks in back of the house, over to this side near their house. 

Papa knew all the time schedules for when the trains ran.  He worked it out how they would move the house across the tracks at just the right time.

They used a mule, a dead man post and rollers.  They drove the post in the ground and attached the lines from the house to the mule.  The mule would take a turn around the post and then pull forward with the post taking the brunt of the force, the house moved slowly forward.
 

As the mule pulled it forward the boys were responsible to move the rollers from the back to the front and keep it moving till all of the slack in the line was taken up and tight against the dead man post.  They would move the post and start the process all over again.

I don’t remember how long he said it took them to move it. This was back in the late thirties.

Papa Haven, had only a third grade formal education, but he was a brilliant man.  He was also color blind, and when the Railroad eventually switched over to the various colored light system on a big board alongside the tracks up and down the line, he had to learn the new system.  

He could see the lights lit up, but couldn’t tell what color they were. Chuck worked with him and taught him the colors by the position of each light that signaled the engineer.  So that he knew what he needed to do by whichever light was lit up on the system board.

Papa had to memorize all of this.  Chuck’s older brother Hoyt and Chuck used to help Papa do all of his record keeping and make out the reports he had to turn in.

West Lake Wales was also a switching yard, and there was a Depot Terminal for passengers to leave and arrive.  The beautiful old building was torn down long ago, but it is still a switching yard.  The Depot Terminal was moved to Winter Haven.

To be continued .  .  .  .