Pete's News

ALL THE NEWS THAT'S FIT TO PRINT 
AND SOME THAT AIN'T

Howdy folks! This here’s ol’ Pete and Rosebud comin’ at you again!

“I’ll tell you right now, they ain’t no flies on me.” That’s what the feller said that come walkin’ up the road here the other day. He wasn’t old but he wasn’t no spring chicken neither, and looked like maybe he’d run outta luck somewheres along the way. He said he was lookin’ for a job and was walkin’ up and down the road out there, askin’ at ever place he come to if they had any work. He wasn’t askin’ for no handout, he said. All he wanted was somethin’ that’d pay him a little somethin’ and if he couldn’t get money, he’d trade out work for somethin’ to eat or maybe a place to stay. He had a family, he said, a wife and two little young’uns, and they was needin’ a place to stay, somewheres out of the cold and rain.

I didn’t know what to think. Me and my mule Rosebud was standin’ out there in the front yard when we seen him comin’ down there. There ain’t that many people lives on up past us here in the holler and we know ’em all. So we knowed that he wasn’t nobody from around here and we stood around actin’ like we was doin’ somethin’ so’s we could get a good look at him when he come by. Only he didn’t. He come up and stopped. That throwed the whole thing outta kilter.

I’ve heared about people bein’ homeless. They talk about it on the TV. They say they’re thousands and thousands of ’em in places like New York and Californy. But there ain’t never been none around here. Ain’t nobody up here in Gump Holler that’s got much, mind you. We’re all pore folks, but there ain’t none of us up here that ain’t got a roof over our heads neither. There’s a few of them roofs that’s purty leaky, but it’s still a roof. Everbody’s got a place to call their own.

I never did think nothin’ about people bein’ homeless. I mean, ’cept when they showed pitchers of ’em on the TV. I remember they showed some that was livin’ in one of them shelters one time. Lord, them shelters looked better’n what me and Rosebud’s got! Or they showed pitchers of ’em layin’ out there on the sidewalk, all bundled up in big ol’ coats or hunkered up in pasteboard boxes. But they didn’t look real. They didn’t to me. They was just pitchers. I guess I knowed they was human beans, but it was like they didn’t have nothin’ to do with me. I didn’t know nothin’ about ’em and couldn’t do nothin’ about em’ if I did. Me and Rosebud ain’t got nothin’. We get by, but that’s about all. And if we had a million dollars, it wouldn’t go very far when it comes to feedin’ and takin’ care of a hunnert thousand homeless people.

But this wasn’t no hunnert thousand homeless people. It was one feller down on his luck. He had a wife and two young’uns huddled up under a cedar tree down the road there and he was tryin’ to find a place for ’em to get in out of the rain and somethin’ to go in their empty stomachs. And these we could do somethin’ about.

This ol’ place we’ve got ain’t nothin’ fancy. It’s old, it ain’t very big and it wasn’t nothin’ fine the day it was built. It’s got two front rooms and a lean-to kitchen on the back. That’s about all there is to it. I use the left hand front room for my bedroom and the other’un is our livin’ room. Rosebud gen’ally beds down in there when it’s chilly. She lays in there by the fireplace or sometimes she just stands up to sleep. I don’t know how she does that, sleep standin’ up. I tried it once and fell over and like to broke my nose. In the summer, when it’s warm, she goes out to the barn out there behind the house and sleeps out there.

We do have that little ol’ barn out there. It ain’t much neither, just two stables with a shed built on the side of it. And it’s in worse shape than the house is. It’s okay in the summer when it’s hot, but you couldn’t stand it out there in cold weather. It’s full of cracks and the wind just whistles through there. We’ve got a little ol’ hen house, too, but it ain’t big enough for nothin’. And there’s the wood shed. It ain’t nothin’ but a few pieces of tin roofin’ on a pole frame, like one of them carport things ’cept it ain’t as big. It’s just big enough to keep a rick or two of wood dry, and not very dry at that.

We put ’em up down there in the barn. It ain’t as much as some could do, I reckon, but it was better’n what they had, better’n nothin’. But they took and tacked pasteboard up on the walls to stop the cracks and swept the straw up, down to the bare dirt floor. We had this ol’ tin heater that we let ’em have to help knock the chill off and we give ’em some dried beans, a little corn meal, what we could spare. And they made ’em a reg’lar little home down there in the barn.

They’re still down there. I ain’t been down there much. I figger it ain’t my place to go out there all the time so’s they’ll feel obligated to tell me how much they ’preciate gettin’ to live in our barn. But I see ’em comin’ and goin’, the man and his wife. I figger they find a little work here and there. I know they’re tryin’ real hard. Sooner or later they’re gonna find good jobs and get ’em a place of their own, maybe better’n what me and Rosebud’s got. I hope they do.

You can contact Pete and Rosebud by email at
bstover43@yahoo.com