Five Years To Life

Five Years To Life(Evangeline) Five Years To Life
By
Evangeline
An Autobiography

It is Friday night, circa 1965. Granddaddy and Grandmama have an old black and white TV. We don’t have a TV. We live a short walk to their house, but usually ride over because it is me, my brother, younger Sister Jenny and my Mom is expecting a fourth child.

We arrive and Grandmamma will be busy in the kitchen. The house smells like a mixture of aftershave, biscuits, sour milk, old newspapers, rotting wood, Vick’s Salve and tea. You know, heaven.

The house was sagging in from floor to ceiling. It had an old fireplace in Grandmama’s bedroom. Not for luxury, but to have some heat.

I look at the spot on the ceiling and try to use the imagination of my five-year old mind to pretend I am in that spot, immersed in it, away from what is happening.

I am not sure what is happening, but I know it is evil and the pain is more than my very soul can bear. It is the first of these days. These days are where my very being will forever be changed by chance and circumstance.


My childhood began at Martin’s Hospital in Pell City, Alabama, about 35 miles due east from Birmingham. Back then, the route was Highway 78, but the cities have long since been connected by I-20. Much of my childhood, I lived just off Exit 156 known as the Eden exit, so named for the local community.

Many people say they do not remember much, if anything, before age 7 or so. I cannot imagine not knowing or remembering those earlier years. Perhaps their lives are less eventful. In any event, my brother and I can recall in detail accounts of our childhood when he was only 5 and I was 3 ½ . My first memories are the fondest of my childhood.
My brother, Buddy, and I played as would most kids of that day. We did not have a television nor did we care that we did not have one. We both liked to be outside and would spend hours in the backyard. My father was working nights at Connor’s Steel in Birmingham. When he was in a good mood, he would hide in the shrubbery while my brother and I walked around the house waiting to shriek when the booger jumped out.

My Mother was still so very young, at only 24 and we had a little sister, Jenny. I remember ‘the baby’, but Buddy and I were in our own world. Mother was, and is, the type beauty where total strangers will walk up and say to her children “don’t you hope you grow up to be as beautiful as your Mother”.


It wasn’t long before my Mother’s belly began to swell with the fourth child. During this same time, my Father decided to build chicken houses. I think this was really my Grandaddy’s idea, but nonetheless became my Father’s project. In those days of the mid-60’s, it was common for the local families to have men who held a job at the steel mill, worked construction on the side and had chicken houses. Some of the chicken houses were for raising chicks and others for egg production, or layers. First, my Father had turkeys. I guess they were for raising, although they seemed pretty big when we got them. That only lasted a year. The turkeys died off easily as they were susceptible to disease. The chicken houses were as long as two football fields. Metal coops were mounted along the interior walls. Eggs were gathered by hand and put in metal baskets. When the basket was full, it was put on the trolley and another one started. There was a skill to gathering eggs. The roosting hens didn’t want the eggs gathered and they would peck the skin off the back of your hands. The trick was to reach in over their head, grab them by the neck quickly and pull them off the roost and gather the egg.

The first hell of these days began the winter I was five. Buddy was in school. I would accompany my Dad or Grandaddy to the turkey houses. Then, there were no eggs to gather. The turkeys had to be fed, but this was done by a silo carrying feed on a conveyor system. The watering troughs had to be washed out every day. The water would be so cold in them, my hands would bleed. When Buddy got out of school, he would come in and we would cull the turkeys. This meant taking the dead ones to a place in the pasture where they would later be burned or eaten by buzzards. The turkeys that looked like they were getting sickly would be put in a partitioned area.

We had a Tom house, too. It was less than half the size of the hen houses. I have no idea why we needed Tom turkeys and later roosters, but we had them. The Tom turkeys were like raging bulls. They are very aggressive and I spent too many days climbing a partition and waiting it out until the turkeys lost interest or an adult showed up to help me escape. I had to walk through them to turn on the feed system.

In between the two chicken houses, was a small concrete building called the egg house. The front half of the egg house had rudimentary shelves made from supported plywood and a big wash sink. We had sanding blocks and each egg was lightly sanded, placed on a 2 ½ dozen flats, then into a cardboard box. Some eggs had poop on them and these had to be washed in the sink. The back half of the egg house was a cooler room. The boxes of eggs were stacked in the cooler room until the Purina truck came to pick them up.

The summer I was five and Buddy was seven, he and I were put in charge of the chicken houses. Production peaked at over 10,000 eggs a day. At the end of the day, we would have a worksheet where the four lines were drawn, then the fifth line to mark 5 to mean five boxes. Each box contained 48 flats. If the eggs weren’t gathered in full, production would go down. The more daylight there is, the more the hens lay. In the winter months, lights are set on timers to keep the hens laying, but it still doesn’t fake them into laying as much as they do in the summer. That summer, the summer of 1966, with egg production at an all time high, my Dad decided to hire a local teenager to help out. My Dad was still working nights, raising cattle and had started a construction business. That left me and Buddy to be up at dawn with our breakfast and lunch packed in a brown paper bag, to walk through the pasture at first light and to work about 10 hours. There would have been no use to complain about it. It was what we had to do.

Not long after the summer help was hired, I was in the egg house. Buddy gathered one house and I gathered the other house. The helper was to help keep the watering troughs cleaned, help with the cleaning and crating of the eggs and other such task.

In the summer, I never wore shoes. I can tell you exactly what it feels like to have warm chicken crap ooze between your toes. I would wipe it off as best I could on clean sawdust. Sawdust is put in the chicken houses to absorb the litter. It is effective for a short while, but gets downright nasty before the chickens are turned. We would have the chickens about 10 months, then they would be hauled off to become soup or pot pies and the houses would be cleaned out, repairs made, fresh sawdust shavings brought in and the next batch of layers brought in. A hell of sorts where the fire is always on….

On the first fateful day in June of 1966, I had gathered eggs for the day and it was time to unload them into the egg house. Making it to the egg house was blissful. The cooler room was, well, cool, and we could run in there to cool off. I never had much mind to eat, but I guess I must have eaten some. My granddaddy lived walking distance to the chicken houses. He was a farmer, peddler, delivered the Birmingham News, raised hogs, delivered milk and worked some on I-20 road construction. He’d come over once or twice a day to check on us. Otherwise, Buddy and I were left with the help. I had on a homemade pair of shorts and sleeveless shirt in pink and white. Work clothes. Nothing fancy. No shoes. My hair would have surely been a matted mess from hours of sweat. I smelled like chicken crap. I was hauling in two totes at a time of eggs, which is a lot for a 5 year-old. The helper offered a hand and gave me a wink when he said to sit down and rest while he brought in the rest of the egg baskets. I don’t know why, but I felt sick to my stomach because of the wink. Not long after, I was taking the first box of crated eggs into the cooler room when the door shut. It was near dark in the room. The helper, he said if I laid down on the floor he would do something that would make me feel real good. I didn’t know what he was fixing to do, but I felt sick just like I had when he winked. He told me if I said anything to my Father he would make me sorry and hurt me and my brother. I couldn’t see much light coming in. There was just the one black spot on the ceiling. I could go there. I could pretend to be in the spot. The warm liquid running down my legs, it couldn’t really be there. The pain, it had to go. Worse even that the physical pain, was the God-awful end where the helper would lick the aftermath.
My soul crept slowly into the dark spot on the ceiling. Some 45 years later, a part of it remains stuck there. With it went all the innocence of childhood.

Afterwards, I somehow managed to finish out the day. I had to work side-by-side with this monster. My brother came in with his eggs and I didn’t dare speak a word to him. I never dared, but towards the end of the summer the helper would openly take me to the egg room, then my brother. I hope what was done to him, was not so bad as what was done to me. Violence escalates. When being stoic became less of a turn on, then the pain had to be administered in other ways. Sticks, fingernails, whatever it would take to get the reaction to make a monster smirk.

The first day, I went home and got on the swing set and my Mother came outside to hang clothes. I told her my panties were full of blood. She said I must have hurt myself on the swing set. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t even know how to say what had happened.

I knew about prayers. We went to church sometimes. Not all the time, but enough to know about prayers. I prayed for God to take the man away. A few weeks later, the helper was working atop a partition making a repair. He slipped and a foot long splinter caught him. It set up an infection and he didn’t come to work.

This ended the chapter in my life, but the damage was done. I don’t want to smell a cool room, I definitely don’t want to be cold like the cold of laying on a slab of concrete in a cooler room, and I don’t want to see a spot on a ceiling because the soul of a 5 year-old is in it and I don’t want to see a flat of eggs or smell chicken litter and don’t ever want to wear pink and white and I don’t want to watch light filter through a tiny window and see the dust in the air and smell the scent of evil in the midst of all of these things.