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I’ve got nothing to do but keep my foot up while it heals. May as well sit and tell stories.
When I was a kid the office of the feed store was a local gathering place. The place was great, smelled like feed supplement and horse lineament. And tobacco. They had four or five chairs sitting around a Warm Morning wood stove. A big old guy named Warnie ran the place. He probably weighed 300 pounds and wore bib overalls with a ratty cardigan sweat over them. He chewed tobacco constantly and kind of gargled when he talked. On a cold winter day the old farmers would gather around the stove and pass a bottle around and gossip. Dad would take me in with him to unload a truckload of grain. I would wait inside and sit on the bags of supplement and listen to the men while he unloaded. It seemed Warnie’s mission in life was to reduce the stove to a pile of molten iron. He’d take a chaw, take a drink, and jamb some more wood in the stove. He’d spit on the stove now and then and if the glob of tobacco juice sizzled on the stove he’d get up and jamb more wood in it. When the stove was showing a little red and seemed to be jumping up and down Warnie would launch a gob of spit at it and the spit would just vaporize. He’d take a sip and slap his knee and say, “She’s hawt now boys!”
Warnie and the boys fascinated me, but Dad couldn’t get me out of there fast enough.
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