Me, LaVerne & Franklin Brown

Me, LaVerne & Franklin Brown

The first five bucks I ever earned was for selling scrap iron with LaVerne that we hauled in a 1919 Model T
Me, LaVerne and Franklin Brown searched farmer’s dumps all over town and picked up every piece of scrap we’d see

Franklin Brown smoked cigarettes when just a kid but I forget which brand of those damned cancer sticks he chose
At three am he’d come awake and grab that pack and then he’d take deep drags and you could smell it in his clothes

His dad had driven my dad’s trucks and one day had the worst bad luck to ditch a truck with a full load of cement
The load broke loose and hit the cab and crushed the chest of Franklin’s dad on the steering wheel which wasn’t even bent

We worked the spring of forty nine, I close my eyes and see those times and the memories we picked up just to sell
Worn out plows and sickle bars, tractor wheels with rotten tires and every piece of scrap had tales to tell

Of farmers dreams and farmers dreads as they worked their lives out in those sheds and hay fields in the shadow of those hills
Getting by on hope and sweat and doing all they could to get the family fed and pay the monthly bills

Milking cows and cutting corn, till old and sick and bent and worn and living every moment just on will
Shirley Richmond comes to mind, all stoved in and face all lined, he worked that farm on the road to Manorkill

I’ve made a little money since, in the third world I could be a prince, but I still can feel and smell those crisp new bills
My brother paid to Frank and me beside that black old Model T in 1949 on Hubbard Hill.