Bud
Copyright© 2015 by Bill Offutt
Chapter 25
When his six-month appointment at VA ended, Bud took a series of part-time jobs including some construction work but finally decided that he could not succeed at school if he was working at night. He went home.
"Paw," he said to his father after his first supper at home, "I've got a problem."
His father nodded without looking up from his diligent pipe cleaning.
"I have to give Jeanne and the kids at least a hundred a month, and I want to go to school so I can get a better job."
"I'd say that's a problem," said Sam Williams, scraping the bowl of his ancient pipe with a small aluminum tool that looked like a truncated ten-penny nail.
"You got any suggestions?"
His father sniffed and glanced at him. "Go talk to your wife. I don't know how she feeds those kids on twenty-five a week, not the way prices are now; even milk's gotten awful dear. Her folks must be helping, but when she comes here on a Sunday, everybody looks clean and healthy. Go talk to her. Tell her you've changed."
"I can't, Paw. Not the way things are." Bud hung his head. "Can you lend me some money?"
Sam Williams sucked on his pipe and made a sour face. "I suppose."
"I'm looking for work. I'm going to make my schedule just Monday-Wednesday-Friday at school. I had to drop one course."
Sam nodded and stuffed coarse tobacco into his old pipe.
"So I'm going to start looking for work. Buster told me Congressional Country Club was hiring assistant greenskeepers."
"I'll talk to your mother. She might pay you to take care of her rentals on the weekends, doing repairs and such. The man she's got now ain't worth," he paused and smiled, "nothing, ain't worth nothing."
For the next six months Bud worked for his mother, cutting lawns, trimming trees, fixing broken windows, hauling trash and doing general maintenance on the five homes she was renting and checking on the two farms she and Sam still owned farther out in the County. In return his folks gave him $120 a month for his wife and children and ten dollars a week for himself. His mother went back to fixing him lunches to take to Montgomery Junior College three days a week, and Bud's class work improved greatly, he even passed the first semester of Spanish, a course he had failed once and withdrawn from on the second try.
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