“Your responsibility to be ready for a fight never ends!” James Yeager

I am John O’Shea, a son of Captain Jack. My birth mother is Ginger, Sean is my brother and we were born on the dining room table at about the same time. I graduated high school but never went to college. From a very young age all I ever wanted to do was ‘cowboy’. We have a 500 head herd of momma cows, so that is a big job.

Everyone knows I met my wife while on vacation in Orlando the summer before my senior year in high school. I brought her home with me and we married after we graduated. It was a big double wedding with my brother Sean and his fiancée Barbara.

Barb, as we call her, had a hard life. She was half black in rural Mississippi. The white rednecks picked on her as well as the blacks. They called her horrible names and insulted her all the time. She was a year ahead of Sean and me, so we were not in the same class. We went to different grade schools and did not see what she was going through until our freshman year in high school.

Sean would defend her, trying to reason with the ones harassing her. Every day it was the same bullshit, and always from the same assholes. One day I had enough. When I caught one of the big redneck football players pinning her up against her locker wanting to know when she was going to give him some of that ‘half-nigger pussy’; I lost it. No more talk. I busted his nose and loosened about half his teeth. He got my message, “Do not talk to her again!”

We both received a five-day suspension from school. The Captain let me spend those five days riding my horse, checking the cattle and repairing fences. The redneck spent his 5-day suspension learning to breathe thru his mouth and eating Jell-O.

Everything went smoothly for about another year.

Sean and I were sophomores, Barb was a junior and number one in her class. One day I saw two black guys pulling Barb into a janitor’s closet. She was protesting and trying to fight them, but they were big guys. I opened the closet door just as her blouse was being pulled over her head. I grabbed a mop that had a thick handle and began to wear it out on their heads. When I was finished, they were lying on the floor with blood coming out of their mouths, ears and noses. Barb went to the door and screamed for help. She only had on her bra and panties! In a few seconds there were teachers helping her get dressed as she told her story.