I Used to do That for a Living; Landing and Leaving 108 Jobs Introduction, Chapter 1, Chapter 2 | Page 33

I Used to do that for a Living

Maybe insecurity about his own want of
schooling caused him to suspect everybody with
more education than he of trying to put one over
on him. He’d got only as far as seventh grade,
and by then was sixteen. Jack wasn’t dim. He’d
missed a few grades.
The Depression was on. And even before the
Depression, his father, the guy I knew as Grandpa Jackson until I was five and he died, couldn’t
hold a job or stay put. A wife and eight children,
and De Wit Talmadge Jack Son (as he spelled it)
kept right on rambling, just as he’d been doing
since he was thirteen, when his family moved
away without him one day while he was at
school, and he’d taken to riding the rails, which
he did right up to when he married Grandma
Jackson, when he was twenty-one and she was
thirteen. Begetting a brood didn’t break him of
his wandering ways. He was a man who would
rather argue than get along, rather squat than
pay rent, rather work himself and his three boys
cutting stave bolts in the woods for twelve hours
and raise a dollar between them, than earn two
dollars all by himself in town working for some
boss.
He and the nine in his care ranged along a
narrow band of latitude bounded on the east by
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