SALTY DOUGH

"That young’un will wind up in the penitentiary before he’s twenty-one!" I can still hear my Mama say.

I was only six years old and plain chucked full of a high grade type meanness that goes along with having a mind of ones own. My brother Tob and my sister Alta were a few years older.

Mama came running out of the back bedroom with a bedspread thrown over her arm demanding to know and yelling, "Who cut the fringe off of my new counterpane?"

I hadn’t cut it, so I figured that it must have been Alta or Tob but they denied having anything to do with it..

Mama was furious. "I’m going to get to the bottom of this. You young’uns stand right there while I fix up a batch of salty dough!" she yelled on her way to the kitchen.

While Mama was in the kitchen Tob said, "She can always tell when you do something mean. If your finger turns green when you put it in the salty dough she will tear your butt up!"

Mama came back from the kitchen with a saucer filled with a big wad of salty dough and plunked it down on the sewing machine. "Stick you finger in there!" she commanded.

Alta and Tob marched right up there and stuck their finger into that salty dough all the way up to their knuckles!

I later learned that Mama figured the one most reluctant to put their finger in the dough was the guilty party. How was I to know Alta and Tob was hep to her psychological mumbo jumbo?

I got to thinking about what Tob had said and figured that if Mama could really tell when a person done something mean, I was a goner for sure. Not for the counterpane, but all the other things I had gotten away with. I could see my finger turn green and I could see that green creeping right up my arm until my whole body was green. There was no way I would stick my finger in that wad of salty dough.

Like Tob said, Mama tore my butt up!

For months thereafter, Alta and Tob got away with a multitude of sins while I took their punishment. All Mama had to do was to mention salty dough and I was gone!

Mama finally came to realize what they were doing and didn’t know whether to punish them, to laugh or to cry. She finally tore their butts up!

It didn’t take me long to figure out how to get even with a pair like that, especially with a mother that was carrying around a ton of guilt. I asked Mama to use the honor system rather than a wad of salty dough!

One day right out of the clear blue Mama said, "You know that dough wasn’t really salty!" I think it made her feel better.

Not long after that I lost my halo and Mama found a keen birch switch!

There is no joker
In the game of poker,
And no two cards are the same.
But it is mighty tough
To run a bluff,
Until you’ve learned the game!