Every town has one person who is larger than life. In Bynum, that was Dewey Holmes. Dewey was my Dad’s best friend for a very long time, and he was also like a second dad to me.
We all knew him as “Hot” Holmes who got started as a bootlegger. I did not know him back then, but according to the stories, he must have been a character. By the time I knew him, Dewey was one of the biggest land owners around. He was not a good role model for being rich because he did not seem to care about the trappings of money: he never took vacations, never built that dream house he promised Lucile, and drove around in a beat- up pickup truck.
Bynum kids did not like to work for Dewey; he made you work too hard for just a few dollars that he would reluctantly pay you at the end of a very long, hard day. I remember him paying me by peeling off a couple of bills from a huge wad of bills while he complained about how broke he was and how much he had to pay in taxes. When you worked for Dewey, he was out there with you working just as hard all day long; he did not know how to not work. One of the hardest days for me was cleaning out chicken houses in the heat of the summer and then spreading out the mixture of feathers, chicken poop and shavings on the pasture; Dewey was there working with us all day just like another field hand. On another hot day, we were burning huge brush piles to clear a new area on the lower farm, and Dewey was out there with us, dragging up the tree limbs that were too big for me to move.
Dewey lived in the same house a mile west of Bynum on Highway 202 for the rest of his life. The house was part of his compound; there was a barn across 202 with chutes for cattle and stored equipment. There was a gas station and small store in front of the house. I remember working with a couple of black guys who would stop in the store to buy a working man’s lunch, an “r-oh-see” cola and a moon pie. That’s all they had to eat all day and they kept working all day running circles around me!
The house was a typical Alabama house, comfortable but not too large. Lucile always made me feel welcome when I stopped by offering something fresh to eat. In his later years, there were always a couple of big, scary dogs in the yard and we would stay in the car until Dewey quieted them down.
There was a pump house behind the house; the house got its water from a well. Then there was another barn and shed grouping when he stored hay right up to the roof. Off to the side they had built a bunk house for the boys. I remember playing cowboys and Indians with Donald around the bunk house. One wall of bunk house had a picture of Custer’s Last Stand, and I would study the picture for hours. There was a silo next to the bunk house, and Donald and I would climb all the way to the top. Sometimes that could be an exciting trip because the fumes from the fermenting corn in the silo got us pretty tipsy after a few minutes.
There was pasture land all around Dewey’s house and Bynum kids used the pasture as a short cut whenever we went west of Bynum; Dewey did not care if we crossed his land; he just told us to be careful of the bulls when they were in the pasture. Every now and then, we would have to run as fast as possible when one of the cows or bulls starting eyeing us and asking us to move on in a language that only a cow speaks.
His land extended to the west almost to the intersection of Highway 202 and 78 by the Billups station. Just off of 202 was the “mud mine” where they once mined clay to line the walls of furnaces. There must have been an underground huge spring because the mud mine was like quicksand and they lost a couple of trucks in the mud mine before it was closed. Just past the mud mine by the railroad tracks was a building where Dewey kept huge vats of molasses that he put into sweet - feed for the cattle. We loved to lick the molasses off our fingers; it had a sweet tangy taste that I still remember to this day.
Dewey also had a farm in Talladega County just south of the racetrack that he called “the lower farm”. He did most of his serious farming and cattle raising there because it was fertile bottom land. There was an old house near the entrance to the farm; its yard was littered with horns that he had cut off from the cattle. There was a caretaker who lived in an old shotgun house on the property, but Dewey ran the farm.
Dewey also kept cattle on the Depot in the restricted area. I went back there with him several times and remember going into some of the igloos; they were strange looking structures with sloping sides, grass covered on the outside and a large flat cement wall in the front. Sometimes you could see the rows and rows of bombs in an igloo with an open door. One time, I helped round up cattle in the restricted area and we would ride the horses on top of the igloos looking for cattle. At the time I was riding our horse, Major, probably the worst cattle horse in history. Major was too tall to turn fast to cut off a cow and he loved to run; anytime I let him gallop to ask a cow to rejoin the herd, it was all I could do as a skinny kid to slow him down again. Dewey stayed with us for the roundup and directed us from his pickup truck. You could tell that it was time to put the cattle on a grain diet; they sweated and slobbered like crazy because they had been eating only grass.
Dewey seemed to relate to cattle better than he related to people. Whenever he drove out to feed his cattle, he honked the horn and gave his “yah-hoo-eee” cattle call, and all the cows came out to see him. I don’t think he knew each cow’s name, but they sure knew him. He also had a few horses that we were welcome to ride, but there was a catch: you had to catch them and the horses always knew when we wanted to ride them and ran away to the farthest corner of the pasture.
I never called Dewey “Hot”; he was Dewey, Mr. Holmes or as the black guys called him, “Mister D.E.”. Whatever he was called, he one of the hardest working, fairest and most humble people I have ever met. I do not know how much education he had, but he insured that both of sons became professionals. Neither of his sons wanted to continue his ranching and farm work; they saw first hand how hard of a life it could be.
My Dad would razz Dewey because he never took a vacation, and Dewey would say that he could not leave the cows. Then my Dad would point out to Dewey that all of his money was not buying him happiness, just more work. Maybe work was Dewey’s happiness.
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