Me n Poot Burn Down a House

When me n Poot set Mom’s front yard on fire, it was an accident. When we burned down Dad’s storage room and destroyed his boat motor, several coolers, fishing poles, life preservers, and a lawn mower, that wasn’t on purpose neither. But when we burned a house to the ground in the summer of 1969, it was no accident. Poot called it “our finest hour.”

Towards the end of that first summer we had our mopeds, Poot started talking about us setting fire to a house. This was when we was fishing the Yalobusha River. Mostly that summer, besides smoking and drinking beer, we was pretty good boys. But me n Poot couldn’t be good for too long. Fun was building within us and like lava inside a volcano, and it was bound to bust out sooner or later.

Beside the old gravel highway that we usually rode in on, there were some more gravel roads that led from the new, paved Highway 7 to the levee near where me n Poot fished. We rode them all and discovered a few abandoned houses sitting alone surrounded by sedge grass and unhealthy looking trees. In those days, tractors and field equipment was getting bigger and bigger and it didn’t take as many people to farm the land anymore. Empty houses was everywhere in the delta. Many of them was what we called shotgun houses, long, thin shacks that once housed the families of sharecroppers and tractor drivers. Some were larger structures where plantation managers raised their families back before a man could farm over a thousand acres alone.

Poot got the idea that we should burn one of these old houses to the ground. Just thinking about it gave me the trots and had me unable to sleep most nights. It made me think a lot about something Dad once told me. He said when I was thinking about doing something I thought would be fun but could get me in trouble, to think how it sound to try to tell him and the police why I done it. That was some of the best advice my dad ever gave me even though it never kept me from having fun.

I tried that with burning down a house and couldn’t think of nothing good to say about it. I imagined myself in court, shackled in leg irons and handcuffed trying to tell the jury and judge and a firing squad why I burned a house down. Here are the best ones I could come up with:

  “The farmer didn’t need it no more, so we got it out of his way.”

  “We got wet and cold and needed some heat.”

  “We was just looking around and using our cigarette lighters for light and the fire just started when one of us dropped a lighter.”

  “We was just standing there a BOOM, lightning struck and set the place ablaze.”

  “We rode over and when we stopped, a hobo ran out and dropped his cigarette on the porch. Before we could put the fire out, it was too late.”

  “Somebody set us up because they was jealous we was catching so many fish.”

Those didn’t seem to be worth much. Besides, we had already set two fires at my house. If we got caught, nobody was going to believe a single word we said, and we would go to prison for sure.

But Poot kept bringing it up and the more he talked about it the better it sounded. I was still scared and tried to talk Poot out of it.

“We’ve been coming down here all summer,” I told him. “The farmers and the people who live on the old highway and all the tractor drivers have all seen us over and over. Who do you think they are going to think done it?” I tried to reason with him.

“They won’t know nothing. They can suspect all they want but they won’t know.”

“Why can’t we just shoot some stuff?” I asked. “We could go to prison for burning houses down. We might even get the death penalty and go to hell.”

“If nobody sees us do it, nobody can’t prove nothin’. Besides, who will really cares? It will actually help the farmer out. He can get some of his field back and make more money. If anybody asks us about it, we don’t know nothing. Just like you and me and breaking into Bankston School. Remember how Bailey tore into you? He knowed you done it but he couldn’t prove nothin’.”

Besides all that, it was getting close to school starting Poot argued. We would pretty much not be fishing every day and swimming the river. We needed a big event to end the summer, to hold us over till next vacation. And burning a house down would be the biggest and best thing we had ever done.

So that’s how it went down, that’s how he convinced me and then I really got the trots. I would lie awake at night thinking about it and then be up and down for hours squirting in the commode. Momma made me take Pepto Bismo or whatever that stuff is, and at breakfast, on those rare days me n Poot didn’t fish because one of us had a yard to mow, I would pick at my food and wonder what Dad would say when the police came to arrest me. Actually, it would have been the sheriff, but I didn’t know the difference then. I used to wonder if Mom would cry and bring me cookies in prison.

So me n Poot went fishing a few more times, but on each trip we rode around and looked at all the houses. We finally picked the one on the road nobody lived on thinking that would reduce the chances of us being seen. We fished and talked about how we would do it. Buy a can of lighter fluid from Jack’s Store. Squirt it on the floor. Light it. Run! Our mopeds would be parked in the middle of the road so as not to leave tracks.

That’s how we done it late one afternoon after spending the day on the river bank. We stopped our mopeds in the road and walked up on the porch. When we found the front door locked, we was surprised, but a surprise never stopped Poot. He took a piece of a 2X4 and knocked the front window out and then squirted the lighter fluid on the floor, lit a match and dropped it.

We drove like our lives depended on it all the way to the highway and only slowed enough when we got there to make the turn. Once on the highway, I looked to my right and saw smoke rising in the distance from where we had just come. Those mopeds would go 52 miles per hour and that’s how fast we went all the way back to town.

At home I went straight in and took a bath. I wasn’t hungry and told Mom me n Poot had eaten all day on the river. I went to bed right away but I didn’t sleep. Three days later we started the eighth grade at Bankston. Poot was pissed because nothing was never in the paper about the house burning.

Now forty-five years later, I think back on those days and try to figure out why we done some of the stuff we done, why we thought we needed to burn down houses. Later, I’ll tell you about some of the others. All I can say now is we wanted to have fun, and me n Poot thought we needed to prove we was above average. The problem with Poot was he needed to prove it often. And we did.