There was an upside to my finger being crushed by that rod line.  Dad must have contacted the oil company who operated the lease because several months later he, Mother, and I drove to Oklahoma City to visit an official in the oil company's executive offices.   Dad came out with $300.00; Payment in full now and forever for damages to my finger, pain and suffering. That money bought several things that made life better for the family.  First was a hand-cranked cream separator.  Mother used it to separate cream from the milk we got from our cow and then  used the cream to make butter which she sold to supplement the family income.  The $300.00 also bought a nice bed, dresser, and chest of drawers for their bedroom, and finally, a wonderful source of light called an Aladdin Lamp The cream separator and bedroom set served their purpose and have long since disappeared.

The Aladdin Lamp, something like today's Coleman Lanterns lit our house much better than the coal oil  (kerosens) lamps we had been using.  Most of the parts to the Aladdin's Lamp disappeared over time.  The base, however, sits on my mantle; a grim reminder of just how intense pain can be.  Sadly, Dad converted it into an electric table lamp sometime in the sixties.

As a minor, but pleasant, consequence of my injury and Dad's getting the settlement money, I developed a liking for “buttermilk,” which we had abundantly as a by-product of Mother’s butter making business.   The "cultured buttermilk" sold in stores today bears only slight resemblance to the real buttermilk by-product of churning pure cream into butter.   Real buttermilk has a thicker consistency than regular milk and and has flecks of real butter floating around in it.  It tastes slightly likesour cream.   It is a taste that will never be known to those who experience nothing but the “cultured” buttermilk sold in stores.

The sale of butter became an important part of our family economy.  Mother had a little wooden form that made nicely shaped one-pound rectangles of good, country butter.  She wrapped them in waxed paper and kept them in the icebox except when the weather was colder.  Then she kept it on a shelf in our unheated back porch wrapped in clean cloths.

We always had a dog.  They ate table scraps which they supplemented with rabbits and whatever other game they could catch.   That included, in one case, a neighbor’s goat.  Bitter words were exchanged between the neighbor and our family, including suggestions that our dog be killed forthwith.   It was Mother’s contention, though, that it was a dog’s natural tendency to forage for food and that he, like many humans of the late 1930’s, was always a little hungry.  His name was “Shep”, a common dog name of the times.   Shep was a mongrel with a lot of German Shepherd in his ancestry.

He was a companion to my older brothers and always waited patiently alongside the road to greet them as they got off the school bus.   As when he helped himself to fresh goat meat, he was accustomed to taking care of most of his needs for himself.   If he could reason and speak he would have said he was only exercising his natural drive for self-preservation in finding and eating a five-pound cache of butter that Mother had left on a shelf on the back porch to cool and firm-up.

When Mother discovered the theft of the butter, She, as is sometimes said of the Queen of England, "was not amused."  Nor was she disposed to be kindly and forgiving.  That butter represented food on the table for her kids.  The evidence was clear.  Shep had done the deed.  And it was as heinous a deed as that of a lifeboat survivor who steals food from his fellow survivors.   Mother always had an explosively, fierce, Scotch-Irish temper and it went into hyper drive when she saw the buttery dishcloth wrappings on the floor and the greasy, yellowed chops on Shep.  For some reason she had arsenic in the house.  I can't imagine why and will neither speculate nor dwell on that question.

While raging over the loss of the butter and what it would mean to the her grocery buying power she force-fed a goodly amount of arsenic down old Shep's throat.  To his credit he didn’t try to bite her.  He just swallowed and went out into the back yard.   As soon as her temper cooled, Mother was overcome with grief; both for the loss of the butter and the incipient death of Shep. She truly loved the dog and knew he meant a lot to her kids.  She moped around in sackcloth and ashes for several hours waiting for Shep to die.  But she was spared the guilt of being a dog-killer.  By some chemistry or dark, doggie, magic the five pounds of butter acted as both a laxative and an emollient for Shep's innards.  The arsenic went right through him.  He deposited it in the backyard and all was well.  Mother was greatly relieved.  She found a higher, more Shep-proof place to store butter.