My Bee-hind Got Left Behind

...and be sure your sin will find you out. Numbers 32:23


This was told to me by my father whom I regard as a usually reliable source.

You know about the tractor shed, situated maybe thirty yards from the back porch of the Old House.

Seems my dad and a couple of the hired hands were working there one morning, when they heard a ruckus from the house.

Which consisted mostly of me screaming and my mother calling, "Come back here to me!"  Or some such motherly advice.

The situation quickly became apparent as I rounded the corner, taking very long steps indeed, with my two-year-old legs, yelling, "Daddy, Daddy!"

Lagging behind, but not too far behind, was my mom, clutching a willow switch.

Being nearly eight months pregnant, she advanced slowly but inexorably in my path (like the "turning of the earth," as John Wayne would have put it).

I continued in my flight from justice and rounding the far corner of the shed, noticed a storage room filled with oil barrels and other things. A hiding spot.

Dashing inside, I quickly hid my head between two barrels.

It is a commentary, I suppose, on the as-yet unformed nature of the two-year old mind that I apparently reckoned that as long as I could not see my pursuer, she could not see me.

I soon learned the fallacy of this line of thought when my mother stepped into the narrow room and found that which she had been seeking.

The rest of the story, as my dad related it, takes little time to tell. I re-rounded the corner, cries of pain replacing screams of fear, two-year old legs taking very long steps, my mom hot behind me, whistling willow switch doing its job and onlookers collapsed in laughter (rather mean-spirited laughter, to my way of thinking) at the boy who ran from his mother and whose bee-hind got left behind.