Ball of String

(This is one of the stories my husband's dad told. He grew up in the 30s, and he had a lot of stories to tell about it!)

BALL OF STRING

I was in the dining room with Uncle Tom late one evening when he was on one of his binges. Aunt Annie had talked me into staying to eat supper because, generally, if he had supper, he'd get sleepy and go on to bed.

She had soup for supper that night. There wasn't a soul in the dining room while we were in there. They were just hoping he'd eat and go to bed.

He went to spooning that soup. I was sitting there looking at him eating, because I wanted to go home. Pretty soon, I saw something hanging out of the corner of his mouth.

He reached up and pulled down on it about three or four times. Then he reached up with the other hand and pulled down on it. He was pulling a string out of his mouth.

Back then they bought feed in feed sacks where the women could make dresses out of them, and the women saved that string and rolled it up in little balls. Aunt Annie had rolled up a small ball of it, about the size of a golf ball or a little smaller, and she had laid it up on the warming closet on top of the wood cook stove. Somehow or another, when she was making that pot of soup, that ball of string rolled off into the soup.

Well, with big chunks of tomato in the soup and all, that ball of string had got soaked, and Uncle Tom had eaten it just like it was tomatoes, and swallowed it. And it just happened that the end of that string was hanging out of his mouth.

I watched him, because I didn't know what was going on, and he didn't either. He pulled that string out four or five times and looked at it. Then he turned right up in the air, and he leaned back and squalled, "Annie! Come in here! I'm raveling out!" You could have heard him a half a mile. I just about busted my sides open laughing at him. He kept pulling until he unrolled that whole roll of string.