HOLD ‘EM, JOE

 

HOLD ‘EM, JOE

 

Joe Bob Rowe-Fester was born in rural Alabama in a town called “Burnout” in Calhoun County, named after John C. Calhoun, the seventh vice-president of the United States.

He was one of eleven children, all packed into a one-room, tar-paper shack, heated by a pot-bellied stove, when wood was available. Furnishings were sparse: a table, a few chairs and three beds with straw mattresses – two of which were shared by the eleven siblings (none with more than a third-grade education); the other by his mom and dad and infant children up to age two. An old metal water pump and a rickety wooden privy were outside.

Joe’s dad earned a meager living as a sharecropper on hard scrabble land owned by Jeff Sessions. He mostly grew cotton and tended a vegetable garden and with whatever game he could kill, formed the bulk of the kid’s sparse diets.

 

His dad was a brutish man who a physically abused his wife and beat each child whenever he felt like it with a hickory switch in one hand and a bible in the other. He quoted scripture with each punishing blow.

There was always a lack of food to eat. Hunger and cold were ever-present. Joe lost two sisters to influenza and a brother was run over by a tractor.

His dad left, when Joe was seven. The remaining eight kids pretty-much had to shift for themselves as their battered, broken mom was unable to function at all. She passed away two years later.

The children took whatever odd jobs they could just to survive. Two brothers were arrested for robbery and spent long sentences in state prison.

Joe eventually went north, ending up in Connecticut, taking any odd jobs; eventually becoming a gardener, tending to the lawns of the rich residents of Cos Cob. He got by on what little he was paid and whatever he could steal or beg.

 

 

 

 

 

He lived alone in a one-room flat, never making any friends, devolving into a world of delusion and paranoia, which led to the killing of five people!

Years went by. He was never apprehended. He died at age forty-two of tuberculosis in the charity ward of the county hospital. He made a death-bed confession to a nurse he never saw before.

His body was donated to a medical school for dissection in an anatomy class.

He left no will – in fact he left nothing. No one attended his burial.

He never recovered from his abominable childhood.