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Memories of Golde Dicks Markham (1996) Golde Markham Dicks 92/125

One afternoon after the store closed1, Eric and I drove about fifteen miles north of
Lake City to look at German'police puppies for sale. They were cute; I was especially

attracted to one. I fell right into Eric’s trap! I think he paid $50 for that female puppy. That
was a lot of money back then—especially to plunk out on a dog. We called her “Queen.”
Unbelievably, that dog did protect me! When Eric took off fishing, I’d call Queen into
the house. She slept on a throw rug beside my bed. But when Eric came home late at night
and used his house key to get in, Queen wouldn’t let him come into his own house until I got

up and told her it was okay.
Eric could take a dollar bill out of his pocket, and Queen would rear Up on him and
take the dollar from him and bring it to me. She was strictly my dog. If anyone had wanted

to bother me, they would have had to kill Queen first.

Mary and Clyde Rivers were good friends of ours. We became acquainted with them
when we were first married because they lived next door to the Axmans. My mother’s sister,
Francis, and her husband, Gordon Douberley, and their children lived right across the street.

We played cards nearly every night.
Around Thanksgiving one particular year, Mary and I were cooking fruitcakes in a
kerosene oil stove when she suggested that we go down to their farm about three miles north

of High Springs and kill and butcher a hog.
“Can you shoot a hog?” she asked.
I answered, “Sure! Would Clyde care if we killed one of his hogs?”
She laughed, “No, as long as we fix the chitterlings because Clyde loves chitterlings.”

Chitterlings are the small intestines of pigs, cooked and eaten as food.
We picked up Eric’s rifle and cartridges for the shooting. At the farm, we cleaned a
sixty-gallon iron kettle and pumped enough water to fill it two-thirds full. While the water

was getting hot, we coaxed the hogs up to us by throwing down grains of dry com. We got
the hogs all around us and chose a nice fat one. I loaded the rifle and aimed right at the
forehead of the hog just like I had seen Pa do many times. I pulled the trigger, and that old
hog just laidldown. After Pa shot a pig, he did one more thing called “sticking the hog,” so I

got a good sized pocket knife and jabbed the hog in the jugular vein. Blood started pouring
from the neck.
The water was just about the right temperature. Mary and I drug the hog up to the

kettle and somehow we got him over into that hot water. We pulled all of the hair out with

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