“I am not whipping you because you broke my ruler, I am whipping you because you lied to me.” Papa was holding me around the shoulders with one arm and hand and giving me a good hard spanking with the other. “I know you had broken it when you started running,” he was saying. “But you had lied, you had said you did not break it.” And Papa was right.
It was hard times and money was scare. We peddled farm vegetables, wood for burning, moss rock and wild ferns from the woods, anything that was available to get cash. Any work that Papa could find to do, he did. Somehow we had managed to save enough money to buy him a new carpenter’s ruler. This was a six foot long ruler that folds every eight inches.
I must have been about seven or eight years old. This ruler fascinated me. The way it folded up was magic to me. I had often played with parts of Papa’s old broken rulers, folding them and then unfolding them. It was such fun. Now, I wanted to play with the new ruler! After all, it would unfold to be six feet long! Oh! How I wish I could.
One day Papa left his new ruler on the kitchen table. I saw it when I came running in to get a drink of water. After drinking the water, I turned and without thinking, picked-up the ruler. I stood there unfolding it and then folding it back, unfolding it and folding it back. This was heaven! This was so much fun. Just watch how it folds.
Then, SNAP! I heard the ruler snap in two on one of the folds! There I stood with half of Papa’s new ruler in one hand and with the other half in my other hand. I stood there frozen. Then fears began to take over as I realized what I had done. I had broken Papa’s new ruler. I looked around. No one was in the kitchen but me. No one had seen me break it (no one except God!). With the two pieces of the ruler in my hands as I ran out the front door, crawled under the house, and hid the broken ruler under the front steps of the house.
Later that day Papa was looking for his new ruler and asking all of us if we had seen it. I, along with the others, said I had not seen it anywhere and did not know where his ruler was. For several days Papa looked for his ruler. Then one day he had gone down into the basement and had just casually glanced thru the basement window towards the front-door steps. He had seen the broken ruler under the steps and had gone under the house to get it out.
When he crawled out from under the house with the ruler in his hand, my brother and I were playing on the front porch. I saw the ruler. Papa had found it. I was panic stricken, scared to death. I ran to the edge of the porch, jumped off, and started running towards the barn.
I was about halfway there when Papa caught me.
“I did not mean to break it,” I hollered to him.
“I am not spanking you because you broke my ruler. I am spanking you because you lied to me,” Papa was serious.
But by that time, he was well on his way to making me realize that I was not suppose to lie about anything. I deserved the spanking because I knew I was not suppose to lie. This, and one other, were the only times that Papa ever spanked me. I had deserved both of them.