Another thing I was too little to do was go upstairs at Grandma's. Yet, I didn't mind that so much because I wasn't the only one. Even Earl and Joel couldn't go up there. Robert and Ed were still living at home and not married. Their rooms were upstairs and they didn't want us little kids messing around up there. Besides, there was danger we might fall on the steps and get hurt. I didn't know at the time why they didn't want us to go upstairs. They didn't tell us the truth about it. What they told us was, "If you go up there, the Old Bootjack will get you." Well, I was almost grown before I learned what a bootjack was. Then it was easy to see that a bootjack wouldn't hurt anyone, especially little kids. But the fear of it served its purpose. And I suppose we were not mentally warped because of having been fibbed to. We learned other lessons also--some the expensive way. I remember, some of us Johnson kids were at Uncle John Hudson's house one day, playing with all his kids, when we discovered a pig out of his pen. Now, Uncle John was away from home at that time and we thought we should do him a big favor and get his pig back in the pen with its mama. I don't know why, he couldn't hurt anything, he was too small. But he had a pen and we kids thought a pig ought to be in his pen. So we got after him. It was a hot day. In fact, it was so hot that the sandy ground burned our bare feet. We were suffering from the heat but we thought we must not stop until we caught him. We felt duty bound to get that pig back in his pen. We chased him all over the place and finally caught him out in the peach orchard. Well, we were hot, the ground was hot, the weather was hot, but most of all, that little pig was hot. We carried our little prisoner and we all got under the shade of a peach tree. We kids cooled off right away, but the pig was so tired and was breathing so fast, we thought we ought to cool him off with some cool water. We carried water from the windmill--good, cool water right out of the well. Then we poured it on the little pig--and he was dead in about one minute flat. We were sorry, but how were we to know that cold water would kill a hot pig? No one had ever told us it would. We learned that lesson the hard way--that is, hard on Uncle John. And we learned some other things too, when he learned about his pig. Oh yes, he told us a few things he wanted us to know. Regardless of all the little mistakes we kids made, we generally had the run of the farm at our Exum place, except for a few things which were not allowed. One of these was, "Don't climb on the feed stacks." That would destroy a lot of the feed and allow rainwater to run in and ruin even more of it. No problem there. Most any kid could follow that line of reasoning. But another "Don't" that was not so easily understood was, "Don't play in the cottonseed."