Clover Garden (Excerpt)
Excerpt from Clover Garden: A Carolinian’s Piedmont Memoir by Bland Simpson. Copyright © 2024 Bland Simpson. Used by permission of The University of North Carolina Press.

Orange Grove Silos. Photo by Ann Simpson.
Later that summer, my friend Jake Mills and I drove down to Gum Springs to see the new litter. We each knelt in turn to duck into an antique henhouse where an old gyp, not the mother, was nursing the small snubnosed bluetick pups.
I held several of the males, my hand under their bellies, till I found the one that seemed neither too slack nor too wild. In another couple weeks, when he was big enough, I came back and got him for good.
He was all gunmetal blue ticking, with a big black saddleback patch of color, and he had doubled in size since I picked him out. I took him home and named him: Blue Tom Cotton.
To the manner (and manor) born, I thought, when the first thing he did was run up under the cabin porch and lie there listlessly, looking worthless.
Cotton was baying in no time at all and taking delight in it, and he ate steadily in all weathers through the seasons. His Arkansan stock, which Sherman Butler brought into this part of the country, had been bred up in size to make bear dogs for the Upper Peninsula hunters of Michigan.
He weighed a hundred pounds by his first birthday, and on Thanksgiving morning of his second year he devoured an entire twenty-two-inch apple tart, intended for a community dinner, in barely half a minute.
***
As he grew into a giant, he became famous around the Clover Garden neighborhood—both for his size and for his hoarse roaring howl. Down at Jerry Copeland’s corner grill they called him “Old Rattler,” after the famous-long-ago Grandpa Jones song, and my timberman neighbor Clayton Rogers once told me, “It may be a half a mile or more from my house to your cabin, but when that big blue dog really gets going, I swear I look over and he’s rattling the window lights.” Sherman Butler gave me some copies of coonhound magazines he had lying around, American Cooner and Full Cry, full of ads for vaunted studs that could chop-mouth, howl and tree, and stand and serve, and he told me I ought to take Cotton down to the big Fourth of July coon dog congress outside of Candor. This annual shindig of hounds always drew several hundred people and about as many coon dogs, and it was a long, hot Fourth of July day of baroo-ing and chop-mouth barking from these legions of blueticks, black and tans, Treeing Walkers, redbones, redticks, English, and even brindled Plott hounds from the high Carolina hills, this last breed soon voted by the General Assembly to be the state dog of North Carolina.
This was the biggest crowd Blue Tom Cotton had ever seen, and he did not put on that good of a show. He failed to really open up much at the raccoon in the cage up the tree, and when it came time for a race across a lake against other hounds, Cotton refused to go anywhere near the water. Nearly a dozen people came up to me after this dog-world humiliation, offering sympathy in earnest.
“Oh, I can tell he’s a good dog, he’s gon’ finish out great,” they would say, “but he ain’t done much of this, has he?”
“No,” I answered. “This is his first time out.”
“Well, that’s the thing,” someone else said. “You got to work with ’em.”
Working with him, as best I could tell, would have involved going out in a boat on a pond thirty or forty-five minutes at a time, several times a week, and luring him into the water by waving an old coonskin at him. Then he would be ready for next summer’s events. I simply decided to neglect this part of Cotton’s education, and I reported this, and his poor showing, to Sherman Butler sometime later when I was boarding the hound with him.
“Oh, they pick it up on their own,” Mr. Butler said. “That’s just for fun, that big get-together and all. I wouldn’t worry about it.”
Then we went on out to the old dairy barn where Cotton and my other dog, by comparison a slight—only seventy pounds—black-and-tan named Posey, were tethered. It was summer twilight, and Sherman Butler told me how they’d fared: “Now, that black dog of yours, she went to eating first time I fed her, but the blue dog, he was so lonely for you he cried the first three or four days till it looked to rain and I moved him from off that chain tied on the oak tree and carried him down to the barn where I had your black dog. After that they were both pretty good and ate all right too.
“In a month or so we’ll catch up and take a dog or two apiece and go see can’t we catch the old coon once he starts moving about. Not on a real cold day—I don’t like the cold and can’t go as hard and long as I could when I was your age, but later on in October, November, come on and we’ll go out.”
This was the last time I would see Sherman Butler—he died on Christmas Eve that year. I never heard what became of all those dogs, but I will never forget the way, whenever he walked about his grounds, from six to ten dogs would lazily rise and move along with him apace, not as if expecting food or even a petting, just wanting to be close to the hound-dog man of Gum Springs.
***
Cotton throve.
The great blue dog spent his days ripping at rotten trees, setting up echoing bellows from the hollows near the cabin. Anytime I took him somewhere, he drew comments. I had him in my pickup once at Lewis Allen’s store out on NC 54.
“You gon’ hunt coons with that dog, I reckon?” Mr. Allen said.
I thought better of telling him the dog was a porch sitter and an intended house pet.
“Squirrels,” I said.
“Squirrels!?” Mr. Allen laughed big and loud. “Why, he’d scare everything for two miles around out of the woods, first time he opened up. You ain’t gon’ get no squirrels with that dog!”
***

Morrow Mill Hayfield. Photo by Ann Simpson.
I was out walking along the west end of Morrow Mill Road one morning, and Cotton went running into the yard where the very genial Jazz Thompson, an African American neighbor and friend, was sitting in a kitchen chair with a magazine on his lap. Jazz said, laughing: “Whoa! Out the way, here comes old King Pin!”
I called the dog and when he wouldn’t come went to fetch him.
The magazine was a catalog, and Jazz was puzzling over the way the confusing information was laid out. He wanted to order by phone the right size sausage plate for his grinder from this discount mail-order house, but he seemed ready for a break, and we talked for a little while.
Jazz was an active man, a man of parts: he farmed, he did repairs, he knew his way around a still. He laughed in a heartbeat, especially when he was telling me what the judge had said when he sent Jazz home from court one day: “Now, Mr. Thompson, I don’t want to hear any more about you and white liquor.” “Yes, sir, your honor,” Jazz said he told the judge, adding for me: “I made me a copper worm and I was set up back on the creek with a still before that month was done, I sure was!”
Then Jazz returned his attention to Cotton, exclaiming, “If I was twenty years younger, I’d be out in the woods four, five nights a week with that hound.”
“I’d hate to see his ears get all torn up,” I said.
“Aw, no,” said Jazz, “that’d just make him right. Make him better looking and worth more too. Yeah. Old King Pin.”

Cane Creek in Winter. Photo by Ann Simpson.
***
Another time out walking, Cotton and I were suddenly being stalked by an old low-riding white Chevrolet. A thin teenage boy was behind the wheel, and the man in the passenger seat, a middle-aged character with dark, greased-down hair, was sipping a Blue Ribbon and staring at the hound.
“How much that dog weigh?” the man said.
“About a hundred pounds.”
“It don’t look like he misses many meals.”
“No,” I said. “He eats by the clock.”
The Chevrolet engine went hudnhudnhudn as they drove along slowly, matching our walking pace.
“I got a chihuahua,” the man said, “’bout the size’d fit in a teacup. You want to trade that blue dog for him?”
“How much does he weigh?”
“Two and a half, three pounds.”
“Well,” I said, “sounds like you’d get about ninety-seven pounds more dog out of this trade than I would.”
“Yeah,” he said, nestling the Blue Ribbon in his lap as he head-pointed at Cotton, “but then you ain’t got to feed him no more.”
***
One afternoon we were out in the hayfields, Eric Schopler and his sons Bobby and Tommy, his stepson Oliver, and me, the bunch of us getting up 500 or 600 bales before the rain. Edgar Pickard bellowed like a drover as he piloted his train of farm vehicles, a tractor, a baler, and a hay wagon behind that, down the raked hay lanes. At one point the grizzle-bearded dairyman turned the tractor much too sharply and promptly broke the tongue of the hay wagon. Eric and his stepson went off to fetch another wagon, and Edgar, streaming with sweat and happy for the break, talked dogs with me.
“William Morrow tells me you got some treeing dogs.”
“That’s right.”
“What’ll they tree? William says he’s seen your bluetick tree a squirrel. You gon’ breed him?”
“Might,” I said.
“Well,” Edgar said, “I’d like to have me a pup to go possum hunting with, if they ain’t asking too much for ’em. I don’t have that kind of money. I ain’t gon’ pay no war prices now!”
I thought Cotton had plenty of running room in the woods and ridges, but just shy of half a mile to the north above the deep woods was NC Highway 54. One night, an old woman with a quavering voice telephoned and said: “Your dog is dead down at Lewis Allen’s store and Lewis has got his collar.” Over to Lewis Allen’s I went, and the flinty Mr. Allen said: “He’s down yonder in that concrete ditch. Whole pack of ’em was chasing a deer, ran out in front of a woman driving a Toyota, tore the front of that thing all up.”
“And you have the collar?”
“In the back of my truck out there.”
***
I got the collar, then went back into the store to thank Mr. Allen again for getting it and for having his wife call me. But Allen, for whom a call to me at that time would have been long distance, costing twenty-five cents, let me know that what he’d really done was wait for someone on my exchange to happen by and had given her the assignment: “I didn’t call you,” he said, almost with a snarl. “You’re on the Mebane line.” For the great blue dog I made a cairn down a ravine in the woods at home. In the years since, I have often thought of his huge full-throated howl, his vigorous ear-flapping, his table-clearing tail, the long, high lonesome ahooooo he made sometimes. I have not missed his cross-country jaunts or the subsequent phone calls from people eight or ten miles away across the Haw River—“Come get your dog!”—including one older woman whose telephone call is seared into my memory: “Is this Simpson?” she had asked, and I said yes. “You got a great big blue dog?” Yes ma’am, I said. “Well, I got him tied to the back-porch stair rail at my house over at Eli Whitney—you come get him right now ’cause I ain’t gonna feed him!”