People

Mr. Maddox

In the Fall of 1995, we watched a bulldozer on a neighbor’s property, clearing some land. The man operating the dozer was adept at what he was doing, getting the most efficiency possible out of his older, earth-moving machine.

For several weeks we had been discussing the possibility of getting someone with a bulldozer to clear out the swampy, wooded area on our property, to make additional pasture land. When we saw the dozer working nearby, it gave us the nudge we needed to get something started at our place. We talked with our neighbor to find out who did his dozer work, and he suggested we might find him working at another farm not far up the road. That’s where we found him, bulldozing brush from around an existing pond.  

That’s when I first met Mr. Maddox. He was over six feet tall, thin, and wiry, his white hair and weathered skin showing his advanced age and many years in the sun. We had a pleasant introductory conversation in the field that day, the beginning of a twenty-year long, special friendship. That day he said his name was Horace Maddox, so I called him Mr. Maddox, and I never called him any other name for the rest of his life. I told him my name was Ed Arnold, and he never called me anything other than Mr. Arnold for the rest of his life. He said he was retired for several years, and did dozer work as well as farming and raising beef cattle.  

Soon, Mr. Maddox moved his dozer down the road to our place and set to work piling up small trees and brush. In those days that part of our property was wet all the time, but I imagined that once it was cleared it would dry out enough to grow pasture grass. At one point I counted 25 large piles of trees and brush which took me a couple of years to burn.  

During our second year of working on the clearing, it became obvious that this area would never remain dry enough to grow fescue and clover. There were several occasions when his dozer would sink so far into the ground that Mr. Maddox had to bring his son, David, and his second dozer to pull the first dozer out of a hole. It was during one of these episodes that it became clear we needed to change our plan for this patch of swampy ground and turn the area into fish ponds. Mr. Maddox loved to dig ponds with his dozer, and he was very pleased to start the digging and piling up rocky dirt to be hauled off. The piles he created took four years to remove from our property.

His digging process was to build a ramp, sloping from the pond bottom out of the hole and onto a pile. As the hole got deeper, the pile got higher, and the ramp got steeper. He would push as much material as the blade would hold up the ramp, then back the dozer down the ramp to the bottom again. Some days I would watch this process and wonder, as the ramp got steeper, when he was going to flip the dozer over backwards and kill himself. That never happened, though it came close a few times. But I did learn why he only kept a small amount of diesel fuel in the dozer tank each day: if the machine ever flipped over, there would only be a few gallons of fuel to clean up at the bottom of the pond.

His son, David, was building a house near the back of one his farms, and it was going to require a lengthy driveway.  Mr. Maddox asked me if he could have several truckloads of that rocky dirt to build a base for this driveway. He had a small dump truck so it was going to take many trips back and forth. I would load his truck with our loader, and he would take it the four miles to the site, dump it at the driveway, then return for another load. One of those trips was taking too long one day, so I went to the site to check on him. I found him, he was okay, but a little shaken. Seems the tail gate did not open when he raised the bed to dump the load, and the weight on the back caused the front of the truck to leave the ground and stand the truck vertically on its tail gate. Mr. Maddox was able to climb out of the driver’s seat onto the ground without any injury. We hooked a chain to a tractor and the truck’s front bumper and pulled it back down to the ground, no worse for the wear, just spilled a little fuel.

In the summer of 1999. I was having heart problems and not able to do much around the farm. I tried cutting weeds with the bushhog on the tractor, but a bearing froze up on the cutter and the weeds kept growing. In July, I was hospitalized for multiple heart bypass surgery and was out for several days. When I was able to get out and walk around the farm, I found the weeds had been cut, but I did not know who had done that. I knew the obvious suspect was Mr. Maddox, but he never said anything to me about it. After I asked him, he told me that when he and David learned where I was, they brought a tractor and cutter to our farm and cut about 20 acres of weeds.  While there, they put a new bearing in my bushhog. Never mentioned anything about the cost, wouldn’t even discuss it.

One day during the following summer I stopped to see Mr. Maddox’s new quonset-style hay barn, and I found him working on some shed additions to his repair shop. He already had the posts in the ground and was starting to put up the beams and rafters. He was working by himself, and it was clear he needed some help. We spent the rest of that day, and the next four days working on his new sheds, and we were able to do some serious talking. He was easy to talk to, but he was not overly talkative. He did not use bad language or speak ill of anyone, at least never to me. When I asked him where he went to church, he said he was a member of a nearby Baptist church where his wife was very faithful. When he said he never went to church, he emphasized quickly that he was a believer.

One day Mr. Maddox asked me if I wanted to bring my grandkids over to his farm for a day of catfishing. He had a three-acre pond which he had stocked with channel cats with the intent to sell them to a commercial processor. The deal he had made fell through, so he was left with several thousand catfish, and he was inviting people to come catch them. He had been feeding these fish heavily for over two years, and they were all getting too big to survive for very long in that pond. We all went over there and had a great day catching some nice fish. Two days later Mr. Maddox called me, and the tone of his voice told me that he had some bad news. That night the fish pond had ‘rolled over’, experiencing a sudden drop in oxygen, killing most of the fish. I went over to his pond and saw thousands of floating, dead catfish. A sad sight.

Mr. Maddox didn’t talk much about money, except the few times he would mention how little he had paid for a certain piece of ground here and there. He was a firm believer in buying land as there was a limited amount of it. And he told me on several occasions he did not trust banks. One day he asked me point blank what I would suggest he do with the cash money he kept in his house. He was often being paid in cash for his dozer work, he sold hay for cash, sold cattle for cash, rented some of his land for cash. And he was beginning to worry about the safety of all that money in a box in his house; the last time he mentioned it, he hinted that it was around $50,000. I agreed with him about not putting too much faith in banks, and I never got around to any specific ideas about what he should do with the cash. But he trusted me to keep what he said just between us.

Every year Mr. Maddox grew about 50 acres of mixed grass hay which he put up in large rolls, about half of which he fed to his cows, and sold the rest to local farmers. One summer our area was blessed with an abundance of rain yielding an exceptional hay crop, and every barn was filled with hay for the winter. Come Spring, Mr. Maddox still had several large rolls of good hay stored in his barns. He could have sold it at a reduced price, but he offered it to me at no charge, and he delivered to us on his flat-bed truck. We had several cows at that time, and we were buying hay so this was a welcome gift.

The year Mr. Maddox turned 85 his son called me to tell me that he had taken his dad to the hospital, and they thought it was a heart incident. They kept him there for a few days for tests, and we all thought it could be very serious. I called the pastor of the church where he said he was a member. I told him where Mr. Maddox was, and I suggested he visit him. When the pastor got to the hospital, they had already sent Mr. Maddox home with some new stents, so the pastor visited him there. The next day the pastor called me to say he had seen Mr. Maddox at his home, and he was doing well. He said while he was there he prayed with him and he gave him assurance he was ready to die. I visited with Mr. Maddox about week after this event to take him some firewood for their fireplace. We had a nice visit and he thanked me for calling the pastor. None of us knew that Mr. Maddox still had several more years to get back on a tractor.

In the summer of 2015 one of our near neighbors died suddenly of a heart attack, and we visited the funeral home to meet with the family. While we were there Mr. Maddox was brought into the parlor in his wheel chair. I was surprised to see him as he had been staying in and not seeing visitors. He was too weak to say much, but he had known our deceased neighbor for so many years he wanted to pay his last respects.

That day would be my last visit with Mr. Maddox, as he would pass away in September that year at age 92. We had an interesting, eventful, twenty-year friendship. When I walked away from him that evening at the funeral parlor, I told him I would see him later. 

And I meant it.