A Brief Moment In Time
Memoir, Poems & Musings
By William Wayne Dicksion
Smashwords Edition Copyright 2011 William Wayne Dicksion
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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Original Copyright © 2008 by William Wayne Dicksion
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recoding, taping, or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Cover art and design by Malia Wisch
ALSO WRITINGS BY WILLIAM WAYNE DICKSION
Sagebrush
Puma Son of Mountain Lion
A Man Called Ty
A Button in the Fabric of Time
Legend of the Lost
Danny
Beyond the Valley of Mist
TABLE OF CONTENTS
The Christmas of the Little Red Wagon
The Rough Riders and the Haunted House–My Secret Place
A Tribute to My Mother and the Women of the Early West
Freezing The Balls Off A Brass Monkey
The Future Is Now For Those Who Will See
Why Is The Desert Dry Only On One Side of the River?
It was an early summer morning in 1930. White clouds were drifting lazily across a blue sky. Birds were singing, bees were buzzing; every flying, creeping or crawling thing was busy doing whatever it was supposed to be doing. I was almost five years old and I, too, was busy being part of that glorious day.
In the pasture nearby, I heard a calf bawling. I guessed it had gotten lost, and it was frightened or hungry. Then I heard its mother moo in reply, so I knew the calf would be all right—Mother Cow would take care of the problem.
I heard my mother calling me, so I ran to the house to see what I had done wrong. She just wanted me to go to our neighbor’s, the Cosbys, to borrow a cup of sugar so she could bake cookies. Baking cookies seemed like a great idea to me, and I was happy to go get the sugar. It was only a mile down the road and I’d be back in no time. Mother gave me a small jar with a lid on it so I wouldn’t spill the sugar, and I was off down the road in a jiffy.
The road consisted of just two rutted paths that marked where horses had pulled wagons. Father’s land was on the left side of the road and we had no fences, but our neighbor’s land was fenced because he usually had cows grazing there. A bull was with the cows, and we weren’t supposed to go inside the fence. I didn’t know what the bull would do to me if he caught me, though I had an idea it wouldn’t be anything good. At any rate, I sure didn’t want to find out.
The sand in the ruts was soft and warm, and it felt good to my bare feet. I saw a grasshopper with its tail sticking in the sand. Everett, my older brother, had told me that grasshoppers lay their eggs in the warm sand to hatch. I wanted to see the eggs hatch, so I watched for a while, but nothing happened. The grasshopper just sat there with its tail sticking in the sand. I couldn’t wait all day—I had to get that cup of sugar.
When I looked up, I saw something sitting beside the road. It was still quite a ways off, and I couldn’t see it very well, but I could see that it was big and black. Because I couldn’t figure out what it was, I hid behind a hackberry bush to take a good look. It wasn’t a cow. It wasn’t a horse. It wasn’t any kind of farm animal I had ever seen. The longer I stared at it, the more it looked like a big, black bear! That was something I hadn’t planned on having to deal with. All I wanted to do was borrow a cup of sugar.
This “thing”—I was pretty sure now that it was a bear—was between where I was and where I had to go. I couldn’t turn around and go back. There was no way that I was going to convince Mother that there was a bear on the road. If I returned without the sugar, I’d get a scolding, at best, and I wanted them cookies. I decided to climb through the fence and go way around the bear. But the bull might be in that pasture! I didn’t see him, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t there. I figured that, even if he saw me, he might still leave me alone. If he chased me, I could run pretty fast, and I’d crawl back through the fence, or maybe climb a blackjack tree. Blackjack trees don’t grow very big, but they’re big enough to get away from an angry bull! I didn’t know what I would do if the bull got me up a tree. When could I get down? Climbing through a barbed wire fence was no easy matter either, and I sure didn’t want to get my britches caught on the barbed wire with that angry bull after me. Well, I’d just have to deal with that problem when—and if—it happened.
I ran from blackjack tree to blackjack tree, finding my way through the neighbor’s pasture until I thought I must have passed the bear. When I got to the road, I glanced back, and I couldn't see a bear. I figured if I couldn’t see him, he couldn’t see me, and I sighed with relief.
I ran on to the neighbor’s house. Mrs. Cosby was there, all right, and filled my jar with sugar. She even gave me a glass of buttermilk. I had hoped she would have some cookies, since she had plenty of sugar, but since she didn’t offer me any, I guessed that she didn’t have any to offer. I’d been taught not to ask. If you ask for cookies, and they don’t have any, they’d be embarrassed. It just ain’t nice to ask.
I thanked Mrs. Cosby and started home with the sugar. Then I remembered that I had to go around that danged ol’ bear again! I knew I was taking too long, but I didn’t dare face that bear, so I went go all the way around again and ran all the way home.
Mother wanted to know why I had taken so long, but I didn’t want to tell her about the bear, so I told her about watching the grasshopper laying its eggs and waiting to see them hatch. She looked at me kind of funny, and then scolded me for inventing such a story. In those days, I had a reputation for stretching a story a bit, but I was telling the truth this time. At least part of it was true.
Mother and Dad had to go into town that afternoon to get groceries. I guessed that Mother needed to buy some sugar.
Dad told me to go to the pasture and bring in our team of mules. We called them Ol’ Sam and Ol’ George. They weren’t old; we just called them that. We had horses, but Dad liked the mules better for pulling the wagon. He said the mules walked faster.
It didn’t take long to find the mules. They were resting in the shade of a cottonwood tree. They saw me coming, and right away they knew that Dad had work for them to do, so they tried to run away. I was up to their tricks, so I headed them off and got them started for the barn. It took me a while, but I got them into the corral. Then I had to shut the gate. The gate was made of four strands of barbed wire with a gatepost at the end. The gatepost was heavy, and I had to drag it to get it to where I could get the wire loop around the bottom of the post. The wire loop would hold the bottom of the post in position until I could get the wire hooked around the top to shut the gate.
I got the post in the bottom loop all right, but the loop at the top was too high for me to reach. I thought about laying the gate down and going to tell Dad that I couldn’t close the gate, but I knew that if I laid the gate down, those danged mules would run off, and failure was not an option with my dad. I decided that I’d better figure out some way to close that gate.
A short length of rope lay nearby, so I tied the rope to the end of the gatepost, climbed the fence, and got the post in the wire loop at the top, and then snagged a hole in my britches getting down, but Mother probably wouldn’t notice the tear. I went back to the house to tell Dad that the mules were in the lot.
“What happened to your britches?” Mother asked as I walked through the door.
Having to explain about climbing the fence to close the gate took some of the pleasure out of my victory over that gate. Dad seemed kinda pleased, but he’d never say he was pleased; he just wasn’t made that way. I had done only what I was supposed to do, so I hadn’t earned any praise.
Dad went to the barn to harness the mules and I went with him to watch. Dad was good with animals. He liked animals, and they liked him. Even Ol’ Sam, who was a very contrary mule, seemed to have a real respect for Dad. It might have been because Ol’ Sam knew that Dad tolerated no nonsense from man or beast. The harness was heavy, and it took a strong person to throw it up onto the mules and strap it into place. The first thing Dad did was put on the bridles, and then he put the harness on. After he got them harnessed, he backed them up to the wagon and hooked them to it. Dad took the lines in his hands, climbed up on the wagon, and drove it around to the front of the house and waited for Mother to get in.
My older sister Naoma, and my two older brothers Everett and J.D., had been hoeing weeds in the cornfield all morning, but they were going to town with us. We normally didn’t go to town in the afternoon. It took too long to get there, but I guessed Mom and Dad figured that we could get back before dark. It was summertime, and the sun wouldn’t go down until late. Naoma, the oldest of us kids, was ten, so she seemed almost like an adult. She was allowed to ride on the buckboard with Mother and Dad, but my brothers and I had to ride in the bed of the wagon. I liked to stand behind the buckboard with my chin resting on the back of the seat, where I could gaze out between Mother and Dad.
We were going down the same road I had taken to borrow the sugar, and I wondered if that bear would still be sitting beside the road. I didn’t know how long a bear would stay in the same place, but he might still be there. I watched the mules as they walked. If anything was wrong, the mules would usually be the first to notice. Their heads would come up, and they’d look all around to see what might be the matter. Their ears were very sensitive, and they could rotate them to pick up even the slightest sound.
I knew that Ol’ Sam would be the first to notice the bear, but so far he wasn’t showing the slightest indication that he sensed anything wrong! His head was going up and down, up and down, in rhythm with his walking, and his ears were just going back and forth, steady as you please.
Way up ahead, I saw the black bear. He was still sitting right in the same place. I was pleased, because now I could explain to Mother why I had taken so long to get the sugar. I wasn’t afraid of the bear this time. I knew that the mules would notice the bear long before we got to it, and for sure Dad could handle any ol’ bear.
I watched the mules to see when they would notice the bear, but nothing was happening. Their heads were just going up and down, and their ears were going back and forth, back and forth. I wondered if the mules were daydreaming or just not paying attention, but I was pretty sure it didn’t work that way with mules. Ol’ George was a calm and steady animal, and seemed to trust Dad’s judgment in most matters. But Ol’ Sam wouldn’t trust anything except his own instincts, so I watched him more closely. Nothing was happening. We were getting closer and closer—no one was seeing the bear but me! Should I tell Dad about the bear? Nooo, that don’t seem like a good idea. He’ll see the bear…But why is that bear sitting so still? I didn’t know much about bears, but I was pretty sure that a bear wouldn’t just sit there with a whole wagonload of people coming down the road toward him. The closer we got, the less it looked like a bear…And we were getting pretty close.
Mother and Naoma were sitting calmly in the seat beside Dad. Everett and J.D. were sitting with their feet hanging over the tailgate of the wagon, arguing about something, so naturally they didn’t see anything. The thing that made me begin to wonder if it really was a bear was that the mules’ heads were just going up and down, with their ears going back and forth. And now, we were passing the thing, and I could see it real good. It was not a bear at all …It was nothing but a burned-out old stump! It really made me mad that I had gone to all that trouble to go so far around an old stump!
Boy oh boy, was I glad I hadn’t told Mother about that bear. My reputation for being a little loose with the facts would not have improved one bit with that story. So the best thing for me to do was just lie down in the bed of the wagon and take a nap.
One of our cows was due to calve, so when she didn’t show up one morning, Father told J.D. and me to go find her. He wanted us to make sure that the cow was all right and to find out if the calf had been born. The pasture was large, with a lot of hills and ravines, and it had lots of trees and bushes.
It was about 10 o’clock on an early-summer morning. J.D. was seven and I was five. We were plenty old to take on the responsibility we had been given, and we knew that only our best effort would be acceptable.
It was a beautiful day. We were barefoot, and the best place to walk was along the cow trails that laced the pasture. The trails were about a foot wide, and cows always follow easy terrain to wherever they want to go, which is always toward food, water, or shelter. The grass and weeds were only about a foot high, so the trails weren’t hard to follow. Sweet-smelling flowers grew alongside the trail; birds, rabbits, ground squirrels, horned toads, lizards, and an occasional snake skedaddled out of our way. We saw dry-land turtles, too, which we called terrapins.
But we weren’t searching for terrapins; we were searching for Ol’ Brownie. She wasn’t old, that’s just what we called her. Most of the animals’ names were preceded by the term ol’, like Ol’ Baldy, Ol’ Red, and Ol’ Roan.
Ol’ Brownie was only four, which was young for a milk cow. This was to be her second calf so we weren’t worried about her ability to have a calf, but we still had to find her and make sure that she and her calf were all right.
After searching several ravines, we spied Ol’ Brownie. She had given birth down by the creek under a big elm tree, where there was shade and fresh water.
Tall grass can be difficult for a calf to walk in, and that is probably why the cow had chosen that spot. There was only a little bit of grass under the tree, so the calf wouldn’t have too much trouble getting up to nurse. The calf was lying on the ground, and its mother was cleaning it by licking its hair. Every place the mother cow licked, the calf’s hair was pretty and wavy. I was thinking, Women were always trying to get their hair to be wavy when all they’ve got to do is let that cow lick their hair, and it’ll be wavy.
The calf was all black—except for its legs and face: They were snow white. Its nose and eyes were black and shiny. Ol’ Brownie was proud of her calf, and she had every right to be—it sure was pretty. It was a little heifer, so we would keep it, and one day it would be a milk cow.
The calf hadn’t gotten up to feed yet, so we had to wait and make sure it got up to suckle. Once a calf gets up and feeds, it’s going to be all right. While we waited, we gathered wild plums from a thicket nearby. The plums were bright red, and they were sweet and juicy. We ate all we could. We would have gathered some to take home, but we didn’t have anything to put them in.
Soon the calf got up and wobbled around until it found its mother’s udder. When the calf stood up, it appeared to be wearing white stockings, so we named it Ol’ White Socks—she was a beauty.
It was about 12 o’clock and time for dinner. We called the midday meal dinner, the evening meal supper. Dinner was the big meal of the day and supper was a light meal of milk and bread. It wasn’t good to eat a large meal before going to sleep, because it could cause you to have nightmares.
On the way home, we saw a rabbit and decided to catch it for dinner. We chased and chased the rabbit. It ran this way and that way in the tall grass. Each time we were about to catch it, it jumped sideways, and we missed. We thought the rabbit must be getting tired, and we were getting tired, too. We were just about to grab it when it ran down a hole. That wasn’t too bad, because we knew how to get a rabbit out of a hole. Dad had given us pocketknives and taught us how to use them. We cut a stick from a green willow tree. The stick was about three feet long, with a fork at the small end. We pushed the forked end into the hole, pressed it against the rabbit’s fur, twisted the stick, and tried to pull the rabbit out. We could feel the rabbit, but we couldn’t get the stick to grip onto its fur. Something was wrong so we pulled the stick out to see if the fork might be broken.
When we pulled the stick out, something followed it. It was gray and white like a rabbit; it had round eyes and long ears like a rabbit. All we had to do was grab it. But when it came out, it flew away! J.D. and I stood there, dumbfounded, and watched that rabbit fly. We knew that rabbits couldn’t fly, but this one sure did. We both watched it fly right off into the sky!
“I don’t think we’d better tell anyone about this,” J.D. said.
“Why not?” I asked.
“No one’s gonna believe us.”
“We both saw it. They’ve got to believe us.”
“I still don’t think we ought to tell them.”
We walked home thinking about what we had just seen.
When we got home, Mother had dinner on the table, and everybody was eating. We sat in our usual places and made our report about Ol’ Brownie and her calf.
While we were eating our dinner of fried chicken, biscuits, flour gravy, and beans, I told the story of the flying rabbit. By the time I finished the telling, everyone was laughing so hard that they couldn’t eat.
“I told you not to tell them,” J.D. said shaking his head.
Father left us in suspense for a while, but then he explained: “There was probably a horned owl in the hole that the rabbit ran in to, and while you were poking into the hole, it was the owl you were feeling with the stick. The stick wouldn’t catch in the owl’s feathers, so you couldn’t pull it out. When you pulled the stick out, the owl had had enough of being poked and decided to come out and fly away. When the owl came out, you thought it was the rabbit that you had chased into the hole. The owl was the same color as the rabbit. It had big round eyes like a rabbit. Its horned feathers looked like a rabbit’s ears. You expected to see a rabbit. So when it flew away, you were sure you had seen a rabbit fly.”
My family would never let us forget about the “flying rabbit” and laughed about it during many a meal. We were just a couple of little boys, and it was an honest mistake.
On a crisp autumn day in 1930, Everett, J.D., and I were cutting logs into firewood. J.D. and I were sawing the logs into blocks, and Everett was splitting them.
Our neighbor, Mr. James Nelson, was visiting with Dad. They stopped by to see how we were doing.
My brothers and I were talking about hunting. December 2nd was coming soon—the beginning of fur season, when we’d go into the forest to trap and shoot animals. Then we would skin them and prepare their pelts to be sold. Selling pelts was a way to make extra money. It was important, and we were looking forward to it.
Dad and Mr. Nelson listened for a while. Mr. Nelson told us that we should be careful in those deep woods because there was a dragon that lived there. He said the dragon had wings and could fly. We had seen hawks, owls, and a few eagles, so—perhaps there were some dragons, also.
We knew about every kind of animal that lived in those woods, but we’d never seen a dragon. Since Mr. Nelson was an adult, he must know something we didn’t, so we listened carefully. The expression on Dad’s face gave me cause to think that perhaps Mr. Nelson was just trying to scare us. But I wasn’t sure, and Dad wasn’t denying the story, so I just listened.
“Mr. Nelson, what do dragons eat?” I asked.
“Their favorite food is children, but they’ll eat a pig or a chicken if they can’t catch any children,” he replied seriously.
That bit of information made me pay a lot closer attention.
“I saw one just a couple of weeks ago in the north edge of the woods,” he said.
Dad and Mr. Nelson got up and walked to the barn. They were kind grinning as they walked away. Mr. Nelson’s story seemed strange—I didn’t know what to make of it. On our hunting trips, we sometimes went all the way through the woods. His story about the dragons gave me reason to think that maybe we shouldn’t go there.
“Ah, don’t pay any attention to him; he’s just kidding,” Everett said.
We continued cutting wood and forgot all about the dragon.
***
December came, and the weather turned cold, so the fur would be good. Cold weather makes the fur take a good grip on the animal’s skin. If you take the pelt before the weather gets cold, the fur won’t hold; it will just drop off and the fur is no good.
One cold day when we didn’t have to work, Everett picked up Dad’s 22-caliber rifle, and we went into the woods to see if we could shoot a possum, a skunk, a civet cat, or perhaps get lucky and come across a muskrat. The value of the pelts was a deciding factor in determining what we hunted for. A possum's pelt was worth about two dollars, and that was a lot of money in 1930. The pelt of a skunk was worth about four dollars, and a muskrat was worth nine dollars.
When we caught or shot an animal, we removed its skin, stretched it over a board with the fur side in, scraped the excess tissue from the hide, and then hung it up to cure. The skins had to be cured. No one would pay for raw skin. Skinning a skunk was a smelly job, but the pelt was worth a lot of money, so we did it, if we were lucky enough to catch one.
We had been out almost all day, and we weren’t having much luck. All we had to show for our time were two small possums. We had just about decided to call it a day when we came upon the tracks of a skunk. We could tell by the tracks that it was a big one. Maybe worth five dollars! We were so sure that we could catch it that we were already spending the money. The tracks led us deeper and deeper into the dense forest. The fall rain had left the leaves wet and soft, and we made very little noise as we followed the trail. There could be anything hiding in all that brush, and it could creep right up on us before we knew it was there.
After about an hour, we felt we were getting close. We ran faster, and faster trying to close the gap, when all of a sudden we found ourselves on the north side of the big woods. The tracks led on across a meadow, and beyond the meadow was a creek with a stand of trees along both sides. The skunk could hide among those trees, so we hurried across.
On a grassy slope beyond the creek, we saw something strange charging down the hill with its black wings flapping. We had never seen anything like that before, so we stopped and looked at each other wondering what we should do.
“Is that the dragon Mr. Nelson was talking about?” I asked.
What should we do? We believed our skunk was just ahead, among those trees. The dragon would reach the creek before we could. At best, we were going to lose the pelt. If the dragon were as bad as Mr. Nelson said, we might lose a lot more than that pelt. It was obvious that the dragon had seen us. Frightful sounds were coming from the beast, and it was without a doubt coming after us!
“Everett! Shoot it!” J.D. and I shouted.
Everett drew a bead and fired. The dragon folded its wings, ran back up the hill and disappeared into the trees. We gave up on chasing the skunk and walked home carrying the two possums. When we got home, we told Dad about the dragon.
“You didn’t shoot it, did you?” he exclaimed.
“I shot at it, and it ran back up the hill,” Everett said.
“Did it seem to be hurt when it was running up the hill?”
“No, it was running pretty good.”
“That’s good,” Dad said, as he heaved a big sigh. “How did you happen to miss? You can shoot better than that.”
“I don’t think I missed,” Everett replied, “but I must have, because it sure was running! It looked like a man when it was running.”
At that time, Mr. Nelson drove his wagon into the farmyard and showed Dad the hole in his coattail.
“How could you have gotten a hole like that in your coattail and not have a wound on your body?” Dad asked.
Then Mr. Nelson showed us how he pulled his coattail up over his head and waved it to frighten us as he came down the hill.
“You’re damn lucky you didn’t get killed,” Dad said. “Those boys can shoot a rifle pretty good.”
“I’ll never pull a crazy stunt like that again,” Mr. Nelson said, and agreed that he was lucky. He gave a nervous laugh as he rode away.
THE CHRISTMAS OF THE LITTLE RED WAGON
In 1932, America was in the grip of the Great Depression, and the central states were experiencing a severe drought. This was before social security, welfare, unemployment insurance, and food stamps. People were going hungry.
I was seven, the fourth in a family of five children. We had worked all year to grow and harvest fields of cotton, corn, and wheat. But we couldn’t sell what little we had grown. This was the second year in a row that we hadn’t made enough money to pay expenses. Debts were piling up. The only payday a farmer gets is when he sells what he has produced. The drought and the accompanying depression made it necessary for Father to mortgage the farm to get money to plant new crops.
We were so poor that Father had to wrap his feet in burlap when he worked in the fields to save his shoes for going into town. The only things we could sell were butter and eggs, and we used the money they brought in to buy necessities such as salt, baking powder, and medicines. Everything else that we used or ate, we either grew or made on the farm.
The school was five miles away in a small town called Amber. Naoma, Everett, J.D. and I rode a bus to school. The townspeople were poor, also. The merchants depended on the farmers to buy their merchandise, but the farmers had no money. So the merchants had to close their stores, and that created an even greater hardship.
Our family didn’t go hungry, because we lived on a farm with animals, gardens, and orchards. We had milk and butter from our cows, meat and eggs from our chickens, and from our pigs we got meat and oil. We preserved what we grew in our garden by canning in the summer, which provided food through the winter. We gathered pecans and black walnuts that grew wild along the creek. The townspeople didn’t have these advantages, so they went hungry.
Since our cows produced more milk than we could use, we gave some to the people who came by at milking time. They were proud, and they didn’t want to accept charity, but they had no choice. For some, it was the only food they would have all day. They didn’t always express their gratitude with words, but their faces said it plainly.
Each year, on Christmas Eve, the school put on a Christmas pageant. I was one of the Three Wise Men. We practiced singing, “We Three Kings of Orient Are,” until I could sing it in my sleep. I still hum the song; it left an indelible mark on my memory.
The Christmas tree stood on the stage at one end of the gymnasium. The students decorated it with handmade ornaments: colored paper cut into strips and pasted together to form links into chains. We also strung popcorn to add decoration. Evergreen trees were too expensive, so we used branches from regular trees and gathered mistletoe that grew wild along the creeks and placed it on the bare branches to add greenery.
The school placed gifts for each child under the Christmas tree. The gift was a red mesh bag that contained an apple, an orange, nuts, and a few pieces of hard candy. The gifts were passed out after the play. It was the only Christmas gift most of the children would receive. I waited eagerly to receive mine because it was the only time I’d get an orange—I wouldn’t see another for a year.
Money for buying the gifts was obtained by holding a community box supper after the autumn harvest. Women prepared boxes of food and wrapped them in gaily colored paper, decorated with ribbons. Some of the women baked a pie or a cake. People gathered at the gymnasium, and the boxes were auctioned to the highest bidder.
The boxes, even in those hard times, brought the enormous sum of two or three dollars. It was a compliment to the girl or woman when the food she prepared sold for the highest price, and it was the talk of the town for days.
Christmas Eve was crisp and cold. The bus didn’t run at night, so we walked to the pageant. Mother and Dad never attended. They probably felt their clothes were inappropriate, but I would have been proud to have them witness my performance in the play.
After the pageant, Naoma, Everett, J.D., and I walked home. Stars illuminated the light covering of snow, and the frozen clods made crunching sounds as we walked. We kept our hands warm by stuffing them in our pockets, and we talked about the Christmas play and the people we saw. It was so cold that our breath turned to steam. We had fun watching the steam coming out of our mouths, making it appear that we were smoking.
By the time we got home, we were tired and cold. Mother, Dad, and our baby brother Valatus had already gone to bed, but they had left a fire in the stove. I wanted to eat my apple before going to bed, but when I opened the bag, the apple rolled under the bed. I crawled under the bed to get it. Lo and behold! There was a little red wagon under the bed! It was gleaming red, with yellow wheels and black tires. The tongue and frame were black, and the wheels sported silver hubcaps. It was beautiful. I couldn’t believe my eyes.
Where could it have come from? Mother and Dad didn’t have enough money to buy something like that! But there it was. They had bought it somehow and then concealed it so they could surprise us in the morning. I couldn’t hide my excitement. When I crawled out from under the bed, my sister and brothers saw the expression on my face and looked under the bed to see what had caused it. They, too, were astonished. Somehow our parents had managed to buy one gift that we could all share. I was so excited I could hardly sleep. I lay in my bed thinking of the sacrifice they had made to buy such an expensive present.
The next morning when Dad got the gift from under the bed, we kids pretended to be surprised. We learned later that they had sold a calf to get the money for it.
We rode the little red wagon on paths and trails made by animals. There were no paved roads or sidewalks, so we coasted down bumpy hills and used it to haul feed for the animals. We played with that wagon until we wore the wheels off. We repaired the wheels and wore them off again. We finally outgrew it. The last I remember of the wagon was its battered bed being used as a feeding trough for the chickens.
Of all the presents I ever received, that present is one of the most treasured. I will always remember the Christmas of the little red wagon. We were poor, but we were blessed in many ways. I think back on those times with fond memories.
I was walking home from where the school bus dropped me off. The bus stop was more than a mile from our house. I don’t know how cold it was, but the water in the wagon tracks was frozen, so it must at least have been in the twenties. The earflaps of my winter cap pulled down and tied under my chin, but my ears were still cold. I wanted to rub them, but I was afraid—I imagined they might break and fall off like chipped ice. I had my gloved hands stuffed into my jacket pockets, but they were still cold.
In spite of the howling of the wind, I heard a tiny sound. I stopped to listen. It sounded like the mewing of a kitten. Nah, that couldn’t be, I thought. Not out here, in this kind of weather. I started to move on. But there—I heard it again! It seemed to come came from what appeared to be a bundle of rags or a bag lying in a gully. I crawled into the gully to take a look. I picked up the sack, opened the drawstring, and peeked inside.
It appeared that someone had tossed a mother cat and her litter of kittens into the gully to get rid of them. They were all dead but one. The survivor was a tiny kitten, so white it looked like a snowball lying there. The kitten was all but dead. I picked it up and put it inside my jacket to keep it warm. I didn’t know what I was going to do with it, but I couldn’t leave it there in the cold to die. Somehow I wasn’t so cold, now that I was concerned about keeping the kitten warm.
As soon as I walked into the house, I went to the stove to get warm. Mother was busy in the kitchen preparing supper, but she was never too busy to check on her family. She came into the living room to check on me.
“What have you got under your jacket?” was the first thing she said.
How could she notice that I had something under my jacket? The kitten was so small I didn’t think anyone would notice. I reached inside my jacket and removed the kitten. Mother took it in her hands, shook her head. “It sure is a pretty little thing,” she said, “but it’s too young to survive without its mother’s milk. Where did you find it?”
I related the story of finding the kitten.
“I’m pleased that you have a good heart and want to save its life,” Mother said, “but I’m afraid it’s hopeless. I suggest you take it out into the field and bury it.”
“Mom, I can’t do that. It’s still alive, and I sure can’t kill it and then bury it. May I try to save it?” I pleaded.
“How will you feed it?”
“We have eyedroppers. I could heat cow’s milk, warm it just enough to make it like its mother’s milk, and feed the kitten with an eyedropper.”
“Son, I don’t think it will work, but if you want to try, I’ll help you all I can. You know that if you manage to get it to live, you won’t be able to keep it in the house. Your father has a rule—no animals inside the house. I’ll talk to him and see if he’ll let you keep it in the house until it’s old enough to live on its own. He may not even let you keep it in the barn. The rule on this farm is that everything must earn its own keep. How can a cat pay its own way?”
“It could catch mice. There are always mice in the granary.”
“Yes, that’s a possibility. If you can convince your father to give it a try, then it’s all right with me. Now, get that kitten taken care of. You have chores to do before supper, and then you have to do your homework before you go to sleep. You’d better get busy.”
I took Snowball—that’s what I named the kitten—to the barn and milked one of the cows and fed the kitten warm milk with an eye dropper. Snowball didn’t want to take the milk from the eyedropper at first, but after trying again and again he began hungrily taking the milk. After feeding the kitten, I put it back inside my jacket to keep it warm, and it was soon fast asleep.
I knew Dad would never allow me to take Snowball to bed with me, so I borrowed Mother’s hot-water bottle, wrapped it in some cloth, put the kitten in a cardboard box along with the hot-water bottle, and placed the box beside my bed. I had to get up twice during the night to feed the kitten. The next morning, Mother said she would take care of Snowball while I was in school.
Time passed, and Snowball kept getting stronger and stronger, until one day Dad said, “Son, that cat is old enough to make it on his own. Take it to the barn and see if it will catch those mice.”
This next step was crucial. It would determine the fate of Snowball. If he caught mice, he would be allowed to stay. If he didn’t, I would have to get rid of him. We watched closely. For three days Snowball caught no mice. Father didn’t say anything, but I could tell by his expression that he was becoming skeptical.
I asked Everett what I should do.
“Are you feeding the cat?” he asked.
“Yeah, I’m feeding it just like I always have.”
“Then quit feeding it. Mice are food for cats. Snowball will catch mice if he gets hungry enough.”
The next day Snowball came to me crying for food. “No,” I told him. “Go catch your own food.”
On the third day of going without food, we saw Snowball catch a mouse. Father smiled, and I knew that Snowball had a place on the farm. Snowball became my closest friend. He walked with me to catch the school bus, and he was waiting for me when the bus brought me home. He followed me when I went into the pasture to get the cows. He liked to ride with me in the saddle.
***
Years passed and we moved many times, and Snowball always moved with us. I was becoming a young man, and Snowball was getting old, but we were still steadfast friends. World War II came, and I had to leave the farm. When I returned years later, Snowball was gone, but there was a litter of kittens on the neighbor’s farm. One of them was as white as snow. Snowball had left his mark, and I felt a little better.
Uncle Luther’s farm was about two miles from our farm and a railroad ran through it. He and Aunty Cynthia had a large family, like our own. We spent Sunday afternoons playing on their farm with our cousins, getting into all kinds of mischief.
The railroad track provided many opportunities for adventure. We placed nails on the tracks, and the iron wheels of the train flattened them into some interesting shapes. When we placed pennies on the rails, the wheels rolled them out flat as a fritter.
The railroad crossed a deep canyon on Uncle Luther’s farm. The crossing was just a long bridge with no overhead structures, called a trestle. We talked about what we would do if we should get caught out on the trestle when the train was coming. If we were in the middle, we would be trapped. The distance to the end was too far to run to get off before the train would overtake us. And the trestle was too high to risk a jump into the canyon below. The cross-ties didn’t extend out far enough to allow a person to stand on them while the train passed. Someone suggested that it might be possible to hang onto the ties with your hands. It would be a mighty risky thing to do, but we considered it.
Cousin Dink dared me to wait on the trestle with him. He was indeed a daring young man, but I wasn’t going to let him out-dare me. We walked on the rails to the center of the trestle, and waited. Soon we saw a train coming. We were committed. It was too late to get off the trestle.
By the time the engineer saw us, it was too late to stop the train. I looked down and considered jumping onto the boulders. It was a long way down. It took me only a second to change my mind about that option. Dink and I climbed out on the ties and swung down, holding on with just our hands. The engineer was pulling the train whistle with all his might! I had never heard such a racket. It was exciting and frightening, seeing the boulders way down there, then seeing a wailing, roaring, freight train bearing down on us with no chance of stopping.
Soon the train was passing over us. I never realized how much dirt and debris fell off a freight train, or how much a trestle shook when a train passed over it.
We waited and waited. The train must have been a mile long. My hands were getting tired, and I closed my eyes in an effort to concentrate on hanging on. I opened them just long enough to peek at Dink—his eyes were closed, also. After what seemed like an eternity, the train passed.
Now: Do I have enough strength to pull myself back up on the rails? It was a struggle, but I made it. After getting back up, I lay there shaking. Dink was on the rails nearby and, like me, he was in a state of shock.
The other kids came running, laughing and shouting. According to them, we were heroes. I didn’t feel like a hero; I felt kind stupid. I’ll never do a thing like this again I told myself.
Anyway, the praise didn’t last long, and we were off to the next wild, exciting adventure, running, fishing, swimming, and hunting. Then the day ended, and we had to go to our homes to do our chores.
Our parents occasionally caught us doing some of these crazy things, and as you would expect, we got spankings from time to time, but it sure didn’t daunt our spirits much.
THE ROUGH RIDERS AND THE HAUNTED HOUSE
Abandoned farms and empty houses dotted the countryside in the winter of 1934. Times were hard, and many farmers had moved away— some to California and some to the industrialized cities of the Northeast and the Great Lakes, trying to find a place to start over, rebuild their lives, and provide for their families. A few hardy souls tried to hang on.
Dink, Tyree, Milt, Drew, and I were sons of these hardy people. Like my two older brothers, I had a group of friends that I played with. We formed a comradeship and played together when we weren’t too busy working on our parents’ farms. We called our band “The Rough Riders,” a name taken from Teddy Roosevelt’s famous brigade.
This was before radio, television and computers. We had no commercial entertainment, so we found ways to entertain ourselves. The land was undeveloped—that part of Oklahoma was a place of trees and grass and was, for the most part, empty, but there was plenty to do. We had creeks, canyons, hills, and valleys to explore. We hunted wild animals, played along the creeks, swam and fished in the ponds and lakes. We had endless trails to ride. We planned our activities in advance and called our escapades adventuring.
Summer had gone and the nights were cold. Layers of thin clouds scurried past a sliver of moon. The frozen dirt crunched under our feet as we followed a trail made by cattle. A biting wind blew across the prairie, and dry brush rubbed against our pant legs, making a rasping sound.
We were different in age, size, and character, but we made a good group. Dink was about twelve. He was a wiry kid with dark hair and eyes. He had a great imagination and always thought of interesting things to do. Tyree was a gentle boy who loved animals. He brought his dog Scooter along on this adventure. I was the youngest at nine and small for my age, but I was a rough-and-tumble kid, and I could keep up with the best of them. Drew, the biggest of the bunch, was stable and slow to anger. Milt was the tallest, but he was a little timid. He lived in town with his old-maid aunt who ran a dress shop. We called him a city kid because he had grown up back East in Boston. Country life was new to him, but he was game to try anything.
Tonight the adventure was to visit the haunted house. The haunted house was a dreary place where no one in his right mind would want to go, especially on a dark, cold night, with the wind howling across the prairie, making the walk much less than pleasant.
But nobody pretended to be in their right mind; we were just responding to Dink’s challenge.
Dink had dared us to go with him to see if the house was really haunted. We had to prove that we weren’t afraid. None of us really wanted to go, but if we didn’t, we would be admitting that we were afraid, so we had to call Dink’s dare.
We had food to heat over a fire that we planned to build on the dirt floor of the haunted house. We could tell by the chimney that the house had a fireplace, but we wanted to sit around an open fire. One of the boys brought wieners, another brought marshmallows. I brought biscuits that Mother had baked for supper.
“Maybe it won’t be so cold,” Milt said, “once we get inside the house and get a fire going.”
A short distance ahead, we saw the dim outline of a house sitting back among the trees. It was just a dark shadow, old and deserted. It had been abandoned for a long time and tall weeds had grown up in the yard. An old oak tree overhung the house, and its branches dragged the roof. The place was lonely, scary, and forlorn, with an air of mystery clinging to it.
All we had for a light was a kerosene lantern that Dink carried. It didn’t provide much light, but it was better than nothing. Dink walked up to the door and gave it a push. The door’s rusty hinges squeaked loudly. That sound alone was enough to make everyone want to go home. It had been a long time since those hinges had moved. We stood at the door trying to see into the gloomy interior, but all we could see were some old pieces of broken-down furniture and a few pots and pans that were lying on the floor. Tyree had Scooter on a leash, and the dog was whining and trying to pull away. Not even the dog wanted to go inside that old house! That did not bode well; we thought that Scooter wasn’t afraid of anything, but he was sure afraid of something in that house.
Dink held the lantern high, trying to see inside. “Well, who’s going in with me?” he asked.
Drew was inclined to do some wild and foolish things, so he stepped forward. “You go first, and I’ll follow,” he said.
The rest of us brought up the rear cautiously.
“Let’s get a fire going,” Milt suggested. “Maybe it’ll cheer the place up a bit.”
“This place needs more than a bit of cheering up,” I said, “but I’m all for getting a fire started. It’s just too cold in here.” “Let’s go outside and get some of the deadwood that has fallen from that old tree,” Dink said.
There was plenty of wood, but it was so dark that we had to feel around with our feet to find it.
“We’ve got enough,” I said, after everyone had an armful. “Let’s take it inside and see if we can get it to burn.”