The Cross Timbers (8 page)

Even before our western venture I had done a great deal of work in the field chopping cotton, thinning corn, and cutting sprouts that sprang up in any newly cleared field. Like most children in the South, I had also done a great deal of cotton picking; therefore, by the time Father and I returned from the Prairie West late in June, 1889, I was fairly experienced in both field work and household duties, including a little cooking.

It was a joy to be back in the Cross Timbers neighborhood again, although we could not move into our own home until Mr. Pulliam had harvested his scanty crops. We lived with Tom and Lucy for some six weeks in order to assist Tom, who needed help in getting his crops “laid by,” which, in the lingo of the South, meant the final plowing and hoeing of the corn and cotton. Then John Briley, who was moving to Roanoke to operate a small meat market, asked us to occupy his house and care for his cows
and pigs until he could sell them, and the man to whom he rented his farm could move in. This we were glad to do and “bached” in his home for a month.

By that time the cotton-picking season had come, and we returned to Tom's home to help him with the first picking of his cotton crop. There would be a second picking when the rest of the bolls had opened, but that would be a month later. Until then there seemed comparatively little to do on Tom's farm. If we had been in our own home Father would have found plenty of work for all three of us clearing land, building or repairing fences, and doing any other thing needed to improve the farm.

Unwilling to remain idle, he decided that we should drive west to Parker County in the Upper Cross Timbers, where we had heard that there was a great demand for hands to pick cotton and gather corn. We accordingly packed the wagon with the necessary food and bedding, put on the bows and canvas cover, and headed west. After crossing the wide belt of prairie we entered the Upper Cross Timbers and on the second evening camped in a grove of trees on the banks of Walnut Creek.

We were on land belonging to Mr. McCrory, who grew corn, cotton, sorghum cane, and other types of feed on his farm of four or five hundred acres. He was in sore need of cotton pickers and help to gather corn, which in most Southern states is not husked but snapped from the stalks in the husk or “shuck.” He paid seventy-five cents a hundred for cotton picking and three cents a bushel for gathering corn.

Unfortunately, it had been raining and the cotton and corn were both wet. We spent the next day or two in fixing up our
camp while we waited for sunshine to dry them so that we could work. We were camped at the edge of a field of millet which had been cut and shocked. Just beyond were shocks of sorghum.

Father cut down a sapling to make a ridgepole. One end of this was lashed to a tree and the other rested in the fork of another long pole sharpened with an axe and driven into the ground. Over this ridgepole was stretched the canvas wagon sheet to make a tent. Enough tall stalks of cane were brought to form a wall at the back and a thick layer of millet was spread on the ground beneath the canvas. In the back part of this shelter we spread our blankets and slept at night, while in the front we kept the food and cooking utensiles.

We lived in this crude camp for over a month while George and I picked cotton. George could pick from 250 to 300 pounds a day, while my limit was about 150 pounds. Father, who had never acquired any skill in picking cotton, gathered corn, which weighs about seventy-two pounds to the bushel in the husk. As he could gather a hundred bushes a day and was paid three cents a bushel, he made about as much money a day as George and I both did picking cotton at seventy-five cents a hundred.

Pickers were so hard to find that Mr. McCrory had only a young Mr. Daugherty and George and me as hired help. As a result, his whole family, consisting of a twenty-year-old son, a seventeen-year-old daughter named Cynthia, twelve-year-old Georgia, and a little girl of six called Dora, picked every day. Even his wife came out every afternoon and picked cotton until time to go home and cook supper.

Except when picking beside Cynthia, in whom he apparently
had a romantic interest, Mr. Daugherty sang most of the time. Unfortunately, he seemed to know only one song and just a single stanza of it:

Jesse had a wife

Who mourned all her life

Three children they were brave

But a dirty little coward

Shot Mr. Howard

And laid Jesse James in his grave.

After I heard this all day long it seemed to ring in my ears when I lay down to sleep at night.

When we had finished picking all of McCrory's cotton, we picked for a neighboring farmer, Mr. Chandler, who paid us a dollar a hundred for picking a field that had been covered with water when Walnut Creek overflowed its banks after a heavy rain.

We became acquainted with three or four other families living near our camp and found all of them “mighty clever people,” the word
clever
meaning generous and kind in the vernacular of the Cross Timbers. When George and I called on the Nelsons to see if we could buy a gallon of sorghum and half a bushel of sweet potatoes they seemed glad to let us have them. They refused any payment, however, saying that they
“would
not dream of charging a neighbor for a jug of sorghum molasses and a few sweet potatoes.” We were much pleased by their generosity, but applying the term “neighbor” to persons camping for a few weeks half a mile farther down the creek seemed to be stretching the word quite a bit at least.

This generous attitude seemed to be typical of everyone we
met during our stay in the Walnut Creek camp. Mr. Chandler brought us a big piece of beef cut from half of a quarter that he had bought from someone who had butchered a fat heifer and was peddling out the meat to families in the community. Father did most of the cooking over a camp fire built in front of our so-called tent. Biscuits were baked in a Dutch oven, while beans were boiled in an iron pot with a slab of salt pork to season them. We often had hot cakes for breakfast, with bacon, sorghum, and dried fruit, plus plenty of hot coffee; all of us gained weight.

When, after a few weeks, most of the cotton had been picked Father decided it was about time to return home. We all felt that it had been a successful venture. Unfortunately, there had been several days when rain or misty weather made it impossible to pick cotton or gather corn. At such times George and I had fished or hunted, unless it was actually raining. Yet, on every working day we had made five or six dollars. Because our living had cost very little, by the time we started home we had saved seventy or eighty dollars. This was important money at a time when bacon sold for nine or ten cents a pound, and a good farm hand could be hired for fifteen dollars a month, plus board.

Once we were back at Tom's place we helped him pick the rest of his cotton. By that time our tenant, Mr. Pulliam, had finished harvesting his crop and had rented another small farm. To this he and his daughters, Adar and Idar removed, and we occupied our old home once more after an absence of nearly a year.

We were all most happy to be back home, and the neighbors seemed pleased also. In “neighborly fashion” they told us that the shiftless Mr. Pulliam had allowed most of the blackberries and peaches to ripen and fall to the ground and rot. Plainly, he
had not kept up the fences or barn and sheds and he had allowed the weeds and sprouts to grow up in the fields.

With characteristic energy our father set to work with the help of George and me to put the little farm and its improvements in good order again. He bought two or three milk cows, a couple of sows with their litters of pigs, and a dozen or more hens. The fences were mended, the fields plowed, the fruit trees checked for borers, and the orchard enlarged by our setting out forty or fifty more peach trees.

During my stay with Mattie in Greer County I had done a bit of the cooking. This now helped, for we were keeping “bachelor's hall” and had to do all of our own housework, including preparing our own meals. So-called mixes, and biscuits and rolls ready to pop into the oven, which have saved the reason of many young brides and the lives of their husbands, lay several decades in the future. In consequence, we had to deal with the raw materials in our culinary efforts.

Father, whose experience went back to the days of the California gold rush, did most of the cooking, but I could do a fair job at “skillet slinging” myself, even if only ten years old. As George was a fair housekeeper we got along in excellent fashion and even entertained a good many persons at dinner or for overnight, including old Mr. Lopp and some of my father's brethern in the Primitive Baptist Church.

Toward spring Lucy, who was a remarkably good cook but a notoriously sloppy housekeeper, sponsored a surprise party for us. She conspired with seven or eight other women of the neighborhood to bring food for a sumptuous dinner and come to our bachelor home soon after breakfast to clean every inch of the
house and prepare the noonday feast. They came in full force, each bringing her contribution of food.

After looking the situation over, with two or three suggesting that maybe they should go home and clean up their
own
houses, they set to work. Some prepared the dinner, while others washed the windows and did a bit of scrubbing. Then, after finding a large stack of copies of the St. Louis
Republic,
they decided to paper the living room and small “side room” with newspapers. Because we did not have enough copies of
The Republic
to complete the project, one lady sent her son home to bring back an armload of another newspaper, to which she and her husband subscribed.

It was a grand day, for two or three women had brought their children, and we had a lot of fun playing “hide-and-seek” and marbles while their mothers cooked and mixed flour-and-water paste, and applied it to the newspapers with which they covered the rough walls. Although it was to be a surprise party, I am sure that someone must have given Father a tip as to what had been planned. It is true that he
seemed
surprised but rather overdid it. Everyone had a good time but, unfortunately for me, these amateur paper hangers pasted some papers upside down or “slaunch-wise” on the walls. This almost forced me to stand on my head or in a slanting position to read them!

With the coming of warm weather we were kept very busy planting corn and cotton, setting out sweet-potato slips, and making a garden. We even planted a patch of peanuts and a few rows of popcorn. Father and George did most of the plowing, but in thinning corn or chopping cotton and other work done with a hoe George and I worked together. From the time I was
four or five years old and had been told such stories as “Jack and the Beanstalk,” “Cinderella,” “Little Red Ridinghood,” and “Sinbad the Sailor,” George and I had told one another stories which we had “made up” ourselves. They usually began, “Once you and I were little fairies.”

Now that we were older and had read a good deal we resumed this practice to relieve the tedium of working all day in the field at such mechanical tasks as thinning corn and chopping or picking cotton. After reading the
Swiss Family Robinson
our stories ran largely to being shipwrecked on some desert island. Sometimes we were accompanied by two of our playmates, Walter and Oscar Briley. With complete disregard for geography the wreck usually occurred while we were on a voyage across the Atlantic to enter school in England.

Not all of our made-up tales were based on wrecks while at sea and attacks by pirates or savages. Some of them were “Westerns,” probably due to our reading
Dick Onslow among the Indians
or
The Trader Spy.
In these we were usually on our way to California with a wagon train and had been captured by Indians when we left it for an hour or so of hunting. After reading a book about Africa, which the Taylors had been kind enough to lend us, our yarns tended to shift to the Dark Continent. They usually dealt with lion hunts and adventures with Pygmies.

Our story telling was to sustain an enormous advance from an unexpected source the following year. We made a good crop of corn and cotton in 1890, and the peach trees were loaded with fruit. As a result, we worked hard drying peaches all summer and harvesting the field crops during the autumn months. The wheat crop of the prairie farmers was also good, and Father was able to
sell all the blackberries and best peaches at what was then considered a good price.

In February, 1891, my brother John wrote that he had just married and settled on a claim, where he had built for his bride a large and comfortable sod house. There was little prospect of making a crop on freshly plowed sod, however, and if Father could rent some additional land he and his wife would be glad to come down and make a crop with us. Father accordingly rented a twenty-acre field about three-quarters of a mile southeast of us to be planted in cotton. The terms were for the renter to receive three-fourths and the landowner one-fourth of the money derived from the sale of the crop.

This twenty-acre field was level, fertile land which had formerly had a house on it occupied by a family named Moore. The house had either burned or been moved but the tract of land was still known as the “Moore farm.” In the corner where the house had stood was a small plot of grass and a big apple tree that bore large, long apples resembling the variety called “sheep's nose.” Evidently the tree was a seedling, for the fruit was extremely sour and never seemed to ripen.