The Cross Timbers (9 page)

Once this field had been rented, Father wrote to John, who, with his wife, Ava, arrived by train late in February. We were all delighted to have them with us. Ava was only nineteen years old, while John was about twenty-seven. She was a gay, lively girl, the oldest of a bevy of sisters ranging from seventeen to three or four years of age, though she had an older brother, who was married and lived in Dallas.

As the oldest of so many sisters, Ava had been forced to assume a measure of responsibility in her parents' household. She
was an excellent cook and a remarkably good housekeeper. Her big snowy loaves of homemade bread, six-layer chocolate cakes, golden-brown doughnuts, and luscious pies were most welcome additions to our bachelor fare of the past year. To our great distress, a late freeze wiped out our crop of peaches, but we had berries and the products of a big garden.

A couple of months after John and Ava joined us, Ava's mother and a seven- or eight-year-old daughter, Minnie, came to see us. They had gone to Dallas to visit the son and family and were returning to their home in Vernon, Texas, with a stop-off to see Ava and the family into which she had married. We all liked Ava's mother, Mrs. Brown, very much. Apparently she largely supported her family by keeping boarders, while her husband, a more or less worthless old fellow, contributed a little by working at odd jobs that he could find.

Mrs. Brown stayed only a day or so but left Minnie with us for the summer, which pleased Ava and me very much. Minnie was a nice kid, and because I was two or three years older she came to regard me as the fountainhead of knowledge and wisdom. This was a new role for me, which I savored to the fullest. Hitherto I had been the one to seek knowledge from George by asking numerous questions, which he never failed to answer.

With John to help with the work, even the addition of twenty acres of cotton did not require my spending as much time in the field as usual. As a result, I helped Ava with the housework, with Minnie as my able assistant. I soon found that she liked stories and when we were working or playing alone she proved an enthusiastic audience for my made-up narratives, usually about
nations of Pygmies about a foot tall. These little people often engaged in wars, in which a part of the troops rode into battle mounted on jack rabbits! Minnie even told some stories of her own, in which her only toy, a “sleepy doll” named Pearl, was always a leading character.

When the time came to chop cotton, I had to lend a hand part of the time. Knowing that our scholarly brother John had read many more books than we had, George asked him to tell us one of his favorite novels. John was willing but said that he would rather tell an original story. That suited us exactly; for the next few months he and George, when working in the field, took turns in relating some amazing narratives. I was not able to hear all of these, but new ones were started in the fall when we began picking cotton, which kept all three of us in the field all day.

The summer slipped by as if on fleet wings. When it became intensely hot our father built a brush arbor in the back yard. We moved the dining table out of the steaming hot kitchen and set it up under this shady arbor, which made eating our meals and the aftermath of washing the dishes far more comfortable. As we had no peaches to prepare for drying, we all had more leisure than in previous summers. Minnie was a good playmate as well as a good listener to my stories, and I was truly sorry when late in August two of her older sisters, who had been visiting in Dallas, came by with instructions from their mother to take her home.

Ava returned to Greer County in October, going to Vernon by train, where she was met by Henry. John stayed another month to finish picking the cotton crop. He then bought an old wagon
and a yoke of oxen, and drove to Navajoe. This must have given Ava ample time to put their sod house in order, for travel by ox team was indeed slow.

Some of the stories told by John and George were truly thrillers, and following the pattern set by the imagination of John, George and I continued to relate amazing narratives of adventures by land and sea as long as we lived in the Cross Timbers. I recall one in which George was seeking gold in Alaska, when he discovered a hidden valley with a warm climate due to many large hot springs. Here the vegetation grew almost as rank as in the tropics and a few mastodons were found.

In another yarn he had sought to reach the South Pole by balloon. With a parachute strapped to his back and with chemicals to generate enough gas to reinflate the balloon so that he could return after a landing, he drifted south from Australia. Upon reaching the Antarctic continent he floated over a range of high mountains and discovered a valley with a subtropical climate caused by smouldering volcanoes. Here he was forced to bail out because of a gas leak but, relieved of his weight, the balloon rose enough to pass over the mountains to the south.

He landed safely, but soon after he had repacked the parachute and strapped it to his back he was seized by four tall black warriors armed with spears. He tried to talk to them by signs, but with little success. They led him to a village of round grass houses, where black men, women, and children seemed much excited by his appearance. His captors took him to their king, who lived in a big house in the center of the village.

The king apparently ordered him to be destroyed, because the four warriors led him to the south side of the valley and up a
steep trail to the top of the mountain on the south. Once there he was led to the edge of an overhanging cliff where he could see, some two thousand feet below, huge boulders half-covered by snow and ice. He was permitted only a brief look before two of the warriors grasped his wrists and the other two his ankles and with a “heave ho” launched him into space.

Praying that he might escape a broken bone he made the required count and pulled the rip cord. Fortune was with him, for the north wind carried him away from the boulder-strewn ground and he landed safely in soft new-fallen snow. His luck still held, for less than a mile away he found his collapsed balloon, with everything in the basket untouched, including the food. A day or so later the wind shifted to the south; he moored the balloon to a huge rock, repaired the leak, and reinflated the balloon. He then climbed into the basket and cut the mooring rope. The wind continued from the south and two or three days later he landed safely in Australia.

Such yarns, slightly reminiscent of Jules Verne, were harmless and did much to relieve the boredom of hoeing corn and chopping or picking cotton. Little did we realize that nearly three-quarters of a century later millions of housewives in America would find entertainment by watching on television the unfolding of equally lurid and impossible narratives, while shelling peas for the family dinner or knitting a sweater for an appreciative husband.

6. Play and Playmates

Although my father firmly believed that every child in a family should work for the common good, he was careful not to give us tasks too difficult for our strength. Moreover, he never insisted that we work unreasonably long hours in a day, but I sometimes did not quite agree with his idea of what constituted “unreasonably long hours.”

Upon one occasion I was given a grubbing hoe, commonly called a “mattock,” and put to work at cutting sprouts in a newly cleared field. That evening at supper, after my father had said grace, I turned my plate over and remarked, “This plate sure feels light after swinging that old mattock all afternoon!”

Father made no reply, but the next morning at breakfast said, “Ed, I think you'd better not cut sprouts today. I'm afraid you'll eat too much dinner and make yourself sick. You can take a hoe and thin corn this morning.” Evidently, he thought that he had given me too heavy a job the previous day.

In spite of the fact that George and I started to work at what would today be considered a very early age, we had plenty of time for play. Our father, not being a reading man except for the Bible and his religious paper, had probably never heard of the old adage that “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy!” but he was wise enough to know that children, like the young of
all animals, enjoy playing. He never joined in our games but never objected to them when our work was done.

Sunday was a day of rest, which, to George and me, meant a day of leisure to be devoted largely to playing various games with some of the neighbor boys or merely “horsing around” looking for wild plums and mulberries in the woods or swimming in one of the stock ponds commonly called “tanks.” We never attended Sunday School because Father, like most other members of the Old School Baptist Church, objected to the “literature” used in Sunday Schools to explain the various passages of the Scriptures.

The greatest difference between our play and that of present day children was that we had almost no toys except those which we made for ourselves. The greatest treasure of the average Cross Timbers boy of the 1880's was his pocket knife. It was usually a Barlow knife with one blade. George and I each had one, which we whetted to a razor-sharp edge on the sandstone that was abundant on our farm. To lose one's knife was a tragedy. Most little girls had only a doll and sometimes a set of little dishes.

Almost every boy also had a few marbles of various types. The glass ones were called “glassies,” plain white ones were either “chalkies” or “connicks,” while mottled brown ones were known as “crocks.” The superduper or Cadillac of all marbles was an agate. I never owned one, but two or three boys in the neighborhood did and were envied by all the rest of us. The proud possessor of an agate always used it as his “taw.” This was a term applied to the marble with which a boy shot at those in the ring or at an opponent's taw after the game was under way. To hit another player's taw removed him from that particular game.

In addition to marbles and a pocket knife, I once received the gift of a small toy pistol and one box of caps. These were about the only “store bought” toys I ever owned. My sister Fannie, in Nebraska, sent us a Christmas box one year containing a bag of beautiful glass marbles for me and a harmonica, which we called a “French harp,” for George. He was delighted with this and soon learned to play it very well. The average harmonica cost a quarter and was either a “Hohner” or “Richter” made in Germany.

Although we lacked the toys that children have today, we made many of our own. A good ball could be made from yarn obtained by unraveling an old hand-knitted woolen sock. When the yarn had been rolled up as tightly as possible into a ball, somewhat smaller than a baseball, it had to be thoroughly sewed with a needle and thread or it would unravel. Rubber balls could be bought at a store for from ten to twenty-five cents, but neither George nor I ever felt that we could afford to buy one, even if we had that much money, which was not often.

A sled was easily made upon those rare occasions when there was snow on the ground, and when we could find two or four wheels we often made a small cart or wagon. For use inside the house I would often make a little wagon from four spools and a match box. A wooden pistol could be whittled out of a soft pine board and we often worked at making a bow and some arrows. The bow was usually made either from hickory or Osage orange, called “bode ark” [
bois d'arc
], while straight shafts of false dogwood made excellent arrows. They were scraped down until only slightly thicker than a lead pencil, tipped with a point
made of tin, and feathered with bluejay, woodpecker, or meadow-lark plumage.

A good bow and half a dozen arrows were highly prized for they represented many hours of patient whittling with a sharp knife and scraping with a piece of broken glass to produce them, and then more time to get the arrows properly tipped and feathered. We hunted with our bows and arrows but I cannot recall that we ever killed anything. Most of our pleasure was derived from shooting at a target and from playing a game with one of us as Robin Hood or William Tell, for our reading affected our play just as it did our work. Neither of us ever had enough faith in the other's marksmanship, however, to risk having an apple shot off his head.

Much of our play with other boys occurred when we had Sunday visitors, who came to spend the day bringing all the kids with them. A ball was used in several games but my favorite was “town ball,” which was a simplified version of baseball. Two self-appointed leaders chose the players for their teams. Who should have first choice was determined by spitting on one side of a small piece of board and calling, “wet or dry?” as it was tossed high in the air. One player called his guess and the two looked at the board when it struck the ground and called, “Dry she lie,” or “Wet she lie.” If the guess was correct the guesser had first choice, otherwise it went to his opponent. Another method of deciding who had first choice of players, or which team should bat first, was for one leader to toss either the bat or a stick the size of a broom handle to his opponent. The latter caught it about the middle; the tosser and “tossee” then
clasped the stick hand over hand until the top was reached, and if the lad who reached the top had sufficient grip on the stick to throw it over his shoulder he was the winner. His opponent called, “Venture crow picks!” to prevent its being picked out by thumb and fingers.