Footloose in America: Dixie to New England (7 page)

She hesitated, then slid in next to my wife. “You really want to hear this?”

In unison we said, “Yes.”

Ruth paused a moment, then said, “Well, when he proposed to me he asked if I would sail around the world with him. I think he was surprised when I immediately said yes. I had heard him talk about it so much, I already had it in my mind that I was going with him. Anyway, we decided that after we got married we would both work for a few years, save our money, buy a boat and do it before we had children.”

Ruth folded her hands on the table in front of her and let out a sigh. “Then the war broke out and he had to go. When he was over there, in nearly every letter, he’d write something about the trip. He figured we’d do it a couple of years after he got back. But after he came home I got pregnant–twice. So then we decided we’d do it after the kids were grown. And then it was going to be when we retired.”

She shook her head. “But the plant where he worked shut down before he could retire. When they gave him his severance check, he said ‘Now’s the time to do it!’ But I had a good job. If I’d quit then, I would have lost my retirement and everything else I’d built up. Still, he insisted it was time to go.”

While she was talking, Ruth had been looking down at her folded hands on the table. But then she stopped and looked up across the table at me with a sadness that accentuated every crease in her face. “I hated him going off without me. But I couldn’t stand in the way of his dream. So we bought a twenty-seven foot sailboat and off he went.”

Ruth paused and looked up at the ceiling. She was obviously fighting tears. Patricia put her hand on top of Ruth’s, then tenderly asked, “Did he make it around the world?”

Her head began to nod, then she slowly turned toward Patricia with a big smile and a voice full of pride. “Oh yes! It took over two years, but he made it. A couple of times I joined him for a week or so.”

Right then Ruth crossed her arms like she was hugging herself. She had the same twinkle in her eyes that she had when she talked about them being sweethearts. “But the best part was when I got to sail with him for two months. It was at the end of the trip. Just the two of us, alone on the ocean. Those were the best two months of my life!”

Someone yelled, “Ruth, they need you in the kitchen!”

She slid out of the booth, then turned and touched both of us on our arms. Tears were rolling down her cheeks when she said, “Oh, you two, I’m so proud of you. Stick with it! Do it
now
while you can. My husband died of cancer two years after he got home. I thank God he got to do it. It was the best part of both our lives.”

Della–the heart and motor

CHAPTER 3

D
ELLA
I
N
T
HE
D
ELTA

F
ROM THE
O
ZARK
P
LATEAU
, A
RKANSAS
Highway 157 twisted down into the bottom lands of the White River. It was so steep that Patricia had to ride in the cart and operate the brake as the upland forests gave way to rice and soybean fields. Flat lands flooded by pumps drawing massive amounts of water up to the surface from the aquifer. In some fields, water flowed across the top of the ground guided by furrows that farmers had fashioned out of dirt. Water gushed from the open portals of metal pumps that looked like the nose of a missile poking up from the ground. In other fields, long pipes–some more than a quarter of a mile long–spanned out horizontally above the crops. Supported by metal legs on wheels, the pipes pivoted from a pump in the middle of the field. On top of the pipes were sprinklers that spewed and spit water across the plants. In the bottoms, in the summer, there’s always the sound of pumps.

Another prevailing sound in the bottoms was the whine of mosquitos. They attacked Patricia first because she was sitting still in the cart. Then, when I stopped walking, if even for a moment, they’d swarm me. The sun was about to slip toward dusk, and we’d been told many times, in the bottoms mosquitos rule the night.

Oil Trough was the first town we came to–population 200. A couple of times on our way there we’d been warned that it was a town of rogues. “Don’t stop in Oil Trough. They’ll rob you blind.”

It was next to the White River and called “Oil Trough” because in the 1800s bears were rendered there for their oil. Back then, the town had a
bar that featured bear wrestling on Saturday night. In 2001, when we were there, Oil Trough had a couple of farm businesses, a café, a grocery store, an elementary school and about half a dozen churches–but no bears. And because it was a dry county, no bars either.

When we walked into Oil Trough the sun was low and those warnings about this town of rogues were ringing in our heads. It didn’t sound like a good place to spend the night. But we hadn’t come across a suitable spot to camp before we got there.

The Oil Trough Store was an old wooden building with four steps that led to the front porch. It had a steep pitched roof and the whole thing leaned toward the river. In the one-hundred years since it opened, the store had two presidents pass through its door. But neither Bill Clinton nor Jimmy Carter were in office when they were there.

The moment we pulled into the store’s gravel parking lot, we were surrounded by people. A reporter for the Batesville newspaper had interviewed us the night before. They deliver
The Batesville Daily Guard
to Oil Trough in the middle of the afternoon. So a lot of the local folks had just read about us before we arrived. Many brought copies of the story for us to autograph. Some brought produce from their gardens. We ended up with so many tomatoes in Oil Trough, we had to give some away farther up the road. And because the story mentioned that our trip was financed by the sales of my poetry books, we sold a few in the parking lot. The atmosphere in front of the Oil Trough Store was so festive, it felt like we’d brought the circus to town. I performed a couple of poems for the group.

That night we slept in the fellowship hall of the Methodist church. They told us to make ourselves at home. “Help yourselves to anything in the refrigerator.”

While I fed Della in the church yard, a man told me a great mule story: One of the guys he worked with had a garden mule that he used in the fall to haul firewood in a wagon. This mule was a good worker, but when it decided it was time to quit, that was it. The mule wouldn’t move again until it was unhitched.

One autumn day, this man and some of his friends were cutting firewood, and on the last load of the day when owner told the mule to “Get up!” it refused. The man coaxed, cursed and then beat the mule to get it to move. But it wouldn’t budge. One of the other woodcutters said, “When the old army mules balked, they’d start a fire on the ground under its belly to get it moving.”

So the owner of the mule did that and it worked. The mule pulled the wagon about three feet. Then he stopped, with the wagon directly over the fire. The mule didn’t move until they unhitched it from the flaming wagon.

Next morning, while we ate breakfast at the Oil Trough Café, some of the customers and the waitress treated us to lots of great stories about the town. And one of the customers insisted on paying for our meal. When we walked out, Patricia said, “So they’ll rob you blind in Oil Trough, eh?”

From Oil Trough, we took Highway 14 east along the White River. On our right were endless plains of rice and soybeans that, in some places, stretched beyond the horizon. Occasionally we would see farm buildings or a house, but they were few and far between. About six miles east of Oil Trough, in front of one of those rare roadside homes, I heard a thud and the cart skidded to a stop. Della backed up a step, then lunged into the harness. But the cart only moved a little, with the sound of skidding from the rear. When I walked to the back of the cart, I found that the right rear wheel had struck an old telephone pole that was lying in tall grass next to the road. The impact broke a weld that held the wheel in place. So now it was cocked and skidded sideways instead of rolling. Della couldn’t pull the cart with the wheel like that, and we were blocking the east bound lane of the highway.

Patricia asked, “What are we going to do?”

“Well, first we’ve got to get out of the road.”

The wheel was still attached, and I was able to kick it back into place so it could roll. On the front porch of the house a woman was talking on a phone, and she said we could pull into her yard. So Patricia led Della, while I walked beside the cart constantly kicking the wheel into position so it could roll.

After we got off the road, the woman on the porch held up her phone and said, “Do you need to call someone?”

What we needed was a welder. In Oil Trough, several people gave us their phone numbers and told us to call if we had any trouble. So Patricia called the Oil Trough Store, and within thirty minutes six pickups were parked around us, and Stan Haigwood was under the cart welding the wheel back into place. During this whole affair, people came and went exchanging handshakes and backslaps. There was plenty of, “How you doing?” and “I ain’t seen you in ages!” and “Did you hear about such and such?” Our little disaster had turned into the Saturday social event of Independence County.

Stan was in his late twenties, and built like someone who might ride bucking broncos in a rodeo. When he crawled out from under the cart, he pulled off his welding mask and wiped sweat off his forehead. “This is only a temporary fix. Our shop is two miles down the highway. When you get there, we’ll jack it up and fix it right.”

“What’s this going to cost me?”

“Nothing. If you find someone in need, just pass on the favor.”

Stan was the youngest of three brothers who farmed 7,200 acres of rice, soybeans, and corn. It takes lots of big equipment to run an operation like that. You also need a big shop to repair and store those machines. A 747 jet could have parked in theirs.

It took Stan three hours to fix the cart. Not only did he reinforce the problem wheel, he strengthened the other wheel welds and beefed up the suspension. When he finished, it was close to sundown, and the forecast was for a stormy night with a tornado watch. So they invited us to camp in their shop office, while a neighbor let us stake Della in a sheltered part of her yard.