The Cross Timbers (7 page)

Unfortunately, not all of Mattie's books and magazines were of the caliber of these two or the
Youth's Companion.
Many of them, such as
The Trappers of Arkansas
and the saccharine effusions of Charlotte M. Braeme and Mary Cecil Hay, were sheer trash, but I read them all. Many were published by the F. M. Lupton Company and sold for a few cents each, including such
titles as
Lord Lisle's Daughter, Reaping the Whirlwind, A Mad Passion, Thrown on the World,
and a host of others. Because one volume, which I found very interesting, lacked the covers and title page it was impossible to know the name of either the author or the book. Many years later I learned that it was Victor Hugo's
Toilers of the Sea.

When I moved to Mattie's home Father decided that it was best for me to attend the Navajoe school, which began early in November. The school house, made of boxing planks, was in the northwest part of town. The children sat on long wooden benches, while a wood-burning stove supplied heat. There were about thirty-five pupils ranging in age from six to seventeen years.

The teacher, Miss Anna Davidson, was a maiden lady of uncertain age, who lived with her widowed mother in the southwest part of the little town. She had an excellent library as judged by the standards of the region. Among her books were most of the novels of Dickens, Scott, and John Strange Winter, the poems and some prose works of Bulwer-Lytton, and books by George Eliot, Hawthorne, Cooper, and various others.

She soon learned that I liked to read and began to lend me books. As a result, during the winter and spring of 1888–1889 I read a number of Dickens' novels, including
David Copperfield, Pickwick Papers, Bleak House, Old Curiosity Shop,
and some others. Also, I read several of Scott's Waverly novels, George Eliot's
Mill on the Floss,
and several other books by various authors. Plenty of time was available in which to read, for my school studies were easy and I had little to do except for helping Mattie with the housework.

George remained in Greer County only about three months. As spring approached he received a letter from Tom offering to pay him eighty dollars to return and help him on the farm during the spring and summer months. As this seemed important money to a fifteen-year-old lad, George gladly accepted the offer.

Naturally I missed him a great deal, for we had never been separated except for the six weeks between my departure with Alice for Navajoe and his arrival with Father. During those weeks there had been so many interesting things for me to see that there was little time left in which to get lonesome. Now I began to get a little homesick for our Cross Timbers home and the kids that I had played with, but especially for George!

There was still much about life in the little town of Navajoe, however, to interest me. The Indians, wearing red blankets and beaded moccasins, with their hair in long braids tied with red yarn, especially fascinated me. Hardly a week went by without a few of them coming from the Reservation beyond the North Fork to pitch their tepees at the edge of town. Usually they would stay two or three days, coming to the stores to buy groceries, bright-colored calico, and other merchandise.

Few of them could speak much English, but Henry knew a little of the Comanche language. He taught me a few Comanche words and to count “in Comanche.” This information I treasured carefully to spring on the neighbors' kids when we got back to our home in the Cross Timbers.

Early in May, 1889, Alice was married to Henry Roach, a young widower, who lived in Henrietta, Texas. I am not sure where she first met him but it was probably in Dallas when she was working in a hospital in that city. He was a contractor and
builder, who also was an expert bricklayer and stonemason. He came to Navajoe for the wedding, but immediately took his bride to his home in Henrietta.

With George and Alice both gone, my father grew increasingly restless and early in June decided to return to the Cross Timbers. We could not regain possession of our home until the tenant had harvested his crops, which would be in November, but we could live with Tom and Lucy and help with the farm work. Probably the chief factor in Father's decision was his church. He missed the old friends and neighbors, but especially he missed his brethren in the Primitive Baptist Church, and the association with them in their homes and at worship.

At first he considered leaving me with Mattie for a few months but finally decided to take me with him. We left Navajoe early in June in a covered wagon drawn by a pony team. Our route was to Doan's Crossing on the South Fork of the Red River and to Vernon, Texas. From there we followed roads paralleling the Fort Worth and Denver Railway.

We reached Henrietta about ten o'clock one morning and stayed long enough to have noonday dinner with Alice and her husband. It was characteristic of my father, however, that soon after dinner we continued our journey. We were both pleased to note that Alice had an attractive home and seemed to be very happy.

We reached the western edge of the Upper Cross Timbers at Bowie and emerged from them near Aurora. Just ten days after leaving Navajoe we rolled up to the home of Tom and Lucy. Our ten-day trip would now be considered only a half-day's drive by car.

I was delighted to see George again and much pleased to see Tom and Lucy. It seemed that we had been away a long time and the familiar scenes of the Cross Timbers neighborhood looked very good to me after an absence of some eight months. While we could not occupy our own home until the old renter, Mr. Pulliam, and his two daughters, commonly called “Adar” and “Idar,” had harvested their crops, it would be fun to live with Tom and Lucy for a time.

The few months of life in the Prairie West had stimulated my imagination. I had seen real cowboys and Indians, had lived for several weeks in a half dugout, and had often climbed the Navajoe Mountains, only a mile east of the little town named for them.

Of course, after we had returned to our Cross Timbers home I was not slow in telling my boy friends of these experiences and adventures with enough details and embellishments to make my stories interesting. When asked about Indians, I assured my questioner that they often camped near town and came to my brother Henry's store wearing blankets and moccasins, with their hair in two long black braids, and their faces painted.

Yes, I had seen the great Comanche Chief Quanah Parker many times. My brother Henry had traded with the Comanches so much that he knew their language fairly well and he had taught me some words and how to count in the Comanche tongue. When my bug-eyed listeners demanded a demonstration, I began, “sem-us, wo-hot, pie-heet, ah-tery-o-quit, mah-vit, nah-vit, tie-suit, nem-o-wah-sute, wo-ma-nie, say-men.” This is one to ten.

While this boosted my stock a bit among my Cross Timbers playmates, by far the most important result of my western trip
was that I had read a great deal more than I would have had the opportunity to do if we had spent the winter on the Cross Timbers farm. Some of it was trash but the major part was good literature, which, even as a boy, I preferred to read when given a choice. Reading greatly affected both my work and play, not only in my boyhood days but throughout my life.

5. “Six Days Shalt Thou Labor”

John Clark once remarked that “Heaven will be jus' lak it is here 'ceptin we won't hafta work.” If John was correct in his conception of Paradise there were a few men in our Cross Timbers community who were enjoying Heaven here on earth! Not so my father. He had little patience with loafers and wondered how they were able to live in idleness. Yet, I heard him say once that it seemed sometimes that there was not more than fifty cents difference between the man who worked and the man who didn't, and that the one who
didn't
got the fifty cents!

This was obviously only a joke, for up to the time of his final illness his amazing energy was noted by all who knew him. Even at the age of sixty-five he could do more work in a day than any of his seven sons. Not only did he work hard himself but he demanded that his children do the same. Summer or winter he was up at dawn and calling George and me before he started to the barn to milk our three or four cows. Winter mornings in our attic bedroom was like the Arctic Circle; we would count “one, two, three,” at which point we would toss back the covers and hit the icy floor with our bare feet. Dressing was quickly done, for we slept in our underwear. In two or three minutes we were clothed and standing before the fire downstairs, for Father
always lighted fires in both the fireplace and kitchen stove before going to milk the cows.

Just when I started to do useful work and ceased to be a total liability is impossible to say, but it must have been at a very early age. Yet I cannot recall doing much before my mother's death except help pile brush when Father was clearing land. Also, of course, I had such chores as gathering up the eggs, bringing in chips or corn cobs for the kitchen stove, running errands, and pulling up weeds in the garden.

After my sister Alice became our housekeeper, however, I gradually began to do more to help in the household work and to do some work in the fields. My father encouraged and taught me to do farm work. He had grown up in an era when a farmer raised his own help, just as he raised his own fruit, vegetables, and meat. Four or five husky sons, if properly taught, were a distinct asset. Otherwise it would not have been possible to feed and clothe a family of ten or twelve, which was not considered unusually large seventy-five years ago.

Even as a very little youngster I realized that carving a farm out of even a small tract of timberland required an enormous amount of hard work. Many times, when I was only four or five years old, my father would take me with him when he went to work in the woods. To me it was most interesting to watch him cut down the big post-oak trees and trim off the branches. It was also fun to watch him split a log into rails. For this he used a maul, which he made of hardwood, and an iron wedge to start a split of the log. Once a crack had been opened he used two or three hardwood wedges called “gluts” to widen it and at last
split the log wide open. The two halves were then further divided by the same process into rails.

Even at that early age I could help a bit by piling brush or taking Father a drink of water. Our large peach orchard usually furnished us with far more fruit than we could use. Father had a light spring wagon commonly called a “hack.” He would load this with peaches about wheat-harvest time and peddle them out among the wheat farmers on the prairie, who seldom tried to raise fruit of any kind on their black, waxy land. Their wives needed fruit very much at harvest time because threshing grain, and sometimes even cutting and shocking it, was a cooperative enterprise. This meant that a threshing crew of a dozen or more hungry men had to be fed and every housewife sought to outdo all the neighbor women in feeding them.

Wheat harvest, however, seldom lasted over three or four weeks at most; moreover, many of our peach trees were seedlings that produced the small freestone type of fruit that was hard to sell and therefore had to be dried. For weeks almost every summer “all hands and the cook” worked at cutting peaches in half, tossing the seeds aside, and setting out the peach halves with the cut side up on any flat surface to dry in the sun. Since, obviously, even a small child can cut a peach in half and put it out to dry, I very early put in weeks every summer helping to dry peaches. We also had about a quarter of an acre in blackberries, and picking blackberries was part of the work for George and me to do every summer.

When Alice became our housekeeper, I helped quite a bit in the house by washing and drying dishes, doing the churning, and bringing in wood and kindling.

One day George and I were in the orchard when peaches were ripe and we saw a woman and a little girl in a buggy drive up to our yard gate and go in the house. Neither of us knew them but presently I heard Alice calling me. George grinned as he said, “I'll bet she wants you to bring that little girl out to the orchard and get her some peaches.”

I was sure that Alice wanted me to bring in some wood so I leaned back and stuck my chest out, answering, “Not
me.
If she asks me to do
that
I'll tell her to let th' little dickens go and get peaches for
herself
if she wants 'em. I'm not waitin' on any baby girl like her.”

When Alice called again I yelled “Comin'
” and started for the house in a lope, secure in my certainty that she wanted some wood.

“Ed,” said Alice as I came in, “take this little girl out to the orchard and get her some peaches.”

I swallowed a couple of times and replied, “Yes Ma'am!” Thinking back over three-quarters of a century to this little incident it seems plain what sort of kid
I
was, but I am hopeful that the child is not
always
“father to the man.”

Our equipment for farming consisted of one breaking plow, a “Georgia stock” commonly called a “bull tongue” plow, a double shovel used to cultivate crops, a big farm wagon, the hack which Father used to peddle fruit and sweet potatoes, and that was about all. In addition, we had an axe, rake, pitchfork, two or three hoes, a grubbing hoe called a “mattock,” a crosscut saw, handsaw, hatchet, and claw hammer. It is doubtful if all the farming implements and tools cost much over $150.00 when new.

Power was supplied by a small sorrel horse named Pompey, a
little bay mare called Net, and a larger, older mare known as Old Nell. All three of these animals could not have been sold for a total of $75.00, including the harness and old saddle. Old Nell died, apparently of old age, before we made our visit to Greer County. While out there Father sold Net and bought from an Indian for $14.00 a little yellow mare, that George and I promptly dubbed “Comanch.” She was a typical Indian pony with an evil temper which was probably due to being teased by some papoose, for she bit my arm the first time I sought to put a bridle on her. As compared with the agricultural machinery most farmers have today, our equipment seems most meager and primitive. One modern tractor alone would cost two or three times as much as all my father's farm implements, tools, and horses were worth.